John Cooke

LC name authority rec. nr91026681

LC Heading: Cooke, John, 1731-1810

Biography:

Cooke, John (1730/31–1810), publisher, first appears, according to the Dictionary of National Biography, as an assistant to Alexander Hogg, one of the first to publish cheap ‘Paternoster Row numbers’, or standard popular works issued in weekly parts. In this line of publishing Cooke made a fortune, successively setting up shop in London at the sign of the King's Arms in Great Turnstile, Holborn (1756), opposite St Clement's in the Strand (1758), and at Shakespear's Head, first behind the chapter house in St Paul's Churchyard (1759), then in Paternoster Row (1761 onwards). Religious works, practical manuals, and jest books dominated his work; nearly half of fifty-four titles in his c.1770 catalogue contain the words ‘complete’ or ‘universal’, as in The Complete English Brewer and The Gardener's Universal Guide. His folios and quartos were sold in parts, each 6d. number ‘enriched’ with a copperplate-engraving. Keen attention to advertising these illustrations was displayed in his catalogue of c.1784, a sign that his son Charles Cooke [see below] was now active in the concern. Depictions of torture and ‘general Scenes of Pagan Barbarity and Popish Cruelty’, for example, adorned Southwell's New Book of Martyrs. Likewise the Universal Family Bible (called Southwell's, though compiled by Robert Sanders) was ‘embellished’ with 100 plates ‘taken from the finest Paintings of the most esteemed Masters’. The many editions of this title reportedly netted the publisher £30,000.

On 18 January 1773 Cooke was made a freeman and liveryman of the Musicians' Company, and was made steward in 1778. Between 1774 and 1782 he served on the city's common council for the ward of Farringdon Within. He died at his home in York Place, Kingsland Road, London, on 25 February 1810, aged seventy-nine.

Charles Cooke (1759/60–1816), publisher, was bound to the stationer Henry Cooke on 4 April 1775. He was freed on 9 April 1782, and was made a liveryman of the Stationers' Company the following month. He succeeded to his father's business about 1789, and further refined the art of serial publication. Illustrations had been made integral to a series of pocket editions by John Bell in his Poets of Great Britain (109 vols., 1776–82). Cooke's innovation was to apply this formula to several genres in a co-ordinated fashion. By marketing parallel series of novelists, poets, essayists, historians, and devotional authors—in uniform pocket editions, all ‘Superbly Embellished’—and by adding plays to his list (he bought up Bell's British Theatre), Cooke became the first purveyor of a full range of English classics. One series alone, the Select British Poets (56 vols., 1794–1805), included more than 200 engravings. Commissions on this scale lend credibility to the claim that, in the annals of book illustration, Cooke helped to provide ‘the first steady market for the work of English engravers and artists’ (Amory, 140). The engraver Abraham Raimbach thought him a ‘rather pompous gentleman publisher’, inclined to ‘dispense his patronage among the hungry artists, with an air of conscious superiority’ (Memoirs and Recollections, 25). For 2s. Cooke offered deluxe imprints on vellum paper with hand-coloured stipple engravings, and for 1s. a ‘superior edition’, but the ‘cheap edition’ was his stock-in-trade. ‘How I loved those little sixpenny numbers’, testified Leigh Hunt about his boyhood enthusiasm;

I doted on their size; I doted on their type, on their ornaments, on their wrappers, containing lists of other poets, and on the engravings from Kirk. I bought them over and over again, and used to get up select sets, which disappeared like buttered crumpets; for I could resist neither giving them away, nor possessing them. (Hunt, 77)

By 1803 Cooke had amassed a fortune sufficient to build at Walthamstow ‘a sort of baronial mansion’, as the bibliographer T. F. Dibdin called it (Dibdin, 749), overlooking the countryside—whence its name, Belle Vue. A description of the house, dubbed Cooke's Folly by locals, is given along with a picture in Bosworth's Some Walthamstow Houses (pp. 31–8). Between 1805 and 1816, like his father, Cooke was a member of the common council for the ward of Farringdon Within. He died on 16 April 1816, aged fifty-six, leaving a widow, Sarah.

Thomas Bonnell

(Thomas Bonnell, ‘Cooke, John (1730/31–1810)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://proxy.bostonathenaeum.org:2055/view/article/6172, accessed 14 March 2016])