The Pinnacle of Editorial Style in Eighteenth-Century England: John Smith’s The Printer’s Grammar

Abstract

This chapter presents a textual analysis of John Smith’s The Printer’s Grammar (1755), the publication of which occurred approximately 70 years after that of Joseph Moxon’s Mechanick Exercises (1683). Smith’s manual is significant to book-history research and editorial theory for two reasons as it was the first manual in English to instruct the print trade on the intricacies of punctuation, and its publication coincided with three fundamental shifts in the eighteenth century: typographical, grammatical and orthographic. Hence, Smith’s The Printer’s Grammar was truly unprecedented and, by necessity, resides at the pinnacle of the progress of editorial style towards standardisation.