Proof-reading in 1650 London: The Case of Thomas Sanderson

Abstract This article examines financial records in British Library, MS Sloane 915, a manuscript note-book that belonged to Thomas Sanderson (1622–1670), sometime Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and son of Robert Sanderson (1587–1663), bishop of Lincoln. The records seem to record costs for proof-reading work performed by Sanderson between 1649/50 and 1650/51. This evidence is assessed in terms of what is known of Sanderson’s biography, and in terms of proof-reading practices in the seventeenth century. Sanderson seems to have worked directly with the printer John Legate (1600–1658). As a result of this evidence, it is possible to name Legate as the printer of a number of texts whose printer was previously unknown, including Thomas Hobbes’s De corpore politico. Or The elements of law, moral & politick (1650).