Richard Janeway Senior (fl. 1667–1710)

JANEWAY (RICHARD), senior, printer, bookseller, and bookbinder in London, (a) Queen's Head Alley, (b) Queen's Head Court, Paternoster Row, 1680–98(?). Like Benjamin Harris, Langley Curtis, and Nathaniel Thompson, Janeway became notorious as a fanatically Protestant publisher in the time of the Popish Plot. His first entry in the Term Catalogues is in Easter 1680, and is characteristically entitled The Tryal, conviction and condemnation of Popery for High Treason. [T.C. I. 397–8.] In this year he sold also A Defence of True Protestants, spelling his name "Janua". [Title-page only in Bagford Coll., B.M., Harl. 5927 (504).] Janeway quarrelled with other publishers of Protestant news-sheets and retorted in The Impartial Protestant Mercury and The New News Book, both of which he started in 1681. In that year he also brought an action for assault against Thomas Newcombe, John Towse, Randal Taylor, and Michael Foster, all of them stationers. The details of the case are wanting; but it was probably connected with a search carried out on his premises by the Company of Stationers. [C.P.R. 2296, m. 256 r.] His name drops out of the Term Catalogues in Easter 1690. [T.C. III. 318.] He is probably the "honest Dick Janeway", the binder, described by Dunton [p. 257] apparently as dead in 1703. He was probably alive in 1698, as Richard Janeway junior (q. v.) describes himself as such in that year.