“Odious! In Woollen!”: Blank Precedents and the London Stationers, 1690-1830

Twenty-First Kenneth Karmiole Lecture on the History of the Book Trade

Lecture by Dennis Duncan, Associate Professor, University College London

In eighteenth-century England, even the fabric in which you were buried required paperwork. The law required the dead to be wrapped in wool to support the wool trade, and a relative had to make a sworn statement confirming that this had been done. Printers supplied forms with the statement already printed, leaving spaces for names, dates, and other details to be entered by hand.

In this lecture, Dennis Duncan will trace the story of four dozen surviving burial forms from the village of Upper Heyford in Oxfordshire. These roughly printed documents, each on a single sheet and illustrated with crude woodcuts of skulls and cadavers, span the eighteenth century. All were printed seventy miles away in London.

Following these sheets from a country rector’s records back to London’s printing shops, Duncan will explore who produced them, how they advertised and sold them, and how the “blank precedent,” what we would today call a form, offered rich, ever-changing opportunities to supplement their book work. The lecture will show how ordinary paperwork can reveal a history of printing that books alone cannot tell, connecting the working lives of printers with the legal requirements and burial practices of a rural community.

Dennis Duncan is a writer and Associate Professor in English at University College London. His books include Book Parts (with Adam Smyth, Oxford University Press, 2019), and Index, A History of the (W. W. Norton, 2022). The latter was a New York Times bestseller and was listed as one of the Books of the Year in the New York Times, TIME magazine, the Washington Post, and the Financial Times. It has been translated into nine languages. He writes regularly for the New York Times, the London Review of Books, the Guardian, and the Times Literary Supplement. His current research concerns ephemera and the history of collecting. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

This event is free to attend with advance registration and will be held in-person at the Clark Library. Seating is limited. Walk-in registrants are welcome as space permits. Registration will close on Monday, November 2, 2026 at 5:00 p.m.

The lecture will be livestreamed and the recording will be available to watch on the Center’s YouTube channel for one year following the event. Registration is not required to watch the livestream.

Image: Illustrated Burial in Woollen Affidavit for Anne Wadney, Upper Heyford, Oxfordshire, 1706.