Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Jones, Richard (fl.1564-1602)
JONES, JHONES, or JOHNES, RICHARD (fl. 1564–1602), printer, was admitted a member of the Stationers' Company 7 Aug. 1564. The first entry to him in the registers is for a ballad (Arber, Transcript, i. 271). His shop was ‘joyning to the south-west doore of Paules Church.’ He also printed ‘at the west end of Paules Church, betweene the Brasen Pillar and Lollard's Tower,’ as well as ‘over against S. Sepulchre's,’ ‘Without Newgate neere unto Holburne Bridge,’ at the Rose and Crown, and other places. In June and August 1579 he was fined for disorderly printing, and in January 1582–3 he was committed to prison by the wardens for printing without license. He issued about ninety works (several in partnership with others), consisting chiefly of plays, chapbooks, romances, and popular literature. He had licenses for a large number of ballads, ‘particularly 8 Aug. 1586 he had allowed to him 123’ (Ames, Typographical Antiquities (Herbert), ii. 1055). He used the device of a flower, with a Welsh motto. Dibdin points out that the woodcut representing an old man about to pluck a flower, usually supposed to be a portrait of Jones (reproduced by Herbert, ib. ii. 1039), is a fancy sketch, probably borrowed from an ancient herbal (Typographical Antiquities, 1812, ii. x). Some of his introductory addresses are very quaint, as, for instance, those to Marlowe's ‘Tamburlaine’ (1592) and Nash's ‘Pierce Penilesse.’ He wrote an introduction to Breton's ‘Bower of Delights’ (1591), but Breton complained in the preface to ‘Pilgrimage to Paradise’ (1592) that the book had been printed by Jones ‘altogether without my consent and knowledge, and many thinges of other mens mingled with a few of mine’ (J. P. Collier, Bibliographical Account, 1865, i. 83). Jones had printed for Breton in 1575, 1577, and 1582, and issued in 1597 a second edition of what he called ‘Britton's Bowre of Delights.’ He also collected and published ‘The Arbour of Amorus Delightes, by N. B.,’ consisting only partly of Breton's pieces. The last entry to Jones in the registers was on 4 June 1602 (Arber, Transcript, iii. 206).
[Authorities quoted: J. Johnson's Typographia, 1824, i. 584–5; Timperley's Encyclopædia, 1842, pp. 425–6; Bigmore and Wyman's Bibliography of Printing, i. 376; W. Roberts's English Book-selling, 1889, pp. 60–2.]