SOURCE: Tierney, James E. “Robert Dodsley: The First Printer and Stationer to the Society.” In The Virtuoso Tribe of Arts and Sciences: Studies in the Eighteenth Century Work and Membership of the London Society of Arts, edited by D. G. C. Allan and John L. Abbott, pp. 281-92. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

In the following essay, originally published in 1983, Tierney recounts Dodsley's five-year association with the London Society of Arts.

With noticeable pride, Secretary George Box recorded in the three-year-old Society's Minutes on 6th April 1757 that Robert Dodsley ‘who has long taken Care of correctly printing whatever has been order'd for the press, was proposed and unanimously appointed Printer and Stationer to this Society’. For historians of the eighteenth-century book trade, the title the Society chose to bestow on Dodsley seems curious indeed, for, by trade, he was neither a printer nor a stationer, but rather a bookseller...