Aphra Behn, the Stationers’ Company and Their Wast Register Book

Abstract Following Aphra Behn through the records of the Stationers’ Company, this article explores in detail new documentary evidence, including a previously unnoticed Wast Register Book of copy entries, to cast new light on her texts, including The Emperor of The Moon (1687) and The History of Adolphus (1691). We demonstrate that changing practice in the Stationers’ Company saw them institute a new category of record in 1687, their Wast Register Book, which runs in parallel to the better-known Register (Liber G) for the period until 1695. Identifying the kinds of errors that copying between these two documents can create allows us to identify the characteristics of the now-lost documents that individual stationers, and especially Francis Saunders, brought with them to Stationers’ Hall to enter copies of Behn's texts. We argue that different renderings of Behn's surname, which reliably proved difficult to enter and to transcribe, can uncover among other things a manuscript ‘book of songs’ that she presented to George Granville, and which is printed in The History of Adolphus. Such discoveries, we argue, allow us to situate these and other texts within an understanding of the Stationers’ Company's working practices and of Behn's patronage relationships, seen through the material relationships of manuscript and printed texts.