H. Herringman

Artist Info

H. Herringmanactive London, 1653 - 1690s

LC name authority rec.n85196058

LC Heading: Herringman, Henry, -1704

Biography:

Herringman, Henry (bap. 1628, d. 1704), bookseller, was born in Carshalton, Surrey, the son of John Herringman, yeoman, and was baptized on 14 March 1628 at the Carshalton parish church. His mother's name may have been Margaret. He served an apprenticeship with the London bookseller Abel Roper from 1 August 1644 until 28 June 1652, when he became free of the Stationers' Company.

Herringman is probably best-known as the publisher of John Dryden, but his first enterprising move was to purchase the stock of John Holden, who had died in May 1652, and to set up business at Holden's former shop at the Blue Anchor in the Lower Walk, New Exchange, London, during 1653. Samuel Pepys writes of several occasions when he met friends and had news of Herringman's authors there. He married Alice Abel on 29 September 1653 at the church of St Dunstan-in-the-West, London, and with her had five daughters and four sons. At about the same time he began buying copyrights: the first book to bear his imprint was an edition of Horace's Lyrics, published in 1653; the first copyright he registered with the Stationers' Company was a translation by Sir Kenelm Digby of Albert the Great's Treatise Adhering to God, entered on 19 September 1653. By the late 1650s it is almost certain that, as Thomas Shadwell suggests in The Medal of John Bayes (1682), Herringman began employing the young Dryden to write prefaces, commencing a relationship that developed through the 1660s and 1670s when Herringman bought up the copyrights to most of Dryden's work. Dryden briefly mentions his publisher in MacFlecknoe (1682), describing Herringman as captain of a guard of ‘Bilk't Stationers’ (Dryden, 57).

Herringman's early association with the established literary publisher Humphrey Moseley was another important element of his career. The two published a number of works together, and after Moseley's death in 1661 Herringman purchased from Moseley's estate copyrights to the poems of Abraham Cowley, Richard Crashaw, Sir John Denham, John Donne, Sir John Suckling, and Edmund Waller, as well as some of the plays of Ben Jonson and Sir William Davenant. Although numerous entries in the Stationers' Company register attest to the variety of Herringman's early trade list, he concentrated on the publication of belles-lettres from the 1660s.

Herringman's middle career was assisted in some ways by the great fire of London, which saw the disruption of his competitors' businesses and the destruction of whole editions of many books, including much of Shakespeare's third folio. Herringman was instrumental in the publication of the fourth. Herringman bought few copyrights after 1678, concentrating instead on republishing popular literary works and bringing out collected editions—Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher in 1679, Shakespeare in 1685, Jonson in 1692. In 1684 he turned over the retail side of his business to Francis Saunders and his partner Joseph Knight. A year later he became master of the Stationers' Company.

It is evident from his will, written the day before his death, that Herringman's hope was to keep his publishing business in the family. He stipulated that his kinsman John Herringman should have ‘my Coppyes and partes of Coppys of Books as they stand entered in the Register Booke of the Company of Staconers ... provided that he serves out his seaven years of Apprentishipp justly and truly’ (TNA: PRO, PROB 11/474, fol. 322v). Instead the younger Herringman abandoned a book trade career for the wardenship of the Carshalton parish church. Many of these copies were acquired by Jacob Tonson, who developed even more strongly the line of fine literary publishing begun by Moseley and Herringman.

Herringman probably retired to Carshalton in the mid-1690s, when his name no longer appears in the poor rate ledgers for the parish of St Martin-in-the-Fields. He died in Carshalton on 15 January 1704 and was buried at the parish church, where a memorial was erected.

C. Y. Ferdinand, rev.

Sources C. W. Miller, ‘Henry Herringman, Restoration bookseller-publisher’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 42 (1948), 292–306 · H. R. Plomer and others, A dictionary of the booksellers and printers who were at work in England, Scotland, and Ireland from 1641 to 1667 (1907) · parish register, Carshalton, Central Library, Sutton, Surrey, Sutton heritage [baptism, burial] · parish register, London, St Dunstan-in-the-West, 29 Sept 1653, GL [marriage] · poor rate ledgers, parish register, London, St Martin-in-the-Fields, GL · will, TNA: PRO, PROB 11/474, sig. 40 · IGI · The works of John Dryden, 2: Poems, 1681–1684, ed. H. T. Swedenberg (1972)

C. Y. Ferdinand, ‘Herringman, Henry (bap. 1628, d. 1704)’, rev. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Jan 2008 [http://proxy.bostonathenaeum.org:2055/view/article/37538, accessed 28 Oct 2015]