A Dictionary of the Booksellers and Printers who Were at Work in England, Scotland and Ireland from 1641 to 1667/Head (Richard)

by Henry Robert Plomer

HEAD (RICHARD), author and bookseller; The Heart and Bible in Little Britain, 1666-7. Born in Ireland about 1637. His father is believed to have been John Head, B.A., New Inn Hall, 1628, who became a nobleman's chaplain and was killed in Ireland by the rebels in 1641. Richard and his mother, after many sufferings, reached England, and Winstanley says that after studying for a short time at Oxford at the same hall as that from which his father had graduated, Richard Head was apprenticed to a Latin bookseller in London, and that he afterwards married and set up for himself. He gives no dates, but makes these events occur before the publication of Head's first work, the play of Hic et Ubique, which was written in Ireland and printed in London in 1663, that is before he was twenty-two years of age. There is no confirmation of this story. The earliest date at which Richard Head's name is found in the imprint of a book is the year 1666, when he issued Saml. Hieron's Fair Play on both sides. 4^o. [B.M. 1077, h. 71 (4).] In the same year Richard Head and Francis Kirkman jointly issued a book of jests entitled Poor Robin's Jests, of which a copy is noted by Hazlitt. In the Luttrell Collection is a broadside dated 1667 entitled The Citizens Joy for the re-building of London, which was also one of Head's publications. His career as a bookseller was a short one, as he was a great gambler and was ruined by losses at play. He is said to have been drowned in 1686 when crossing to the Isle of Wight. Head is chiefly remembered as the author of The English Rogue in which a thief's career is set forth. The work became popular, and Francis Kirkman issued several additions to it, until its author began to doubt whether he would ever make an end of pestering the world with them. [Head (R), Proteus Redivivus: Epistle Dedicatory.]