Nicholas Culpeper Redivivus

This chapter deals with the vicissitudes of the London publishing scene in the early 1790s. Sibly published beautifully produced books—on astrology and magic, astrological medicine, and later on gynecology and venereal complaints. But publishing was fraught—he never had enough money to keep control of the copyright to his works—so one of the main themes of this chapter is how he maneuvered through copyright law and practice to take advantage of lacunae in the law to repeatedly reclaim copyrights, and with them, the profit from popular works. The chapter uses Sibly’s case to illustrate the difficulties authors had in making a profit in the late eighteenth-century London publishing world.