Edward Blount

BLOUNT (EDWARD), bookseller in London, 1594–1632; (i) Over against the Great North Door of St. Paul’s; (2) The Black Bear, St. Paul’s Churchyard. Son of Ralph Blount, merchant tailor of London. Born in London in 1564. Apprentice to William Ponsonby for ten years from June 24th, 1578, and admitted to the freedom of the Company of Stationers on June 25th, 1588. First book entry May 25th, 1594. Blount became one of the most enterprising of the booksellers of his day. He was a friend of Christopher Marlowe, and published several of his books. In 1603 he published the first edition of Florio’s translation of Montaigne’s Essays. In 1608 when he moved to the Black Bear he was joined by William Barrett, and amongst their notable undertakings was the second edition of the same work. Blount was also an extensive publisher of dramatic literature and in conjunction with Isaac Jaggard, William Jaggard, John Smethwicke and William Aspley issued the First Folio of Shakespeare’s works in 1623. Toby Cooke, stationer, at his death left Blount a bequest of £20, and he was witness or executor to the wills of several other stationers. The last book entry by him in the Registers was on January 17th, 163¹/₂, and from a law suit in the Court of Requests it appears that he died in October, 1632. On October 3rd, 1636, his widow assigned the remainder of his copyrights to Andrew Crooke. [“An Elizabethan Bookseller” by Sidney Lee, in Bibliographica, vol. i., pp. 474–98.]

BLOUNT (or Blunt), EDWARD (b. 1565?), the printer, in conjunction with Isaac Jaggard, of Mr William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories and Tragedies. Published according to the true Originall Copies (1623), usually known as the first folio of Shakespeare. It was produced under the direction of John Heming (d. 1630) and Henry Condell (d. 1627), both of whom had been Shakespeare’s colleagues at the Globe theatre, but as Blount combined the functions of printer and editor on other occasions, it is fair to conjecture that he to some extent edited the first folio. The Stationers’ Register states that he was the son of Ralph Blount or Blunt, merchant tailor of London, and apprenticed himself in 1578 for ten years to William Ponsonby, a stationer. He became a freeman of the Stationers’ Company in 1588. Among the most important of his publications are Giovanni Florio’s Italian-English dictionary and his translation of Montaigne, Marlowe’s Hero and Leander, and the Sixe Court Comedies of John Lyly. He himself translated Ars Aulica, or the Courtier’s Arte (1607) from the Italian of Lorenzo Ducci, and Christian Policie (1632) from the Spanish of Juan de Santa Maria.