Andreea BratuAn III, Grupa 2

THE CURANTO / CORANTE

The Curanto or Corante also named Corante: or, Newes from Italy, Germany, Hungarie, Spaine and France was the first English newspaper. In the beginning of the 17th century, the right to print was strictly controlled in England. This was probably the reason why the first newspaper in English language was printed in Amsterdam by George Veseler  in June 1618. The Corante  was the first to appear in folio- rather than quarto-size.  It was a regular weekly publication. It can be called the first broadsheet paper, because it was issued in folio-size. Amsterdam, a center of world trade, quickly became home to newspapers in many languages, often before they were published in their own country. The first issue presented news from four different sources, including Venice and Prague.

The paper carried no imprint of the printer or the publisher, but based on similar papers published later, it was probably printed by George Veseler and published and edited by Caspar van Hilten. The Courante was a single folio sheet. This means it was a full sheet folded once to form 4 pages and then cut open at the fold. The first issues were printed on just one side of the sheet. It also did not have a serial number, a date or a publisher's imprint. These features are now considered essential to newspapers. The imprint appeared in 1619. The date and serial number as well as the practice of printing on both sides of the sheet started in 1620. The main text was written in two columns. The columns were separated with a gutter and a line running in it. There were no empty lines within the body text. The text was fully justified.

Some authors regard the Courante as the world’s first proper newspaper. Two years after starting the Courante, Veseler printed the first newspaper in English for the publisher Pieter van den Keere. a Dutch map and print engraver who had lived in London for a few years. It was a translation of the dutch newspaper and – as the result of a 1586 edict from the Star Chamber – carried no news about England. Nevertheless, this was the most timely form in which the English ever had been offered news in print.

This first English newspaper begins not with a title -- in those early years papers often did not have consistent names -- but with an apology: "The new tydings out of Italie are not yet com." This newspaper ended with

a typographical error: Its date was written at the bottom of its second and last page as "the 2. of Decemember." For a short period of time it followed the format of the dutch Courante but after the very beginning, English news periodicals reverted to the pamphlet form. It was the start of what has been called a “news revolution” in which printers and journalists began to appreciate the potential commercial benefits of periodicity.

The earliest of the seven known surviving copies is dated September 24, 1621 (although John Chamberlain is on record as having complained about them in August), and the latest is dated October 22 of that same year. Early issues of the Corante are thought to have appeared as early as the spring of 1621. In September of that year, Thomas Archer, a printer in London, was arrested for distributing corantos without a license, and his printing press was shut down. Archer was released shortly thereafter, as "a license to print (corantos) and sell them, honestly translated out of the Dutch" had been purchased by an individual identified solely by the initials "N.B."; these initials, thought to belong to book publisher Nathaniel Butter, or to Butter's contemporary Nicholas Bourne, appear on all surviving copies.

The publication of these newsbooks was suspended between 1632 and 1638 by order of The Star Chamber. After they resumed publication, the era of these newsbooks lasted until the publication of the Oxford Gazette in 1665. However the first daily newspaper, dealing with foreign and home affairs, titled the ‘Daily Courant’, didn’t emerge in Britain until tge beginning of the 18th century.

Bibliography:

1. Ross Eaman,2009, The A to Z of Journalism, Scarecrow Press Inc., U.K.

2. Mick Temple, 1996, The British Press, Bell and Bain Ltd., USA3. http://www.rhymes.net/rhyme/CORANTE 4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_British_newspapers 5. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspaper#History 6. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Courante_uyt_Italien,_Duytslandt,_

%26c.7. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corante 8. http://www.nyu.edu/classes/stephens/Collier's%20page.htm 9. http://katherineshaw88.wordpress.com/