Randal Taylor (d. 1689; fl. 1650–1689)

Randal Taylor, bookseller, map/chart seller, 1650–ca. 1694; in St. Martin le Grand near St. Leonard's Churchyard, 1664–1667; at the Crown in Little Britain, 1669–1677; near Stationers' Hall, 1680–1694 / near Stationers Hall in Amen Corner, 1681–1690. Father of James Taylor and Elizabeth Whitlock, also a bookseller, married to bookseller John Whitlock.

Plomer's statement that Taylor was "Still in business in 1700" is mistaken. The "R. Taylor" in the entry for Wing D655 in the Term Catalogues (February 1699/1700) is actually Richard Taylor, a Congregational minister. Taylor's will is dated 22 November 1689 and probated 21 September 1694. He left a few small bequests and divided the rest of his property equally between his son and daughter. He bequeathed Elizabeth's half to his son James and bookseller Benjamin Tooke

in Trust to & for the Sole & seperate use & maintenance of my Daughter Eliz: Whitlock the wife of Iohn Whitlock to be placed & put out in the names of my said good ffreind Master Benjamin Tooke & my said Sonn lames Tayler for the  Sole & seperate use & maintenance of my said Daughter & her Children barring & excluding her said husband from having any thing to doe therein or to intermeddle therewith & willing that my Daughter's Receipts & discharges without her husband shall be at all times good & sufficient discharges to my Executors from time to time for what she shall receive for her maintenance as aforesaid. (Wayne H. Phelps, "The Will of Randall Taylor, a Restoration Bookseller," Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 1978, p. 336–7)

Michael Treadwell includes Taylor as one of "a small group of specialists who, for a fee, would put their names to and handle the sale and distribution of printed works 'tho the property [was) in another person'" from the 1670s to about the middle of the eighteenth century.

Throughout this period there were never fewer than two nor more than five of these specialist trade publishers, the two best-known and longest-surviving businesses being those 'near Stationers' Hall' which was operated successively from 1680 to the 1720s by Randal Taylor (1680–94), his son-in-law John Whitlock (1694–96), Whitlock's widow Elizabeth (1696–98), John Nutt (1698–1706), John Morphew (1706–20), Morphew's widow Elizabeth (1720–22) and Thomas Payne (1722–26), and that 'near the Oxford Arms in Warwick Lane' which was operated successively from the time of the Glorious Revolution until the 1740s by Richard Baldwin (1688-98), his widow Abigail (1698–1713), and the Baldwins' son-in-law James Roberts (1713–1740s). The 1680s also saw the shorter-lived shops of Langley Curtis, of Walter Davis, and of Richard Janeway, while the next burst of activity in the early 18th century gave rise to those of Sarah Malthus, of Benjamin Bragg and his niece Sarah Popping, of Ferdinando Burleigh and his widow Rebecca, and of John Baker, whose business split on his death between his widow Shirley and her successors William Boreham and John Peele on the one hand, and Thomas Warner and his much better-known successors Thomas and Mary Cooper on the other.

... the presence of any one of them in an imprint in the form 'Printed for [for example] S. Popping at the Black Raven in Paternoster Row' is an almost certain guarantee that that imprint is what I have called a misleading one and that the work on which it appears was actually published (in our modern sense) by someone else—someone the identity of whom in the absence of surviving manuscript evidence, it will be extremely difficult to discover. There are, of course, exceptions to this rule for ... trade publishers did occasionally own copyrights and publish on their own account. And there are also a large number of trade publisher imprints, perhaps a quarter in all, though the proportion varies widely from one to another and over time, which are not misleading at all, being in the correct form 'Sold by [for example] Ferdinando Burleigh in Amen Corner, where the name of the actual publisher is not misrepresented, but merely omitted. This does not, however, alter the fact that, in the absence of specific evidence to the contrary, it is always safest to assume that any work bearing the imprint of a known trade publisher was published for someone else.

—Michael Treadwell, “On False and Misleading Imprints in the London Book Trade, 1660–1750,” in Fakes and Frauds: Varieties of Deception in Print and Manuscript, ed. Robin Myers and Michael Harris (Oak KnollPress, 1989, rpt. 2006), 33–34