Selling Such ‘Sad Sheets’: Ellen Cotes and the Marketing of Mortality

Presentation abstract

Abstract

The Bills of Mortality were a weekly published account of deaths in each parish of the City of London from the 1590s into the 18th century. In 1665, a collection of the previous years’ Bills were printed and sold by Eleanor Cotes, one of the small number of women printers working in the City at the time. In this edition Cotes includes a dedication from ‘The Printer to the Reader’. Such dedications are standard in many early modern texts, serving as valuable bridges between a stationer and their anticipated customers that forges a connection that can lead to a sale. In her preface, Cotes demonstrates knowledge of these conventions but her dedication goes further, revealing additional information about the production of this book and its printer; for Cotes is not only the printer of these accounts meant to monitor the plague, but a resident of the city that was recently ravaged by it.

This paper examines a rare example of a paratext written by a woman member of the early modern London book trade in order to identify and contextualise her strategies for selling this unusual type of publication. The paper combines literary and textual analysis with the history of London Printers to unpack this artful, technically savvy and poignant piece of publication history and to also recognise it as an account of one person’s experience and reckoning with one of the darker, yet ever-present elements of early modern culture.