Tace Sowle

Tace Sowle (1666-1749) learned the printing trade from her father, Andrew Sowle (1628-95), a Quaker printer in Shoreditch. In 1691 she assumed control of the family business and became the primary printer to the Society of Friend, though she was not freed from the Stationers’ Company (via patronage) until October 1695, shortly before the death of her father. She expanded the business considerably in the next decade (1691-1705), moving to a new location at the sign of the Bible in Leadenhall Street, selling as well from a location near the Quaker meeting house in Gracechurch Street. She married Thomas Raylton (1666/7-1723) in 1706, but chose to put her mother’s initial on her imprints, as well as “assigns of J. Sowle,” which was a reference to her, an appellation that appeared on her imprints through 1736, even though her mother died in 1711. Her husband worked in the printing establishment but Tace remained the primary head of the business. In 1736 she hired her relation, Luke Hinde, to assist her and imprints changed to “T. Sowle Raylton and Luke Hinde.” He became her partner in 1739 and continued so until her death in 1749. She was the chief Quaker printer and bookseller in England for more than a half-century, especially works by George Fox, Margaret Askew Fell Fox, William Penn, and Robert Barclay, as well as William Sewel’s The History of the Rise, Increase, and Progress, of the Christian People called Quakers (1722).  She also printed more than 100 works by women writers, including one non-Quaker, the Philadelphian Jane Lead, as well as printing routine business meetings of the Quakers, such as the Yearly Meeting Epistle. She also oversaw much of the distribution of Quaker materials in America, where her sole surviving sister was married to William Bradford, a prominent printer in Philadelphia and former apprentice of Andrew Sowle in London. She was buried in Bunhill Fields, being succeeded in her business by Hinde. Unlike most of the other nonconformist women printers and booksellers appearing on this website, Sowle printed and sold exclusively by herself until her brief partnership with her nephew near the end of her career. Her total output of imprints places her at the top among nonconformist women involved in the print trade in the eighteenth century, with Mary Lewis second to Sowle. For more on Sowle, see Alison McNaught, "Two Nonconformist Women Printers and Booksellers in the Mid-Eighteenth Century," Bunyan Studies  24 (2020), 65-84; also Paula McDowell, The Women of Grub Street: Press, Politics, and Gender in the London Literary Marketplace 1676-1730 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), and McDowell's entry in the ODNB for Sowle.