The Ackermann Ledgers: Redux

Some of you may recall the posts on Rudolph Ackermann’s ledgers which appeared on this blog last year and have perhaps been wondering what happened to my plan to transcribe and publish their contents. The Ackermann ledgers project kicked-off back in May 2013, when Dr James Baker was kind enough to share photographs of the original ledgers via his blog. James downloaded his pictures of the ledgers for the years 1812 to 1822 into a public folder in Dropbox, and then asked if there was anyone out there willing to lend a hand with the task of transcribing them into a digital format that would be easier to analyse. I volunteered, feeling that the chance to poke my nose through the records of one of Regency London’s most prestigious publishers was too good to miss, and immediately got cracking with the otherwise unenviable task of copying out thousands of individual financial transactions.

Things got off to a flying start and within a couple of weeks I was able to produce a short post setting out my initial thoughts on the first twelve months’ worth of data. The most striking feature of the ledgers at this stage being just how little information they appeared to contain which linked Ackermann directly to the production of large quantities of printed material. I found hundreds of transactions relating to the purchase of picture frames, paper and stationery, but hardly any which could be linked to coppersmiths, manufacturers of inks, typesetters etc. This, combined with the substantial regular payments that Ackermann was making to other printing firms, led me to question whether Ackermann’s business was primarily focused on the publishing and retail of prints, rather than their actual manufacture. At this point I received a letter from Ackermann historian John Ford, who was critical of any suggestion that Ackermann ran anything other than a substantial printing and publishing operation and rather sceptical of any attempt to divine conclusions about Ackermann’s business activities from the fragmentary evidence found within the ledgers. Taking John’s comments on board, I dashed off another post at the end of July last year and then got back to transcribing. It has taken a long longer than I originally anticipated, but I finally have three full years’ worth of data, covering the period June 1818 to May 1822, transcribed and felt it was about time we revisited the Ackermann ledgers.

But before we get onto the data itself, it seems sensible to pause for a moment to remind ourselves of what information the ledgers actually contain and the issues associated with their use as a form of historical source material. The ledgers are a record of the payments made to and from the account that Ackermann held with Coutts Bank in London. They are similar to a modern bank statement in some respects, with each transaction being recorded chronologically and accompanied by details of the exact amount paid and the name of any third party associated with the payment. They do not, however, provide a summary of the total balance of the account and therefore while it is possible to calculate whether Ackermann’s credits exceeded his debits, we still do not know how much money he actually had at any given moment in time.

There are several complicating factors one needs to consider when attempting to use the ledgers to draw conclusions about Ackermann’s publishing activities. Firstly, that Ackermann used the same account to manage a multifaceted business operation encompassing publishing, carriage-design, art dealership and a drawing school, as well as his regular household expenditures. It is therefore not possible to simply look at payments recorded in the ledgers and assume that they relate to the productions of printed materials. Secondly, that in most cases it is not possible to determine the specific nature of the transactions being made from the account. There is almost no information on the source of payments made by Ackermann into the account and while we are usually given the name of the merchant drawing bills, we have no idea what goods or services were actually being provided. Thirdly, that the names of third parties are not recorded with any degree of constancy and that we are therefore making assumptions, based on cross-referencing data against contemporary trade directories, about who was actually drawing money from the account. Fourthly, that the ledgers only record details of transactions carried out through Coutts Bank and are not a comprehensive list of his financial activities. It seems reasonable to assume that, like all businesses, Ackermann would have maintained a store of petty cash which would also have been used to meet expenses. The substantial amounts being paid into and taken out of the account with Coutts suggests that Ackermann probably used it for larger bills and standing orders only.

The data I have transcribed covers the period from June 1818 to May 1821. These were the years in which Ackermann was to publish two of his most memorable caricature-related works, in the form of the second and third installments of the Dr Syntax trilogy, as well as the less enduring Johnny Qae Genus. He also continued to publish prodigious quantities of other material, with an analysis of a bibliography of his surviving works indicating a preference for illustrated topographic surveys and instructional works for amateur artists. He was also to persevere with an attempt to bring the newly imported German technology of lithographic printing into mainstream adoption in Britain and presided over one of the first technical manuals on lithography in 1819. This eye for innovation also brought him commercial rewards on another front, when in 1818 he acquired the patent for a moveable carriage axel which was soon to become incorporated into the standard design of all of Britain’s horse-drawn vehicles. The ledgers seem to confirm that there were profitable years for Ackermann, with the balance of his account increasing by a notional net figure of roughly £3,000 between December 1818 and June 1820.

The ledgers also provide a lot of data on the types of goods and services Ackermann relied upon to run his business. His chief area of expenditure appears to have been letterpress printing, which by 1819 amounted to a total cost of almost £5,000 per annum. This was chiefly carried out by William Clowes, whose workshop in Northumberland Court, just off the Charing Cross end of the Strand, was located within a couple of minutes walk from the Repository of Arts. Clowes drew substantial bills on Ackermann’s account at least two or three times a month and these payments give some indication of the scale and intensity of Ackermann’s publishing operations as the evolved over time.

Paper was Ackermann’s next largest area of expenditure, with Key & Co of Abchurch Lane being his principle supplier. Large but infrequent payments were also made to two other City paper wholesalers, the firms of Williams & Co and Tipper & Co, who may have been called upon to provide additional materials at times of particularly high demand, or perhaps different grades of paper that were not readily available through Jonathan Key. Ackermann’s consumption of paper appears to have grown steadily over the three years covered by the ledgers, rising from £3,630 in 1818-19 to £4,659 by 1820-21.

Disaggregating the data relating to printing and paper and dropping them into a graph reveals that there may be a degree of correlation between the two types of payment. Of course, we have no way of knowing what publications that specific peaks of activity may relate to but it is interesting to note that the release of the complete edition of the Second Tour of Dr Syntax in September 1820 does seem to have corresponded with a significant leap in Ackermann’s printing costs.

Ackermann’s payments to the picture frame manufacturers Edward Peirce and John Jacques also raise some interesting questions about the nature of his business. The value of the bills paid to these two merchants during 1818-19 was almost double the amount Ackermann spent on book-binding and almost equalled the amount spent on paper over the same period. The payments than began to tail off during the 1819-20 and by 1820-1 had been reduced to roughly a third of the amount being spent two years earlier. This all seems to suggest that Ackermann was involved in some major project relating to the art gallery side of his business during late 1818 and early 1819, but I must admit that I have been unable to determine precisely what this could have been.

The ledgers also contain details of the payments that were made to some of the artists and writers in Ackermann’s circle. These were usually made on an intermittent basis and for comparatively small sums of money, suggesting the creative element may actually have been one of the lowest areas of expenditure associated with publishing in this period. The only exception to this rule was the author William Clowes, who received a regular salary of £33 a month from Ackermann from April 1820 onwards, and was paid substantially more than any other artist in Ackermann’s stable. Somewhat surprisingly, Thomas Rowlandson’s name appears only twice, in November 1819 and October 1820, when he received payments of £12 and £45 respectively. Other names that appear include those of J.S. Agar, J.G. Hamilton, Samuel Proutts, Thomas Unwins, J.B. Papworth and J. Cockburn.

So what are we to make of all this? The ledgers certainly allow us to draw some broad conclusions about the overall health of Ackermann’s business affairs and his place within the wider commercial networks of the metropolitan print trade. Further and more rigorous work would be required to determine whether the apparent correlation between paper and printing costs is sustained over a larger data set, and to understand the possible implications of this. A more detailed bibliographic study of Ackermann’s works, including information on advance subscriptions, and the publication dates of successive issues, may also allow us to pinpoint some of the financial transactions associated with specific books. However, this is all work for the future and for the time being anyone who would like to start their own research into the Ackermann ledgers is welcome to take a look at the data I have transcribed. Just click on the research archive link on the left and open the ledgers folder. Good luck!

Keeping up with the Ackermanns: An update on the Ackermann ledgers

Rowlandson & Woodward, What’s the News, published by Rudolph Ackermann, 20th October 1799

The historian and Ackermann biographer John Ford contacted me recently to share his thoughts on the Ackermann ledgers at Coutts bank and my post Twelve months with Rudolph Ackermann…

John was particularly keen to challenge any suggestion that Ackermann was not directly involved in the production of the prints he sold. He pointed out that Ackermann may have had up to 16 printing presses in operation at any one time while he was resident at 101 Strand and also owned a host of other printing-related paraphernalia, such as a set of gas cockspur burners that were used to prepare plates for pressing. He also felt that the various payments to stationers firms which are recorded in the ledgers relate to the purchase of blank paper for printing, rather than the wholesale purchase of stationery for re-sale, although acknowledged that it was impossible to verify this without a copy of the original trade bill.

John also took exception with my theory about the large payments that Ackermann was making to printers as being evidence that he had outsourced his printing activities. John was convinced that although Ackermann used letterpress printers to produce text for his publications, the images themselves were still engraved and printed in-house.

He was also kind enough to correct a couple of factual errors which appeared in my original post:

1) My description of William Clowes as an “engraver and printer” was inaccurate. Clowes was a printer and stationer and is listed as such in the 1819 London Post Office Directory.

2) The engravings by J.B. Papworth which appeared in Rural Residencies had previously been published by Ackermann in 1816-17. Payments to Papworth which appeared in the ledgers for 1818-19 were therefore more likely to relate to his work on Pictorial Cards.

3)Thomas Unwins and Samuel Prout were not involved in the production of Flowers: A Series of Studies from Nature Drawn on Stone. The payments to Prout which appear in the ledgers may relate to a series of drawing books which the artist had produced for Ackermann in 1819.

Of course, Twelve months with Rudolph Ackermann was really only a first attempt at divining something useful from the data that was emerging from the ledgers. I said at the time that any conclusions were open to re-interpretation and revision as the process of transcribing the ledgers continued, and this has indeed proven to be the case. At the very least I can say that I am pleased that this project has sparked something of a debate and look forward to seeing what other information about Ackermann’s world emerges from the ledgers as we continue our work.

Twelve months with Rudolph Ackermann – The Ackermann ledgers for 1818 and 1819

An advertisement for Rudolph Ackermann’s Repository of Arts. Ackermann paid the master engraver J.S. Agar a substantial amount of money to produce the elaborately stipple-engraved masthead. The advertisement itself gives some indication of the range of different products Ackermann sold.

Those of you who regularly follow the Cradled in Caricature blog will know that James Baker has been kind enough to make his images of the Ackermann ledgers at Coutts Bank available for public use under licence. Given that the opportunity to peruse the books of one of Georgian London’s most prestigious printsellers doesn’t come along every day, I decided to take up James’ offer and have spent the last two weeks slowly working my way through a portion of the ledgers and trying to make sense of the complex mass of information they contain. Now that I’ve finally finished transcribing a full twelve-months’ worth of data, I thought it was worth pausing in order to share a few initial thoughts on what this wonderful and unique source tells us about Rudolph Ackermann and the world he inhabited.

The ledgers may contain a vast amount of data but it doesn’t take one long to realise that they still only provide us with a fragmentary and at times frustratingly opaque view of Ackermann’s business activities. For starters, the lack of detail on the origins of the money being deposited into the account means that the ledgers tell us far more about Ackermann’s costs than his his earnings. Our analysis of the outgoing payments is also complicated by the fact that creditors were often only identified by their surname and in some cases, such as the various Williams’ that appear in the ledgers, it is difficult to tell whether we are dealing with one individual or a number of people with the same name. What follows is therefore a far from complete picture of Ackermann’s publishing activities in a twelve month period straddling the years 1818 and 1819. It is fully open to reinterpretation and challenge and will no doubt be revised as further transcription work allows me to make more sense of the nature of Ackermann’s business.

Once I’d finished copying out the relevant sections of the ledgers, I decided to cross-reference the names that appeared against the London Post Office Directory for 1819, the British Book Trade Index and the catalogue of the British Museum, in order to see how many entries referred to individuals that had some connection with Ackermann’s publishing activities. At the end of this process I was left with a list of 30 business addresses which I ran through Batchgeo and dropped on a modern map of London.

One of the most surprising features of the map was the extent of the geographic area covered by Ackermann’s business contacts. My previous work on mapping the Georgian print trade had led me to believe that it was an industry that was firmly rooted in central London, whereas in fact elements of the trade stretched out into the suburbs and possibly beyond into the surrounding towns of Middlesex and Surrey. I had also speculated whether the apparent clustering of print-related businesses in the City and the West End had resulted in the creation of two disparate, or even competing, metropolitan publishing hubs which catered for different markets and had little interaction with each other. Examination of the ledgers now renders this theory completely redundant, as it reveals that the majority of Ackermann’s suppliers were located in the area between Cheapside and Fenchurch Street.

In order to get a more detailed sense of the volume and nature of the business that Ackermann was engaged in with these firms, I sorted the digitised copy of the ledgers and calculated the total value of the payments made to each of Ackermann’s creditors between June 1818 and May 1819. The results were again surprising, indicating that Ackermann’s largest areas of expenditure were the payments he made to wholesale stationers, whose bills totalled £2,676 and oil and colourmen, who drew a total of £1,901 from the account. Publishing costs were another substantial overhead, with the engraver and printer William Clowes drawing a total of £1,637 from the account. Ackermann also appears to have spent a surprising amount of money on picture framing and indeed, if the Edward Pierce (or Peirce) whose name appears frequently in the ledgers is the same individual whot ran a framing and guilding business in Fenchurch Street, it may even have been the case that Ackermann’s framing costs exceeded his expenditure on stationery or paints. This money was presumably spent on framing the oils, watercolours and old masters drawings that Ackermann is known to have displayed and sold in the gallery space at the Repository of Arts. The ledgers also contain details of numerous small payments to plasterers, lace-makers, manufacturers of ‘fancy paper’, which reflect the variety of goods that Ackermann sold alongside his prints, books and stationery.

Another intriguing feature of the data was the apparent lack of evidence of payments that were related to the process of printing. During the twelve month period under consideration, Ackermann made only a handful of sporadic and relatively small payments to businesses with some ancillary link to the print trade, such as typesetters, paper merchants and tallow chandlers. This seems to suggest that Ackermann’s in-house printing operations were relatively modest and that the majority of the material he published was in fact printed by a third parties such as William Clowes, W.C. Drake and J. Diggins.

The names of several artists and engravers also appear in the ledgers and although none of these individuals has a verifiable link to graphic satire, the data still gives us an interesting insight into the relationships between those who made and sold prints. The illustrious stipple-engraver John Agar was the most highly paid of Ackermann’s employees, receiving a total of £119 for his work on a set of historical engravings and an advertisement for the Repository of Arts. After that comes the architectural draughtsman J.B. Papworth, who was paid £80 to provide plates for the book Rural Residences… and then the watercolourist James Green, who received a £70 royalty for allowing Ackermann to produced engraved copies of his paintings. Finally, there are the less well-known names of Thomas Unwins and Samuel Prout, who were each paid around £40 for producing multiple engraved images that were used to illustrate works such as  the Complete Course on Lithography and Flowers: A Series of Studies from Nature Drawn on Stone. This suggests that the costs of hiring artists and engravers varied according to the reputation of the individual in question and the number of plates to be published. Master craftsmen like Agar could charge relatively large sums for producing a small number of images, whereas regular draughtsmen like Prout would be expected to engrave large numbers of images in exchange for much lower wages. Generally speaking though the ‘going rate’ for producing a series of illustrations for one of Ackermann’s publishing projects seems to have been about £40.

The overall picture that emerges from the ledgers at this stage is one that seemingly challenges many of the conventional assumptions about Rudolph Ackermann and the world of the late Georgian print shop. Although Ackermann is chiefly remembered as a publisher and printseller, it’s clear that by far the largest proportion of his business was taken up with the more mundane business of selling stationery, art supplies and paintings. This inevitably leads us to wonder whether printselling was only a subsidiary part of a much larger trade in stationery and books and if businesses that dealt only in satirical prints, such as Hannah Humphrey’s, were in fact something of an oddity. The data also implies that printsellers may actually have had remarkably little direct involvement in the production of many of the prints they sold, with much of the actual printing and colouring of prints being carried out offsite by third party contractors. Once again it appears that the closer one looks at the trade in satirical prints, the more marginal and ephemeral it begins to appear. It will be interesting to see if this continues as I move through further editions of Ackermann’s ledgers in the coming weeks.