A history of British publishing

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A HISTORY OF BRITISH PUBLISHING

This revised, restructured and thoroughly updated edition of a classic text covers six centuries of publishing in Britain, from before the invention of the printing press to the electronic era. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the publishing industry is being transformed by new technologies. Over 500 years ago, book production was revolutionised by the introduction of the printing press and moveable type. A whole new industry grew out of this invention, an industry in which books were mass-produced for the first time. By the end of the fifteenth century printed books had largely ousted manuscripts in the commercial book trade; their predominance as an information medium was not seriously challenged until after the turn of the twentieth century, and even then only at the margins. The printed book became one of the symbols of Western culture. In this book, John Feather considers not only the publishing industry itself, but also areas affecting and affected by it, from education, politics, technology and law, to religion, custom and class. He traces the history of the publishing of books in Britain, looking at how they were financed, produced and distributed. Moving into the twentieth century he considers the fate of publishers such as Penguin, Macmillan, Faber & Faber and Collins and how they have fared against the onslaught of the great global corporations which dominate the media today. In this radically reworked second edition, John Feather places Britain, and her book industries, firmly in the international marketplace. With transatlantic competition and co-operation now standard, and with books marketed across the world via internet stores, Feather concludes by asking, how British is British publishing? John Feather is Professor of Library and Information Studies at Loughborough University.

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A HISTOR Y OF BRITISH PUBLISHING Second Edition

John Feather

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First published in 1988 by Croom Helm Ltd First published in paperback in 1988 by Routledge Second Edition published 2006 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” © 2006 John Feather The right of John Feather to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Feather, John. A history of British publishing/by John Feather. – 2nd ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Publishers and publishing – Great Britain – History. 2. Book industries and trade – Great Britain – History. I. Title. Z325.F414 2005 070.5′0941–dc22 2005004363

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ISBN 0-203-12680-7 Master e-book ISBN

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ISBN 0–415–30225–0 (hbk) ISBN 0–415–30226–9 (pbk)

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CONTENTS

Preface A note on countries, dates and money Introduction

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PART I

The early modern book trade

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1 Literacy, print and culture in early modern England

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2 The development of the book trade

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3 The book trade and the state

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4 The market for books

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PA RT I I

Publishing in the industrial age

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5 The first publishers

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6 The book trade and the industrial revolution

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7 Publishing in a free trade economy

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8 The diffusion of knowledge

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9 The age of the novel

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10 Authors and publishers

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CONTENTS

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PART III

The publishing industry in the twentieth century

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11 The first of the mass media

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12 The publishing industry

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13 Paperback publishing

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14 Publishing for the Empire

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15 The trade in war and peace

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16 New competitors

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17 The second industrial revolution

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18 British publishing in a global economy

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A note on further reading Bibliography Index

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PREFACE

The first edition of this book was written in the mid-1980s and published in 1987; with a few minor revisions for the paperback edition of 1988, it has remained unchanged since then. The subject, however, has not. Since 1987, there have been many important developments in the field of publishing history. There are flourishing and well-established journals which were then in their infancy, or not yet born. There are important national histories of the book, then only in the process of conception. There is a whole body of scholarship which addresses issues such as audiences, reading and reception. Theoretical frameworks have been evolved which have their roots in a wide range of disciplines: literary studies, history, women’s studies, communications science and media studies. All of this has both extended and enriched our understanding of the subject, and some of it is, I hope, reflected here. Although this is at one level a revised edition of the earlier book, large sections are completely new or so heavily rewritten that they will barely be recognised by those familiar with the first edition. I have made Part I both more concise and more analytical, concentrating on the issues, people and events which are important to understanding the evolution of the publishing of books in Britain. It ends with the emergence of the publishing industry at the end of the eighteenth century. Part II deals with the nineteenth century, when many of the names, activities and preoccupations are already familiar to students of the twentieth-century book trade. In Part III there is a far more detailed account of the twentieth century, which tries to come to grips with both the commercial and cultural issues which have determined the course of recent developments. Publishing is, among many other things, an instrument which can facilitate cultural diversity. Although for much of its history British publishing has been dominated by a small group of usually conformist men based in London, there have been ‘other’ book trades in the British Isles: in the English provinces, in Wales, in Scotland and in Ireland; among political and religious dissenters; and in and for minority groups. Many of these ‘others’ have histories almost as long as that of the formal, and sometimes almost official, trade which was almost the only focus of my original book. I have tried to redress the balance here, while retaining a sense of the relative importance of various activities.

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I know that the book has been extensively used by students in a number of disciplines, almost all of whom are studying the history of publishing for the first time. I hope that this book will give the reader, at the very least, a sense of chronology and development, without imposing a misleading teleological or ideological framework on the events which are described. For this reason, I have added a brief list of suggestions for further reading which will provide both general historical background and some indication of essential texts. It is difficult to enumerate the many debts which I have accumulated in the thirty years during which I have been reading, researching and writing in the field. They include my own teachers – many of them now dead – as well as colleagues, friends and former students. Among them are Terry Belanger; Maureen Bell; Fiona Black; Mike Crump; James Dearnley; Diana Dixon; David Fleeman; David Foxon; Peter Isaac; John Joliffe; Jack Meadows; David Pearson; Graham Pollard; Tim Rix; Michael Turner; and Ian Willison. I am also grateful to successive editors at Routledge who commissioned this revision and tolerated my tardiness in delivery; to the anonymous referees who analysed the first edition and commented on the proposals for this revision; to my colleagues at Loughborough for whom there have been times when I must have seemed invisible; and to Sarah. John Feather Loughborough University November 2004

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A NOTE ON COUNTRIES, DATES AND MONEY

Countries There are four countries in the British Isles: England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland. Wales became, legally, a part of England in 1536; thereafter, in official terminology, England includes Wales, although the phrase ‘England and Wales’ was often used. James VI, King of Scots, succeeded to the English throne as James I in 1603, but the two countries remained separate legal entities under a single monarch. In 1707, the Treaty of Union, ratified by both parliaments, brought them into full union. Between 1603 and 1707, the term ‘Great Britain’ was increasingly used to describe the two countries; after 1707 its use was widespread, and in some circles Scotland was referred to as ‘North Britain’. In fact, the legal name of the country was the United Kingdom of Great Britain. In 1800, Ireland, which had been under several varieties of English rule since the eleventh century and had been a separate kingdom in various manifestations since the late fifteenth century, was brought into the Union. Thereafter, the country’s legal name was the United Kingdom. From the early eighteenth century onwards the term ‘British’ was regularly used as the adjective for all the countries and their inhabitants, although ‘English’, ‘Scottish’, ‘Welsh’ and ‘Irish’ also remained in use. In 1922, Ireland, with the exception of six counties in the province of Ulster in the north of the country, acquired self-government as the Irish Free State. This state became the Republic of Ireland (or Eire) in 1937. The six counties continued to be part of what was (and is) called the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, although with a partly devolved form of government which has existed in various forms for most of the time since then. Scotland and Wales acquired (in different degrees) devolved powers, including elected representative bodies, in 1999, but are still part of the United Kingdom. As some key aspects of the history of publishing in the British Isles have a legal dimension, and as this book focuses on British publishing, the various names and adjectives are used with their precise historical meaning at the period under discussion.

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A NOTE ON COUNTRIES, DATES AND MONEY

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Dates Until 2 September 1752, Britain used the Julian Calendar (‘Old Style’), which by that time had fallen some twelve days behind the Gregorian Calendar (‘New Style’) used throughout the rest of Europe. The day after 2 September was therefore 14 September 1752, the beginning of New Style dating in the UK. All dates before the change are Old Style, and all subsequent dates are New Style. The legal year, which is used in official records, including those of the Stationers’ Company, ran from 25 March to 24 March. All year dates have been regularised to a year beginning 1 January.

Money Until 15 February 1971, the Pound Sterling was divided into 20 shillings, each of which was divided into twelve pennies (or pence). This was written as £10.5s.6d., i.e. ten pounds, five shillings, and six pence. This style is used throughout for all references to money before the date of the changeover.

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INTRODUCTION

Publishing, as it is generally understood, is the commercial activity of putting books into the public domain. Publishers decide what to publish and then cause it to be produced in a commercially viable physical form; the product is then advertised and sold through a network of wholesalers and retailers. In those terms, publishing is a comparatively straightforward process which can be represented in the classic form of the Shannon–Weaver model of the communication chain: SOURCE → TRANSMITTER → RECIPIENT The Shannon–Weaver model The Shannon–Weaver model, originally devised to conceptualise telecommunications, has proved to be a useful means of describing any form of communication which involves technological intervention (Shannon and Weaver 1949). In theoretical terms, it can certainly be used to describe the publishing process in a highly simplified form: AUTHOR → PUBLISHER → READER Shannon–Weaver adapted to publishing In practice, the process is, of course, far more complicated than this implies, and involves many different participants and functions. Nevertheless, this simple model gives an important insight by putting the emphasis on the publisher as an intermediary between the author and the reader, or, in more formal terms, between the source and the recipient. This central concept defines the focus of the history of publishing. It is part of a larger and broader history which touches on the practitioners of many arts, crafts and trades. These include writers, illustrators, printers, bookbinders, booksellers, and librarians; and they are only the most obvious. There are also the makers of the materials used in the manufacture of books – papermakers and type founders, for example – and those who trade in the products used for books, such as stationers and fellmongers. Moreover, books are by no means

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INTRODUCTION

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the only products of the publishing process; others include magazines and newspapers. At the same time, the printing technology used for book production for the last five hundred years has also been used for many other products, including packaging, printed forms and other pre-printed stationery, advertising, business cards and a multitude of other manifestations of words and images on paper, cardboard, textiles, plastics and other materials. And such communications are not confined to print: a process analogous to publishing is used for the commercial production and dissemination of audio-visual and digital products; some of these have functions which overlap with the traditional domain of print. In recent decades, scholars of the history of publishing have been working within the broader context of the history of communications in general, and the history of books in particular. The history of the book – a literal translation of the French l’histoire du livre – has come to be understood to imply a broadly based social, economic and cultural history of books in society, which examines their origin, distribution, use and influence. It encompasses not only the history of book production and sale, but also that of writing and reading, and it blends into a broader cultural history. The intellectual tradition from which this derives is that of the annaliste school of French historians, who developed the concept of histoire totale in which political, social, economic and cultural history were seen as elements in an holistic understanding of the past. In a key work by Lucien Febvre, one of the great exponents of this approach, and Henri-Jean Martin, one of Febvre’s last pupils, the techniques and concepts of the annaliste school were applied to the history of books in early modern Europe (Febvre and Martin 1976 [but originally published in French in 1958]). This marked the beginning of a new approach to studying the role of books in history, although it was almost twenty years before its influence began to be felt in scholarship in the English-speaking world. During the 1970s and 1980s, however, a new approach to book history was developed by scholars in the English-speaking world, significantly influenced by the work of Febvre, Martin and their followers (Adams and Barker 1993; Birn 1976). This came to be associated with the work of D. F. McKenzie (see particularly McKenzie 1986) and Robert Darnton. Darnton, an historian of the French enlightenment, developed the concept of the ‘communications circuit’ which encompassed all the essential elements of the processes of writing, producing, selling and reading books. In a key paper (Darnton 1990, but originally published as Darnton 1982), he proposed a comprehensive model of which the essential feature was that it was continuous rather than linear, showing how readers (and those who provide books for them) influence authors and hence publishers. Indeed, the word circuit, with its implication that the process is continuous rather than moving towards completion, is a fundamental concept to contemporary book historians. It is in this context that we should approach the history of publishing in general and the history of British publishing in particular. We cannot understand it in isolation; in a paper in the second issue of the then-new journal

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Publishing History (which was itself a product of the growing scholarly interest in book history) the reviewer of a book on William Blake strongly made the point that publishing history cannot be ‘parochial’ (Eaves 1977: 76). The history of publishing is about much more than the publishing industry, because the industry itself makes no sense unless it is understood as a Shannon–Weaver transmitter or as part of Darnton’s ‘circuit’. It has to be concerned not merely with how publishing happened in the past, but also with what it produced, and the societal and political context in which it was working and changing. On the other hand, it must also maintain a sense of proportionality and discipline. Elizabeth Eisenstein’s bold attempt to rewrite the history of early modern Europe in terms of the ‘printing press as an agent of change’ (Eistenstein 1979) has been hugely influential. Her scope was huge, but paradoxically the vision was too narrow, making assumptions that all cultural change was driven by print. Recent scholarship clearly indicates that this was not a contemporary perception, and indeed that it can be shown to be a later construct driven by eighteenth-century concerns rather than those of the fifteenth century (Johns 1998). The widest definition of the ‘history of book’ is so all-encompassing that it can almost seem to run out of control. Yet a broadly based approach to the whole concept of ‘print culture’ can lead the historian into instructive reflections on matters as diverse as how people read as well as what they read, how writers are influenced by the forms of output, and how the published word works as an instrument of information and propaganda. All of these are legitimate subjects of study in themselves (Clegg 2001b); it is bringing them together in a broad interdisciplinary context which is so illuminating. There is, however, a danger of loss of focus. The historian of publishing needs to maintain a very clear focus on the central theme. That theme is, as was suggested at the beginning of this Introduction, the commercial process of putting books and other printed matter into the public domain, while recognising that it is only one aspect of the broader history of the writing, manufacture, distribution, sale and reading of books. The publisher – whether a person or a company – lies at the heart of this process. In its modern sense, publishing in Britain dates from the late eighteenth century, when we can first identify individuals and firms whose primary engagement was in issuing printed books for sale but were not directly involved either in printing or in retail bookselling. In its narrowest sense, a history of British publishing would focus on that activity alone, but it is precisely that narrowness that the work of the last thirty years has taught us to distrust. Just as there were books before there was printing, there was publishing before there were publishers. Manuscript books were bought and sold in the ancient world and in medieval Europe. By the middle of the fifteenth century, a sophisticated trade had developed in their production, distribution and sale. Printing changed the technology of production, but its early commercial success depended on making use of the existing trading mechanisms. These mechanisms changed as the number

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of books exponentially increased within a few decades of the development of the new craft, but it was an evolutionary rather than a revolutionary process. The first English printer, William Caxton, was a publisher as much as he was a printer. What this means is that Caxton, as well as owning the means of production, was financially responsible for the process and subsequently responsible for putting the printed books into circulation for sale. This combination of the roles of printer, publisher and bookseller remained common for much of the sixteenth century, when printing began to separate from the other activities. There were many reasons for this, some of which will be explored in Chapter 2. What was left after this separation had taken place was a body of tradesmen, almost all of them in the City of London, whose businesses revolved around the financing of the production of books and their subsequent sale. Their formal designation was as stationers, not least because the trade guild to which they were obliged to belong was the Stationers’ Company. During the seventeenth century, they became more commonly known as booksellers, a title which continued in common use until almost 1800. To confuse matters further, the term publisher began to be used in the early eighteenth century, but only to describe a group of people engaged in the sometimes rather disreputable occupation of distributing pamphlets, ballads and other ephemera. Not until the early nineteenth century was the word publisher established in its modern meaning, because by that time publishing and bookselling had also come to be practised by different people and firms. Although the focus of this book is firmly on the activity of publishing, it is assumed that it cannot be adequately described without touching on bookselling (a good deal) and book production (a little). For that reason, there is more emphasis on the last two hundred years than on the two centuries before then, but the story cannot be told without some understanding of what had gone before. We start therefore with the beginnings of the trade in printed books and the culture into which it was introduced, and trace the development of the trade. There are some key themes: the growth in the number of books published and copies printed, and the related increases in the number of readers; the diversification of the subject matter of books and the formats of printed material; the control of the press by state and church; and the internal culture of the book trade itself. These themes recur constantly over the five centuries of this history. The publishing industry can only be understood, however, as part of a wider picture. We cannot ignore either readers or authors. A literate population is critical to the existence of a successful publishing industry; how and by whom literacy was acquired is therefore part of the story, so we touch on the history of formal and informal education and of autodidacticism. What people read also changes, so that literary history, and indeed cultural history in its widest sense, give us insights into the market for books and therefore into how publishers made provision to meet the demands of that market. As the world of the book became increasingly driven by profit – as it has been since at least

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INTRODUCTION

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the middle of the sixteenth century in England – the business relationship between authors and publishers, and the legal framework within which that relationship is defined and practised, also becomes an integral part of the story. There is still, however, room for a narrative history, albeit a narrative with a logic and a theme. In other words, the history of publishing, although it has intrinsic interest and significance, has to be understood as part of the seamless garment of history as a whole, of histoire totale.

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Part I THE EARL Y MODERN BOOK TRADE

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1 LITERACY, PRINT AND CULTURE IN EARL Y MODERN ENGLAND

Introduction In the second quarter of the fifteenth century, when the German goldsmith Johann Gutenberg was beginning the experiments which were to lead to the invention of typographic printing, the form of the book which he knew was already sixteen hundred years old. The codex, the folded sheets held together in a binding with which we are familiar, had gradually displaced the scroll between the first century BCE and the third century CE, until it had become the only form in which texts were normally copied. The trade in manuscripts was even older than the codex. There seems to have been a commercial book trade in ancient Athens; the existence of the trade is well authenticated in Rome. Scribes working for booksellers made copies of texts for individual customers or for authors to distribute to their friends, or even speculatively for the booksellers to offer for sale. After the fall of the Roman Empire in the west at the beginning of the fifth century CE, the copying of manuscripts retreated into the monasteries, and it was not until the twelfth century that it emerged again into the sphere of commerce. This crucial development took place in Paris, and thereafter commercial book production developed in most of the major cities of the west (Roberts and Skeat 1983; Kenyon 1932: 82–3; de Hamel 1984). In England there was a commercial book trade by the fourteenth century. More than seventy years before printing was introduced into the country, by William Caxton in 1476, this trade was sufficiently highly developed for the scribes who wrote the manuscripts to have formed their own guild in London. The scribes were sometimes employed by wealthy individuals who wanted a copy of a particular text, but they also worked for the stationers who by the middle of the fourteenth century were acting as intermediaries between the scribes and the book buyers. The stationers were the publishers of the late Middle Ages. They co-ordinated the work of all the craftsmen who were involved in the production of manuscript books: the scribe, the illuminator, the bookbinder. They were also the suppliers of the paper or vellum on which the book was written (Christianson 1999: 128–35). Literary manuscripts

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were copied in considerable quantities and often to a high standard by commercial scribes. There is even evidence for a particular scribe being associated with a living author, and working under his direction as his ‘publisher’, preparing a number of copies of a new work for circulation to patrons and friends (Edwards 1983: 17–19). Moreover, the crafts of book production were not confined to London. There were commercial stationers working for the universities in Oxford and Cambridge (Pollard 1979), and there is evidence for a book trade in York and other cities before the invention of printing, as well as flourishing monastic scriptoria. Even at that early date, however, there is a suggestion that for manuscripts of the highest quality the bibliophile would turn to the London book producers (Turville-Petre 1983). Late medieval England was certainly not a bookless society. The ownership of books was not uncommon among the richer classes, both clerical and lay; the evidence for it is abundant in inventories, wills, catalogues and incidental references (Goldberg 1994; Humphreys 1967; Moran 1985: 185–220). By the middle of the fifteenth century, ownership of both religious and secular books was noticeably increasing among the laity (Fischer 2003: 168–70). There were libraries and other collections of books in universities, collegiate foundations and monastic houses, and from the reign of Edward IV (1461–83) there was a formally organised Royal Library based on royal collections that were already at least a century old (Backhouse 1999; Bell 1999; Stratford 1999). Books were undoubtedly expensive (Bell 1936–7), but they were available and in limited circles of society they were familiar.

Education, literacy and reading The market for books is essentially determined by two factors: the number of those able to read and who wish to do so, and their ability to obtain reading matter. The commercial book trade, of which publishing is a part, depends on both. It is not, however, essential that all readers can afford to buy the books they want. Access to libraries may satisfy their needs, in which case it is the library which becomes the customer rather than the reader. Literacy is, however, fundamental. Although the inability to read does not wholly exclude an individual from the world of the book, since the fifteenth century it has increasingly had that effect. In late medieval England it was still not uncommon for ‘reading’ to mean ‘recitation’, that is the practice of reading aloud to a group of people. Silent reading was first practised in the monastic houses and the universities, and became the norm for private study from the thirteenth century onwards. Indeed it has been argued that it was the development of silent reading which made it possible to have communal collections of books to be read in situ, that is, in libraries. In secular society, however, recitation continued to be common until at least the middle of the fourteenth century, and perhaps later (Fischer 2003: 166–7; Saenger 1997: 256–76).

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Once recitation had largely disappeared, the illiterate were in danger of not being able to access the contents of books. But in this, as in other matters, we should not overestimate either the speed or the suddenness of change. Orality remained a common form of public instruction. The lecture and the sermon are obvious examples. Recitation in the family circle remained a common leisure activity among the upper and middle classes until the nineteenth century. Perhaps more importantly, public reading and recitation continued to give the illiterate some access to the printed word. The sellers of printed ballads, for example, sang their wares at fairs and markets throughout the country for centuries to come. Their main purpose was to sell the printed text, but it had the effect of making that text available orally to those who could not read or afford it (Watt 1991: 23–5). Access to literate culture without mastering the art of reading may have been tenuous, but it was never impossible; well into the nineteenth century, there is evidence for a literate person with illiterate relatives, friends or colleagues reading to them from newspapers and books. Literacy among laypeople should not, however, be understood as simply a recreational tool. By the fourteenth century, and arguably earlier, it was for many people becoming a necessity. Written documents were fundamental to the ownership of property and goods, and to their transfer from one person to another whether by sale, gift or inheritance. Public business was also dependent on written documents and records. By the beginning of the fourteenth century, it was necessary to be able to read – although perhaps rather less necessary to be able to write – for anyone who owned property, ran a business or had recourse to the law. Written documents were regarded as authoritative; they gradually displaced the reliance on human memory whether individual or collective. Even in the law, where oral evidence continued (and continues) to be of vital importance, written records of the law itself and of judicial decisions, and of course documentary evidence to be presented to the court, was critical to the whole process. Late medieval England was far from being a wholly literate society, but it was a society in which literacy conferred social and economic advantages and was essential to the transaction of complex business. The pleasure to be derived from reading was almost coincidental to this central fact (Clanchy 1979). The actual extent of literacy in late medieval and early modern England is still a matter of debate among historians. A recent analysis concludes that by the middle of the sixteenth century perhaps half the adult population of England could read English to some extent, following a period of significant growth in the literacy rate (Trapp 1999: 39–40), although other scholars would take this to be a distinctly optimistic overestimate. By the second half of the sixteenth century, there are records from which inductions can be made about the extent of literacy, although the methodology is still somewhat contentious. Nevertheless, it seems reasonably safe to conclude that up to 60 per cent (and rising) of tradesmen and craftsmen in London and the south-east of England were literate, although in remoter parts of the country this proportion fell quite

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dramatically lower: 40 per cent in East Anglia, 30 per cent in Devon and Cornwall, perhaps less than 20 per cent in the north-east of England. Female illiteracy among the general population was in excess of 90 per cent. In the countryside, literacy rates did not rise to 50 per cent until well into the seventeenth century, and even then the evidence is ambiguous (Cressy 1980: 42–61; 142–74). In general terms, however, there are some conclusions which seem to be broadly valid: literacy was more common in the towns than it was in the countryside; men were much more likely to be literate than women; literacy was common among urban tradesmen; it was normal for the upper classes (both men and women) and among the clergy. All of this raises questions about the acquisition of literacy. Among the aristocracy and the wealthier landed gentry, education was normally based in the home. It was undertaken by a domestic chaplain, or perhaps the local priest; even after the Reformation this remained a common practice, although employing a lay school master or governess gradually displaced the practice of employing a clergyman. Few if any girls went to any kind of public school. Boys, however, did. Schools proliferated in late medieval England. Some were associated with monastic foundations and other ecclesiastical bodies such as cathedrals and collegiate churches. Some were little more than adjuncts to parish churches. Some of these schools taught basic literacy; others were more advanced, meaning that they taught Latin. These were what were to become known as the ‘grammar’ schools. During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, many such schools were founded and endowed by laymen, typically for the benefit of the sons of local tradesmen. By the end of the fifteenth century, there were few towns in England which did not have such a school. For a few, grammar school led to one of the two English universities. These were the training grounds for England’s intellectual elite, and in particular the higher clergy who were influential in the state as well as the church. The state itself had no role in education. In short, by the middle of the fifteenth century, it was normal for a boy from a modestly prosperous urban home to obtain a basic education in English and possible for him to have access to a more advanced education (Orme 1973: 167–223; Orme 1989: 1–22). The existence of a literate population underpins the existence of a commercial book trade. Literacy was, for the most part, acquired for utilitarian reasons: to conduct business, to transact correspondence and so on. But it was used for other reasons as well. There is ample evidence of leisure reading among the wealthy by the end of the fifteenth century, as well as evidence of aesthetic pleasure in books. Private individuals formed collections even before printed books became available; after that time, such collections proliferated, leaving evidence in the forms of thousands of books which can be shown to have been privately owned before the year 1557 (Ford 1999: 205–28). It was against this background that the printed book made its first appearance in England, and the trade in books was gradually transformed.

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The printed book The first printed book, an edition of the Bible in Latin, was produced by Gutenberg at Mainz in Germany in about 1454–5. The production technique was radically innovative, but in almost every other respect it was a profoundly traditional object. The appearance of the page was essentially the same as that of a manuscript. The type was copied from contemporary handwriting styles, complete with the diacritical marks and the multitude of abbreviations which were common in formal writing of Latin. The codex form itself was retained, and with it the binding. Of all those involved in manuscript production it was the bookbinders who suffered least from the new invention and the scribes who suffered most. In fact, some skills were in greater demand than ever before because of the vast increase in the number of books which were being produced. In the transitional period between manuscript and print, we find the work of the same binders and illuminators on both manuscripts and printed books. The increase in the number of books forced the binders into developing cheaper and simpler forms of binding (Pollard 1956; Nixon 1975/6), while illuminators soon fell victim to the economics of uniformity. At first, booksellers, readers and librarians did not really distinguish between printed and handwritten books. The texts which were put into print were those which were in greatest demand, the Bible, the Church fathers, biblical commentaries and the like (Goldschmidt 1943). They were acquired by the traditional buyers and owners of such books as convenient copies of texts which they needed (Doyle 1988). Printed books began to make their way into England from the middle of the 1460s, including some brought in by individual travellers (Armstrong 1979). Gradually, the number of imports increased, until by the end of the fifteenth century continental printed books were a major factor in the English book trade, far greater in numbers and of far greater commercial significance than the small number of domestically printed titles (Needham 1999). This was particularly true for those institutions and individuals looking for theological and scholarly texts which were rarely produced in preReformation England but which proliferated on the continent (Roberts 1997). Indeed, an awareness of the significance of imported books must lie behind any analysis of the English book trade until at least the second half of the sixteenth century. The reasons for the reliance on imports were both cultural and economic. England was part of a common western European culture essentially defined by the Catholic Church. Known to contemporaries as ‘Christendom’, western Europe was in some respects culturally unified around this common religious heritage and the Latin language through which it was expressed. Despite the development of vernacular languages, and their increasing use even in formal situations (such as the law courts and representative assemblies like the English parliament), Latin was in widespread use as a spoken as well as a written language. It was the language of public worship, and the normal language of

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instruction in the universities. It was the administrative as well as the theological and liturgical language of the Church. It was the language of diplomacy, which was, in any case, often undertaken by senior churchmen. It was, in short, the normal medium of complex intellectual communication between educated people. The universality of Latin made the task of the first printers both easier and more difficult. It was easier because they had a European rather than a merely local or regional market in which to sell their wares; it was more difficult because that was precisely what they had to do. While the scribes whom they gradually displaced wrote two or three books a year, an early printer might produce a title every month in fifty or more copies. Indeed, there was little point in print runs shorter than that (see below, pp. 23–4). Printed books thus began to appear at the great fairs which were the entrepôts of international trade in late medieval Europe. A successful printer/publisher was generally one who had easy access to this continent-wide market of the educated elite (Febvre and Martin 1976: 216–39). Printing developed most quickly in Germany, Italy and France, the three territories (only France could be called a state in anything like the modern sense in the fifteenth century) which had the most convenient access to the great north–south trade routes along the valleys of the Rhine and the Rhône and through the Alpine passes. It took more than twenty years for the art of printing to reach the periphery of Europe, a periphery in which England was firmly located. England in the 1470s was beginning to recover from a long period of foreign and domestic instability. The wars with France which had begun in the reign of Edward III (1327–77) had petered out with the loss of all but a handful of England’s French territories in 1453. Domestic unrest followed. The loss of France was the harbinger of a long period of rivalry between different branches of the royal house of Plantagenet, which had begun with the deposition and assassination of Richard II in 1399, and continued through the deposition and brief restoration of Henry VI (1422–61 and 1470–1). Edward IV restored order and began a process of administrative and political reform, but the poverty of the crown, the growing discontent of the merchant classes and the simmering jealousies of the aristocracy made his task at best very difficult. After Edward’s death, his younger brother was widely suspected of murdering his young successor, Edward V (1483), to claim the throne for himself as Richard III (1483–5). Richard’s reign came to an ignominious end when he was defeated in battle by his distant relative Henry Tudor who (tenuously) claimed the throne as Henry VII. His reign (1485–1509) was marked by the gradual restoration of the finances and the power of the English monarchy, and the establishment of a more peaceful, settled and prosperous society. It was against this turbulent background that the first English printers tried to make a living. William Caxton (c. 1422–91) was directly involved in some of the political events of the mid-fifteenth century. He was an import–export merchant who seems to have been very successful in his trade. He came to the attention of

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the court of Edward IV and undertook a number of diplomatic missions to the court of the Duke of Burgundy, the king’s brother-in-law, which was based at Bruges in modern Belgium. Burgundy was a prosperous independent state, and one of England’s major foreign trading partners as a market for her primary exports, wool and woollen cloth. It was in this trade that Caxton was engaged. Margaret, Duchess of Burgundy, the English king’s sister, was a patron of the arts, including the arts of the book, especially binding and illumination. Under her patronage, Caxton was encouraged to translate some contemporary French romances into English, and then to master the art of printing in order to disseminate them in his own country. It seems more than likely that he saw this as a simple commercial opportunity. England’s need for scholarly and religious books, almost all of them in Latin, could easily be satisfied by importing them from the continent; indeed Caxton himself may well have been involved in this trade. But there was no source for the secular works which amused the leisure of the English upper classes: this was the gap which Caxton sought to fill (Corsten 1976/7; Hellinga 1999; Hellinga and Hellinga 1976/7; Nixon 1976; Painter 1976). Caxton’s first book was his own translation of a French romance, Recueil des histoires de Troie, which he printed in 1474–5, under the title Recuyell of the histories of Troy, in either Louvain or Bruges. It was the first book to be printed in the English language. In that sense it marks the beginning of a new chapter in the history of the English book trade and what would later be the publishing industry. Caxton printed four other books in the Netherlands, but in 1476 he returned to England to set up shop in the precincts of Westminster Abbey; he was to remain there until his death (Painter 1976: 82; Nixon 1976). He had brought home with him a supply of type, and probably some workmen including Wynkyn de Worde, who was to be his successor (Blake 1971; Blake 1972). The press itself may have been imported, or it may have been built locally to Caxton’s specifications; we do not know. We do know, however, that by 13 December 1476 he had produced the first surviving piece of printing done on English soil, an indulgence for which the English commissary was John Gant, Abbot of Abingdon (Pollard 1928–9). During the next fifteen years Caxton produced more than a hundred books and other items of which copies are known to be extant; it is more than likely that there were others which are now lost. As the founding father of English printing (the ‘prototypographer’ as the Victorians loved to call him) Caxton is a major figure in the history of British publishing. On the other hand, he was far from being typical either of his immediate successors or of the printing trade in early modern England. First, Caxton was not a printer in the literal sense of operating a printing press; he was an employer of labour whose own function was as capitalist and salesman. In other words, he was primarily a publisher. By 1476 Caxton had behind him a solid record of commercial achievement. He was a wealthy man, well able to indulge his taste for literature. This does not mean that his press was a

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hobby. It was clearly intended as a commercial venture for which he carefully selected titles for their appeal to a small but well-defined market. Second, Caxton was not only a businessman but also a diplomat. When he returned to England it was the nobility of the court of Edward IV who provided both patrons and customers (Painter 1976: 59–71, 108–20). Although his Yorkist links caused him some difficulties after the accession of Henry VII, Caxton weathered that storm and his business continued to flourish. To appeal to this courtly audience, Caxton printed many volumes of the romances and poetry which were the dominant literary amusement at the courts of Edward IV and Richard III. Caxton’s book trade business was essentially medieval rather than modern, built as it was on royal and aristocratic patronage just like the businesses of contemporary scribes and producers of illuminated manuscripts. While his own approach may have been that of a businessman – and it would seem that it was – his customers must have seen him as being essentially a client. Because he was patronised by the court, it was natural for Caxton to establish himself at Westminster, the seat of the court and of parliament. In addition to the vernacular works for which he is chiefly remembered, Caxton also published a number of liturgical books, devotional treatises and indulgences all of which would have been useful to the clerics who clustered around the Abbey in which his shop was situated. It was, however, the court connection which made Caxton unique and gave him unique opportunities, which he readily seized, to develop his extensive programme of publishing literary works in English. Apart from the religious books, he made little attempt to appeal to an audience outside the important but narrow circles in which he moved. Caxton’s successors worked in a very different world. He soon had a competitor who, although unspectacular and virtually forgotten, was far more typical of future developments. John Lettou was, to judge from his name, of Lithuanian origin, although he learned to print in Rome. He established himself in the City of London, the commercial centre of the kingdom, in 1480, where he printed a few indulgences and other books. In 1482 he took a partner, William de Machlinia, a native of Flanders. Together they printed the first English law book, Tenores novelli, in 1482. This marked the beginning of one of the most profitable fields of early printing, for the uniqueness of the English common law meant that the Roman law books printed in great quantities on the continent were of little use in England. English law depended largely on precedent and statute; it was a field in which the changeover from manuscript to print was to be both rapid and comprehensive. The statutes from 1327 to 1483 were published by de Machlinia in 1484 or 1485; the first abridgement of them was already in print, having been published by Lettou and de Machlinia in 1482. The same printers issued the earliest printed Year Books, the reports of judicial decisions which formed the all-important precedents of the common law, in 1482. Within a few years, and less than a decade after the first press was operated in England, the essential documents of the English law were available in print (Baker 1999: 423–32).

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Like Caxton’s vernacular books, the law books were peculiarly English. There was no market for them outside England, and no reason why any continental printer should trouble to publish them. Indeed, the Englishness of English publishing is one of its abiding characteristics. From the beginning, it was predominantly in the English language, and predominantly literary, legal and popular. Scholarly publishing in England was a much later development since imports could provide all that was needed (see above, pp. 13–14). Moreover, it was not only books which were imported, but also materials and workmen. The early English printers, except for Caxton himself, were all foreigners, and indeed an Act of 1484, designed to restrict the activities of foreign merchants in England, specifically excluded ‘any scrivener, alluminor, binder or printer of . . . books’. Ironically, then, it was foreigners who established the traditions of English publishing, for it was not until the 1520s that a generation of Englishmen began to dominate the new trade. Indeed it was only in 1534 that the relevant clause of the 1484 Act was repealed, and foreign printers and booksellers were forbidden to practise their trades in England except, in the latter case, as wholesalers (Siebert 1965: 30–2).

The English book trade: London and the provinces The import of books on a growing scale in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries created in England precisely the same problem which the first European printers had faced, that of distribution and sale. The basic mechanisms of trade certainly existed through markets and fairs. We know that by the early sixteenth century books were being sold at the major fairs such as those at Stourbridge, near Cambridge, and the St Frisewide’s Fair in Oxford. There is evidence that London booksellers travelled to the country fairs, but it is also clear that as booksellers established themselves in country towns they too used this method of sale (Pollard 1978: 12–13). The import of books, however, was a small and recent phenomenon compared with the import of paper. That trade had begun in the early fourteenth century, and a hundred years later it was a major commercial enterprise. Indeed, England’s paper was largely derived from foreign sources until the late seventeenth century and it was not until the 1730s that domestic production was able to meet demand (Coleman 1958: 3–23). Paper was imported by London merchants and distributed by them through provincial fairs where they functioned as wholesalers. These paper merchants were men like Caxton in his Bruges days, operating with large and complex businesses; books were often added to these imports, and thus found their way into the mechanisms of domestic trade (Thrupp 1968: 161). The early importers of books therefore pioneered the development of a distribution system within England by using the existing channels of trade in association with the dealers in a closely related product. From the little evidence that exists of the sale of English books at fairs it is clear that the English printers and publishers followed their example.

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The links between the paper trade and the book trade were already close, and the growth of printing increased them. The printers were among the major consumers of paper and the two trades gradually coalesced so that by the late fifteenth century the combination of printer and retail stationer was already a common one. When the printers moved into the City of London in the early sixteenth century, and were obliged to join a guild, it was to the guild of scriveners and ‘writers of text letter’ that they gravitated, a guild which was transformed in 1557 into the Company of Stationers (see below, pp. 29–31). Some of the patterns which were being established in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries were to survive for much of the next five hundred years, and so too were some of the characteristics of the English book trade which were already becoming apparent. The trade was inward-looking, seeking a domestic rather than a European market; it was for that reason primarily concerned with vernacular books; and it was developing distribution mechanisms which assumed distribution from London to the rest of the country. London’s predominance, which has dictated the history of British publishing, was not entirely unchallenged in the early decades of the trade. Until the middle of the sixteenth century it seemed that the trade in England might develop as it had on the continent, where printers established themselves in many cities under the patronage of a local institution such as a monastery or university. In Germany and Italy, lacking central political structures, this was a widespread phenomenon and so, briefly, it became in England. About two years after Caxton arrived in Westminster, a second printer appeared in England, not in London but at Oxford. This was Theodoric Rood, who apparently came from Cologne, perhaps at the invitation of a group of members of the university or perhaps as a commercial venture. Certainly Oxford was precisely the sort of town to which a printer would have been attracted had it been in northern Italy, but in England the enterprise proved hopeless. Rood began work in Oxford in 1476 or 1477 and was subsequently in partnership with Thomas Hunt, one of the university stationers, but he was in no sense running a university press. He printed fewer than twenty extant items, and vanished from the scene in 1486. Most of his books were patristic or classical texts for which the English market was minuscule, and we may take it that the first Oxford press was a commercial disaster (Carter 1975: 4–12). The competition from the continental imports almost certainly defeated him (Leedham-Green 1999: 337–9). A similar, and similarly unsuccessful, enterprise existed in the early 1480s at St Albans, where the Benedictine Abbey had been a major centre of manuscript production for centuries. It had assembled a proportionately large library and also had a very successful school. The first St Albans printer, whose name is unknown, produced his first book, an edition of a work on rhetoric, in 1479 or 1480. Between that year and 1486 eight books were produced, including two in English for a secular market. The St Albans printer, apparently a master

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at the school, obviously worked as an amateur. He had no real commercial interests and was no competition for the London printers (Barker 1979; Knowles 1948–59: vol. 1, 291–6, vol. 2, 264–8, vol. 3, 24–5). Two other monastic houses encouraged printers in the last years of their own existence. In 1525 there was a printer at Tavistock Abbey, under the patronage of a monk, Thomas Richard, who produced an edition of Boethius, and in 1528 John Scolar, already established as a printer in Oxford, printed a breviary at the abbey in nearby Abingdon (Knowles 1948–59: vol. 3, 25–7). These three presses, again all following a pattern which was not unusual in Germany and France, were not commercial enterprises in any sense. This was an attempt to introduce new technology into the traditional monastic scriptorium. It failed. The other early presses outside London were also associated with towns which had a long ecclesiastical or educational tradition. In 1520 a group of humanists invited John Siberch to Cambridge where he printed a few books under their patronage before returning to his native Germany. He was as unsuccessful as Rood had been in Oxford in establishing a learned press (McKitterick 1992–2004: vol. 1, 38–9). Both Canterbury and York had presses before the middle of the sixteenth century; Frederic Freez may have been printing in York as early as 1497–8 and was certainly doing so by 1509 (Sessions and Sessions 1976), while there was a printer at Canterbury by 1536 (Zell 1977). In Ipswich, Anthony Skolokar may have been printing in 1547, followed in 1548 by John Oswen, who is alleged to have printed four books in the town before moving to Worcester to print religious books for distribution in Wales in 1549 (Watson 1946/8). There were no presses in Wales itself until 1718 (Rees 1998: 123), nor in Ireland until 1551 (Pollard 1989: 2). Scotland, an independent kingdom with a version of English (Lallans) quite different from that spoken in England, had its first printer in 1507 (Mann 2000: 7). It is easy to dismiss all this activity as trivial and marginal, and so in a sense it was. It does, however, demonstrate that there were individuals and institutions who felt the need for printed books. The monastic houses, especially perhaps St Albans with its great history of book production, saw the printing press as an extension of their traditional concerns. Certainly the one consistent theme running through the history of these early provincial presses is that many of the printers were working for a patron as a scribe might have done in earlier times. Book production by patronage was, however, no longer viable in the age of the printed book. To produce a single copy of a printed book is a commercial and technological nonsense; to produce 500, however, or even 50, requires a distribution and marketing system which the patrons simply did not have. The monasteries and universities and cathedrals of England, great institutions as they were, could not themselves provide a sufficient market, and were not equipped to reach markets elsewhere. In retrospect, these presses can be seen not so much as the harbingers of the new age but rather as the last heirs of the medieval tradition of localised book production for local use.

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The variety of printed books The English trade in printed books during the first century of its existence can be characterised as a combination of two strands. The first was the import and distribution of continental books in Latin, largely consisting of classical and theological texts, with some Roman law and contemporary scholarly works in Latin. The second was the production in England – almost entirely in London – of a comparatively small number of books in English which were then sold through retailers in the capital and – to a much lesser extent – through stationers and booksellers in the provincial towns and at fairs and markets. Few if any of these vernacular books were exported, not least because the English language was virtually unknown outside its native land. Although the import trade – then and for many decades described by contemporaries by the significant name of the ‘Latin trade’ (Roberts 2002) – was probably far more important in economic terms than the vernacular book trade, it was nevertheless from the latter that the publishing industry developed. The first English printer/publishers, Caxton and his contemporaries, clearly focused on the English market. Even Caxton, despite his dependence on his courtly patrons, did not disdain a more popular market. He engaged in ‘jobbing’ printing, such as the surviving indulgence (see above, p. 16), and also produced a number of small books clearly not aimed at his usual audience. As with the output of all early printers, we have to assume that there was more than survives; popular books were cheap and unregarded, and rarely found their way into the libraries which preserved the great folios and quartos which are so overrepresented in the surviving corpus of fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century printed books. Yet from the beginning of printing in England, vernacular books intended for the devout layman formed an important part of the products of the press, and played a significant role in laying the foundations for an economically viable trade in printed books. Among the major printers of the period, Caxton, de Worde, Pynson and Berthelet all devoted about 40 per cent of their output to religious books of one sort or another. In the context of the import of the majority of liturgies intended for use in England, and of academic theology, this output can be taken to be aimed at the popular market, although the English market was large enough to enable de Worde and others to produce Books of Hours (Horae) and the devotional works in Latin for the pious laity (Bennett 1969: 65–6; Erler 1999). It is clear that from its very beginning English vernacular book production relied on books which could command a large market. Indeed, the economics of printing meant that it could not do otherwise. In every field, we find evidence for books which were clearly aimed at a ‘popular’ market, even in subjects like law and medicine. By the middle of the sixteenth century, there were books published which would assist the local magistrate in carrying out his increasingly onerous duties, and there were ‘medical’ treatises which distilled the essence of centuries of folk wisdom and the lore of the herbalists. In science

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and medicine, as in theology and classical scholarship, learned works were imported; as a general rule, only popular vernacular books in these fields were actually published in England (Bennett 1969: 84–5, 97–100; Jones 1999). The gradual spread of literacy down the social scale created a market for books on a much wider range of occupations, especially those associated with farming (Bennett 1969: 111–12). All of these subjects came together in the almanacs and prognostications which were to form the basis of a very profitable branch of the trade. Prognostications, single sheets in which an astrologer presented his predictions for the coming year, had been familiar in manuscript before the invention of printing, and there are a number of continental examples of printed versions in the fifteenth century. The first printed prognostication in English was published in 1502, and thereafter there was a steady stream of them year by year. Gradually, the prognostication and the almanac took on a more substantial form, becoming a small book which contained not only predictions but also useful information on the weather, farming, medical and veterinary matters and similar material of general interest. By the middle of the sixteenth century, the predictions were becoming increasingly political, and indeed, despite the efforts of successive censors, the almanac continued to be a vehicle for political comment until the middle of the seventeenth century. The almanacs attained an immense popularity; quite apart from their practical value, they had a strong appeal to a society in which traditional beliefs still competed with formal religion in the popular imagination (Capp 1979: 25–30; Jones 1999: 439–44; Thomas 1978: 347–56). The genre can be taken to exemplify the development of a popular vernacular tradition in the English book trade.

Conclusions The transition from a manuscript to a printed culture was not marked by sudden change, but rather by gradual transition. Printed books first reached England as imports through established channels of trade. The introduction of the art of printing was the result of aristocratic patronage as well as of commercial acumen. By the time that printing came to England, more than twenty years after its invention, it was already widespread on the continent, and the presses there were producing more than enough of the common Latin culture for England’s needs to be satisfied by continuing imports. As a result, the production of printed books in England was focused, from the very beginning, on books in the vernacular. This development was unique in western Europe, and created a small ‘publishing’ trade which looked solely to its own domestic market. That market was small but growing. To maximise it, however, the English printers looked to products which were English in more than just their language. They were books specifically for an English audience, most notably the books of common law.

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The printing trade was concentrated in London. Despite a few attempts, it proved impossible to operate a viable press even in the most superficially promising provincial towns. Ecclesiastical or academic patronage was not enough to enable printers outside London to compete with their commercially-minded contemporaries in the capital. Book distribution, although on a very small scale, was built around networks of trade which radiated from London to the country fairs and markets; these networks could carry imports as well as domestically produced books, and continued to handle manuscripts as well as printed books. An English national book trade was coming into existence, dominated by London importers and producers. Late fifteenth-century England was emerging from a long period of political and economic instability. Not until the turn of the century was it certain that Henry VII would succeed where his predecessors had failed in taming his leading subjects and bringing the kingdom under royal control. Even then, the future hung on the thin thread of the life of his son and heir. A new means of book production was of small concern in such times, although Henry VII, like Edward IV before him, did patronise Caxton, and the legislation of Richard III, which had been designed to help the book trade by allowing the use of foreign labour to fill the skill gaps in the English workforce, was allowed to remain on the statute book. There was, however, no overt interference with the operation of the trade, just as there was no more than marginal encouragement of it. This situation was not destined to last. The power of the printed word was soon to be made manifest in the most dramatic way. Henry VII’s Tudor successors, and their successors of the House of Stuart, were never to enjoy his luxury of being able to ignore it.

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2 THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE BOOK TRADE

The book trade in the early sixteenth century Printing was not brought into a society without books or a book trade. There was a well-established trade in books in London and the larger provincial centres. The production, distribution and sale of these books created a good deal of employment. There were scribes and scriveners who wrote them, limners and illuminators who illustrated and rubricated them, binders who bound them and retailers who sold them. There were also merchants who supplied the raw materials: paper and parchment for writing on, ink and pens for writing with, and skins for bindings. Since the early fifteenth century, the majority of those engaged in these trades in London had belonged to a trade guild which came to be called the Company of Stationers. To be a member of the Company gave a man both privileges and obligations; above all, he had the right to trade in the City of London of which he was a citizen by virtue of being a liveryman of the Company. This gave the City authorities jurisdiction over him in many respects, including the right to regulate the prices of his goods and his places of trade, but on balance there were far more benefits than disadvantages. Caxton did not belong to the stationers’ guild; he was actually a member of the far more prestigious Mercers’ Company. But many of his successors did. It was through the stationers that they obtained their supplies; since the printers had to have guild membership to ply their trades in the City, the links and potential benefits were obvious. The two leading printers of the second generation – Wynkyn de Worde (d. 1534) and Richard Pynson (d. 1529) – were both stationers, although there were others in the trade who were not. Perhaps there were tensions; after all, the printers represented a growing and ever more visible threat to the livelihoods of the scriveners who dominated the guild (Blayney 2003). Gradually, however, the practitioners of all the branches of the book trades coalesced around the guild, with consequences then unforeseen and unforeseeable which were to determine much of the future direction of English, and later British, publishing. By the end of the fifteenth century, printing was well established, and a pattern of relationships had begun to emerge within the book trade. The

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printers were the dominant players in the production of printed books. They not only owned the production facilities and had both the equipment and the trained labour force (all of which were still uncommon), they also had the capital with which to fund the enterprise of book production. This was a key factor, which was rooted in the complex process of typesetting. This is timeconsuming and skilled work, but once it has been done there is no practical limit to the number of copies that can be printed. The more copies that are produced, the lower the unit cost of producing each copy, since the initial cost of typesetting remains the same whether the print run is one copy, or a hundred, or a thousand. On the other hand, a second print run could cost almost as much as the first. In the fifteenth century, and indeed for much of the next three hundred years, the normal practice was to break up (‘distribute’) the type when the print run was complete. This was partly because early printing houses were typically short of type, and partly because the made-up pages were difficult to handle and to store. Thus, the printer sought to print the number of copies that could be sold in a reasonable time and would meet the total demand for the book. In the meanwhile, until these books were sold, there would be no income, and until a significant percentage of the print run was sold there would be no profit. There was thus an incentive to sell the books as quickly and as efficiently as possible once the printing was completed. Through all the commercial and technical changes which have come to the book trades in the last five hundred years, this basic economic fact has remained as a constant. The early continental printers sought a Europe-wide market for their wares for precisely this reason (see above, pp. 13–14); the English printers, with their vernacular and even parochial products, had no such option. What they did was to identify markets which they could easily reach and move to be close to them. By the middle of the fifteenth century, the book trades were well established in the area around St Paul’s Cathedral in the heart of the City of London, easily accessible to clergy and laity (especially lawyers) alike (Christianson 1999: 129). The printers followed them. De Worde moved Caxton’s printing house – which he inherited – to Fleet Street in 1498 (Blayney 2003: 23–4), the precursor of dozens of printers who were to have that address until the late twentieth century. It was de Worde who really began the commercialisation of the production of printed books in England (Edwards and Meale 1993). The reason why he and his contemporaries and successors wanted to move to the City was a simple one: they needed to be near their customers. That tells us an important fact about their businesses: they were not only printers and publishers, they were also booksellers, selling their own products from shops (or at least counters) on the premises where they had their presses. The printers had not merely brought a new activity into the book trade: they had begun to absorb other much older activities. In the early decades of the sixteenth century, a reasonably clear pattern of commercial relationships developed. The printers were the capitalists of book

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production: they owned the production equipment and employed skilled labour to operate it; they bought materials such as paper and ink from wholesale stationers; they financed the process of production; and they sold the books they produced both directly to customers and, perhaps with increasing frequency, to other booksellers some of whom were trading with the continent or the English provinces. This was a capital-intensive activity, and as the scale of the trade grew it put a strain on both the financial and managerial capacity of some of the printers. Moreover, as the number of printers increased (a slow but discernible process by 1520) it became possible for others in the trade to commission printing work for books for which they carried the financial risks. Although significant change was to be a long process, not fully complete for more than a hundred years, even in the early sixteenth century it was clear that the relationships which had evolved might not be permanent and that other forms of trade organisation were possible.

The censorship of print The centrifugal forces which concentrated the English book trade in London had their origins in economic imperatives. The trend was, however, reinforced by political considerations. The initial impact of the printed word was on the traditionally literate classes: clergy, lawyers, aristocrats and other wealthy laymen. However great that impact may have been it was nevertheless confined to this elite; when, however, it began to be seen that the dissemination of print was beginning to disturb the very foundations of society, kings and bishops began to take a closer interest in the new art. This interest became closer from the 1520s onwards as the unity of western Christendom was wrenched apart by the Protestant Reformation. Centralisation of government and closer control of all manner of activities was a policy pursued both by Edward IV and by his Tudor successors in their attempt to restore the power and the wealth of the debilitated English monarchy. The generously defined and widely exercised royal prerogative was a fundamental tool of this process. Printing did not escape. While Richard III’s parliament had encouraged foreigners to come to England to practise the various branches of the book trades (see above, p. 17), Henry VIII (1507–47) issued a proclamation in 1528 which strictly limited the number of aliens employed and forbade aliens from opening new bookshops or printing houses. At the same time, they were strongly encouraged to take English apprentices. In 1534, the 1484 Act itself was repealed, printing restricted to English subjects and strict controls imposed on imports by foreigners (Avis 1972). Superficially, this was a measure designed to protect the economic interests of the growing number of English printers and booksellers, and certainly it had this effect (Siebert 1965: 30–2). It also ensured, however, that all of those involved in the book trades were indisputably in the royal jurisdiction. Moreover, the explicit prohibition on book imports by foreigners was undoubtedly intended

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to prevent the import of books, whether in English or Latin, which were politically or religiously unacceptable to the crown. It marks in fact the beginning of the restrictive controls which were to characterise the English book trade until the end of the seventeenth century and which residually survive even today (Reed 1919). It was not only imports which were controlled. In the early 1520s, Lutheran books were publicly burned in London. In 1525, de Worde was brought before an ecclesiastical court for printing an unacceptable book; in 1526, Thomas Berthelet (d. 1555) suffered the same fate for publishing an innocuous work for which he had not sought prior permission (Siebert 1965: 48, 51). Throughout the 1520s and 1530s the controls were made more stringent as Henry VIII and his chief minister Thomas Cromwell (c. 1485–1540) forced their own version of the Reformation on the English church. In 1538, they began to systematise the ad hoc developments of the previous twenty years. A royal proclamation (which had the force of law) required that all books should be approved by the Privy Council or designated members of it before publication. The proclamation was re-enforced by statutes in 1540 and 1542–3 which established an ecclesiastical commission to act as censor of all religious books (Clegg 1997: 25–7). This procedure survived the further religious changes under Edward VI (1547–53) and the Catholic reaction under Mary I (1555–8). Not until 1557 did the queen and the hard-pressed Council begin to seek an efficient but less burdensome alternative (Towers 2003: 18–22; see also below, pp. 33–7).

The King’s Printer and the printing patents Censorship was not the only manifestation of royal interest in the book trade; from Henry VII’s reign onwards a series of privileges, patents and monopolies was granted to various individuals within the trade for various reasons, although these reasons are sometimes obscure (Clegg 1997: 7–8). In 1504, William Facques (d. 1538) was appointed as King’s Printer with the right and the duty to print royal proclamations, statutes and the other ‘crown’ books. The office has a continuous history from that year. By 1508, Facques had been succeeded by Richard Pynson; on Pynson’s death in 1530, it passed to Berthelet, and in 1547 from Berthelet to Richard Grafton (d. 1573). By that time, it was a highly lucrative position, but in 1553 Mary I took away certain of the Printer’s rights and conferred them separately on others. This was an important decision, for what Mary did was to grant to Richard Tottell (d. 1593) the sole right to print all common law books, and at the same time to forbid all others to do so. This was not entirely without precedent. In 1539, Berthelet had petitioned Henry VIII for similar privileges with regard to the Bible; the king accepted the principle, but the privilege was actually conferred on Cromwell. After Cromwell’s execution in 1540, it was transferred to Anthony Merler, a merchant who was in fact one of Grafton’s financial backers. In 1543, Grafton

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himself was granted similar rights in service books and primers, to which the statutes were added in 1547 (Siebert 1965: 38–9; Plant 1965: 100–1). These grants of monopolies had their origin in an attempt to control the output of the press both positively and negatively. The King’s Printer (or Queen’s Printer during the reigns of queens regnant) was required to print all those documents which were becoming essential to the efficient operation of the state: proclamations, statutes and the growing quantity of other ‘official’ printing. The later privileges, such as Tottell’s and Grafton’s, had a twofold purpose: to the printer/publisher they gave a commercial monopoly on a profitable class of books, but to the authorities they gave the comfort of knowing that certain sensitive books (especially religious texts) were safely in the hands of printers who had every reason to uphold the royal authority under which they exercised their profitable monopolies. Tottell’s patent was particularly interesting and valuable. It covered a whole class of books, including any written after the granting of the privilege, whereas the earlier patents had related to specific books. It was these class privileges, or monopolies as they were to be known to their opponents by the end of the century, which multiplied in the next few years. By 1559, Tottell had the sole rights in all law books; by the late 1570s similar privileges covered not only law books, Bibles and prayer books, but also almanacs, ABCs (elementary reading books), catechisms, Latin books, grammars and printed music. The list was to be extended yet further before 1600 (see below, pp. 35–6).

Writers and the book trade The printer/publishers were the key players in the world of the book in midsixteenth-century England. They introduced into that world a commercial element which, while it was not wholly new, was certainly more overt and more extensive than had ever been the case in the past. They relied for much of their income on the sales of popular religious books, school books, almanacs, prognostications and similar literature. At first, almost all the books they produced were simply printed versions of texts which had circulated in manuscript or perhaps orally. The demand for books, however, did not come to an end when the first group of texts had been made available in print. Indeed, it was self-perpetuating, for the wider availability of books made it easier for more people to learn to read and then to retain the skill of literacy. Endless reprints could not satisfy this growing market. Changing political and religious circumstances and changing tastes and fashions created a climate in which new books were needed, as well as more copies of the old ones. That meant that the printers and others in the trade had to find authors who would write their books for them. The professional author, like the professional publisher, is a product of the age of the printed book. By the end of the fifteenth century books were being

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written which would not have been written had there not been a press on which to print them and a book trade through which to sell them. It was already apparent that the long-term development of the trade would depend upon the willingness of authors to write books which the public would wish to buy. It was to be two hundred years before the full implications of this were recognised, but even in the sixteenth century the conditions of authorship underwent significant change. The medieval author worked for himself, for God or for a patron, and sometimes perhaps for all three. The role of the patron was to provide material support for the author as he might have done for any other servant. This might take the form of appointing him to an office in the patron’s gift, or direct financial reward, or some combination of the two. Whatever form patronage took, it was a means of paying the author for his book which, however, gave him no reason to expect any further payment (Lucas 1982). Such a system could not survive entirely unchanged in the commercial environment which enveloped the book world after the invention of printing. Patronage indeed survived until at least the end of the sixteenth century (see below, pp. 132–3) and vestigially even after that (Collins 1927: 114–212). Patrons, however, were unlikely to lend their names to the very works which were becoming most profitable to the book trade in the middle of the sixteenth century. The trade itself became involved in the process of causing books to be written, beginning the shift away from patronage to payment. Almanacs, for example, were compiled by astrologers whose income came from other sources, such as casting the horoscopes of the wealthy (Capp 1979: 293–340), but the manuals of advice on a multitude of secular subjects, and the growing number of versions and translations of popular stories, were written by people who sought their financial rewards from the printer and publisher rather than the patron. Patronage was still the most important source of support for many writers throughout the sixteenth century (Bennett 1965: 355; Miller 1959: 94–136; Shearyn 1967: 8–38; Voss 1998), but gradually publishers began to pay their authors a little for the right to publish their books. It was impossible to make a living from writing (Miller 1959: 139–40), except perhaps from writing for the stage from the 1590s onwards, but it was increasingly possible to generate some sort of income. Sometimes a publisher would give an author a number of free copies (usually twenty-six) which he could sell for his own profit, or perhaps use to present to an existing patron or to attract a new one (Miller 1959: 160–2). Despite the financial obstacles, and despite the contempt in which those who wrote for money were held by their more fortunate contemporaries, authorship was a recognisable occupation by the end of the sixteenth century. At least another century was to elapse before the professional author could take some pride in his profession, but ‘writing for the booksellers’ as it was to become known, was necessary for the book trade, authors and readers alike if the flow of new books was to be sustained (Saunders 1964: 49–67; and below, pp. 55–6).

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The organisation of the trade By the middle decades of the sixteenth century, the London book trade had fully absorbed the impact of printing. Although scriveners still practised their craft, and indeed were to do so for decades to come (Woudhuysen 2000: 29–87), printing had become the normal means of commercial book production. Statistical precision about London book production is impossible for this period; indeed, even approximations are necessarily based on surviving books rather than on contemporary production records (which do not exist). We can, however, make some reasonably safe inferences. There was a steady growth in the output of titles throughout the first half of the sixteenth century; the average went up from about 100 a year in the 1520s to about 150 in the 1550s. These figures are likely to be underestimates because of the nature of the evidence; it is clear, however, that the general trend was towards a significant increase (derived from Pantzer 1991: 336–46). There were fifteen printing houses in London in 1547 (Blayney 2003: 47); in 1557, when the Stationers’ Company received its royal charter, ninety-seven names were listed as its first members (Blagden 1960: 20). This was still a small trade, geographically concentrated, consisting of a modest number of small businesses, all of which were essentially family firms; some had a handful of employees and apprentices. But it was a growing trade, which was evolving in response to both commercial and political pressures. The very nature of its products exposed the book trade to the vagaries of church and state, two entities which were difficult to distinguish for at least 150 years from the middle of the sixteenth century onwards. Official pressure, especially if it resulted in the suppression of books for which production costs had already been incurred (quite apart from penalties such as fines and imprisonment), had serious financial implications. Yet the trade had made itself essential to the authorities as well as being a potential nuisance. The limited range of privileges granted to named printers and others, although they covered some of the most profitable books, were by no means comprehensive; there was plenty of scope for commercial enterprise. There was also, however, a growing concern about the number of people involved in the trade. Despite a period of growth, the market was still limited, and too much competition would be deleterious to the vested interests which had developed since 1476. It was to address this problem that the leading members of the trade acted collectively in 1557. In that year, they petitioned Mary I for a Royal Charter which would establish the stationers’ guild on a more formal footing and give it certain powers and privileges which it could collectively defend at law. There has been some scholarly controversy about the origins of the Charter (Arber 1875–94: vol. 1, xxvi; Greg and Boswell 1930: lx–lxi; Pollard 1920: 10–12; Pollard 1937–8: 29–36), essentially revolving around whether the initiative came from the crown or from the guild. Grants such as that made to the Stationers in 1557 were

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normally the result of a petition to the crown asking for a charter or other document; if there was such a petition it has not survived, but the one document which is extant suggests that the normal procedures, which were in any case statutory, were followed (Pollard 1937–8: 32–3). The members of the guild had a clear commercial interest in obtaining a charter which gave them a conjoint monopoly over their increasingly profitable trade; this the Charter certainly granted them. Both of these considerations argue against a crown initiative. The whole line of argument is strengthened when we consider the alleged motive of the crown, the control of the press, for there was no need to create a corporation when there were existing executive decrees to the same end. Moreover, there is nothing in the Charter which grants the Company any rights of censorship or licensing, and Elizabeth I’s Injunctions of 1559 (see below, pp. 33–4) make it quite clear that it was envisaged that the traditional system, somewhat modified and augmented, was to be continued. Far from being a ‘master-stroke of Elizabethan policy’ designed to use the trade to control the content of books (Greg and Boswell 1930: lx; it was in any case Marian rather than Elizabethan), the grant of the Charter was a perfectly regular transaction for the commercial benefit of the guild of stationers which we may take to have been initiated by them. Why should they do so? It was partly to protect themselves against political upheavals by having a more formal official status. It was partly an assertion of power by the printers who now clearly dominated the trade, and, to some extent, the stationers’ guild (Blayney 2003: 49–51). It was also, however, an instrument designed to benefit the trade as a whole by regulating entry to it, by controlling the number of practitioners and by restricting the production and sale of books to those who were members of the Company. The central provisions of the Charter were that only the Liverymen of the Stationers’ Company could practise the trades of printing, bookselling and bookbinding in the City of London. This was strengthened by effectively banning printing throughout England by anyone who was not a Liveryman, and hence bringing to an end any potential for provincial printing; this was to be reinforced by other means at a later date (see below, p. 46). The Company was self-governing. Its Court of Assistants, elected from among the senior Liverymen, could adjudicate in disputes between members, and – crucially – controlled entry to the trade through apprenticeship. Formal apprenticeship was the only route into full membership of the Company (except for a handful of men who transferred from other companies, or were made free by virtue of their father’s membership), and thus the only way to establish an independent career in the trade (Blagden 1960: 34–46). All of this was quite normal for a City livery company in the sixteenth century. The objective was to ensure that trade was conducted fairly and equitably, and that it was – as contemporaries saw it – appropriately regulated so that unrestrained competition did not produce undesirable rivalries. But in one important respect the Stationers were different, because their product was

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different. Livery companies were expected to regulate the quality of the work done by their members; for the Stationers this meant that they had to find some means of controlling the quantity and quality of the books their members produced. It also, however, had implications for the control of their contents, since no regulation of the book trade made sense unless this crucial element were to be taken into account. At the same time, regulating the competition between members for the general good also necessitated some system which would identify who had the right to print and sell particular titles. All of these factors were to come together in the 1560s with consequences which were to reverberate through the subsequent history of publishing far beyond the confines of the City of London or indeed Tudor England.

Conclusions When Elizabeth I came to the throne in 1558, the English book trade was flourishing. It was producing a steady and growing supply of books for the domestic market. It was responsible for the import and distribution of those books which it was uneconomic to produce in England. The relationships between the major players in the trade – the printers, booksellers and stationers – were sufficiently well established to be capable of evolutionary change without damaging the trade as a whole. Above all, the trade had secured a modus vivendi with the authorities. At a time of great political and particularly religious upheaval, the leading members of the trade had co-operated with successive monarchs and their ministers sufficiently to obtain a privileged position in printing some of the most profitable and sensitive material. They had also secured a Royal Charter for their trade guild, which gave them an enhanced status among their fellow tradesmen in the City, and which institutionalised their oligarchic control of the trade. Despite the forebodings about the future which many Englishmen felt in 1558, the book trade was well placed to face it.

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3 THE BOOK TRADE AND THE STATE

Introduction The efforts made to control the output of the press from the 1530s onwards all recognised that the only effective way in which this could be done was by controlling the production process. Once a book had been printed in scores or hundreds of copies, dissemination could be inhibited but rarely wholly prevented. Any enforceable controls had to be achieved at the point of production, or preferably before production even began. Pre-publication censorship was to be the normal practice in England from the 1530s until the 1690s, with a few interludes when it was unenforceable or – very briefly – abolished. It is important to recognise the historical context of this practice. A ‘free’ press in the normally understood modern sense was unknown in early modern Europe. It would have been considered neither possible nor desirable. There was an assumption that civil, ecclesiastical and academic authorities had a right and a duty to control what was printed, disseminated and read. The issue, therefore, insofar as there was an issue, was not whether to censor but rather what and how, with the inevitable concomitant of who was to undertake the task, and how a mechanism would be created to monitor compliance. In England, the underlying principle was that the crown had the prerogative right to control the content of printed matter. It could exercise this right through a variety of means. The legislative framework might be promulgated through proclamation or by statute. Enforcement could be delegated to various officials and organisations, in the church, in the organs of state and in the universities, or to civic officials and corporations. The courts could be used to penalise infringements and to determine the extent to which common law could be applied. Punishment of offenders ranged from confiscation and destruction of offending material, through fines, closure of bookshops and printing houses, seizure of equipment, imprisonment and mutilation or even death. None of this was contentious in principle in the mid-sixteenth century and, save for a brief interlude in the early 1640s, it was to remain comparatively uncontentious for 150 years thereafter. The problem for the authorities was how to make controls work effectively; the problem for the book trade

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was how to co-operate with that process without damaging the profitability of the trade. Censorship, however, was not the only aspect of state involvement in publishing and the book trade. The granting of monopolies for certain kinds of books, which had begun in the reign of Henry VIII (see above, pp. 26–7) continued and indeed increased in importance for the rest of the sixteenth century, and despite the rising tide of complaints, continued to be common until 1640. This was in turn related to the wider question of the ‘ownership’ of the contents of books, and the right to print books which were not covered by the various patents, privileges and monopolies. That question was one with which the courts began to concern themselves during the seventeenth century, and which was eventually the subject of a succession of statutes from the early eighteenth century to 1988 (see below, pp. 55–6). All of these legal and quasi-legal matters had an impact on how printers and booksellers conducted their businesses. Some had a profound influence on how the trade developed, on how publishing emerged as the dominant practice in the trade, and on how the publishers then became the leaders of the trade.

Censorship in the late sixteenth century The crown first made special provision for the control of the press in the reign of Henry VIII. The effect of the proclamations and statutes of that time was to put in place a mechanism for pre-publication censorship. It was sufficiently effective to survive the reigns of Edward VI and Mary I, during which the English church first moved in a distinctively Protestant direction and then back to Rome. When Elizabeth I (1558–1603) ascended the throne one of her first, and most delicate, tasks was to try to find a permanent solution to the problem of church doctrine and governance, a matter at the heart of sixteenth-century English statecraft. The solution, an English church of which the monarch was ‘Supreme Governor’ with an English liturgy, a Protestant creed and an episcopal form of organisation, was a compromise which was to prove enduring although never wholly unchallenged. There was a clear recognition in the queen’s inner circle of advisers and ministers that control of the press, and its use as a medium of propaganda, would be an essential part of establishing not just the church but the whole regime. They acted accordingly. Elizabeth confirmed her late sister’s grant of a Charter to the Stationers’ Company in 1559 (Blagden 1960: 41). The need to control printed matter was an important motive for this action. The preamble states that the Charter is being granted to control ‘scandalous, malicious, schismatical and heretical’ books (Arber 1875–94: vol. 1, xxviii–xxxii). The Company therefore took a number of steps which allowed it to meet this requirement, but these can only be understood in a wider external context. At the same time as the Charter was confirmed, Elizabeth I issued a series of Injunctions which clarified the definition of what could and could not be printed. The most important provision

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refined the earlier system of licensing by requiring new books to be approved either by six Privy Councillors or by any two of the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, the Bishop of London, the Bishop or Aldermen of the place of printing, or the Vice-Chancellors of the two universities. No other books were to be printed, and all subjects of the crown, ‘specially the Wardens of the company of Stationers’, were to obey these regulations (Greg 1956: 5–6). This is the first official recognition of the Company’s explicit role in enforcing the licensing system, and the legal basis for the practices which developed during the next decade. These measures should all be seen as part of the settlement of the church rather than as a purely secular matter. The underlying concern was with the censorship of religious dissent in print, with all its implications for creating political instability. It was for that reason that it was the ecclesiastical rather than the civil authorities who had general oversight of the press. The principal enforcement mechanism was through the High Commission, a court of law whose functions were to control opposition to the religious settlement and to enforce conformity with the Act of Settlement (1559) which was the statutory basis of the Church of England as the only lawfully permitted church in the kingdom. The High Commission expected the Stationers’ Company to cooperate in enforcing the law by trying to ensure that its members did not print books which had been banned and that they sought permission before potentially contentious books were published. The system was reasonably effective, although it had to be re-enforced from time to time, most notably in 1566 through ordinances issued by the Privy Council at the request of the High Commission (Clegg 1997: 36–54). The Stationers’ Company played its part in this process by maintaining a register of books which had been licensed for printing, usually known to contemporaries as the ‘Entry Book of Copies’, and to historians as the ‘Stationers’ Register’. The Registers are one of the key sources for the history of the English book trade in the sixteenth, seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The series is continuous from 1576 onwards (Myers 1990: 24–30). It seems to have had two functions in the eyes of the Company: the first was to enable it to meet its obligations under the 1559 and 1566 regulations about pre-publication licensing; the second was to ensure that there was a record of which member of the Company had claimed the right to publish a particular title. This had the effect both of protecting the Stationers against any possible accusation of condoning the printing and publishing of unlawful books, and of giving the Court of Assistants a mechanism for regulating the internal affairs of the trade. The latter was to be of profound, unforeseen and almost certainly unintended long-term significance (see below, pp. 39–41). The 1559 and 1566 regulations were intended by the Privy Council to help High Commission in its task of maintaining order in the church. The Stationers assisted in this process because – quite apart from any other possible considerations – it was to their commercial advantage. But they were soon to learn

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that the book trade could be exposed to other pressures if it engaged in high profile disputes such as that which provoked the next significant crown intervention in the affairs of the trade. This arose out of the patents and privileges which had been accumulating since the latter part of the reign of Henry VII.

Privilege and protest: the English Stock and the Star Chamber decree The patents, from their almost casual origin, gradually came to embrace nearly all of the most profitable areas of publishing. The establishment of the Church of England with its unique doctrine and liturgy reinforced the commercial importance of some of those which existed before 1558. John Day, for example, had held a patent on the Catechism in English since 1553, and in 1567 became patentee for the Psalms and the immensely valuable ABC, the elementary reading book prescribed for use in schools (Oastler 1975: 22–5, 70; Simmons 2002: 504–5). Tottell still held the law book patent, and William Seres that for primers, a little book of private prayers which was central to personal religion. Perhaps the most valuable of all the patents was that of the Queen’s Printer; when Christopher Barker was granted the office in 1583 he acquired with it sole rights not only in all official printing, but also in Bibles, service books and statutes. In a Protestant country, there was a continuous and almost insatiable demand for the English Bible, while the service book, the Book of Common Prayer, was needed by every church and wanted by many pious laypeople. The patents had the effect – unintended by the crown – of putting a formidable concentration of economic power in the hands of a select group of printers. Protests against the patents began in the early 1570s. A number of them had been reconfirmed since 1558, notably Day’s in 1560 and 1567 and the Watkins and Roberts patent for almanacs and prognostications in 1571 (Capp 1979: 29; Oastler 1975: 70). Within the trade, and therefore within the Stationers’ Company since the two were now effectively coterminous, the problem created by the growth of the patents was economic. The number of freemen was increasing, but the number of Master Printers was virtually fixed and unchanging (see below, p. 38). In the early 1580s the troubles came to a head. A considerable number of printers had already been fined by the Company for infringement of the patents, and a few cases had even reached the Privy Council (Avis 1975). Day was, as the chief patentee, the first victim. A petition by the unprivileged freemen to the Privy Council in 1577 named the ABC as a major grievance, and meanwhile piracy (unauthorised printing) of it grew apace. In 1582, Day himself appealed to the Privy Council, and subsequent investigations proved that Roger Ward had printed at least 10,000 illegal copies of the ABC (Anders 1935–6). In the same year, John Wolfe also pirated both the ABC and the ABC and Little Catechism for which William Seres had the patent. Wolfe was actually imprisoned for these offences, but in

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fact these cases were to have a far more important long-term impact than the temporary inconveniencing of one notorious pirate (Hoppé 1933–4). Richard Day, who had succeeded to his father’s business in 1584, continued to prosecute pirates. He also, however, made an agreement with Wolfe, the leader of the anti-patentee group, under which in 1584 or 1585 Wolfe became one of five assignees of the Day patents, and a vigorous prosecutor of pirates. The Day patent had now become a complex piece of jointly owned property and the Seres patent soon took on the same character (Anders 1935–6; Hoppé 1933–4; Oastler 1975: 65–9). The problems of managing these jointly owned patents were solved (or at least shelved) by allowing the Court of Assistants of the Stationers’ Company to play a moderating role. In effect, the Court regulated the operation of the patents by granting the actual printing of the patent books to various less prosperous freemen on behalf of the patentees, and then making arrangements for the disbursement of the profits. By the 1590s this operation had its own treasurer and in 1603 it was formally incorporated as the so-called ‘English Stock’ of the Company (Blagden 1955). At the same time, its financial basis was reorganised, with the agreement of the assignees of the patent; the Stock was divided into shares of a notional capital of £9,000. To satisfy the demands of the majority, while retaining control in the hands of the Court, the 105 shareholders delegated the management of the Stock to a committee consisting of the Master, the Wardens, and two representatives each of the Assistants, the Livery and the Yeomanry. The five seniors could always outvote the four representatives of the lower ranks, despite the fact that there were 60 Yeomanry shares (of £50 each) and 30 Livery shares (of £100) as against only 15 Assistants’ shares (£200). Vacancies among the shareholders were filled by the Court of Assistants, and these were in much demand, for the annual dividend in the early seventeenth century ran at about 121⁄2 per cent per annum (Blagden 1957). The creation of the English Stock out of the crown patents took some of the heat out of the protests against the whole system of printing privileges. But the dispute was far from over, and resurfaced regularly in the seventeenth century. In the meantime, however, the disputes of the 1580s had had another unintended long-term consequence. The Day case provoked the official investigation into the affairs of the trade and the Company which led to the Privy Council issuing a further decree regulating the trade in 1586, this time through the Court of Star Chamber (Clegg 1997: 57–65). The effect of that decree was that the Stationers’ Company now became the openly acknowledged partner of the crown in the process of censorship. Panels of ‘authorisers’ were established to consider and license any books which seemed likely to be contentious. New books were to be approved either by the Archbishop of Canterbury or by the Bishop of London, and no one else. Only the Queen’s Printer was exempted from this requirement. In practice, dozens of senior clergy, crown officials, lawyers and academics were to be involved in the process over the next fifty years (Greg 1962). The name of the licenser had to be recorded in the

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Stationers’ Register. The system itself was explicit, stringent and – above all – enforced (Towers 2003: 25). Moreover, it further emphasised the importance of the records kept in the Register, and was a further impetus for their use for the internal regulation of the trade.

Internal matters: the organisation of the trade The interest of the crown in the book trade was essentially to control the contents of its potentially dangerous products. The trade’s own interest was to achieve commercial success. The leaders of the Stationers’ Company in its early years – and for many decades thereafter – saw this as being achieved through the regulation of competition. This was done through a variety of mechanisms. Under the Charter, the Company ordinances derived from it and the authority of the various royal decrees in 1559, 1566 and 1586, the number of Master Printers was limited (to about twenty), as was the number of presses each could own (normally one, occasionally more than that). The Company had powers of search and seizure on all booksellers’ premises in London. No one could practise any of the book trades in any capacity in London unless he (and now very occasionally she) were a member of the Company. To become a freeman (that is, a full member who could trade independently) it was necessary to serve an apprenticeship, and the Company (like all the City livery companies) regulated that process as well, limiting the number of apprentices any freeman could have at any one time. The overall effect of this was to restrict the number of lawful practitioners of the book trades at a time when the demand for their products was gradually increasing (Blagden 1960: 34–46). The central fact about the Stationers’ Company in this period is its comprehensiveness. The Charter itself and subsequent crown decrees were all aimed, from varying motives and with different approaches, at a single end: restricting the right to print to a limited number of known and reliable persons, and using them as a part of the process of ensuring that undesirable books were not printed. In the Charter this was perhaps conceived as granting that right to all members of the Company, although such liberality of intention may be doubted and was certainly never practised. Almost from the beginning of the Company’s chartered existence, the freemen were divided into two distinct groups, the Yeomanry and the Livery. When an apprentice was made free, he normally became a Yeoman; if he could afford it, and if he could command sufficient support, he was then eligible for election to the Livery. This was crucial, for date of election as a Liveryman determined a man’s seniority in the Company which in turn determined his eligibility for office. The junior office was that of Renter Warden, who was responsible for collecting the Company’s debts; two Renter Wardens were elected annually, and were thereafter eligible for election to the Court of Assistants. The Court, which was a self-elective body, was the central organ of government within the Company and the source of all power; the Master and the Upper and Under Wardens were elected from

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among its members. A pattern was soon established: a man served his term as Under Warden, was elected Upper Warden three or four years later, and Master a few years after that. It seems that all former holders of these three offices continued to be members of the Court for the rest of their lives. The Court ruled the Company, and was increasingly dominated by past office-holders. In this lay the key to the triumph of the printers in the 1560s and the resentment of that power which came close to destroying the Company some forty years later (Blagden 1960: 78–91). The first Master, elected in 1557, was Thomas Dockwray, a lawyer who had presumably been involved in the legal work necessary to obtain the Charter (Blayney 2003: 27; Duff 1905: 40). During the next ten years, only four men held the office: John Cawood (1561, 1562, 1566), Richard Waye (1558, 1563), Reyner Wolfe (1559, 1564, 1567) and Steven Kevall (1560, 1565) (Greg and Boswell 1930: 95–6; Duff 1905: 23, 85, 167, 171–2). Cawood had been Queen’s Printer since 1553; he had survived the transition from Mary I to Elizabeth I and was obviously a politically wise choice. Waye, Wolfe and Kevall, however, were quite different. Although Wolfe was a printer, printing was a very small part of a very large business and neither Waye nor Kevall ever printed at all. They were booksellers and stationers, both of whom were probably involved in the import of paper. Wolfe was also heavily committed to the import trade; he was a native of the Low Countries, although he had been in England for many years and had been naturalised in 1533. He made his fortune as a book importer and did not even begin to print until 1542. In its early years, therefore, the Company was dominated by importing wholesalers not by printers, but the printers were gradually laying the foundations of their power. Richard Jugge and William Seres appear to have been responsible for this. Jugge was Upper Warden in 1560, 1563 and 1566; Seres was Upper Warden in 1561 and 1565. Behind them were two or three other printers, notably Richard Tottell (Under Warden, 1561; Upper Warden, 1567 and 1568) and John Day (Under Warden, 1564 and 1566). In 1567, after a decade of oligarchy by Cawood, Waye, Wolfe and Kevall, the printers made their move. For nine of the next ten years, Jugge (Duff 1905: 82) and Seres (see above, p. 35) shared the mastership between them; the only other Master in that decade was Wolfe in 1571. By the early 1570s a whole group of printers had served as Wardens, and the Court was dominated by them; Seres was succeeded by Tottell in 1578 and Day was Master in 1580. From then until well into the next century control by the printers was secure. Their power was based on their access to the limited production facilities in an expanding trade, and by using this power they were able to reinforce it even further. By the mid-1570s, the right to own a press was confined to a small group within the Livery, called the Master Printers; there were probably never more than about twenty-five of them before the Civil War (Treadwell 1987: 142–3). Their position was officially recognised in 1586, when the Star Chamber decree required that the Court of High Commission had to approve their appointments (see

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also above, pp. 36–7). By that time the trade was firmly in the hands of the printers, both politically and economically, and they effectively entrenched their positions yet further by the transformation of the patents and privileges into the English Stock.

Internal matters: the ownership of copies The books covered by privileges were effectively the property of the patentees, or, after the late 1580s, of the shareholders in the incipient English Stock. It was clearly understood that for anyone else to print them was a breach of the Company’s regulations, which de facto had the force of law. As early as the 1560s, however, the Company had realised that there were other ways in which it could exploit both the Charter and the 1559 Injunctions to the commercial benefit of its leading members. The Company began to evolve its own ‘licensing’ system for a different purpose, to protect the interests of individual freemen. In 1559 it began to draft its own ordinances for this purpose. Among them there was the crucial requirement that ‘Every book or thing [is] to be allowed by the Stationers before it is printed’, and it seems that it was already the custom to record this permission in a register. In 1562, when the Company finally agreed and issued its ordinances, this provision was repeated (Blagden 1960: 40–5; Greg 1956: 4). The Company’s ingenuity lay in the use of the word ‘allow’ which had been in use for decades to describe the permission to print granted by the censors. Within the Company, however, the word was now being used in a significantly different sense. It meant the right to print a particular book, or ‘copy’, granted by the Company to an individual Stationer on the implicit understanding that no other Stationer had previously obtained the same right. This was essential to maintain good relations within a corporation whose members were all engaged in the same highly competitive trade, but it also provided precisely the mechanism which the crown needed for the enforcement of its own control of the press, since no book was ‘allowed’ (in the Company’s sense) until it had been ‘allowed’ or licensed by the royal censors. The confusion was not entirely accidental. The Company’s licence was distinct from the censor’s licence as early as the 1560s; the latter was a generalised permission for the book to be printed, while the former granted the specific and unique right to do so to a named person. This was regulated by the Company’s ordinances of 1562 as an internal matter under the control of the Court of Assistants (Feather 1994: 15–19). The basic principle upon which the Court operated is clear: the first person to enter a copy in the Register was the sole owner of it and had the sole right to print it, provided that no other member of the Company had a prior claim which could be properly documented. Entry was the only way of establishing an unchallengeable claim to a copy, for the person requesting the entry had to satisfy the Wardens of his right to do so.

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Licences could be granted to any freeman of the Company, but they soon began to accumulate in the hands of a small group of men and were handed on to their children and widows; indeed it was through this route that far more women than is apparent from the records became involved in the practice of the book trades (Bell 1996). These people, of both sexes, included some who were printers, but more who were not, and as the number of freemen increased in the late sixteenth century the proportion who were copy-owners declined. In 1579 James Gonneld was the first Master since Steven Kevall in 1565 who was not a printer (Duff 1905: 57–8), but the real harbinger of the future was his successor William Norton: Norton never printed, but he was a large-scale owner of copies (Duff 1905: 112). During the 1580s and 1590s most Masters were printers, but the rising generation were not. Francis Coldock (Under Warden, 1580 and 1582; Upper Warden, 1587–8), Ralph Newbery (Under Warden, 1583–4; Upper Warden, 1589–90), Gabriel Cawood (Under Warden, 1589–90; Upper Warden, 1593–4) and Isaac Bing (Under Warden, 1594; Upper Warden, 1595 and 1598) were all copy-owning booksellers and all were future Masters (McKerrow 1910: 33–4, 65, 72, 199). Printers continued to hold office occasionally, but by the 1620s their former dominance had vanished; between 1620 and 1639, five Masters were printers and six were not, but the six booksellers, all copy-owners, held the office for eleven of the nineteen years. It was the beginning of the long decline in the influence of the printers in the Company and in the trade (Treadwell 1992), a development which marked an important step towards the development of publishing as a distinctive activity. The significance of the emergence of the copy-owning booksellers as the dominant group in the London book trade can barely be overestimated. They owned the rights to print books, and these rights were upheld by the Court of Assistants, the governing body of the Stationers’ Company which was an active partner with the crown in the enforcement of the control of the press by the state. Moreover, many of them were major shareholders in the English Stock, the other major source of protection for their investments in the ownership of rights to print. They were in competition with each other, but they clearly had a common interest in the maintenance of order in the trade, in the enforcement of regulations – whether internally agreed or externally imposed – and in continued good relations with the church and the crown. They were also commercially influential. Few of them were printers, and even the small number who were was in decline. But they employed printers, and without their work the London book printers would suffer. In the early decades of the seventeenth century, therefore, the printers became what they have essentially remained ever since, the paid agents of those who owned the rights to print books. These rights came to be known as ‘copyright’ during the eighteenth century, but it is important not to confuse that property, which was regulated, guaranteed and (up to a point) defined by statute and later the courts, with the ‘rights’ which emerged in the trade itself. These early ‘rights in copies’ (the

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normal phrase from the sixteenth to the early eighteenth centuries) were the subject of mutual agreement rather than statutory control, and regulated by the Court of Assistants. The rights in copies which were recognised within the trade by the late 1580s, and were substantially enforced by the Court of Assistants until at least 1640 and again after 1660, were a statement of property ownership. Provided they were lawfully acquired, whether by inheritance, gift or purchase from a verifiable owner, they were protected. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, the book trade had some clear and well-developed characteristics. It was regulated by the state, working with and through the trade’s own organisation, the Stationers’ Company. There was a functional, although far from burdensome, system of pre-publication censorship, and in parallel with it a system of regulation within the trade which both reinforced state censorship and provided a mechanism for regulating competition. Crown grants of rights in some of the most profitable steady sellers had been taken over by the Stationers’ Company and were – generally – used to benefit the trade as a whole. But ‘the trade’ was changing; the once all-powerful printers, who had displaced the wholesale stationers in the 1560s, were themselves displaced within little more than forty years, and the real power passed to the owners of the rights in copies. It is unhistorical to use the term ‘publisher’ in the modern sense to describe these people – they all had retail bookshops as well, and some were wholesalers and stationers – but part of what they were doing, and probably the most profitable part, was indeed ‘publishing’.

The crown and the book trade in the early seventeenth century The internal arrangements of the Stationers’ Company were largely unaffected by the death of Elizabeth I in 1603. The accession of James I (1603–25) was, however, to have an impact on the relationships between the crown and the trade. James I and his son Charles I (1625–49) had very strongly held views about the status and powers of monarchs. In both reigns, there were attempts to strengthen the role of the church and agents of the crown in censoring the press, while James I also tried to make additional use of the patent system. The outcome was that the alliance between the trade and the crown came under considerable strain, and that the trade as a whole and the Stationers’ Company in particular were confronted with divisive issues which undermined the consensual systems which had developed in the second half of the sixteenth century. Scholars take differing views of both the extent and the effectiveness of the more overt attempts to control the press between 1603 and 1640 (Clegg 2001a; Lambert 1992), but it is clear that there was a desire for more stringent controls even if they could not always be effectively enforced. In general terms, James I and his ministers continued to use the system of press control which they had inherited. Indeed, no formal changes were made to the Elizabethan system, embodied in the Star Chamber decree of 1586,

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until as late as 1637. It may, however, have been used rather differently. James I was an intellectual who, despite his firm views on the nature of monarchy, was not averse to controversy. For most of his reign, there does seem to have been a fairly light touch in the use of the censorship system, with interventions only in the most extreme cases, and often the result of personal grievances brought to the attention of the king and the influential circle around him. When James did agree to overt and high profile acts of censorship, it was typically part of a far wider political activity (Clegg 2001a: 90–123). This did not mean, however, that the Jacobean court took no interest in the press; indeed exactly the opposite was the case in one important respect. James I was a great user of the royal power to grant monopolies, despite the increasingly vocal opposition to the practice which was reflected in all the parliaments of his reign. In the book trade, these grants largely took the form of patents for individual titles granted to authors. From 1603 to 1640 there were more than seventy grants of this kind, enough to threaten to undermine the trade’s internal mechanisms for the protection of rights in copies (Hunt 1997). One particular grant was to cause a great deal of trouble, with long-term consequences for the trade. In 1623, James I granted the poet George Wither a patent monopoly on his Hymns and songs of the church. The unusual feature of it was that a copy of the work had to be bound and sold with every copy of the Metrical Psalms. The latter was an English Stock book; giving Wither a personal interest in this way was seen by the Stationers’ Company as a direct assault on their practices and profits. The dispute was made worse in 1624 when Wither wrote and published a pamphlet entitled Schollers purgatory, discouered in the Stationers’ commonwealth, in which he attacked the Company’s monopolistic attitudes and the English Stock in particular. The immediate problem was resolved, but the underlying issues were not really addressed (Carlson 1966; Clegg 2001a: 44–8; Feather 1994: 34–5; Pritchard 1963). The attitude of James I and his ministers seems to have been that the book trade could be left to its own devices for most of the time, but that it could also be a useful source of revenue through the granting of monopoly patents for new titles which seemed likely to yield large returns. It was perhaps for that reason that when parliament eventually succeeded in its long-standing campaign to restrain the crown’s use of monopolies in 1624, the printing patents and privileges were specifically excluded from the new legislation (Feather 1994: 34). The comparatively benevolent attitude towards the press which seems to have characterised the reign of James I was not carried over into that of his son and successor. Charles I was even less tolerant than his father of the vagaries of the House of Commons, and frustrated by the inefficiency of the English system of government. For eleven years he ruled without parliaments, making use of both laymen and clerics as his ministers. As his personal rule became less popular (and more expensive for taxpayers) in the mid-1630s, the need to exercise greater control over the press became more apparent. In 1637, a further decree of Star Chamber strengthened and extended the powers of High

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Commission to control it. The instigator of this move is normally taken to be William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury, a man who shared Charles I’s views of the divine origins and rights of monarchs. He was also someone who took an interest in books and related matters, and was a substantial benefactor of libraries in Oxford and elsewhere. The new decree of Star Chamber reiterated some existing regulations, strengthened others and, crucially, officially recognised some of the customs of the trade which had developed since 1586. The provisions for crown licensing of books were made stricter, and to ensure proper control two copies were to be given to the licenser, one of which was to be retained and the other taken to Stationers’ Hall for registration. For the first time, entry in the Register was required rather than encouraged. At the same time, penalties for printing illegal books or printing by unauthorised persons were drastically increased (Lambert 1992: 22–3; Siebert 1965: 142).

From Civil War to Restoration The opposition to Charles I reached its climax in 1641–2 when he found himself forced to summon a parliament in order to raise revenue for wars in Ireland and Scotland. The differences between the king and the majority of members of the House of Commons became irreconcilable. Crown authority in London collapsed in the winter of 1641–2. Fighting between the king and his subjects began in the autumn of that year, and was followed by three years of civil war. In 1645, the king’s forces suffered a final and devastating defeat at Naseby. He himself was subsequently captured by the victorious parliamentary forces, tried and executed (1649). For the next eleven years there were various forms of republican and military government, all of them dominated by Oliver Cromwell, the military genius behind parliament’s victory in the Civil War. When he died (1658), it proved impossible to stabilise the regime; the House of Stuart, in the person of Charles II, was restored to the throne in 1660. These events were among the most dramatic in English history, and had both a long-term and an immediate impact. Certainly the Civil War and the Interregnum had far-reaching consequences for the book trade. The Stationers’ Company and its members were open to many fashionable criticisms. Their control of the trade rested on the authority of the crown expressed through the courts of Star Chamber and High Commission, both abolished in the first phase of reform in 1641. Their economic power was reinforced by the Court of Assistants’ effective control of the English Stock which, like other monopolies, was once again under attack. Within the trade there was a growing group of malcontents, economically disadvantaged and politically alienated, who were attracted to the anti-royalist groups which had come to dominate the House of Commons in 1641–2. The rumblings of discontent which had first been heard in the attack on the patents in the 1570s and intermittently ever since, came out into the open again in 1641. Michael Sparke, the leader of the group, already had a history of trouble-making. He had been well known as a publisher

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of Puritan books in the late 1620s and throughout the 1630s, one of his publications being the notorious Histrio-Mastix (1632) for which both he and William Prynne, the author, had stood in the pillory (Siebert 1965: 140–1). Sparke was an active sympathiser with the Puritan and parliamentary cause, but he also had good business reasons for opposing the trade’s hierarchy. He imported Bibles from Holland in defiance of the rights of the King’s Printer, which he justified on the grounds that his imports were cheaper than the legally produced domestic article. With the breakdown of royal control, Sparke seized the opportunity for a more general assault. His pamphlet Scintilla, or a light broken into dark warehouses (1641) was a wide-ranging attack on the Stationers’ Company, the English Stock and the patents, again based on the argument that book prices were kept artificially high by the existence of the monopolies. The Court of Assistants reacted by appointing a committee; this body investigated Sparke’s allegations, but it deliberated for a year and by the time it reported Sparke himself had lost his enthusiasm for this particular cause for the time being. In 1643, he declined the office of Renter Warden, offered to him as a conciliatory gesture, and thereafter dropped out of sight for several years (Blagden 1958). The Sparke affair was only one of several troubles which beset the trade in the early 1640s. The demand for news of public events produced a huge crop of pamphlets and newsbooks, but many of them were printed without licence and sold on the streets. This outburst would not have been possible without a pool of surplus manpower in the trade, and it did at least have the effect of absorbing some of that. It was, however, anathema to the Court of Assistants and its allies. The House of Commons appointed a Committee for Printing in 1641 which was intended to oversee the trade, since the House suspected, rightly, that there were a number of royalist sympathisers in the upper reaches of the Stationers’ Company. The Committee was wholly ineffective. Over the next two years, the situation deteriorated even further. The trade was rife with piracies, including piracies of the almanacs which were becoming the most valuable part of the English Stock; newsbooks were out of control in content, and in production and distribution. Neither a direct order from the House of Commons to the Company in 1642, nor the Ordinance for the Regulation of Printing which the House issued in 1643, had any significant impact on the flood of printed matter (Clyde 1932–3). No real solution was within the power of parliament itself, and certainly far beyond any possible action by the Court of Assistants. The licensing system had collapsed, the English Stock was being challenged by men who might reasonably expect parliamentary support and, in practice, both sides in the Civil War were more interested in the use of printing for propaganda than in protecting the investments of the copy-owning booksellers. For three or four years there was little or no effective control. Throughout the war, the Court of Assistants complained bitterly to parliament of the chaos in the trade, but parliament was unable, even had it been willing, to take any realistic measures.

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In the chaos, there were continuous challenges to the power of the Court of Assistants from discontented stationers; the printers even threatened to break away and form their own company. The monopoly of the English Stock was a continuing target for many of those who favoured a radical solution to the country’s political dilemmas (Blagden 1958: 16–17; Blagden 1960: 134–8). There were also those who, for the first time, were espousing the cause of a free and untrammelled press, including the poet John Milton (1608–74), one of parliament’s most articulate and intellectually influential supporters (Wolfe 1963: 120–38), and John Lilburne (c. 1614–57) a powerful proponent of the radical and republican cause (Gregg 1961: 126–32). The leaders of the Army, which was the last remaining credible centre of power in the kingdom, had other ideas. In January 1645, the Commons ordered the Stationers’ Company to tighten its control of the trade; later in the year the House put its authority behind the Assistants in their struggle against Sparke and the Yeomanry (Clyde 1933–4). From that time onwards, the new government expected, and substantially obtained, the Company’s support in regulating the press. Fairfax, the commander-in-chief, supported by his senior officers, protested to parliament in 1647 that pamphlets attacking his Army were being published without any restraint. Parliament tried hard to bring the press under control. The licenser whom the House had appointed in 1644, John Rushworth, was dismissed in March 1647. His successor, Gilbert Mabbot, was an Army nominee, and he was given a new and stricter ordinance under which to operate. From that time onwards, the regime increasingly tightened its hold on the press. Successive laws were even more repressive. Lilburne’s fears were now fully justified: Cromwell was indeed more tyrannical than Charles and Canterbury (Frank 1961: 199–267). The immediate effects of all this on the trade were economically disastrous, but in some ways it survived remarkably well. Despite all the problems encountered in the early 1640s, the power of the Court of Assistants was substantially intact in 1660. They had defended the English Stock until the time came when parliament had more pressing concerns than old grievances about monopolies. Although times were bad in the 1650s, the copy-owning booksellers and the shareholders in the English Stock had the means of regaining their positions when circumstances changed. Indeed, the lesson of the 1640s was that the established powers in the trade needed the support of state regulation as much as the state needed to control the press. Only the old mechanisms of control had actually been destroyed by the Civil War; the community of interest which had sustained them had not, and when Charles II returned to his kingdom in May 1660 it seemed that the Stationers as well as the Stuarts would be restored.

Statutory regulation in the late seventeenth century The obvious wish to go back to at least some of the old ways in 1660 was an expression of a deeper desire for familiarity and stability. Yet not everything

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was, or could be, restored. High Commission and Star Chamber had gone for ever, and with them at least some of the powers of the crown. The desire for domestic peace was not for peace at any price; the lessons of the Great Rebellion could not be ignored, and the ideas which it inspired were never entirely forgotten. Within the book trade, the lesson was clear enough: the alternative to control was chaos. This was not, however, a complete analysis, satisfactory as it may have seemed to the Master and Wardens of the Stationers’ Company as they joined in the City’s official welcome to Charles II in the summer of his return. The first task was to sort out the organisational chaos which was the legacy of twenty years during which the Court of Assistants had first had to defend its very existence and then to succumb to the demands of an increasingly dictatorial and now wholly discredited regime. A few things could be easily and swiftly accomplished; for example, the patent of the King’s Printer was confirmed to Christopher Barker in partnership with John Bill, sons of men who had helped Charles I in the early 1640s (Johnson 1949). Other things were more difficult. There was no mechanism for government control of the press, although the Company itself still maintained the Register as it had throughout the 1640s and 1650s. There was a need for legislation, and this came, after some difficulties, in 1662. The 1662 Printing Act (sometimes called the Licensing Act) revived all the essential principles of the pre-1640 controls except one. The number of master printers, presses and apprentices was to be limited; printing was confined to London, the universities and (under the supervision of the Archbishop) York; copies had to be entered on the Register to prove ownership; and every copy had to be licensed before it could be entered. The one principle which was not revived was the practice of using an eclectic group of higher clergy, academics and court and state officials as licensers. A Licenser was to be appointed and he was to be subject to the authority of the Secretary of State whose office was to have a general oversight both of the press and of news (Feather 1994: 43–4; Fraser 1956). This provision was a radical departure from previous practice. It brought the whole system, for the first time, into the sphere of parliamentary legislation rather than the royal prerogative, a change which was to prove of great significance. In 1663, Roger L’Estrange was appointed Licenser and he acted quickly to exercise his powers. The printers were summoned to Stationers’ Hall for an investigation of who was and who was not licensed to print; fifty-nine men responded, as against the official figure of twenty Master Printers (Treadwell 1987: 145–6). L’Estrange was determined to reduce the number to twenty as quickly as possible, but he never entirely succeeded; by 1666, there were nearly 150 men in London who had served apprenticeships as printers, and as late as 1675 there were still twenty unlicensed printers. Fundamentally, L’Estrange disliked and distrusted the Stationers; the feeling was reciprocated. To their complaints that there were long delays in obtaining licences, L’Estrange could

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reply that several members of the Court were involved in unlicensed printing and that many in the trade did all that they could to obstruct him. The Act under which he was granted his power was itself impermanent. It was to run for three years only, after which it had to be renewed; this ploy was used in much post-1660 legislation to ensure that there could never again be any attempt by the monarch to govern without parliament. It was renewed in 1665, but it lapsed in 1679, and a new system of control was needed. L’Estrange was full of schemes, all of which revealed his continuing distrust of the Stationers. He had now decided that the printers were more reliable than the booksellers, and that they should, after all, be encouraged to form their own Company, through which control would be exercised; this they now declined to do. The Stationers’ Company was proving a hopeless instrument for control of the press. The government was under intense pressure during the summer of 1679. There was a rising tide of feeling against the king’s proFrench and pro-Catholic sentiments, and this manifested itself in the attempt to prevent his Catholic brother, James Duke of York, from succeeding to the throne when Charles died without a legitimate heir as was now inevitable. The Exclusion Crisis of 1679–81, followed by the Rye House Plot (to assassinate Charles II) in 1682–3, brought about a situation in which the control of the press was as difficult as it had been in the 1640s. It had become apparent that in times of great political controversy it was virtually impossible to suppress the opposition press (Crist 1979; Hinds 2002). The Exclusion Crisis had one lasting political legacy, for it was during the three exclusion parliaments that two distinct parties began to emerge and applied to each other the opprobrious terms of Whig and Tory, which were to become their permanent names even when the ideas which they represented had undergone profound change. Within a surprisingly short time, the idea of the legitimacy of opposition within the framework of the law was to be accepted as a part of the constitution, although the lesson was a hard one for some politicians to learn. It was a lesson which began dramatically. In 1685, the Duke of York did indeed succeed to the throne as James II (1685–8). Parliament, at his instigation, renewed the Printing Act, and a new Licenser was appointed. This was only one part of James II’s attempt to revive the powers of the crown. When he tried to restore Roman Catholicism, Whigs and Tories alike rebelled. In 1688 he was deposed, and the English political classes brought in William III (1688–1702), the husband of James II’s daughter (who became joint monarch as Mary II), as their Protestant champion. The Glorious Revolution is a turning point in the history of England, embedding the practice of parliamentary government in a Protestant state. It was not, however, an entirely liberal revolution. The Printing Act was renewed again in 1688 (after the Revolution), and again in 1693. In 1695, however, when it was due for its next renewal, parliament rejected it (Astbury 1978). To argue that England suddenly acquired a free press in 1695 is to stretch the truth more than a little, but it was nevertheless an important turning

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point both for the trade and for the politicians, for pre-publication censorship was never thereafter revived. After nearly two hundred years of external control by royal and parliamentary decree and latterly by statute, the book trade was free to publish without prior constraint. Pre-publication censorship had been abolished, but much else remained intact.

The English Stock and rights in copies Both privately owned copyrights and the English Stock were still of great potential value, and the Stock had a particularly valuable property in the form of the almanac monopoly. Indeed, it was this which in future was to be the foundation of its prosperity. In the reign of Charles II, the Company was regularly printing and selling some 300,000 almanacs each year; in the 1660s this produced an annual profit of about £1,000, increasing to perhaps £1,500 by the end of the century (Blagden 1958b). The almanacs continued to be a profitable monopoly for the shareholders until the last quarter of the eighteenth century (see below, p. 73). To some extent the debate about the patents and privileges survived the Restoration (Siebert 1965: 244–9), but in fact the more adventurous booksellers were looking in different directions for their business. Nevertheless, rights in pre-1640 books still existed, and had indeed been transferred by entries in the Register throughout the Interregnum. By inheritance and purchase these were now more than ever concentrated in a few hands. This process is exemplified in the history of printed ballads in the seventeenth century. These were controlled by a very small group of booksellers. For a period of sixty years, from the 1620s to the 1680s, the rights in ballads were bought, sold and inherited within a group of about fifteen men and women who had no formal privilege for printing them but who actually encountered little competition (Blagden 1954). Hundreds of other rights survived. In 1662–3, for example, the heirs to the rights in the works of Shakespeare published a new edition, the so-called Third Folio. Some booksellers had done more than cherish their existing rights; they had bought others in pre-1640 works for which they now found a sudden renewed demand after 1660. These included much late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century literature, including much of the great corpus of the printed drama. In 1660, three men were prominent for their ownership of literary copies. Humphrey Moseley (d. 1661) had been in the trade since 1630 and had steadily accumulated literary copies throughout those thirty years. He published Milton’s Poems (1645), Donne’s  (2nd edn, 1648) and Paradoxes (1652), and many works by lesser poets including Denham (Cooper’s Hill, 2nd edn, 1650), Crashaw (Steps to the Temple, 1646, 1648; Delights of the Muses, 1648), Waller (Poems, 1645 [three editions]; Workes, 1645) and Vaughan (Olor Iscanus, 1651; Flores solitudinis, 1654) (Plomer 1908: 132–3). When Moseley died most of his copies were bought from his widow by Henry Herringman

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(d. 1704) who had himself already entered some seventy copies on the Register, many of them plays. From 1667 to 1678, Herringman succeeded to Moseley’s position as the outstanding literary publisher of his day; copies he owned included Donne, Jonson, Waller and Cowley as well as part of the Shakespeare copyright. By 1680, Herringman was a wealthy man and from then until his death in 1704 he continued to live on the profits from the reprints of his copies (Miller 1948). Herringman has been called ‘the first publisher’ (Miller 1948: 292) and certainly he ran his business in a way which gives him some claim to that title. In particular, as well as being the owner or part-owner of valuable older copyrights, Herringman was heavily involved with the publication of contemporary literature. He was John Dryden’s (1631–1700) principal publisher during the early years of the poet’s career when he was at the height of his success as a popular playwright. He published, among other plays, All for Love (1678), The Conquest of Granada (1672), The Indian Emperor (1667), Marriage à-la-mode (1673), and The Wild Gallant (1669), as well as some of his non-dramatic works including Annus Mirabilis (1667). The Dryden copies were a profitable investment for Herringman. With a few minor exceptions, all of them were reprinted several times. The Indian Emperor, for example, went through at least ten editions between 1667 and 1700, in all of which Herringman was involved either alone or with others (Macdonald 1939: 92–5). This was a new kind of publishing, in which the bookseller was seeking out works which would be fashionably successful, but would also, he hoped, have a long-term existence. The ‘backlist’ is a characteristic of modern publishing practice which can be traced to the second half of the seventeenth century. The third of the literary booksellers of the reign of Charles II was Francis Kirkman, who had been one of the first to begin the reprinting of pre-1640 plays after the Restoration, an enthusiasm which extended to the piracy of a number of plays whose copies were actually owned by Moseley. Kirkman was also an innovator in another important respect, for in 1661 he opened the first commercial circulating library (see below, pp. 62–3). As well as being a bookseller and a librarian, Kirkman was an author, his most notable book being The English Rogue (4 parts, 1635–71) which he wrote in collaboration with Richard Head (Gibson 1947), an early example of fictional prose narrative and the direct ancestor of the novel.

Conclusions When the Printing Act was not renewed in 1695 the book trade was very different from the trade which had emerged from the Interregnum. The Stationers’ Company no longer controlled it. The licensing provisions of the Act had changed the relationship between the Company and the state; the relative decline of the commercial value of much of the English Stock, other than the almanacs, further emphasised the Company’s loss of position and prestige. The

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trade was more entrepreneurial, and was operating in a more purely commercial ethos in which competition was rampant. The accumulation of valuable rights in the hands of individuals or small groups was creating new alliances and divisions within the trade. The copy-owners clearly had interests in common, even if they were in competition with each other. Above all, they were concerned to protect their increasingly valuable investments in copies against piracy, and to find some efficient and cost-effective means of distributing the books they published. The lapse of the Printing Act was to provoke further developments, but the seeds of change were germinating even while the Act was still in force. The year 1695 marks a real divide in the history of the book trade in England, and in the history of British publishing. The official history which has been outlined in this chapter – the history of state intervention in the printing, publishing and distribution of printed matter – is only one part of the story. For the convenience of all the parties involved, the history of censorship under the Tudors and Stuarts is inextricably linked with the history of the right to print particular titles. The patents and privileges, the English Stock which developed from some of them, and the evolution of the Stationers’ Company’s internal system for registering and regulating the rights in copies all established the basic concept that a book – a ‘copy’ – was a piece of property which could be owned and traded, and that the right to print and sell it was therefore unique to its owner. Taken together, the official control of the press and the regulation of rights in copies (of all kinds) gave the book trade a stable context in which to work. That stability gave some stationers, printers and booksellers sufficient confidence to become entrepreneurs. We now turn to how this happened and its consequences.

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4 THE MARKET FOR BOOKS

Introduction The formal history of the book trade in Britain in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is dominated by its complex relationships with the wider world of politics and statecraft. The recognition of the power of the printed word, and of the need both to exploit and to restrain it, dictated the policies of successive regimes from the reign of Henry VIII to that of William III. Even the Stationers’ Company, however, never became simply an instrument of the state, and the trade as a whole certainly was not. In focusing on institutional and legal developments, we should not forget that for most booksellers and printers this was indeed just a trade, a business from which they made their livings. Much about the book trade is unknown and may be unknowable. Even the apparently comprehensive lists of those engaged in the trade – seemingly so impressive in extent and in their underlying scholarship – conceal as much as they reveal. We know the names of masters but, generally speaking, nothing of journeymen. In London (although not in most provincial towns) we have lists of apprentices, but no idea of what most of these people did when their apprenticeship was over. We have lists of titles entered in the Stationers’ Register, and yet there are thousands of books which were published without any entry or any known penalty. To understand how a publishing industry emerged from this trade, we need to go beneath the surface and to try to understand a little more of how it worked in practice. The London book trade was built around small family businesses. We typically know the names of the owner and his or her apprentices, although we probably know the names of a disproportionate number of masters whose names appear in the imprints of books, at least in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. There were always those who were stationers and booksellers but never helped to finance the publication of a book; hence they do not appear in imprints. As for the apprentices, some stayed on as employees, but many did not. A few established or bought into their own businesses. Most became journeymen employees. In most of these businesses wives and children were actively engaged in the day-to-day work; indeed women were an important,

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if hidden, part of the workforce (see above, p. 40). The family and its apprentices typically lived above the shop; the apprentices may even have slept in the shop itself. In a sense, it would probably be more accurate to say that the shop was part of the house, a room with a street frontage in which books were displayed. Printing took place in other ground-floor rooms, and perhaps in outbuildings. There was some storage space. Little shops like this were to be found in the streets around St Paul’s Cathedral, and indeed there had been scriveners’ and stationers’ shops in the area long before printed books were on sale (see above, p. 24). Competition between these small businesses could be intense. The market for books was never large. As it expanded, it became more complex, and this was a disadvantage to the smaller participants. The commercial logic of the concentration of the ownership of copies in comparatively few hands was reinforced by the need to develop new business practices to serve a larger and more geographically diffuse market. During the eighteenth century, these trends began to transform the early modern book trade into a publishing industry.

Congers and copy-owners The term ‘conger’ was first used in print by the maverick bookseller John Dunton in the late seventeenth century (Parks 1976: 207). He was using the word as a term of mild abuse for a small group who called themselves the ‘trading booksellers’. They were copy-owning and wholesaling booksellers, including Richard Royston (d. 1686), whose will is our first external evidence for their existence (Hodgson and Blagden 1956: 78–9). Royston had made his will in 1682, when the Printing Act was not in force, bequeathing his copies (which were valuable ones) to his granddaughter on certain conditions. These include the provision that the girl, who was only 16 at that time, should marry a man approved by her mother and grandmother (she did: her bridegroom, in 1686, was Royston’s former apprentice Luke Meredith), and also that she should take advice from his ‘overseers’ (executors), before embarking on new editions of any of his copies. The crucial condition, however, was that she should sell the editions she printed to ‘six or eight or more Tradeing [sic] Booksellers in and about the City of London’. These ‘trading booksellers’ were the wholesalers, known in trade cant as the ‘conger’. The group seems to have emerged in the period when the Printing Act was not in force (1679–85) as a protective device for the copy-owners. The underlying principle was a simple one of deterrence. By marketing their books through a few major booksellers, the copy-owners effectively ensured that those booksellers would not deal in piracies; if they did so there was the implicit threat of the loss of the far more profitable trade in legitimate editions. The conger system did, however, have the incidental advantage of providing income to the copy-owner in that awkward interval between his investment in a publication and the arrival of revenue from the first sales, for the members

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of the conger were not passive distributors. They were genuine wholesalers who bought the books and then resold them to retailers at a higher price, making their own profits from the difference between the two. We can presume that the conger system continued to operate in some form during the last few years of licensing from 1685 to 1694; what is certain is that it reached its fullest flowering in the following decades when it proved to be the crucial weapon in the defence of the entrenched interests of the copy-owners. By the early years of the eighteenth century the conger was handling about 20,000 books a year, to a total value of about £5,000; this was not far short of the turnover of the English Stock (Hodgson and Blagden 1956: 84). The conger proved to be more than merely an ingenious and successful device which protected the investments of the copy-owners and assisted their cash flow. It was also to be the pattern for other developments which all tended towards the creation of an inner circle of dominant copy-owners whose interests largely dictated the pattern of the trade as a whole. The key to this lay in the modus operandi of the wholesaling conger. The ‘trading booksellers’ were competitors as well as collaborators; the conger never operated as a partnership, but rather as a group whose members worked independently of each other while also working collectively in defence of mutual interests. In other words it was what would now be called a cartel. Not every member took copies of every book which was offered to the conger, nor did those who did take copies all take the same number. The actual process of sale was through a private auction open only to invited members of the trade. Everyone attending was as likely to be a vendor as a purchaser, for the members were copy-owners as well as wholesalers. The wholesaling conger had between fifteen and twenty-one members in the first decade of the eighteenth century when it was at the height of its activities. Mutuality of interest in the sales of books led to mutuality of interest in their publication. The 1699 edition of Abel Boyer’s Royal Dictionary appears to have been printed for the members of the wholesaling conger collectively (Hodgson and Blagden 1956: 82–4). In this case, they were working together to finance the book from the beginning rather than merely collaborating in selling it when it was completed. The wholesaling conger did not repeat this experiment until 1711, but long before then other groups in the trade, also called congers by contemporaries, were regularly operating in this way. By 1706 at the latest, copy-owning congers were a recognised feature of the trade (Hodgson and Blagden 1956: 85–6). Essentially, the members of a copyowning conger were owners of shares in a group of copies, although, as with the wholesaling conger, there was not necessarily a complete overlap of interests. Although the membership of these congers was limited, it was never precisely defined; groups of booksellers often worked together on an ad hoc basis for particular titles. Copies were divided into shares, varying in size from one-half to fractions as small as one-sixty-fourth or even less in the case of the most valuable and desirable copies. The jointly owned copies came to include some

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of the best properties in the trade, which further emphasised the need for their owners to work together in defence of their common interests whatever degree of competition might exist between them. The copy-owning congers, like the wholesaling conger, needed to find a means of keeping the shares within the group of booksellers which constituted their membership. The potential for problems lay in the fact that the most valuable copies were those which had a far longer active commercial life than any particular edition; indeed in legal theory a copy was assumed to exist for ever. If, therefore, shares began to be sold outside the conger, sooner or later the conger itself could be taken over by ‘outsiders’. To prevent this, the sharers developed a form of insider trading known as the ‘trade sale’ (Belanger 1975; Blagden 1950–1). Like the sales of books in the wholesaling conger, the trade sales were private auctions. Copies and shares in copies had of course changed hands many times since the Stationers’ Company had evolved its own form of licensing in the 1560s, but formerly changes of ownership had taken place in more conventional ways, by inheritance or by private treaty sale. The auction, however, offered the obvious advantage of competitive bidding to maximise the value of the shares. Since all the buyers, by definition, owned shares themselves, a general rise in the price of shares in copies was of mutual benefit, provided that books did not become so expensive as to deter the potential customer in the bookshop. With the rising tide of demand in the early eighteenth century such an outcome was in the highest degree improbable. The first trade sale for which there is definite evidence took place on 3 April 1718, but the pattern is so close to that of the wholesaling conger, to the extent that it took place at the Queen’s Head Tavern in Paternoster Row (at the very heart of book trade London) where the wholesaling sales were held, that it has to be considered at least possible that such sales had been held before that date. The evidence for the 1718 sale is the survival of a single copy of a printed catalogue, the first of a long series which continued for over a century. The rights in the copies of an astonishingly high proportion of books which went into more than one edition in that long period of time passed through a trade sale at some stage in their history, and the sales became the chief mechanism for the marketing of shares and for the protection of the shareholders. The rules were strict. Although there is no extant formal statement of them before 1829 (Shaylor 1912: 165–9), it is clear that it represents the practices which had evolved over the previous hundred years, and that these practices had developed very shortly after the inauguration of the sales themselves. The fundamental rule was that shares bought at sales could only be sold at sales, thus protecting the interests of the other shareholders against ‘outside’ ownership. If a shareholder died (the usual reason for a sale), or went bankrupt, or left the trade or simply wanted to dispose of some or all of his copies, they had to be offered at a trade sale, which all the other shareholders could attend if they wished and at which all the bidders were necessarily committed to the maintenance of the share-book system.

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By the time that the share-book system was fully operational, however, there had been an epoch-making development which was to have a profound effect on the future of every aspect of the trade and eventually – although unintentionally – be a prime cause of the emergence of publishing as a distinctive and separate branch of the trade.

Copyright and authorship The failure to renew the Printing Act in 1694 seems like a landmark in retrospect, but to contemporary booksellers it was merely an aberration to be corrected. Their interest was, as ever, in preserving their control of the trade rather than any interest in controlling the content of their publications. The historic link between copy-ownership and pre-publication censorship, embodied in the 1662 Act and its various subsequent manifestations, was now an obstacle to them. Yet they petitioned parliament almost annually from 1695 onwards for the Act to be revived. As time went by, parliament showed less and less inclination to do so. In 1707, the booksellers finally began to ask for what they really wanted: statutory protection for copy-ownership. In the parliamentary session of 1709–10 they were successful, and obtained an Act which recognised the existence of rights in copies and of the Stationers’ Register as the record of ownership (Feather 1994: 51–63). The key provision of the Act was that all existing rights were confirmed as the property of their current owners for a period of twenty-one years; new copies were protected for fourteen years, with the possibility of a further fourteen thereafter. In their moment of triumph, the book trade oligarchs perhaps did not consider very carefully the implications of these temporal limitations. The formal title of the 1710 Act was An Act for the Encouragement of Learning, a designation which was not much more than a pious aspiration, although some minor aspects of the Act (such as the requirement – which was to be widely ignored – to deposit copies of new books in certain libraries [Feather 1994: 97–100]) could be argued to have that implication. But in practice the Act, known by the end of the century as the Copyright Act, opened the way towards practices which the booksellers had certainly not envisaged when they petitioned parliament for protection for their copies. In particular, it referred to the ‘authors’ of books as well as booksellers and printers, although in terms which had been considerably diluted as the Bill passed through parliament (Feather 1980: 35–7). Even so, the law contained a basic recognition that books originated with authors not booksellers, and that the booksellers were merely the purchasers of a property which an author had created. It soon became clear that some authors were in a position to use the Act for their own advantage. The first to do so on a large scale was the poet Alexander Pope (1688–1744), a man who depended on his pen for his living and never consciously underestimated the financial value of his work. He negotiated deals with booksellers, notably Bernard Lintot (1675–1736) and

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Jacob Tonson (1677–1720), the two leading – and rival – publishers of literary works in the 1710s and 1720s. After he had made a substantial fortune from his translations of Homer, issued by Lintot in 1715–20 (Iliad) and 1725–6 (Odyssey) (Foxon 1991: 51–101; McLaverty 1993), Pope realised that he could make even more money if he had a direct involvement in the publication process. He invested in a number of book trade businesses, including that of Robert Dodsley (1703–64) who was to be the leading literary bookseller of his generation (Solomon 1996: 32–52), as well as in those of the lesser-known John Wright – a printer – and Lawton Gilliver – a copy-owning bookseller – all of whom were closely involved in the publication of Pope’s later works (Foxon 1991: 102–8; McLaverty 1976; McLaverty 1979). Pope demonstrated that a successful author with a head for business could ensure that the profits of his labours were indeed his and not handed over to a bookseller. Of course, not every author was as popular – or as businesslike – as Pope. Even so, during the middle decades of the eighteenth century, the author gradually came to be recognised as a more important player in the commercial world of the book. This was partly a matter of supply and demand; the growth of the market for books created a demand for new titles, and if the established copy-owning booksellers were to preserve their dominance in the trade, they needed to be in a position to meet that demand (see below, p. 137). In other words, we can see the gradual emergence of a relationship of mutual dependence between authors and booksellers, a relationship which was implicitly underpinned by the 1710 Act. By the middle decades of the century, it is possible, without straining either language or credulity, to talk about ‘professional’ authors, men and a growing number of women, who lived by their pens.

The periodical press One reason why this was possible lay in a new form of publishing which developed rapidly in the first half of the century: the periodical or magazine. The tradition of periodical publishing was French in origin; it is normally considered to begin with the Journal des Sçavans, a monthly review of new books, published in Paris from 1665 (Birn 1965). It was the inspiration for the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society which began publication in the same year. Philosophical Transactions, until the nineteenth century, was far from being a purely scientific periodical, and the early issues certainly reflected the very broad interests of the early members of the Royal Society itself (Manten 1980). It was not, however, for the popular market. In the 1680s a number of periodicals began to appear which were deliberately more popular in approach, although still essentially reviewing journals (Graham 1930: 28–9). Some journals of this kind, most notably The History of the Works of the Learned, maintained their popularity well into the eighteenth century. The first British magazine which truly aimed to capture a wider market was The Athenian Gazette, published by John Dunton from 17 March 1691, and

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issued at various intervals between weekly and four times weekly until it closed in 1697 (Parks 1976: 74–108). The Athenian Gazette (called The Athenian Mercury after its twelfth issue) took the form of a question-and-answer journal. Questions on a wide variety of topics, allegedly submitted by readers, were answered by the ‘Society of Gentlemen’ (in fact, Dunton himself) who were the ‘authors’ of the magazine. The question-and-answer journal remained popular for a number of years, and The Athenian Mercury found a number of imitators. Dunton demonstrated that there was a market for publications which contained a wide range of miscellaneous information. He himself operated on the fringes of the book trade; both the peripheral position of the publisher and the anonymity of the magazine itself were typical of much that was to follow. The most direct ancestor of the miscellaneous general interest magazine which was a characteristic of the eighteenth century was The Gentleman’s Journal, started by Peter Anthony Motteux in 1692. Motteux, as his surname suggests, was a Frenchman, and before coming to England he had known some of the emerging French periodicals (Foster 1917). The Gentleman’s Journal retained the epistolary convention for certain articles, and it carried some epitomes of new books, but it added more. The coverage was defined by Motteux himself in the first issue: ‘News, History, Philosophy, Poetry, Musick, Translations, &c.’. On the whole, Motteux kept this promise of variety. Although the news content was minimal he did include a number of works by leading poets of the day including Matthew Prior (1664–1721) and Sir Charles Sedley (1639?–1701), songs (with music), and essays on a wide variety of subjects, as well as fiction – some original and some translated. The Gentleman’s Journal was both innovative and interesting; it came to an end in 1694, but is the precursor of the general interest magazine. Another tradition of eighteenth-century periodical journalism, even more significant in its time, has not survived: the so-called essay periodical. This tradition started with Daniel Defoe, who in 1704 began his Review (Downie 1979: 64–70). Each issue consisted of a single essay of several thousand words, almost invariably on a political theme. Later writers were not so dedicated to politics as was Defoe, and the essay periodical became an important feature of the literary as well as the publishing landscape of the first half of the eighteenth century. Some of these periodicals are outstanding. Richard Steele’s Tatler, and its successor, The Spectator, in which Steele and Joseph Addison collaborated, were both immensely successful. The Tatler was published thriceweekly for nearly three years, and although it maintained the fiction of a club dealing with the queries of correspondents, it was really a platform for Steele’s own views on politics, literature, culture and society (Graham 1930: 65–77; Milic 1977). The Spectator was, if anything, an even greater success than The Tatler. For over 500 issues in 1711–12 it was published on a daily basis, and seems to have sold up to 4,000 copies a day. Both also had a political dimension, particularly The Spectator in the last hectic weeks of Queen Anne’s reign

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in 1714, when the Protestant succession yet again seemed to be in danger (Downie 1993). Later in the century, the form was revived by Samuel Johnson, whose Rambler (1750–2) and Idler (1758–60) were conscious imitations of the work of Addison and Steele, although they never achieved comparable popularity. The Rambler, for example, was published twice-weekly, and sold about 500 copies (Bate and Strauss 1969: xxi–xxii); The Idler was published as a series of essays in a newspaper, The Universal Chronicle. Circulation figures of even 500 copies on a twice-weekly basis made the magazines into valuable commercial propositions, while The Spectator was one of the most spectacular bestsellers of the early eighteenth century. Not surprisingly, the leading members of the book trade were soon very interested in the whole business of periodical publishing, and they played a particularly important role in the publication and distribution of the essay periodicals. The problem for the publisher of a magazine was the need to produce large numbers of copies at regular intervals, since any interruption to the periodicity would be disastrous for sales. There was only one group of people in the trade who could do this, the newspaper printers, and among them there was really only one who was accustomed to working on the scale, and at the speed, which the success of The Spectator demanded. This was Samuel Buckley, the publisher of The Daily Courant, the first successful daily newspaper, which was selling 800 copies a day as early as 1704 (Black 1987: 12; Sutherland 1934–5: 111). Buckley duly became the first publisher of The Spectator. One of the two distributors was Abigail Baldwin, whose late husband, Richard, had been the distributor of The Gentleman’s Journal in the previous decade. Abigail Baldwin was a so-called ‘trade publisher’, the first common use of the word in the history of the English book trade. The trade publishers were principally involved in the distribution of pamphlets, and made use of a network of street hawkers in London as well as conventional bookshops. This suggests that the magazines were sold through unconventional channels as well as through the bookshops of the ‘respectable’ trade (Treadwell 1982: 109–10). Success, however, soon overcame doubts about respectability. Tonson was attracted to The Spectator and became the publisher with issue no. 499 (Bond 1965: vol. 1, xx). He and Buckley each paid Addison and Steele £575 for a half-share each in the copyright of the paper. This was, however, after weekly publication had ended; Tonson and Buckley reissued the entire series of Spectator essays in book form (1711–12). Many other reprints followed, and indeed the rights in The Spectator and The Tatler came to be among the most valuable of the century. The Rambler and The Idler followed this pattern, as indeed did many lesser essay periodicals throughout the century. The importance of the essay periodicals in the history of publishing derives from the trade patterns which they established. Indeed, it has been argued that the discipline of producing a weekly or monthly publication, whether of a magazine or a newspaper, was responsible for enlarging the management skills of those members of the trade who were involved in their production and sale

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(Harris 1981). The fundamental problem, however, was not production, it was distribution as the provincial market expanded dramatically during the eighteenth century (see below, pp. 61–4). Here the periodicals came into their own, and it was this ground that Edward Cave (1691–1754), with his Gentleman’s Magazine, was to claim for himself. The Gentleman’s Magazine was by far the most successful of the general magazines of the eighteenth century; its commercial success was largely built on the vast circulation which it achieved through provincial distribution. Cave himself came from a provincial background. He had been involved in the formative years of provincial newspaper journalism, and had also been an official of the Post Office. From these two vantage points, he could see both the growing market for reading matter among the gentry and the urban tradesmen of the provinces, and the means of reaching them directly and comparatively easily (Carlson 1938: 5–12). The first issue appeared in January 1732. It included essays on a wide variety of subjects: poetry, a digest of recent news, columns of births, marriages and deaths and lists of new books. None of this was new in itself although the lists of books and the personal information were far more accurate than those in competing journals. Cave’s most important innovation was that from May 1732 onwards, he began to include reports of proceedings in parliament. Again there were precedents, but parliamentary reporting was still illegal, being regarded by the House of Commons as a breach of privilege. By late 1732, the reports of debates were being printed as a major feature of The Gentleman’s Magazine, and were a significant factor in its success (Aspinall 1956; Carlson 1938: 83–109). Cave also recruited a band of highly talented contributors to The Gentleman’s Magazine, including Samuel Johnson, who was one of his parliamentary reporters (Greene 1977). In fact, Johnson was only one of many writers who benefited from the existence of The Gentleman’s Magazine and its competitors. The magazines, as they grew both in numbers and popularity, were always in need of material to publish, and they needed writers who could be trusted to meet a deadline. Although the newspapers had produced the first generation of journalists in Queen Anne’s reign, it was the magazines which provided an outlet for the talents, great and small, of writers who could not support themselves by writing for the booksellers. These writers, contributing essays, reviews, epitomes, news reports and the like, were able to support themselves by their periodical writing, and the magazines thus played a crucial role in helping authors to establish a stronger position vis-à-vis the book publishers in the middle of the eighteenth century (Harris 1983). A number of authors followed the example of Johnson in attempting essay periodicals, and many writers were involved with magazines at various stages in their careers. Henry Fielding (1707–54), the author of Tom Jones, was one of them; he was the co-founder of The Champion (1739), and later founded The True Patriot (1745) and The Covent Garden Journal (1752) (Cross 1963: vol. 1, 25; vol. 2, 18–20, 64, 66, 77–9, 364–5). Another novelist, Tobias Smollett (1721–71), was also a periodical journalist, not least

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as the founder of the influential Critical Review (1756), which set new standards of book reviewing in the magazines (Knapp 1949: 178–81). Most of these magazines were overtly political, in a way that The Gentleman’s Magazine was not, which may help to explain its popularity. Gradually, magazines began to be published for more specialised areas of the market, and towards the end of the century even The Gentleman’s Magazine began to specialise in antiquarian matters under the direction of Cave’s successor, the printer and antiquary John Nichols (1745–1826) (Carlson 1938: 242; Kuist 1976). Magazines for women, which had existed sporadically since the late seventeenth century, proliferated after 1750, as publishers began to realise that the growing literacy rate among women was providing a whole new market ripe for exploitation (Braithwaite 1995). The businessman also needed information, and in the rapidly changing economy of the late eighteenth century he was served by a number of specialised journals, of which the most famous, although by no means the only, example was Lloyd’s List (McCusker 1986). Other areas, however, were less well covered. Despite the lively musical culture of eighteenth-century England, no musical periodical was published (Seaman 1984), and British scientific publishing was as woefully behind that of Germany as was British science itself, although the situation was somewhat alleviated by the development of scientific societies in the last quarter of the century (Kronick 1965; Kronick 1976: 89, 118–21).

Fiction: creating a new genre The magazines also became a medium for the publication of fiction, but this was only one manifestation of one of the most important literary and publishing developments of the mid-eighteenth century: the development of the novel. Prose fiction had been published on a small scale since the middle of the seventeenth century, and literary scholars argue about which book was the first ‘true’ novel (Allen 1954: 19–39). In its essentials, however, the novel is a product of the eighteenth century and specifically the product of the growing commercialisation of literature and leisure during the period (Plumb 1983). Despite the example of Daniel Defoe (Robinson Crusoe [1719], Moll Flanders [1721]), the novel really came of age with the publication of Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa in 1740. In Richardson (1689–1761) and his contemporary, Fielding, we have the first great English novelists. Richardson and Fielding, however, together with Smollett and Laurence Sterne (1713–68), are far from typical of eighteenth-century novelists. Although they were always attuned to the financial benefits to be derived from their work, they were outstanding as major writers. The great majority of eighteenth-century novels were produced by far lesser authors whose motives were entirely commercial. Many of these thousands of novels are (perhaps fortunately) anonymous, and many are (perhaps mercifully) no longer extant. From the trade’s point of view, the significance of the novel lay not in its literary merit but in its essential

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triviality. It was seen as an ephemeral production to be read once and then forgotten. This meant that, once the demand had been created, a continuous supply of new novels was needed to fill it. Waves of fashion swept over the novel. Richardson’s moralising and Fielding’s bluff comedy were succeeded by the Gothic fantasies of Walpole and Beckford and their scores of lesser imitators, and the ‘sentiment’ of Fanny Burney and hers. From the last quarter of the eighteenth century, and for more than a hundred years thereafter, novels became one of the most economically important products of the book trade and the publishing industry (see below, pp. 77–8). Like the periodicals, fiction was particularly significant to writers. As the popularity of novels grew inexorably from the 1740s onwards, the demand for new titles created a whole new market for writers. The problem for the trade was that this was a fashionable genre as well as a popular one, and fashions change. The epistolary novels, in which the story is told through letters written by the characters, derived from Richardson and remained a popular format for many years, but went into decline in the late 1770s, as indeed – temporarily as it turned out – did the whole of the emergent fiction industry. The novel revived in the 1790s, with the emergence of new genres: sentimental novels and gothic fiction (Raven 1988; Raven and Forster 2000: vol. 1, 26–7, 30–4; see also below, p. 78). The fickleness of fashion was a characteristic of the fiction industry from its very beginning. The middle decades of the eighteenth century saw the first flush of the novel’s popularity. In the last third of the century a number of works by major authors were published in serial form, of which the first of any literary significance was Smollett’s Sir Lancelot Greaves, published in twenty-five parts in The British Magazine between January 1760 and December 1761. Although fiction had been published serially for many years, Smollett was the first author to write a long work specifically for magazine publication, and he had numerous successors (Mayo 1962).

Beyond the metropolis The use of the magazine for fiction was only one of many ways in which serial publication was used to attract purchasers who might be deterred from buying a book for several shillings but who were prepared to spend sixpence on a weekly or monthly basis (Wiles 1957). This reflected the changing and expanding market for books and other reading matter by the second half of the eighteenth century. Reading for pleasure was becoming a more widespread habit, as both wealth and leisure time increased. Moreover, it was beginning to spread down the social classes, as literacy became more widespread (see above, pp. 10–12). Before the end of the eighteenth century, we can see in retrospect the trends which were to lead to the gradual creation of a mass reading public and a mass market (see below, pp. 108–12). Many of those who were now joining the reading public could not afford to buy all the books they wanted to read. For them, a new kind of library

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evolved, which was as firmly rooted in the world of commerce as was the novel. Circulating libraries, where customers paid a small membership fee and then a fee for each book they borrowed, can be traced back to the late seventeenth century, when Kirkman (see above, p. 49) began to lend books from his stock. By the middle of the eighteenth century, circulating libraries were familiar both in London and in the major provincial towns, and there were probably few booksellers who did not have a small stock of books available for commercial loan (Kelly 1966: 143–9). The largest libraries had a remarkable variety of stock, but the mainstay of all the circulating libraries, great and small, was fiction. In turn, the libraries became the mainstay of fiction publishing, a relationship which survives in the twenty-first century (see below, pp. 151, 155–6). The growth in the popularity of magazines and fiction – both separately and together – underpinned the development of authorship as a profession, and introduced a new dimension into the narrow world of the book trade. The market was no longer confined to – or even entirely dominated by – London. It was during the eighteenth century that booksellers, readers and buyers in provincial England first became a significant factor in the history of the trade (Wiles 1976). Books had been sold in provincial towns – in shops and at markets and fairs – from the very beginning of the trade in printed books and indeed before that (see above, p. 23), but it was only from the early eighteenth century onwards that a more organised and economically significant provincial trade began to develop. This derived in part from the end of the prohibition on provincial printing in the Printing Act. The short-term significance of this change lay not in the small number of books printed outside London in the eighteenth century, but in the rapid growth of the provincial newspapers from the 1720s onwards, and especially after about 1760. This was the basis for a significant expansion of retail bookselling in the provinces. The owners of these very small-scale weeklies were typically printers, retail booksellers and stationers, and indeed often dealers in many other goods. They sold their papers over wide geographical areas, albeit in very small numbers; they developed local networks of distribution to support this. They also, however, had links with the London book trade, whence came their paper and much of their printing equipment. As booksellers, many of them began to act as agents for London booksellers, a practice which developed into a nationwide network of distribution for London books. Through this channel, the London trade maintained its national dominance long after it had lost its de facto monopoly of printing. As the demand for books in the provinces grew, it could be satisfied because there was a well-established chain of supply including all the essential elements of an ordering system, a system of discounts, credit and payment, and physical distribution. The provincial trade thus became a significant outlet for the sale of the books produced by the London trade. The relationship was increasingly one of mutual dependence: the copy-owning booksellers in London needed the provincial trade to sell their books, but the provincial booksellers

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had no other source of legitimate supply of a commodity in increasing demand (Feather 1985). There were, however, illicit sources. One possible course of action for at least some provincial booksellers was to buy their books from Scotland and Ireland, but this introduced a number of legal complications which were eventually to have an important impact on the trade in the whole of the United Kingdom, in Ireland and beyond. The Copyright Act applied in Scotland (and Wales) but not in Ireland. The Scottish book trade had developed independently of that in England, partly under the patronage of the councils of the three major cities (Edinburgh, Glasgow and Aberdeen), partly with the support of the universities, especially in Edinburgh, and partly with some limited royal patronage. After James VI of Scotland succeeded to the English throne as James I in 1603, the Scottish book trade had continued to go its own way as did much of Scottish public and commercial life. The parliamentary, administrative and legal systems of the two kingdoms remained separate until 1707, and during those 104 years the booksellers in Scotland had no relationship to the formal structures of the English trade (Bevan 2002). Rights in copies in Scotland were granted by the crown operating through the (Scottish) Privy Council, and through administrative decrees; in other words, they were derived from the royal prerogative. In 1710, therefore, although the concept of copyownership was well understood in the Scottish trade, the Act represented a new and different form of control (Mann 2000: 95–124). The Scottish booksellers assumed that the 1710 Act meant both what it said – that existing rights (including theirs) were confirmed to their present owners for twenty-one years – and also what it implied: that thereafter these copies would be in the public domain, meaning that anyone could legally print them. From the mid-1730s onwards, therefore, some Edinburgh and Glasgow booksellers began to reprint English books, and many of these reprints were soon to be found on sale in the north of England. To the Londoners these were illegal piracies; to the Scots they were the fruit of legitimate competition. The position in Ireland was different. Ireland was a separate legal entity until 1800, although the English rulers of the island introduced many practices, systems and offices which mirrored those of the English (and after 1707 British) state. A system of licensing and censorship had been developed in Ireland in the seventeenth century, relating both to imported books and to those produced locally following the introduction of printing into Dublin in 1551. The Guild of St Luke, chartered in 1670, had a similar economic and commercial control over the Dublin trade to that exercised by the Stationers’ Company in London, although no formal standing on the crucial issues of licensing and copy-ownership (Phillips 1998: 3–25; Pollard 1989: 166–8). The 1710 Act had no effect on this position. It remained the case that copies in which the rights were protected in the United Kingdom (i.e. England and Wales, and Scotland) could legally be reprinted in Ireland without the consent of the British copy-owner. It was not illegal for the Irish booksellers to sell these

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reprints in Ireland, or indeed anywhere else with one exception. From about 1750 onwards, for example, certain Irish booksellers developed a very profitable, and perfectly lawful, trade in selling their reprints of London books in Britain’s north American colonies (Cole 1986). The one exception was of course the very place which offered the most potentially profitable market: the United Kingdom. It was precisely this practice – the importation and sale of Irish reprints into England – of which the London trade accused the Irish booksellers; furthermore they accused certain provincial booksellers of working in collusion with them (Pollard 1989: 66–109). The development of the relationships between the London copy-owners, the provincial booksellers, and the book trades in Scotland and Ireland was to have a critical impact on the development of publishing. In the background to that story, however, it is important to understand that in both Scotland and Ireland there were independent book trades with their own traditions, customs and practices. In Scotland, in particular, the tradition was maintained in a way which meant that despite everything, British publishing was never to be entirely monopolised by the English, let alone by the Londoners.

The challenge to the London book trade Because the London book trade had been so intimately involved in the 1710 Copyright Act, the whole thrust of the Act was to maintain existing trade practices. By the 1730s, however, this was no longer entirely tenable as Irish and Scottish reprints began to make their way into some of the remoter parts of England where the London trade’s supply chains were not sufficiently well established to meet growing demand (Feather 1985: 44–53). The Londoners reacted both commercially and legally. Commercially, they began to take account of provincial booksellers and provincial readers. The Gentleman’s Magazine’s reliable and comprehensive lists of new books were one means by which they could reach provincial markets, along with the growing network of booksellers to whom the London trade could gain access through their contacts with the provincial newspaper proprietors. At the same time, the London newspapers, especially the thrice-weekly evening newspapers, were becoming more generally available in the provinces (Black 1987: 99–104). They were full of book advertisements, epitomes and reviews, all of which raised the provincial profile of the products of the London book trade. In all of these developments, the 1730s was a crucial decade, as the London booksellers responded to the dangers which beset their investments in copies by providing more information about new books and more efficient supply. The legal challenge to the Scottish and Irish booksellers was more difficult (Feather 1987; Feather 1994: 80–93; Walters 1974). There were some apparent ambiguities in the 1710 Act. It could be interpreted to mean that what actually expired were the penalties for breach of copyright. This argument supposed that the rights which the Act protected were common law rights whose existence

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pre-dated the Act itself. It was on this point that the argument about copyright was to turn for the next forty years. At first, however, the trade did have a victory of sorts. In 1739, parliament passed an Act which forbade the import of any English books into Great Britain. Although it was never wholly enforced, it did give some explicit protection against the Irish imports. The victory proved to be illusory, for enforcement was difficult, and the only real protection for the copy-owner was to take a civil action after the illegal import and sale had actually taken place. It was not until the 1750s that the leading London booksellers began to take collective action to protect themselves against illicit trade. A group of copy-owners, led by John Whiston (1711–80), formed a committee which raised some £8,000 from the trade to mount a campaign against the imports. The success of the subscription is a measure of the importance which the London trade attached to stopping the influx of reprints, but it was not matched by the success of the campaign itself. Only a permanent system of vigilance could prevent the sale of Scottish and Irish reprints, and so it was to the provincial booksellers, rather than to the Scottish and Irish publishers, that the London booksellers addressed themselves. Early in 1759 a letter was circulated to the provincial booksellers in which the London committee offered to buy at cost their existing stocks of imported reprints, or to replace them, book for book, with legally printed London editions. This apparently generous offer was really a recognition by the London trade of their own impotence. From the provincial booksellers’ point of view, the generosity of the offer was very limited; although a bookseller who complied would have the moral comfort of knowing that he was no longer breaking an unenforceable law, when he looked to the future he would doubtless reflect on the likely consequences of the restoration of a complete London monopoly over the bestselling books of the age. The London booksellers would be able to charge any price they wished, and the provincials would have to pay since these were the books their customers wanted to buy. The openly intimidatory part of the letter was even more of a house built on sand. The proposal was that after 1 May 1759, the deadline for the return of illegal books, ‘riding officers’ would be appointed who would tour the country to inspect the stocks of the provincial booksellers. If Scottish or Irish editions were found, legal proceedings would be started under the 1739 Act, and the offending booksellers would no longer be supplied with books. Again, however, the problem was one of enforcement. The £8,000 might have been enough to buy up the stocks of illegal books, but it would not have sustained a long-term campaign of inspection and prosecution. It is doubtful whether this letter, and subsequent documents relating to the same scheme, was ever intended to do more than frighten the provincial booksellers into abandoning their trade in piracies. Even at that level it failed. By the early 1760s, the position was arguably less critical than it had been in the 1730s. The London and provincial trades were by this time indissolubly

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linked. A few provincial booksellers were shareholders in London books, although this was very unusual and the Londoners were not enamoured of it (Ferdinand 1997: 35). More important, however, was the rapid growth of the provincial trade itself. In the early 1760s, the increasingly tight interlocking of the London and provincial trades, and the highly efficient system of distribution which had been developed, seemed likely to lead to a natural atrophy of the whole problem of illegal imports of reprints. That this did not happen was almost entirely the result of the persistence of one man, the Edinburgh bookseller, Alexander Donaldson (d. 1794). Donaldson had made a good career and a reasonable fortune from reprints. His books were widely available in the north and the Midlands. In the early 1760s, however, his trade began to suffer as the London and provincial booksellers worked together more closely for their mutual benefit. He decided to mount a formal challenge to the London book trade. His motives were primarily commercial, although there is some truth in his presentation of himself as a man of principle, a free-trader and a Scottish patriot. Donaldson opened a bookshop in London (which was perfectly legal) in which he sold reprints. But Donaldson was not to be the first target. When Robert Taylor sold a reprint of James Thomson’s immensely popular poem The Seasons (first published in 1726–30) immediately after the expiry of the twenty-eight-year period of copyright, Andrew Millar, the owner of the copy, with the support of others in the London trade, initiated proceedings against him for infringement of common law rights of property. The alleged offence had been committed in Scotland, where the book had been reprinted, as well as in England where it had been sold. It was in a Scottish court and under Scots law that the case was to be heard. This was Millar’s first and crucial mistake. The Scottish courts had never been entirely happy in dealing with copyright cases. Before 1710, custom and practice in relation to rights in copies were quite different from those in England, and had developed in the context of the Scottish legal tradition (Mann 2004). A number of copyright cases had been heard in the Court of Session in the 1750s and 1760s (McDougall 1987). The judges had typically ruled against perpetual copyright, as being alien to the Scottish tradition and not warranted by the 1710 Act. Scots law did not admit of the concept of ‘incorporeal’ property: to be a legal entity, a property had to have real, or physical, existence. Thus, although a book or a manuscript was certainly a piece of property, Scots lawyers were generally very doubtful whether the same could be said of the text. By contrast, English law was more flexible. The English courts had gradually come round to the view that the author created a piece of property when he wrote his book, and the English judges had argued that the Act had not, and indeed could not, interfere with fundamental common law rights in property. Having recognised a copy as a property, they accepted the argument that like any property it had a perpetual existence and that its owner could do with

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it as he wished. The English courts, therefore, had generally upheld the booksellers’ argument for the perpetual existence of copyrights under the common law of property, arguing that the 1710 Act had merely imposed some specific penalties against those who trespassed on those property rights during certain periods of time. It was only these penalties which had a time limit, not the existence of the property itself, and even after that time there was nothing to prevent the courts from penalising trespassers according to the established practices of the law. Millar v. Taylor was to challenge the law in both countries, and indeed to bring about a conflict between the two jurisdictions. The arguments on both sides had been heard many times before. In essence, the plaintiff complained that his rights had been infringed by the theft of his property by Taylor and others; the latter replied that there was no case to answer because the law of Scotland did not recognise the existence of the alleged property. It was now that Millar began to suffer for the error of suing in Scotland. The Lords of Session reached back into the mists of history for precedents on both sides. In a series of interrelated cases, the Court of Chancery in England and the Court of Session in Scotland persuaded themselves that perpetual copyright did exist despite the 1710 Act. Even the judges were not entirely comfortable about the conclusions they had reached based on conflicting interpretations of both law and precedent (Deazley 2004: 169–90). One of the key cases, that of Donaldson v. Becket, was appealed to the House of Lords in 1774, and it was there that the issue was finally resolved. The established English booksellers must have been very optimistic about the outcome of this appeal. The import of English language books into England was an offence, and Donaldson and others had committed it; English law undoubtedly recognised the existence of copyright as a property; and in general, although with a few exceptions, English judges had taken the view that as a piece of property, copyright had a perpetual existence. When the peers began to give their opinions, however, it became clear that something unexpected might happen. A new argument was heard, although it had echoes of a very old one: that the monopoly of the London booksellers was not in the public interest, and that it maintained the price of books at an artificially high level. Doubts were expressed about exactly what kind of property copyright really was, and whether it could indeed be compared with a horse or a house. It was questioned whether the encouragement of learning, which was the alleged basis of the 1710 Act, was really best served by a commercial monopoly. Against the whole trend of the previous thirty years, the Lords found for Donaldson, and against the existence of perpetual copyrights (Deazley 2004: 191–210; Rose 1993: 92–112). This verdict did not come entirely out of the blue, and has to be seen in its intellectual as well as its legal and commercial context. The 1710 Act, despite its claim to encourage learning, was essentially the booksellers’ law. During the next fifty years, partly because of the operation of the Act, authors became more important players in the trade (see above, pp. 55–6). This was not only

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true commercially. They began to lay claim to more than purely commercial rights over their work, by identifying it as the product of intellectual effort and creativity in which they had an intellectual and cultural, as well as financial, interest. Gradually, ‘the author’ came to be seen not just as a producer for the book trade, but as a different and special person. New ideas developed about originality (in all the arts, not just in literature), and the concept of a literary canon began to develop. Since much of the English canon was controlled by the London book trade through their inherited and purchased shares in copies, perpetual copyright was seen as an inhibition on cultural as well as economic development. Scholars disagree about the extent to which these ideas were developed before 1774, and, if fully developed, influenced the thinking of the House of Lords, but there can be no doubt that the cultural zeitgeist was turning against the trade (Deazley 2004; Rose 1988; Rose 1993; Ross 1992–3; Woodmansee 1984). In future, any discussions of the law of copyright were to revolve around authors as much as, or more than, they did around the book trade (see below, pp. 114–15).

Conclusions The verdict in Donaldson v. Becket was a decisive turning point in the history of the English book trade, for it marked the end of the long era of protectionism which had begun with the granting of the Stationers’ Charter in 1557. It threw the London trade into a confusion which it had not known since the lapse of the Printing Act, the last formal breach in the protectionist walls. Since then, trade had undergone fundamental change, much of it evolutionary and largely invisible. The growth of the market, the increasing insistence of authors on receiving proper intellectual credit and financial reward for their works, the development of new genres and formats for popular printed matter: all characterised the eighteenth-century book trade, and all militated against its continued organisation around the convenience and profit of a few copy-owning booksellers in London. The Scots, and up to a point the Irish, had shown that they could compete, and in a free market would do so. Book buyers were more interested in availability and cheapness than they were in legal niceties. Authors wanted to be paid. The London booksellers, who had held a virtually unchallenged dominance of the trade throughout England since the later sixteenth century, had been unable to extend their dominance to Scotland, and had been comprehensively and successfully challenged by Scottish entrepreneurs. It was their response to that challenge which saw the emergence of the publisher as the dominant figure in the trade in printed books in Britain.

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Part II PUBLISHING IN THE INDUSTRIAL AGE

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5 THE FIRST PUBLISHERS

Revolution and evolution The second half of the eighteenth century was a time of great economic and political change in Britain. The United Kingdom was both a European power and a trading nation with a rapidly developing global empire. In north America and the Indian sub-continent, British traders, soldiers, administrators and in some places settlers, were taking the language and some of the culture of the offshore islands across the globe. Another continent was opened up by Cook’s voyages of discovery in the Pacific and the unknown southern oceans between 1768 and 1779; the first British convict fleet sailed to Australia in 1787 carrying men and women who were to form the basis of another part of the rapidly expanding empire. At home, too, there was change. Raw materials from the colonies were being made into goods both for domestic use and for export. New forms of industrial organisation were being created in factories whose machinery was driven first by water power and then by steam engines. The lives of millions of people were transformed by a movement from the countryside to the towns. The towns became very different places; an urban working class developed to provide the labour for the factories. A new middle class whose power was economic rather than social was just as challenging to the traditional social order. These changes took place over many decades. Collectively, they are known to historians as the industrial revolution, but the change was revolutionary in impact rather than in the sequence of events. There was no equivalent of the storming of the Bastille, just the gradual development of a new economy based on manufacturing and mining, and on trading in manufactured goods. That demanded new systems of transport – canals and improved roads in the late eighteenth century, railways from the late 1820s onwards – and new infrastructures for business. Along with the industrial revolution came a commercial revolution, in which insurance, banking and business organisation began to take on their familiar modern forms. The political impact of all of this was immense, although it was long delayed. The great domestic political upheaval in late eighteenth-century Britain arose

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out of the loss of the American colonies, which rebelled in 1776 and won their independence as the United States in 1784. This was trauma for the British ruling class, but one from which it quickly recovered. Energies were re-focused on developing the empire in Asia and the south Pacific, and before long the former colony and the former mother country were trading partners – albeit warily – and were beginning to recognise their shared inheritance of language and culture (see below, pp. 181–93). A far greater impact came from revolution across the English Channel. The French Revolution of 1789, the execution of the king and the more than twenty years of war which followed terrified all but a handful of the British. The domestic political response was to suppress any expression of dissent. While the war lasted, and the new industrial economy flourished under the impetus of wartime demand for goods (not least for armaments), the developing social problems were more or less contained. After 1815, with Napoleon defeated and the British the masters of the world’s oceans, there was almost an explosion when the new urban working class began to demand political rights, a greater share of the wealth they created and improved living conditions. Political reform came in the 1830s, without revolution. But there was genuine change: ancient institutions were reformed without being destroyed – parliament, the law, the professions, schools and universities, even the Church of England. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the United Kingdom was truly a world power, with a functioning system of representative (although far from democratic) government, an efficient infrastructure for business and a broadly equitable system of law. It was a modern state. Nothing and no one in Britain was immune from the consequences of these changes. Even in the little world of the book they took their toll of the old, and offered opportunities for the new.

The end of the monopolies and the beginnings of the reprint series In the middle of the second half of the eighteenth century the British book trade still bore many of the characteristics of sixty or seventy years earlier. Despite important developments, especially in the quantity and variety of material which was being published, the trade was still organised in the way that had evolved during the twenty years after the lapse of the Printing Act. The workings of the London book trade depended essentially on the continuity of ownership of copyrights in which the leading booksellers had invested so much capital. New books were seen as another addition to a copy-owner’s permanent stock of copies, in which, in due course, shares might be made available to others through the trade sales. The system was familiar, safe and successful, all of which made it attractive to the trade. It was not even as exclusive as it might sometimes have seemed. New men did make their way into the trade, although often with difficulty. Despite rapid growth, the trade was

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still essentially stable. However, the momentous events of the 1770s transformed, if they did not entirely destroy, that stability which the trade had enjoyed for so long. The Stationers’ Company, whose leading members were already reeling from the Lords’ decision in Donaldson v. Becket, suffered another blow in June 1775 when the Lords ruled that the English Stock’s almanac monopoly was also illegal (Blagden 1961). This marked the end of another long battle against ‘piracy’, and another victory for the ‘pirates’. The almanac monopoly had been under challenge intermittently since the late seventeenth century, but it was Thomas Carnan (d. 1788), who had been in business in London since 1744, who mounted the final assault. He had openly printed almanacs for many years, but in 1773 he virtually challenged the Company to prosecute him. It did, and Carnan won. Although the English Stock continued to derive considerable revenue from the almanacs until the early nineteenth century, these events reinforced the feeling that the mid-1770s were the end of an era in the formerly ordered world of the London book trade (Howe 1981; Capp 1979: 263–4). Although the break with the past should not be overemphasised, new developments came from every direction in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. The ending of ‘perpetual’ copyrights threw into the public domain the profitable copies on which the London trade had depended for nearly a century. New reprint series abounded, and, in real terms, the price of books probably fell under the stimulus of competition. The most famous of the early reprint series began as a direct response to the loss of perpetual copyright. John Bell (1745–1831), an enterprising and innovative publisher who had founded The Morning Post newspaper in 1772, announced his intention to publish a series called The Poets of Great Britain in collaboration with the Apollo Press of Edinburgh. This series, which began to appear in 1777, was to include all those popular poets whose works were no longer protected. Bell had already published an edition of Shakespeare (1774), and had initiated a series of reprints of plays under the title of The British Theatre (21 vols, in weekly parts, 1776–8). The former copyright owners felt obliged to reply (Morison 1930: 5–6). Led by Edward Dilly (1731–79), who was still writing mournfully about the ‘invasion’ of his ‘literary property’, some thirty-six booksellers combined to produce their own edition of the poets. In the end, it was more modest than Bell’s, for the booksellers confined themselves to poets working after 1660. They did not begin to publish until 1779, the year of Dilly’s death. They had produced 68 volumes when they brought the enterprise to an end in 1781. In the meantime, Bell published 109 volumes between 1777 and 1782. Dilly’s trump card was Samuel Johnson whose Lives of the Poets were written as the prefaces to the London booksellers’ series. Both series have a significant place in literary history, for it has been cogently argued that the selection of authors effectively established what was (and up to a point still is) regarded as the canon of English literature from the late sixteenth to the mid-eighteenth centuries (Bonnell 1989). Despite its literary importance, however, in the history

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of publishing Dilly’s series represented the past, while Bell represented the future. Dilly and his associates were merely trying to avoid the inevitable consequences of Donaldson v. Becket. Bell had discovered, as many after him were also to realise, that reprinting works in the public domain could be a highly profitable mode of publishing. There were no authors to be paid (or indeed to be cajoled for copy) and for so long as the book was in demand there was a large and reliable market. There is a direct line of descent from Bell’s British Poets to Everyman’s Library and the Penguin English Classics; the reprint series and the backlist were destined to become the economic pillars of the British publishing industry. Reprint series, however, were from the very beginning entering a highly competitive market. Having lost the virtually guaranteed income provided by continual reprinting of old favourites under the protection of the law, the booksellers were forced to adopt new attitudes. If copies were to be protected, at best, for twenty-eight years, then it was necessary to generate new and protected copies. In turn, this meant that the booksellers needed authors to write books for them, advertisements to publicise the books when they were published, and a wholesale and retail supply chain to get them to the public. The trade became more specialised than it had ever been before. Dilly himself was an interesting example of this trend. An ardent and radical Whig, he had for many years been involved in publishing political pamphlets as well as in general trade publishing. John Wilkes, Thomas Hollis and Benjamin Franklin were among his friends and authors, and after the outbreak of the American War of Independence in 1776, he came to have a near-monopoly of proAmerican books in London and even continued to develop his profitable trade with the rebel colonies (Butterfield 1951; Adams 1979: 47–9). Dilly was a bookseller with a profile.

Innovations: children’s books Innovation had been sporadic in the eighteenth-century book trade, although there had been some important developments. One of these, which can now be seen to have pointed towards the future, was in the publishing of children’s books. Significantly, the innovator came from outside the charmed circles at the centre of the London book trade. Although John Newbery (1713–67) had family connections with it, he began his career in Reading, and only subsequently moved to London. The obvious parallel is with that other great pioneer, Edward Cave, the founder of The Gentleman’s Magazine (see above, pp. 59–60); it is also worth noting that Newbery was apprenticed to William Carnan, father of the destroyer of the almanac monopoly. Newbery moved to London in 1743–4 and began to build up a modest but successful general business as a copy-owning bookseller. His authors included Johnson, Oliver Goldsmith and Smollett, all of them among the most prominent (and profitable) authors of their generation (Welsh 1885). His real fortune, however, came initially from

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an enterprise outside the book trade. In 1746, he acquired the patent in Dr James’s Fever Powder, a proprietary remedy which was an immediate success and was still on sale in the twentieth century. This was not as eccentric or irrelevant as it might seem. There had been links between the trades in books and patent medicines since the seventeenth century (Alden 1952), because the two trades shared a characteristic with each other which differentiated them from almost all other trades: they dealt in products which were centrally produced and nationally distributed. This called for national advertising as well as national distribution, in both of which the book trade had an important role to play. The London newspapers provided the only national advertising medium, and the owners of the medicine patents were quick to recognise the advantages of making use of them. The book trade was an ideal channel for distribution. The trade’s rapidly developing pattern of nationwide distribution through local booksellers offered a system from which the medicine owners could clearly benefit. Many provincial booksellers were agents for patent medicines, and a number of members of the London book trade were also involved in the medicine trade (Feather 1985: 83–4). Newbery has an important place in the history of publishing for a number of reasons. First, he learned from his experience of promoting the Fever Powder that advertising sold goods, and he applied the lesson to his publishing work. Second, he was the first publisher who began to issue his books in an ‘edition’ binding, in which all copies were uniformly bound before sale as part of the wholesale or retail price (Sadler 1930). Most importantly, however, he was the first publisher who made something of a specialism of books intended to amuse children rather than to educate them. His first real children’s publication was The Lilliputian Magazine (1751). It was issued in monthly parts, and was a juvenile version of the general interest magazine which is so typical of the mideighteenth century (Darton 1982: 124–5; Grey 1970). An early commission for the children’s market was Goldsmith’s History of England (1764), of which there were at least more than twenty editions before 1800, but his most famous children’s book was Goody Two-Shoes (1765) (Roscoe 1973; Roberts 1965). After Newbery’s death in 1767, the business was carried on by others (Weedon 1949), and there were to be many later publishers who found children’s books a very profitable aspect of the trade.

Innovations: withdrawal from bookselling It is doubtful whether the well-established copy-owning booksellers thought that they had anything to learn from the interloper from Reading, but his example actually demonstrated that there were new markets to be conquered and new means of making money even in an old trade. Some established booksellers gradually began to change the direction of their businesses. One of these was John Rivington (1720–92). His father, Charles (1688–1742), had taken over the long-established business of Richard Chiswell in 1711. John and his

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brother James (1724–1802/3) had succeeded to the family firm in 1742. James was a member of the so-called New Conger formed in 1736, but when the brothers’ partnership was dissolved, John gradually withdrew from the collective publishing which characterised the London trade in the mid-eighteenth century, although the break was not immediate. He was involved with share books until the 1770s. He was also a major presence in the trade, becoming Master of the Stationers’ Company in 1775. Nevertheless, John Rivington took an increasingly independent line; he became, to his great profit, official printer to the Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge in 1760, and was increasingly the sole proprietor of the copy in the new titles he issued. When he died, John Rivington bequeathed to his sons, Francis and Charles, a wellestablished business with a long and successful history of producing new titles. He did not, however, leave them a comparably large bookselling business. Although they continued to sell by retail from their shop in Paternoster Row, the Rivingtons were primarily publishers, perhaps the first firm which can truly be described by that word (Rivington 1919: 5–57; Curwen 1873: 296–306). Another old-established business which was revolutionised at the end of the century was that of the Longman family (Cox and Chandler 1925). The first Thomas Longman (1699–1755) bought the bookshop of his former master, John Osborn (d. 1734), in 1726. There came with it some valuable shares in copies including Robinson Crusoe. Both he and his nephew, also Thomas (1731–97), who succeeded in 1755, were involved with the congers, active at the trade sales and in the very heart of the trade’s affairs. In the last two decades of the century, however, the Longman business began to undergo significant change. When Thomas Norton Longman (1771–1842) took over in 1797 he continued and accelerated the process which had been begun by his father of withdrawing from joint publishing enterprises. This proved to present some problems, for although the Longmans could now retain all the profits from their books, they also needed larger amounts of capital to invest in new titles. In 1797, T. N. Longman brought in a new partner, Owen Rees (1770–1837), a Welshman who had been a bookseller in Bristol. Others from outside the family followed in due course. Soon the firm employed clerks who were neither family nor partners, established a separate wholesale department and virtually abandoned their retail bookshop. By 1810, Longmans was recognisably a ‘modern’ publishing house, whose senior partner no longer lived ‘over the shop’ but had established himself in genteel rus in urbe at Hampstead (Wallis 1974: 7–14, 41; Cox and Chandler 1925: 15–16). Longmans and Rivingtons survived to take their place among the giants of Victorian publishing because they adapted to changing circumstances, abandoned long-standing practices and learned to work in the harsher climate of free market capitalism. Even so, both remained essentially family firms, Longmans rather less so than Rivingtons, but both had been fortunate in having energetic young men who took over at the turn of the nineteenth century. Others were less fortunate and less enterprising, and clung on to the

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old ways for too long. This left the field open for new men like John Bell, and, perhaps most famous of all, John Murray.

The new publishers The first John Murray (1737–93), after a brief career in the navy, became a bookseller in 1768, observing that ‘many blockheads in the trade are making a fortune’. He bought the stock and copies of William Sandby for about £400, but, like Longman, he now needed more capital (Zachs 1998: 19–28). He took a bank into partnership to provide it, in itself a testimony to the perception that the book trade could be a profitable investment. In 1771, Murray inherited money from an uncle, and began to publish more adventurously, so that by the 1790s he was regarded as the leading publisher of belles-lettres (Zachs 1998: 63–76). He had cultivated good relations with booksellers in Ireland and Edinburgh, as well as in London and the English provincial towns, and recruited authors, especially from the Scottish universities, by using these contacts (Zachs 1998: 91–121). This was a new way of publishing by a man untrammelled by the traditions of the trade. When Murray died in 1793, he left the business to his son, also John (1778–1843), and a partner, Samuel Highley. As soon as the younger Murray came of age, he bought out the unenterprising Highley, and embarked on the same process as his contemporaries and rivals, Longman and Rivington. He disposed of his retail stock and concentrated entirely on publishing; his authors were to include Scott and Byron and probably no publisher reaped greater profits from the literary revolution of the early nineteenth century (Zachs 1998: 149–50). Murray founded a firm which was to become one of the landmarks of British publishing; it kept its independence until the very beginning of the twentyfirst century. The firms of some other innovators were less long-lived, but they had an important influence nevertheless. During the late eighteenth century, the Noble brothers, for example, were publishers of over 200 titles, mainly of popular fiction intended for the circulating libraries. The authors and their works are long forgotten, but the Nobles deserve to be remembered among the pioneers of library fiction which still remains an important element in British publishing. Like Rivington and Longman they gradually abandoned their retail business, although retaining their own very profitable circulating library. They also devised new techniques for generating income. They bought unsold books from other booksellers and sold them on to the circulating libraries, in transactions which resemble the later practice of remaindering. Like Newbery, they were great users of advertising to promote their business, foreshadowing another development of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Raven 1990). The Nobles are not prominent in the formal histories of the book trade, but in their activities we can see how innovators, concentrating on publishing in a genre which they knew how to promote and sell, could create a new kind of business.

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Of course, they were not alone. Indeed, they were not without competition even in their own field of popular publishing. The rather more famous William Lane (1763–1814), through his Minerva Press (founded in 1790), profited from and sustained the fashion for ‘Gothic’ novels at the end of the century. These horror novels, often set in remote times or places, were immensely popular, especially with the members of circulating libraries. A handful of them are still remembered and perhaps even read. Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto (1764) was the first; William Beckford’s Vathek (1787) is perhaps the most readable; and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) is the best known and moved the Gothic novel from genre fiction to the literary mainstream. Perhaps they are remembered best of all for the glorious parodies of the Gothic in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1808). Lane’s publications came to typify Gothic fiction; indeed the ‘Minerva Press novel’ became almost as much of a descriptor of a genre as ‘Mills and Boon’ was to be of popular romantic novels in the second half of the twentieth century. Lane was an entrepreneur, with an understanding of his market and the ability to turn a fashion into a profit. With Lane, Murray and others of their generation, we are beginning to see people whose businesses were built around the publishing and promotion of new titles for well-defined markets; some sectors were traditional, some were new and destined to become permanent, some were merely the passing fancies of the leisure seekers (Blakey 1939). These dramatic changes in the trade flowed ultimately from Donaldson v. Becket. Much depended on the personalities of the men involved, and the direction of change might have been somewhat different had it not been for the other factors which were also at work to force the bookseller/publishers of the eighteenth century to change or perish. Far away from the relatively comfortable world of Paternoster Row, the British economy and British society were undergoing radical change. Although technological change came late to the book trade (see below, pp. 85–92), the effects of the industrial revolution and associated social development were being felt in the trade during the last quarter of the eighteenth century. Competition was rampant in a period of massive and largely uncontrolled economic growth. New towns grew up around new industries, and created new markets which were demographically vibrant and geographically compact. Service trades flourished in this new economy, and services for education and leisure, which the book trade could provide, were in increasing demand. Self-improvement by self-education was encouraged, and only the book trade could facilitate it. It was a period of great opportunity for those who could grasp it (Feather 1983).

The impact of the Scottish book trade The London book trade has always dominated British publishing, but from the middle of the eighteenth century onwards it was never without competition. The judicial decision against the London booksellers in 1774 created a

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climate in which the provincial trade was potentially of greater importance than ever before. This coincided with a time when the provinces were beginning to exert a far greater influence on all forms of economic activity. Carnan, the man who had wrecked the almanac monopoly, was not a Londoner. Longman brought Rees from Bristol to inject capital into his business. So far as book publishing was concerned, however, provincial activity was still very limited; its growth was to be a phenomenon of the middle years of the nineteenth century. At the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it was the energy and enterprise of the Scots which was brought to bear on the London trade. The links between the London trade and Scotland had been strong for some time. Andrew Millar and William Strahan were only two of the most distinguished of the many Scots who were active in the London trade in the eighteenth century (Brack 1975). John Murray was a Scot; his links with Edinburgh University had been established through Creech and Elliot, the largest booksellers in the Scottish capital (McDougall 1999; Zachs 1998: 94–7). But many in the Scottish book trade sought a larger and less subordinate role. Underlying the legal issues which had led to the difficulties about literary property there was a genuine frustration in the Scottish book trade about the domination of the London booksellers. Some had developed distinctive publishing programmes of their own even in the eighteenth century, and sought markets in north America where they could compete directly with the Londoners (McDougall 1990; McDougall 1997; see also above, pp. 63–4). After what might seem to have been their great victory, however, the Scots did not easily reap the rewards of the end of the perpetual copyrights. A Scottish syndicate led by George Mudie produced its own reprint series of outof-copyright classics in the 1790s, but it was not wholly successful. At the same time, a group of Edinburgh booksellers agreed to sell London books at 6d. above their London prices in an attempt to protect and promote their own publications. In some respects the Edinburgh book trade became stronger after 1775, but it did experience great difficulties as competition led to price cutting and decreases in profit margins (Sher 1998). Edinburgh publishing was important in the Scottish domestic market and at least in some literary and academic publishing sustained a distinctive Scottish culture, drawing on a circle of booksellers, writers and subscribers. This was exemplified by the events surrounding the publication of the first edition of Burns’s poems in 1786 (Mathison 1995). But the domination by London of the British book trade continued. Scottish publishers looking for markets outside Scotland, especially after the loss of the American trade in 1776 and the closure of much of Europe from 1790 onwards, had to look to England. This was explicitly recognised by some of the leading Scottish publishers of the period. Archibald Constable (1774–1827) made links with Longman, among others, as a means of breaking into the English market. He was, up to a point, successful in doing this, but the comparative importance of the two markets is vividly illustrated by the first edition of Scott’s Ivanhoe (1814), one

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of the great bestsellers of the age. Constable was the publisher; he printed an edition of 8,000 copies, of which 6,000 went to his London partners. The size of the English market compared with that in Scotland was an inescapable fact of publishing life. When Constable bought the greatest of all eighteenthcentury Scottish publishing enterprises, the Encyclopaedia Britannica, he immediately ran into problems in raising capital. He formed a partnership with the Robinson brothers in Leeds in an attempt to overcome this. But the Robinsons found themselves unable to operate nationally from their provincial base and they moved to London. When they set up a business there, their inexperience and lack of contacts in the London trade led to further problems, not least for Constable who had become almost totally dependent on them for his access to the English market. The Robinsons ran into financial difficulties; Constable went bankrupt, bringing his greatest author, Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832), down with him (Millgate 1987: 1–6; Millgate 1996). The story illustrates some key points about British publishing at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The London publishers were, if anything, even more powerful than in the days when they had a legal framework for their oligopoly. They were so well entrenched through their control of the distribution system, their access to production facilities and their ability to raise capital that they were difficult to challenge. This was strikingly illustrated in another part of the British Isles in the first two decades of the century. When the Act of Union (1801) made Ireland subject to British copyright law and the judicial decisions which flowed from it, the Dublin publishing trade was all but destroyed. The whole trade in reprinting, legal until 1801, was lost. To compound the loss of Dublin’s traditional export markets in what was now the United States, the Scottish market (some of it legal and some illicit) also vanished (McDougall 1997), as did the very small export trade to England. It was twenty years before the Dublin booksellers and printers began to recover from this disaster (Benson 1990). But it was not impossible to challenge the Londoners. In the first two decades of the nineteenth century, four Scottish houses, Constables, A. and C. Black (founded in 1807) (Newth 1957), Blackie (1809) (Blackie 1959) and Collins (1819) (Keir 1952) did mount a serious and sustained challenge to London’s domination of British publishing. All four survived despite their vicissitudes, and established themselves as major players in the industry.

Innovations in bookselling The competitive ethos in the London book trade created an even greater need for an efficient system of marketing and distribution. The first of the great wholesaling houses was, like the first of the true publishing houses, a product of the late eighteenth century. George Robinson (1737–1801) was a Cumbrian by birth, who went to London in 1755 to work for John Rivington. With some financial help from Thomas Longman he set up his own business in the

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1760s and began to buy shares in copies during the 1770s. By the 1780s, however, he was largely a wholesale bookseller, buying from the publishers and selling to the retailers, especially those in the provincial trade. He soon had by far the biggest business of this kind, which represented another revolution in the book trade. Joint wholesaling had lain at the heart of the conger system which had preceded the development of share-book publishing (see above, pp. 52–3). As the share-book system began to disintegrate in the face of aggressively individualistic publishers like Murray, Longman and Rivington, joint wholesaling also came to an end. Indeed, it had been dying for decades, but the emergence of a large and prosperous wholesale house, benefiting (and profiting from) the entire trade, was a new and significant development. It proved to be the pattern of distribution in the British book trade until after World War II (Pollard 1978: 34–7). The retail trade also underwent changes, although they were perhaps less dramatic. The emergent publishing houses abandoned their retail business for many reasons. By far the most important factor was the sound business practice of specialisation, but in London there was a more specific additional reason related to the changing social geography of the capital. Throughout the eighteenth century there was a westward movement of London’s wealthier and more fashionable inhabitants. They left the City for Covent Garden and the adjacent parish of St Giles-in-the-Fields and then went further to St James’s, Piccadilly, Marylebone and even Chelsea. Whole areas of the West End, as it came to be known, were redeveloped, as fine houses were built in the new squares: Grosvenor, St James’s and Hanover (Rudé 1981: 8–10) Among the many far-reaching consequences of the flight from the City (which, for the poor, was in an easterly direction) was the movement of shops to the west, in pursuit of their customers. The customers of the bookshops were among those who moved in the fashionable world. When Dodsley had established his shop in Pall Mall in 1735, he was among the first to follow them (Solomon 1996: 50). Others followed, until by the end of the century Piccadilly, Pall Mall and St James’s Street were the centres of the London retail book trade. There were at least seven bookshops in Pall Mall, five in Piccadilly, and three in St James’s Street, with others in York Street and Old Bond Street (Maxted 1980: 14–15) If Rivington, Longman, the Nobles, Murray and Lane were, in different ways, the first of a new breed of publishers, and Robinson revolutionised the wholesale trade, the pioneer of the new fashion in bookselling was their contemporary John Hatchard (1769–1849). After his apprenticeship, Hatchard had worked, from 1798, for Thomas Payne, the greatest antiquarian bookseller of the day, at his shop in Mews Gate. In 1797, however, he struck out on his own and opened a bookshop in Piccadilly, having chosen the street because it was in the heart of fashionable London. He did a little publishing, but he was primarily a bookseller, and within four years he had the largest conventional retail bookshop in London (Laver 1947: 14–38). The pattern which was to prevail throughout the nineteenth century was now firmly established. The

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publishers injected risk capital into new books, wholesalers distributed them, and at the end of the chain the retail booksellers laid them before the public. Hatchard sought his customers from what came to be called the ‘carriage trade’. At the opposite end of the social scale, the 1790s saw another development of great significance for the future: remaindering, that is reducing the prices of books which were no longer selling at their original price and which the publisher wanted to clear out of the warehouse to make room for new titles. Until the late eighteenth century, this practice was unknown; some titles remained in print for years or even decades. In the more entrepreneurial climate of the 1790s and the early years of the nineteenth century the development of remaindering reflected the trade’s increasing focus on publishing new books. The inventor of remaindering in its most developed form is usually considered to be James Lackington (1746–1815), although the Nobles, as we have seen, engaged in a variation of it. Lackington came from a poor and virtually bookless background in the west of England, and after various adventures he established himself in the London retail book trade in 1774. He approached the trade with a philosophy which was very different from that both of his predecessors and of his contemporaries. Lackington claimed, with some justification, an interest in reducing the price of books for cultural and religious reasons, but he also recognised that selling large numbers of books at marginal profits could in the long term generate more income than selling fewer books at higher prices. He gained access to the auctions at which publishers sold slow-moving stock, bought in quantity and proceeded to sell off the books to the public at greatly reduced prices which nevertheless still left him with a small profit on each copy sold. At first, this practice outraged the more conventional members of the trade, not least by its manifest success. Lackington’s bookshop, which with typical immodesty he called ‘The Temple of the Muses’, was soon the largest in London and possibly in the world. Despite trade opposition he was successful; gradually the publishers came to realise the advantage of selling off old stock en bloc and thus recouping at least some of their own investments (Landon 1976).

From book trade to publishing industry By the second decade of the nineteenth century, the British book trade was recognisably a modern publishing industry. The process of gradual separation of the several functions of the printer, the publisher and the bookseller, which had been evolving since the seventeenth century, was complete. Within each group specialisms were being developed. There were printers who worked on books, and others who produced principally newspapers, just as there were booksellers who catered for different areas of the market. Above all, however, there were publishers who had established their reputations and developed their expertise in different fields, and whose names were coming to be associated with books on particular subjects or with genres or even authors. Despite the

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fears expressed by some in 1774–5, the trade arrived at the end of the century in a far better condition than it had been at the beginning. But it was a very different trade. From the middle of the sixteenth century to the middle of the eighteenth, the history of the London book trade is one which is characterised by stability and conservatism rather than change and innovation. Of course there was change. The numbers engaged in the trade increased as the market for printed matter grew. New forms of print were developed – the newspaper and magazine – and new genres – novels and travel books – evolved. Relationships within the trade changed as the booksellers began to work together both in shifting partnerships and in longer-lasting business relationships. Extraneous factors, both political and economic, had an impact on how the trade operated; they generated both the constraints which restricted it and potential which it could exploit. By the early eighteenth century, the London book trade was dominated by a small and largely self-perpetuating oligarchy of copy-owning booksellers, who were recognisably the business heirs (and sometimes the actual descendants) of those who had been in the trade a hundred years earlier. The share-book system came to dominate the economics of the book trade, sustained after 1710 by legislation which was, at least in the trade’s view, designed to protect it. The breakdown of the share-book system, which arguably reflected wider changes in societal and judicial attitudes to competition and entrepreneurship, opened the field for new players and, perhaps even more importantly, for new roles. At the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, there were firms which could be labelled as ‘publishers’ in the modern sense, and which were beginning to use that term to describe themselves. Moreover, this was no longer simply a London-based activity, although Londoners continued to dominate it. But the English provincial market had grown in importance throughout the eighteenth century, and by the 1790s the north and the Midlands were clearly the home of the engines of profound economic change. Some genuine provincial competition to the dominance of the London publishers began to develop in the nineteenth century, but its precursor came from Scotland. The Scottish book trade had a history almost as long as that of London, but from the 1770s onwards the Scots, both collectively and through the work of key individuals, had a real impact on publishing and the book trade south of the border. It was from Scotland that there came the legal challenges which led to the end of the share-book system. Ten or fifteen years later, enterprising Scots are notable in the first generation of London publishers, and important books were being published in Scotland and distributed both nationally and internationally. For both writers and readers, these changes in the book trade had significant implications. In a trade which was now wholly uncontrolled, and open to innovation and enterprise, there was room for the maverick and the rebel as well as the conformist and traditionalist. Authors were, up to a point, operating in

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a seller’s market in which they could take their work from one publisher to another, and were no longer confined to a handful of London booksellers. In due course, a new hierarchy developed among the publishers, and authors would seek out one of particular prestige or with particular interests, but there was less and less reason for even the most marginal of work to fail to find a place in print. There were also new horizons for the readers and buyers of books. At the simplest level, more publishers and more titles meant more choice. More bookshops and circulating libraries, and more efficient wholesaling and distribution, meant easier access to this wider variety of publications. Change was in the air, but its pace was uneven. There was not a sudden transformation, but rather an evolutionary process which changed the trade over several decades. That process of change began in the 1770s, and by the end of the century was visible to contemporaries. But it was by no means complete. The changes in the publishing and bookselling businesses reflected, sustained and perhaps even helped to create, larger markets for books. But the market remained comparatively homogenous, if only because the price of books remained comparatively high (Eliot 1994: 59–77). Moreover, despite all the changes, distribution was still a problem, especially outside London, and book production was traditional, slow and expensive. The first of these issues could not be addressed until the 1840s, but a technological revolution in the production of books was beginning with the new century. There were those in the London book trade in 1800 to whom change was welcome: that was perhaps the most revolutionary change of all.

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6 THE BOOK TRADE AND THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

The roots of technological change The eighteenth century had witnessed an unprecedented rate of growth in demand for the printed word, and had seen the beginnings of the final stages of the transformation of Britain into a print-dependent society. The initial impact of print in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries had been on the cultural elites already accustomed to the use of the written word. Although the vastly increased number of books and the much lower cost of buying them were of great significance, the real importance of the printed word was essentially for a small group. The Reformation broadened this group, and in Britain the political revolutions of the seventeenth century expanded it yet further, but the mass impact of the printed word still lay in the future. During the eighteenth century, however, the position changed. The development of the provincial, Scottish and Irish book trades, and of more efficient mechanisms of supply and distribution of London books throughout the British Isles and beyond, both exploited an existing market and helped to create new customers. Provincial readers shared many tastes with their London counterparts, and indeed the two groups overlapped at the upper end of the social scale, but there were some distinctive trends in the trade which can be attributed to the growing importance of book buyers outside London in the economy of the trade as a whole. The thrice-weekly evening newspapers, intended almost entirely for English provincial distribution, are perhaps the most obvious example. Another is that of the part books which were principally intended for the provincial market; the form itself had been evolved to overcome the considerable distribution problems which existed in the first two or three decades of the century. It is no accident that the part books came to an end in the 1750s when the trade had developed adequate mechanisms for the distribution of conventional books. Despite their brief life, however, the part books offer a vivid insight into the tastes of provincial readers, and it is particularly noticeable how many of them are books with a practical bias. Instructional manuals in accountancy, simple legal procedures, business practices and the like bear testimony to the awakening economy of the provinces, and to the essentially practical concerns of many provincial readers (Wiles 1957; Wiles 1976).

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At the same time, the spread of printing through the provincial towns, although it presented no threat to the established book printers in London, gave ready access to printing facilities on a greater scale. Provincial printers did a little book work, but their real profits were from jobbing printing and, in a few cases, newspapers. Jobbing work was the economic cornerstone of the provincial printing trade in the eighteenth century, and provided the great flood of material which enmeshed the printed word into the fabric of everyday life. Tickets, handbills, advertisements, catalogues, posters and a mountain of other ephemeral productions became familiar to the mass of the people for the first time. As the pace of economic change increased, so too did the dependence on print. More sophisticated marketing techniques, which accompanied the development of new technologies in many basic industries, demanded printed documents of many kinds for packaging and selling alike. In such a society, illiteracy was no longer merely a social stigma, it was a fundamental economic disadvantage (Feather 1985). For the book trade as a whole these developments were to have profound consequences. The deeper penetration of print into society created a greater demand for literacy and for the education which precedes it; but a literate population creates further demand for printed matter for business and pleasure alike. It was from this cycle of development and change that there grew the great edifice of the Victorian publishing industry when the trade reached unprecedented heights of prosperity. In turn, this forced the London book trade, and particularly the publishers, to ensure that they could meet the demands which they were at least partly responsible for creating. If they were to succeed in maintaining their domination of British publishing, they had to be able to produce the books that were in demand in sufficient quantities and at the right price. They then had to have access to a distribution system which could operate at the right speed and on an appropriate scale. The steady growth of the domestic publishing industry in Scotland, and the slow but noticeable increase in the number of books printed in provincial cities, sounded a warning to the London trade. The growth in demand for reading matter provoked a search for technical innovations which would facilitate the fulfilment of that demand. In the longer term, there was to be a circular effect: technological innovations which made book production faster and easier, and thus cheaper, stimulated a further demand-led growth in publishing. The printing process at the beginning of the nineteenth century was essentially unchanged from the methods which Gutenberg had invented 350 years before. Typesetting, printing and binding were all handcraft processes, as were papermaking and typefounding. Within a hundred years this was transformed, although change came slowly, and in some cases very slowly indeed. Production processes in some industries were mechanised forty or fifty years before any significant new techniques were applied to book production, and it was not until the middle of the nineteenth century that the key production process – printing – was operating to a contemporary industrial model.

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The industrialisation of book production: paper The need for mechanisation both of book production itself and of the manufacture of the materials of book production was widely felt in the trade at the end of the eighteenth century. The first changes came to the most fundamental of all the materials of book making, paper. It has been argued that the growth of the papermaking trade in Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was an essential precondition to the success of printing itself (Febvre and Martin 1976: 29–44). Certainly paper became the normal medium for book production almost at once. Therefore, when the paper trade faced a serious problem in the middle of the eighteenth century, so did the printing industry and therefore the whole book trade. The cause of the problem was the supply of raw materials. Paper had traditionally been made from linen rags, and the supply of rags could no longer keep up with the demand for paper. Books were absorbing more and more of the available supply. The publishers of the successive editions of the great Encyclopédie edited by Denis Diderot disrupted the entire European paper industry in the 1780s by the sheer quantity of their needs (Darnton 1979: 185–96), but in a sense this was merely an extreme case of a general problem. Inevitably, the price of paper went up, and with it the price of all printed materials. Quantity, however, was not the only difficulty; as the supply of good rags diminished, so did the supply of good paper since inferior materials were, inevitably, substituted (Hunter 1967: 309–40). In England, both James Whatman (1702–59) and John Baskerville (1705/6–1775) experimented with high quality papermaking. Whatman succeeded in developing a new papermaking method which certainly produced a very high quality of paper, but it was inevitably expensive (Balston 1957: 21–4). The use of Whatman papers was the exception, not the rule. More generally, there was actually a marked decline in the quality of paper towards the end of the eighteenth century as chemical additives began to be used to compensate for the low quality of the only rags which were available in sufficient quantities. Indeed, the quality of ordinary printing and writing paper continued to decline throughout the nineteenth century, and has only recently recovered. For the publishers, however, quantity and reliability of supply remained the really urgent problem. The age-old method of papermaking by hand was slow and expensive, and could produce only comparatively small sheets. Experiments in the mechanisation of papermaking began in the 1780s, and in 1798 NicholasLouis Robert (1761–1828) succeeded in building a papermaking machine, driven by water power. He and his designs were brought to England by two London wholesale stationers, Henry (1766–1854) and Sealy Fourdrinier (d. 1847); for them, he built the first commercially viable machine in 1807 (Hunter 1967: 341–73). The Fourdrinier machines, as they came to be known, revolutionised the paper industry, and indeed the design has never been fundamentally modified. In due course, steam (and later electricity) was substituted

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for water power, which further increased the speed of the process and reduced the cost of the product. The industrial-scale use of the Fourdrinier machines made paper plentiful and cheap, and transformed the whole paper trade. Formerly paper had been manufactured on a small scale by a large number of mills; in the nineteenth century the paper industry was characterised by the development of a few very large businesses producing huge quantities of paper and marketing it through a small number of specialised wholesalers (Coleman 1958: 227–58). The transformation of the paper trade was the first direct impact of industrialisation on the book trades.

The mechanisation of book production: typesetting Printers had long since lost the central role in the book trade which they had played in the sixteenth century. The economic power was with the publishers, for whom the printers were little more than paid agents; except for the two universities, no major publisher was its own printer. On the other hand, printers had many customers other than the book publishers. Jobbing printing, the production of all the printed paper needed by a sophisticated industrial economy, was the mainstay of the printing trade by the end of the eighteenth century (Alston 1981). Book printing was already the specialised concern of a few major houses, another trend which was to be common throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. All printers, however, regardless of the format of their outputs, shared the same problems of speed, durability of equipment and ever-increasing print runs, but nowhere were these problems more acute than in the most specialised area of all, newspaper printing. There were two separate but related problems which were exaggerated in the peculiar conditions of newspaper production. The first was the speed of typesetting, a matter of particular concern to the printer of a daily newspaper, for which many columns of type must be set to an unalterable deadline. The mechanisation of typesetting was to prove the most difficult of all the technical problems facing the printers. Early attempts to reduce the work of the compositors, such as logography, proved to be unmanageably cumbersome (Feather 1977). It was not until 1884 that the first successful mechanical system was developed by Ottmar Mergenthaler, an American engineer. His line-casting system, marketed as Linotype, was introduced into Britain in 1895, and became the norm for newspaper work until it was displaced by computer-based systems in the late 1970s (Kahan 1997; see also below, pp. 215–17). For book work, however, mechanical typesetting came even later; it was not until after Tolbert Lanston had produced the Monotype system in 1887 that the British book printers began to mechanise their composing rooms. This process started in 1897, and Monotype survived until long after World War II (Moran 1965: 52–8, 62–5; Boag and Wallis 1997). Thus, for virtually the whole of the nineteenth century, typesetting was done as it had been since the middle of the fifteenth century.

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Almost the only technical development which affected the great majority of printers was the invention (or more accurately, reinvention) of stereotyping (Turner 1975). Stereotyping is a process in which a mould is made which is the reverse image of a page of type; when a cast is made of the mould it is an exact copy of the original type. Stereos (as they were almost universally known in the trade) could be stored with comparative ease. They enabled the printer to reuse his expensive type, or to melt it down in the case of Monotype and Linotype, thus further reducing costs. Reprints could then be made from the stereos; although their quality decreased with repeated reuse, they did serve an essential purpose and continued in use until the end of hot-metal printing in the 1980s. Stereotyping is a particularly striking example of a technical innovation which had a direct impact on the price and availability of books. It opened up the possibilities of more or less unlimited reprinting, on paper of various qualities and in various styles of binding. The ‘cheap’ edition, which was an important commodity in many domains of the nineteenth-century publishing industry, was possible only because of the adoption of this important technique.

The mechanisation of book production: printing While the composing room remained essentially unchanged until almost the end of the nineteenth century, the printing shop was transformed during its first thirty years. The first innovation was the use of metal instead of wood for the traditional hand press. The first iron press was built to the designs of Earl Stanhope for the Oxford University Press shortly after 1800 (Hart 1966: 345–405). Various other designs followed, most notably the Albion, first made by G. W. Cope in the 1820s, which was to be the standard British book press for three decades (Moran 1978: 91–100). As with typesetting, however, the real pressure for change came from the newspaper trade, where speed of production was as important as speed of composition. In 1814, John Walter installed a steam-powered press at The Times, the first that had ever been in commercial use (Moran 1978: 101–11). Steam printing was for some decades largely confined to newspaper printing, but gradually books too began to be printed ‘by steam’. Long, high speed print runs were now possible for the first time, and while this reduced unit costs, it also forced publishers to look at the economies of scale which they could gain from larger editions. For smaller editions, steam printing offered few advantages, and could actually cost more than using an Albion. Many books were still being printed by hand in the middle of the century, although the great bulk of other printed matter was, by that time, printed by steam. As time went on, ever more sophisticated presses were designed, which could cope with multiple feeding of sheets, and rolls (or webs) of paper. At every stage, it was the newspaper printers who took the first step (Moran 1978: 173–83; Comparato 1978/9), but the book printers eventually

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followed. Those printers who wished to compete for large jobs were forced to invest in expensive equipment, and the number of printing firms which had the latest and most efficient machines available was small indeed. As in the paper industry this had the effect of creating large-scale businesses. The Victorian printing industry was made up of a few firms using the latest equipment and thousands of small family businesses which were still setting and printing small jobs by hand when Queen Victoria died.

Lithography and other illustration techniques The technical innovations in the printing industry were not confined to new techniques of papermaking, typesetting and letterpress printing. In 1798 the process of lithography was invented by Alois Senefelder in Germany. It was introduced into England in 1801, providing a high quality, although very expensive, graphic process for illustrations (Twyman 1970: 11–12, 26–40). Lithography – literally, writing on stone – required the artist or other creator to use a wax crayon to draw or write on polished limestone. When suitably treated with water and chemicals, this could be used as a printing surface. The original process was cumbersome and expensive; it was gradually replaced by the use of metal plates rather than stones, and in the twentieth century photography was used to make the images. It was this development which was eventually to cause a printing system based on Senefelder’s original principles – known as offset lithography – to displace traditional letterpress printing in the last quarter of the twentieth century (see below, pp. 213–15). The use of lithography was not confined to illustration. Indeed, it represented an important new tool for publishers in several fields, albeit specialised. Quite apart from luxurious and expensive illustrated books, the autographic process made it easier to print music, maps and other matter which combined text and graphics. A process for lithographic printing in colour was developed at a fairly early stage, and became common from mid-century onwards. Thereafter, illustrations and coloured printed wrappers became a more common feature of many books. In its heyday, from about 1870 to about 1920, lithography, both monochrome and colour, was a key element in books of many kinds. It was used not only for illustrations, but for dealing with complex material such as algebraic formulae, graphs and tables, and languages written in non-Latin scripts for which no type had been made (Twyman 2001). Long before that happened, however, the more conventional illustration processes were also transformed, first by the development of new versions of traditional techniques and then by the development of wholly new systems (Harris 1968, 1969, 1970). The use of hardened steel plates instead of the traditional copper made a more durable printing surface which could be used in steam-driven presses and which could therefore be used for long print runs even of comparatively cheap books (Hunnisett 1980: 18–31) New processes

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for colour reproduction were also developed (Friedman 1978). The most dramatic development, however, was the evolution of a technology which permitted the printed reproduction of photographs (Wakeman 1973: 119–45). The invention of photography was announced in 1839; it soon became a middle- and upper-class hobby. The printed reproduction of photographs, however, took the new technique into a different and wholly commercial sphere. Indeed, whole new domains of print were opened up, not least in the creation of postcards with photographs of places and people. Taken together, all of these developments gradually made the use of graphic material more common in nineteenth-century books. This should not be overemphasised. The great majority of books still consisted only of letterpress text, but illustrations of places, people, scenes from fiction, natural phenomena and flora and fauna gradually became more familiar. Graphics for practical purposes – diagrams and maps for example – also became somewhat cheaper to make and to print, helping both to improve the quality and to reduce the price of instructional books for learners of all ages. Finally, some specialised areas of publishing – notably maps (Mumford 1998) and musical scores (King 1964: 28–9) – were transformed by the use of lithography, photography and in some cases colour.

The mechanisation of book production: binding The mechanisation of bookbinding began in the 1820s, although it was not completed until after the turn of the twentieth century (Potter 1993; Potter 1999). Historically, books had been sold in unbound printed sheets, although the sixteenth- or seventeenth-century bookseller could arrange for the sheets to be bound if the customer so wished. Probably the majority did, although bibliophilic purchasers would often have special bindings made, perhaps using superior materials, or incorporating a family coat-of-arms. From the middle of the eighteenth century onwards, some books began to be issued in uniform bindings, a practice known as ‘edition binding’. John Newbery, the children’s publisher (see above, pp. 74–5), is credited as the originator of this practice, and it was certainly in the children’s market where it first became established. It soon spread to many other cheaper books, however, including school books, and by the beginning of the nineteenth century it was becoming comparatively widespread across the trade. Cloth began to replace the traditional leathers from the mid-1820s (Warrington 1993), and gradually a wide variety of styles – from workmanlike to luxurious to simply eccentric – came to characterise the nineteenth-century British book (Ball 1985). The process of bookbinding, however, remained a hand craft until almost the end of the nineteenth century. Indeed, the traditional process, which involved various stages of cutting, folding, sewing, trimming and gluing was barely capable of mechanisation (Potter 1993). Eventually a wholly new process

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of binding was invented in which an outer case of boards covered in cloth (or other material) was made by one machine, and the book itself was folded, trimmed and sewn in another, before case and book were brought together in the final stage of the process. This technique – case binding – became all but universal for hardback books in the twentieth century.

The social context of industrial change All of these changes have to be seen in the broader context of the gradual mechanisation of British industry. Book production was not in the forefront of change, although it was able to take advantage of many innovations made elsewhere, notably in the harnessing of new forms of motive power, such as water, steam, coal, gas and, later, electricity. It was not, however, only in technical matters that the industrial revolution had a profound effect on the British publishing industry. New business practices were developed in the nineteenth century, which led to a greater regularity in the keeping of accounts and the recording of orders and sales. Changes in banking practices were particularly important to an industry which had always depended on long periods of credit and which needed to move money as well as goods around the country. Following various disasters, legislation in 1826 began the process, taken forward in many later acts of parliament, which led to the long-term stabilisation of the system by controlling the issue of bank notes, providing a framework for inter-bank credit transfers, allowing the development of national banks with a network of branches and giving customers reasonable confidence in the ability of banks to meet their commitments (Collins 1988: 15–29). These changes facilitated the dealings between London publishers, the wholesale houses and the retail booksellers in London, the provinces, the rest of the British Isles and eventually overseas as well. Indeed, the business environment as a whole was changing, typified by the reform of the archaic bankruptcy laws in 1841. Within the book industry, there were other changes which reflected the evolution of a different structure of socio-economic relationships. This was particularly the case in the printing sector. The steam-driven presses used from the mid-nineteenth century onwards created the need for larger-scale operations. Printing, a mechanical technique by definition, had become a fully industrialised activity which took place in a factory environment. Like many Victorian factories, the steam printing house was hot, noisy and dirty. It was labour-intensive, and there was a good deal of hard physical labour. By the end of the century, book printing had become a recognised specialism within the industry, and some of the leading printers were moving out of London to newly established factories in the home counties or even beyond. The firm which became Hazell, Watson and Viney opened a new plant at Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire in 1866 (Keefe 1939: 89–105); Unwins moved to Woking, Surrey, in 1890 (Unwin 1976: 49). Both were major book-printing houses looking for space where land and property cost less than in London. The

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separation of printing and publishing, which had begun in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, was finally completed in the reign of Queen Victoria. Composing rooms were the major source of cost in the book production process, and the compositors found themselves in an increasingly strong position to bargain with their masters. Training was still by apprenticeship (Skingsley 1978/9, 1979/80). Unionisation came early to the composing rooms, and grew strong roots there (Child 1967: 47–104; Howe and Waite 1948: 84–115). As early as 1785, the major London book printers agreed the first version of the London Scale of Prices by which the compositors were paid standard piecerate wages (Howe 1947: 69–83). In one form or another, the London Scale survived into the late twentieth century. The cost of paying higher wages was, of course, passed on to the printers’ customers, and ultimately to the bookbuying public. Industrial relations in printing were fraught for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, particularly in the newspaper industry which sometimes paid a heavy price – literally and figuratively – for its innovative use of new technologies from steam presses in the 1810s to computers in the 1970s. The technical, social and economic changes within the printing industry were, of course, only one manifestation of change throughout British society during this period. The publishers’ customers were also a part of that change, sometimes driving it, sometimes resisting it, always exposed to its consequences. The industrial revolution created a new kind of urban environment, the modern city. The pre-industrial city, although it was often a centre of production, was in essence a place of commerce and services. The new cities, such as Manchester, Glasgow and Birmingham, depended for their very existence on manufacturing rather than mere trading. The production methods demanded large workforces and thus created the great urban conglomerations of intermingled housing and factories which characterised the cities of mid-Victorian Britain. In turn, this provided a wholly different kind of market for the producers of both goods and services. Rapid population growth increased the number of potential consumers, and at the same time their concentration in large towns made them easier to reach. In turn, this created sufficient business to justify the development of specialised retail and wholesale outlets for many goods. The book trade was not exempt from any of these developments. Indeed, the trade was better placed than many to survive, and benefit from, these changes, for it had pioneered the disseminated retailing of centrally produced goods, as the owners of medicine patents had recognised over a hundred years earlier. Books had always come from few sources and been distributed through many outlets. By the end of the eighteenth century there were at least 1,000 bookshops in England and Wales, and few towns of any size which had no shop at which books and magazines could be bought. In the major cities there were many bookshops, some of which were large and well stocked (Feather 1983). The number continued to grow until even most small towns in the British Isles had a bookshop of some sort (Norrie 1982: 78–84).

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The revolution in distribution and transport Distribution was a problem which the book trade had always faced, and with which it had coped surprisingly well in the eighteenth century, when sophisticated systems of supply had been developed despite poor transport facilities and primitive credit transfer arrangements (Feather 1985: 44–68). The existing distribution system, however, was transformed by the building of the railways, a process which began in the 1830s and led to the creation of a national network within twenty years. Indeed, the railways have a part in the history of British publishing in the nineteenth century in two ways. First, and most importantly, the virtual completion of the main inter-urban railway system in the 1850s gave the publishers rapid and reliable access to almost the whole of the United Kingdom market, at comparatively low cost. One of the fundamental economic problems of publishing is the very low value to weight ratio of books. Carriage charges on the railways were low, and for bulk transportation they were ideal, both economically and physically (Robbins 1962: 105–7; Simmons 1986). Improvements in the postal services, which were in part a consequence of the greater speed made possible by the railways, simplified the whole process of ordering and payment. The combination of a postal service and a transport system which offered speed, reliability and cheapness – at least compared with their predecessors – was an unadulterated blessing for all the distributive trades. Publishing and bookselling were among the major beneficiaries. The second great effect of the railways on the trade cannot be so precisely defined, but it certainly existed. Early railway journeys were long and tedious. Reading on the train became a common pastime among travellers, and spawned a whole family of ‘Railway’ books, cheap books designed to be sold at the station, read on the train and perhaps left behind at the end of the journey. At least one major publisher, George Routledge, made his first fortune from such a series (Topp 1993). These series are the ancestors of the modern paperback bought at the airport bookstall and abandoned at the end of the flight. They proved to be a major boon to the publishing trade. Nowhere is the significance of the railways in the history of the book industry more apparent than in the story of W H Smith. At the end of the eighteenth century, Henry Smith (1738–92) was a wholesale newsagent and stationer in a small way of business in the East End of London. His son, William Henry (1792–1865), took over the business in 1812, and developed it considerably over the next few years, especially on the wholesaling side. The dramatic expansion, however, began in 1848 when Smith negotiated with the London and North Western Railway an exclusive contract for bookstalls on that company’s stations. The first was opened at Euston in the same year, and over the next twenty years Smith made similar arrangements with almost all the major railway companies. By the end of the 1860s, the number of Smith’s station bookstalls exceeded five hundred (Wilson 1985: 88–154; James 1981).

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It was not, however, only as retailers that Smith’s came to dominate a large part of the retail book trade in Victorian England. W H Smith also negotiated contracts with the railway companies for the carriage of newspapers, often on special trains timed to ensure that the papers were available for early morning distribution in the major provincial cities. The firm came to be as dominant in newspaper and magazine wholesaling as it was in railway bookselling, and a very potent force in the publishing industry of the nineteenth century. When Smith’s added town shops (as opposed to station shops) and circulating libraries to their armoury, they were well on their way towards a near-monopoly position in bookselling in many smaller provincial towns (Wilson 1985: 218–24). For W. H. Smith the younger (1825–91), the outcome was a Victorian apotheosis: he was one of the best respected businessmen of the age, a member of parliament and First Lord of the Admiralty, for which latter distinction he was immortalised by W. S. Gilbert as ‘the ruler of Queen’s navee’. It was a long way from a stationer’s shop in the East End. Smith’s, however, were not alone in the field of wholesaling. Indeed, their wholesaling activities were largely confined to the field of newspapers; for books the dominant firm was Simpkin, Marshall and Company. Again, it was a company with humble origins which became one of the giants of the trade. Simpkin and Marshall, however, were unlike Smith in that they were imitators rather than innovators. They began by following the example of Lackington in buying large quantities of books from publishers at low prices (see also above, p. 82). This was in the 1820s when trade was going through a depression from which publishing inevitably suffered. Publishers needed to recoup their investments even if profits were slightly reduced as a consequence. Simpkin and Marshall began to build up contacts in the provincial trade, through which they could dispose of their growing stock of remainders, and they thus established themselves as wholesalers, following the pattern established by Robinson in the last quarter of the eighteenth century (see also above, pp. 80–1). From that point, the business took off, and by the middle of the nineteenth century Simpkin, Marshall and Co. was synonymous with book supply for the great majority of retailers in the provinces, and indeed for many in London. When the firm went out of business after the destruction of its warehouse and stock in the Blitz in 1941, it was a major disaster from which the trade never entirely recovered (Curwen 1873: 412–20; Norrie 1982: 71–2, 87; see also below, pp. 196–8).

A modern industry The British book trade in the nineteenth century became a modern industry in every way. It took advantage of mechanised systems of production, developed highly efficient distribution arrangements based on the most up-to-date means of transport, and evolved a division of labour both between and within its various branches. Many firms were still family businesses, but some of them

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were large and many were well organised; some owners were employers of labour on a substantial scale. Millions of pounds of capital investment poured into the trade, much of it generated directly from profit. It was inevitable that attitudes within the industry also underwent a profound change. The parochialism of the battle for literary property and the restrictive practices of the congers and the trade sales vanished into history; the trade was in the marketplace, and the first consideration was economic success in the face of competition.

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7 PUBLISHING IN A FREE TRADE ECONOMY

Competition and the economic cycle in publishing During the first three hundred years of its history, the trade in printed books in England was centralised and organised. This situation was not unique to the book trade. Many economic activities in early modern England were subject to state control, either directly or, more often, through trade guilds and similar bodies. As formal control broke down in the seventeenth century, the protectionist and mercantilist policies developed under the early Stuarts and essentially followed by all governments until very late in the eighteenth century maintained the same tradition. The evolution of the theory and practice of free trade, which was to be the dominant economic ideology of Victorian Britain, represented a profound change in the organisation of the economy and of trading practices. The book trade was not exempt from this change of attitude, and as a consequence its formal organisation in the nineteenth century was far less rigid than it had been previously. The Lords’ decision in Donaldson v. Becket (see pp. 67–8) can be seen in retrospect as the moment at which the book trade had to confront the problem of competition in its fullest sense, although it may be unlikely that contemporaries saw it in this epoch-making light. Nevertheless, competition between copy-owning booksellers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had always, in the last analysis, been restrained by their need to work together to protect the very idea of copy-ownership. Without the stimulus of meaningful competition, the London booksellers had tended to become complacent. In the last quarter of the eighteenth century, they found that there were new players in the provincial towns, in Scotland and, for a time, in Ireland, who could capture and hold part of the market. Perhaps even more significantly, there was greater competition in the London book trade itself. The new publishers whose businesses developed in the 1780s and 1790s were unrestrained by tradition; they were entrepreneurs seeking both new and existing markets. The publishers found themselves operating in a harsher climate in which success or failure was a matter for individual firms rather than for the trade as a whole. Those who survived the transition, such as Longman and Rivington, did so by adaptation

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to the new ways, so that they could compete with newcomers like Murray who knew nothing and perhaps cared less about the traditions and customs of the trade. Longman and Rivington were among the few houses which succeeded in bridging the gap between the old system and the new. Both were fortunate in their family circumstances, but commercial acumen and both the ability to spot new markets and a willingness to deal in them were also important factors (see above, pp. 75–8). In mid-nineteenth-century Britain, individual enterprise and achievement were as highly prized in publishing as in all other aspects of economic life. A more competitive climate, however, brought penalties as well as prizes. The economic history of British publishing in the nineteenth century inevitably reflects the vagaries of the general economic cycle, with periods of prosperity and growth (which became longer from mid-century onwards) alternating with depressions and downturns in trade (Crafts 2004). Data derived from an analysis of the number of titles published, based both on contemporary sources and later compilations, are not completely comprehensive, but they are robust enough to allow us to identify the economic cycle in publishing. Broadly speaking, there was steady growth in the first thirty years of the century, with a minor blip in the late 1820s (Millgate 1996; Sutherland 1987), followed by significant growth in output until about 1850, with the 1840s a particularly vigorous decade. In the 1860s and 1870s, the output of books was more or less unchanged, but there were significant increases in the 1890s which continued into the first decade of the twentieth century (Eliot 1994: 7–24). These cycles of trade are sometimes reflected in the difficulties encountered by individual publishers, although those who suffered most were those who were most exposed or perhaps least efficient. Constable’s dependence on the inexperienced Robinsons (see above pp. 79–80) is one example of this; another is to be found in the case of William Pickering (1796–1854) whose ultimate business failure is argued to have been a consequence of a combination of poor business practices (including tying up too much capital in stock) and the general conditions in the trade (Warrington 1990). We should not, however, exaggerate the effect of the economic cycles. Henry Colburn’s business actually expanded in the immediate aftermath of the economic ‘crisis’ of the late 1820s because he was publishing novels which appealed to a wide and growing market (Sutherland 1986). Despite the vagaries of economic cycles, the general pattern of the growth of the trade is clear enough. In the first decade of the nineteenth century, some 27,000 titles are recorded with London imprints; in the 1850s and 1860s, this had risen to 83,000 in each decade (Eliot 1997). Why did this happen? There are a number of possible explanations, which are not mutually exclusive. First, there is no question that the technological changes in book production had an impact (see above, pp. 85–96). By the mid-1840s compared to the beginning of the century, print runs were longer, distribution was more efficient, paper was cheaper and binding was more cost-effective. All of this was reflected

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in the prices of books. The average fell steadily in real terms during the first half of the century. If book prices are categorised broadly into three bands – high, middle and low – the ‘high’ band is predominant in the 1820s and 1830s. In the 1840s, the position is reversed; ‘low’ band prices then predominated for the rest of the century (Eliot 1994: 59–77). This change in the pricing structure of books certainly coincides chronologically with the general adoption of steam printing and semi-mechanised case binding across the London publishing trade; it would seem logical to suggest a causal relationship. The second strand of the explanation for growth is social and political rather than economic. Books, magazines and newspapers were essentially an elite product in the eighteenth century. By the middle of the nineteenth century, this was no longer true. There are a number of reasons for this. The political awakening of the new urban working class, which began in the 1790s in the immediate aftermath of the French Revolution, and continued throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth century, was a significant factor. The desire to learn to read, and for reading matter when the skill was acquired, had a very significant impact on the book trade. The combined efforts of middleclass philanthropists and of working-class self-improvers created a largely literate urban population long before elementary education was made compulsory in 1870 (see below, pp. 115–16).

Book prices: competition and restraint of trade Anything remotely resembling the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century structures of the trade would have been wholly inappropriate to the lively and prosperous mid-Victorian publishing industry. Yet the competing publishers did have interests in common. All needed to produce and to sell their books, and the well-established functional divisions in the trade meant that they were dealing with printers and binders on the one hand and booksellers on the other. Developments in these trades, therefore, had great significance for publishing as a whole. In turn, this meant that any social, economic or political pressures on printers or booksellers were reflected in their dealings with the publishers (Sutherland 1981). The printers and binders flourished as technical innovation made their industries more cost-effective (see above, pp. 89–92). The booksellers, however, experienced serious problems throughout the nineteenth century, and it was they who were largely responsible for attempts to develop strong central organisations which would give them a more forceful voice in dealing with the publishers. The development of clear lines of demarcation between the publisher and bookseller, a process which had begun in the late seventeenth century, but which was not complete until after 1800, necessarily created a certain conflict of interest between the two sides of the trade. Publishers sold books to booksellers, but it was the booksellers who had to sell them to the public. As publishers sought ever wider markets, and sought to reach them by cheap books

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printed in large editions, the booksellers found themselves facing a serious economic problem. For a publisher, the sale of say 10,000 copies of a cheap book brought a substantial income, even if part of the edition was ultimately remaindered; for the bookseller, however, the retail sale of a few dozen copies of any one title brought a profit which might seem acceptable when expressed in percentage terms, but which simply did not generate the cash flow necessary to sustain a business. The cash flow problem bedevilled nineteenth-century bookselling, as did the related problem of price-based competition between booksellers. As a consequence, the booksellers, despite their competitiveness, found themselves forced to act in concert with each other in the hope of imposing terms on the publishers which would enable them to survive. The efforts of the booksellers to work together, and to reach agreements with the publishers to protect both their profits and their cash flow, is an important element in the internal history of the whole British book trade in the nineteenth century. From the beginning, one possible solution was fully understood: that publishers should fix a retail price for their books and then allow a generous discount to booksellers provided that the booksellers agreed to sell the book at not less than the publisher’s fixed price. The problem was not to invent this solution, but to make it acceptable to the trade and then to enforce it. The first serious attempt was made in 1829 when a group of major publishers and booksellers came together to develop the Bookselling Regulations, which had the effect of fixing both trade and retail prices, and thus guaranteeing the booksellers’ profit margins. This was a time of a significant downturn in the economy generally in the aftermath of the banking crisis of 1826. Some publishers, for various reasons, were caught up in the problem, and there was perhaps a fear in the trade that things might get worse (see above, p. 98). It was a good time for the booksellers to exert themselves; the publishers, at least temporarily, had less power to resist the pressure. Unfortunately, the committee which evolved the Bookselling Regulations was not fully representative of the retail trade, and the Regulations proved impossible to enforce. By the late 1830s, when the trade was buoyant again despite the general economic depression, the system broke down completely, and even before then had never been universally accepted (Barnes 1964: 117–18). Enforcement was ultimately impossible; publishers and booksellers alike wanted to sell books, and if artificial constraints on prices inhibited their ability to do so profitably, they would ignore the constraints. What seemed possible and perhaps even desirable in the depressed economy of the late 1820s, seemed unnecessary at the end of the more expansive 1830s. The trade itself was changing: more publishers, more titles, an increasing market and more bookshops were all factors which militated against a restrictive regime. There was a problem even more fundamental than that of reaching enforceable agreements within the trade. The whole economic philosophy of the mid-nineteenth century favoured free trade; the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 was the effective end of protectionist economic policies, and the dominant

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liberalism of late Victorian Britain favoured the minimalist state (Harley 2004: 187–90). It was in the immediate aftermath of the greatest triumph of the free traders that, in the autumn of 1848, the booksellers once again tried to develop a general system of fixed prices for books. It was a very ill-timed initiative. There was a storm of opposition from the establishment. From Lord Macaulay (1800–1859) – one of the bestselling authors of the age – to the editor of The Times, influential men attacked the trade for what they saw as a concerted attempt to impose high prices on the book-buying public. The Booksellers’ Association, which had grown out of the committee which had supervised the 1829 Regulations, submitted to public pressure and agreed to abide by the results of independent arbitration. An ad hoc committee was established under the chairmanship of Lord Campbell (1779–1861), a distinguished lawyer and politician, and a future Lord Chief Justice of Queen’s Bench and Lord Chancellor. With him sat the historian George Grote (1794–1871), and the Dean of St Paul’s, the prolific author H. H. Milman (1791–1868). The trade broke ranks, and the growing number of booksellers who openly defended free trade in books won the day, not least by recruiting the help of a number of authors who supported their case; these included Charles Dickens (1812–70), Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) the historian (who was always a fervent advocate of cheap books and something of an enemy of the trade [Henderson 1979]) and the poet Alfred Tennyson (1809–92). The Campbell committee reported against fixed prices. In 1852 the Booksellers’ Association dissolved itself, inaugurating a period of unrestricted competition in the book trade (Barnes 1964: 19–29). The abandonment of any attempt to enforce a fixed price agreement was potentially very damaging for the trade. Booksellers competed by undercutting each other’s prices. At a time when books were in any case becoming cheaper, their cash flow problem was exacerbated. By the 1860s, the trade press was full of sad stories of failed booksellers, and even of failed remainder merchants, for whom market forces had led to bankruptcy. By the late 1880s, the retail book trade was in a state of serious crisis, and the publishers were faced with the prospect of being cut off from their market by a lack of stockholding booksellers. The reason was a simple one: with intensive price competition, booksellers could only afford to stock the most popular and fast selling books, and had no space on the shelves for the larger and more expensive works which would sell slowly and in smaller numbers. The bookshops, which were in the most literal sense the public shop window for the publishers, were being squeezed out of business as a market mechanism for serious literature. Indeed, it was eventually from the publishers and not from the booksellers that there came the initiative which was to solve the problem or at least to shelve it for the better part of a century. The lead was taken by Frederick Macmillan (1851–1936), who had inherited his well-established family business in 1890 (Morgan 1943: 139–40; see also below, pp. 103–4). In the same year, he proposed that books should be

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published with a fixed, or ‘net’, retail price; the bookseller would be given a discount which made it impossible for him to sell the book at less than the net price, but which would nevertheless guarantee him a reasonable margin of profit. No books would be supplied to any bookseller who broke the rules (Macmillan 1924: 5–17). The proposal was not popular with Macmillan’s fellow publishers, but many booksellers welcomed it, and, led by Simpkin Marshall, the great wholesaling house (see above, p. 95), they supported the plan (Barnes 1964: 144). During the 1890s, Macmillans published a number of net books, and were actively supported by the newly formed London Booksellers’ Society, which indeed devoted much effort to promoting the idea of net books throughout the trade. In 1895, the Society transformed itself into the Associated Booksellers of Great Britain and Ireland (which later became the Booksellers’ Association), with the avowed objective of persuading publishers to issue books at net prices and to guarantee trade discounts (Corp 1945: 5–9). The publishers could not ignore the booksellers’ enthusiastic response to Macmillan’s proposal, and they formed an organisation of their own which could act as a representative body in negotiations with the booksellers. This organisation, the Publishers’ Association (Kingsford 1970: 8–9, 13–17), finally agreed to experiment with net books throughout the trade, when they found that the booksellers were generally favourable to the idea (Bonham-Carter 1978–84: vol. 1, 178–80). So were the authors, represented by the Society of Authors, founded by the novelist Walter Besant (1836–1901) in 1883 (see below, pp. 137–8). In 1898 all three bodies reached a preliminary agreement. This was finalised in 1899, and came into force on 1 January 1900. The Net Book Agreement, as it was called, essentially followed Macmillan’s proposal of ten years earlier. The publisher had the right (but not the obligation) to fix a minimum retail price (the ‘net’ price) for any book published. The bookseller was then obliged to sell the book at not less than that price, in return for a trade discount. Any bookseller who infringed the rules would not be supplied on trade terms by any publisher of net books. It was a draconian measure, but it was thought to be necessary to save the trade; it certainly worked. It was a realistic recognition both of the relationships within the trade and the economic climate in which it had to work. Publishers, booksellers and authors alike recognised their mutual interdependence, and the perils of wholly unregulated free trade. Although the Net Book Agreement was to be severely challenged during its first few years, it survived to be the economic cornerstone of the whole structure of British publishing until almost the end of the twentieth century (Barnes 1964: 145–6; Macmillan 1924: 29–30; and see below, pp. 226–7). The absence of formal structures or of any form of central control made the British publishing industry in the nineteenth century quite different from the book trade of the previous three hundred years. It was a less tightly knit group than it had ever been before; publishers saw each other as competitors rather than collaborators. They could work together if it became essential, but for the most part publishing was a highly individualistic enterprise. Publishing

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houses of all kinds reflected the commercial, cultural and political interests of their owners. Nevertheless, a pattern of development can be seen. The crisis of the 1820s produced not only the abortive Bookselling Regulations, but also the first serious attempts to find new directions in which publishing might go in search of profit. The next two decades saw many important developments as the use of steam presses for book printing brought the fruits of technological change to the publishers for the first time. By then, the structural changes which had flowed from the events of 1775 were complete, and the time was ripe for innovation. It came from two directions: in the world of fiction, the rediscovery of the appeal of the part book brought a new generation of novelists into the bookshops, and at the same time cheap materials and production methods began to be used for the great mission of bringing high culture to the lower classes. The story of British publishing for the rest of the nineteenth century centres around these themes. The financial troubles which beset the trade from time to time were genuine enough, but they were in a sense, the troubles of success. The printed word was unchallenged as a medium of mass communication; free competition, an expanding market and more efficient technologies combined to give enterprising publishers the greatest opportunities in the history of the trade.

The new publishers and the diversity of publishing As names which had been familiar for a century or more vanished from the trade after 1800, new names, some of them still familiar today, began to dominate the publishing scene. No firm exemplifies this more than the house of Macmillan, founded in 1843 by Alexander (1818–96) and Daniel Macmillan (1813–57). The sons of a Scottish crofter, they had been booksellers first in Cambridge and then in London before they began to publish books. The Macmillans imposed their own personalities on their company in many ways. They were careful businessmen who ran an efficient and profitable firm. They were also, however, capable of being adventurous publishers. Among their first books were some of F. D. Maurice’s (1805–72) controversial works on Christian Socialism, and through Maurice, whom they had known in Cambridge, Charles Kingsley (1819–75) came to Macmillans. They published his Westward Ho! in 1855, the first of a long line of eminently respectable novels which was to characterise the firm (Morgan 1943: 27–49). Macmillans, however, never confined themselves to a single genre. Indeed, the firm is one of the best examples of the ‘general trade publisher’ which was characteristic of the British publishing industry for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They dealt in both fiction and non-fiction, never too specialised, but never wholly devoted to the popular bestseller while not despising the books which sold well. After Daniel Macmillan’s death in 1857 (Hughes 1882: 296–302), Alexander led the firm in the same direction for the next forty years. His authors ranged from Kingsley to Kipling, and subjects

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from theology to travel, but all were characterised by their essential seriousness of purpose. By the last quarter of the century, John Morley, a Macmillan author himself but even more important as a vastly influential reader for the house, felt he could detect, even if he could not define, ‘a Macmillan book’ (Morgan 1943: 101–3; Nowell-Smith 1967). In the final analysis, the Macmillans were committed to publishing serious books as a serious business proposition. Although Daniel, Alexander and Alexander’s son Frederick, who succeeded to the business, all had strongly held political and religious opinions, they never allowed these to prevent them from publishing worthwhile books which could make a profit even while they resisted the intrinsically unworthy, however personally sympathetic they might be to the author, his argument or his subject. Merit was all, for merit was seen as the key to success in the market. The Macmillans were not unique in taking this approach to publishing, but there were others in the trade whose editorial policies were based on their own political and social opinions. John Cassell (1817–65) was such a man. He was a committed advocate of the teetotal cause before he became a publisher. Like William Collins and William Chambers, both of whom were publishers and temperance leaders, he combined his two interests (Harrison 1971: 151; Keir 1952: 258–9). Unlike them, however, Cassell entered the trade almost accidentally in order to promote his views. After a period as a tea merchant, he began to publish The Teetotal Times in 1846, and it was from this that he built up his publishing business (Nowell-Smith 1958: 15–16). Even when he diversified his publishing, he never abandoned the first principles on which he had founded the firm. He recognised, as did other advocates of the teetotal cause, that the working man had to be lured from the public house by means other than exhortation. Alternative entertainment, and, above all, the means of selfimprovement, had to be provided, and much of Cassell’s publishing was aimed at precisely this end. He published a number of cheap periodicals aimed at the working class as well as part books on improving subjects. He also ventured into conventional book publishing, where his list included an early (and arguably pirated) edition of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and a Latin dictionary (1854) whose successor is still in print (Nowell-Smith 1958: 38, 108). Despite his attempt to extend the range of his business, however, Cassell ultimately failed as a publisher; although his name survived as Cassell and Company, the family connection actually ended with John Cassell’s death, and in reality he had lost control of the business as early as 1855 (Nowell-Smith 1958: 51–66). A cause alone was not enough. Commercial astuteness was the essential precondition of survival in the capitalist ethos of Victorian publishing, and John Cassell was too eager to promote his cause rather than to attend to the wider demands of the reading public. The marketplace was the master, and the successful publishers were those who recognised how the market was developing. At one end of the scale, there was a genuine demand from people of all classes for leisure reading.

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There were few other commercially available leisure activities before the last two decades of the century, when the music halls and spectator sports began to make some inroads into the working-class leisure market. The giants of Victorian publishing may have thought in terms of improving literature, but much of the most financially successful publishing of the nineteenth century was very far from the ideals of Samuel Smiles (see below, p. 108). Publishers like Edward Lloyd (1815–90), employing such authors as G. W. M. Reynolds (1814–79), churned out popular fiction and periodicals for a working-class audience and sold them at a penny a part (James 1974: 32–50) Some of this verged on the pornographic, although more was as respectable as it was dull. The mainstream publishers, solid middle-class men who sought a solid middleclass audience, had little sympathy with, or understanding of, the real tastes of the majority of the working class. The middle-class publishers did, however, recognise and exploit the more respectable market for self-improvement. The cheap reprint series, whose development had been one of the first consequences of the ending of perpetual copyright, was prominent in the trade throughout the nineteenth century (Howsam 1992). Although much of the publication of improving works for the working class was undertaken by charitable and religious societies, it was a segment of the market which was too important for commercial publishers to ignore whether they sought the middle-class or the working-class market. By exploiting cheaper materials, production and distribution, it was possible to sell books in far greater numbers than at any previous time in the history of the trade. Bell’s immediate successors in the cheap reprint field included John Cooke (1731–1810) and Charles Whittingham (1767–1840). The latter’s reprint series included The British Poets in 100 volumes (1822), and if that evoked memories of Bell so did the Chiswick Press, Whittingham’s imprint, which had exceptionally high standards of production and was a major beneficial influence on early nineteenth-century British book printing. The cheap reprint series had become a fixture in the landscape of British publishing. Perhaps the greatest innovator in the field was John Murray (1808–92), son of the founder of the house (Paston 1932: 6–38), whose Family Library was inaugurated in 1829. Between that year and 1834, when the series came to an end, some forty-seven volumes were published, together with six others in an associated ‘Dramatic Series’. Murray made use of the technological innovations of the previous thirty years, especially stereotyping, to hold down both costs and prices. This was an important innovation in itself, but the Family Library is also notable for its contents. Unlike Bell, Whittingham, Cooke and others, Murray did not simply reprint the favourites of earlier generations. The Family Library included Southey’s Life of Nelson (1830), several books by Washington Irving and Milman’s History of the Jews (3 vols, 1829). Consequently, Murray was paying copyright fees, unlike the earlier reprinters, and this contributed substantially to his expenses. In the end, the Family Library failed, partly because the books were perhaps a little too serious for the popular

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market for which they were intended, and partly because of the comparatively high costs incurred by Murray’s standards (Bennett 1976). Murray was perhaps never entirely comfortable with the reprint series. Others revelled in it, none more so than Henry Bohn (1831–64) and George Routledge (1812–88). Bohn was a German refugee who dominated the remainder market in the 1830s, when he was also an antiquarian bookseller. He turned to publishing in 1846, concentrating on reprints of out-of-copyright classics. He made a fortune from them; when he retired in 1864, he sold his stock for £40,000. By then his various Libraries series, bought by Bell and Daldy, included more than 600 titles (Weedon 1993: 16; Mock 1991). Routledge was Bohn’s greatest rival in both bookselling and publishing (Mumby 1934: 20–8). He had trained as a bookseller’s assistant, established his own business in 1836 and began to specialise in remaindering. He soon came to realise that in the midst of the spate of cheap publications made possible by the adoption of steam printing, remaindering was no longer as profitable as it had once been. He turned instead to publishing. Recognising the potential of the new ‘railway’ market, he started his Railway Library in 1848, the year in which Smith opened his first bookstall at Euston. Neither Bohn nor Routledge were Scottish Puritans in the mould of Murray or Macmillan. Certainly Routledge’s business dealings were never entirely above suspicion. He exploited copyright law to its outer limits (Fyfe 1999: 50–3) and sometimes beyond them (Barnes 1974: 156–64). On the other hand, some authors, including Disraeli and Bulwer-Lytton, benefited financially from the inclusion of their books in the Railway Library (James 1978). The final impression is of an astute operator who was always sharp and sometimes a little too sharp for his own good. Certainly the firm was successful; the Railway Library, only one of several such cheap series which Routledge published, ran to over 1,000 volumes. At the end of the century a series of mergers led to the creation of the eminently proper house of Routledge and Kegan Paul. His name still survives in academic and reference publishing, and is indeed to be found in the imprint of this book (Barnes and Barnes 1991: 261–5; Howsam 1998: 173). The first generation of publishers of reprint series found many successors. The series was to become one of the characteristic products of Victorian publishing, and it survived well into the twentieth century. Most of the major publishing houses, as well as many of their lesser would-be competitors, had long and successful series of ‘standard’ works in literature, history and religion. They included Longman, Macmillan (who published forty-three distinct series at various times) and Blackie, as well as Routledge and organisations like the Religious Tract Society (Howsam 1992). For the whole of the second half of the century, George Bell (1814–90) – sometimes alone and sometimes with partners – built virtually his entire business on series, including the increasingly profitable school textbooks. He bought Bohn’s various series, as well as Pickering’s Aldine Poets and many others (Weedon 1993). These reprint series were an important cultural force. They made a wide range of books available

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at modest prices. They also could be argued to have helped to establish the canon of English literature in its widest sense. The series were dominated by ‘respectable’ books: poetry, middle-class fiction, works of theology, history and travel. At the end of the century, many of the established classics of midVictorian fiction, including the works of Dickens, Thackeray and Trollope, began to come into the public domain (see below, p. 161), and the publishing of series experienced another revival. One of the products of this was Everyman’s Library, which began in 1906 and still survives (Turner 1992). It is the clear precursor of series such as The Penguin Classics and Penguin Modern Classics which were a powerful influence on mid-twentieth-century cultural life (see below, pp. 172–6).

Conclusion Successful publishers in nineteenth-century Britain were those who stayed ahead of the market and helped in its evolution. Perhaps this was never more obvious than when the 1870 Education Act suddenly created a vast new market for elementary textbooks for the newly established board schools. But that Act was the culmination of one process as much as it was the beginning of another. The success of the British publishing industry in the nineteenth century was based on an unprecedented expansion of the size of its market as well as on its capacity to exploit technological innovations. For decades before 1870, publishers had played a key role in helping to create and sustain literacy, and in bringing a new social and political awareness to great numbers of people. The ‘diffusion of knowledge’, to use a contemporary phrase, was one of the ideals of the age, a free trade in facts to stand beside the free trade in goods. The great reprint series which are so characteristic a product of Victorian publishing were just one manifestation – albeit a critically important manifestation – of a far larger phenomenon.

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8 THE DIFFUSION OF KNOWLEDGE

The education of the poor The power of the printed word to effect the moral improvement of the working class was a fundamental tenet of nineteenth-century philanthropists. The danger of a literate working class was a similarly recurrent theme of the social conservatives. Whatever their views, however, no one seriously doubted the importance of the skills of reading and writing. The movement towards near-universal literacy, a process which was beginning in 1800 and was all but complete by 1900, is a fundamental factor in understanding British publishing in the nineteenth century. Books and other printed products were used to teach reading and writing, and they were essential to sustain whatever tenuous hold on reading skills people might acquire. When larger numbers could read, there was a larger potential market for publishers to exploit. The growth of the publishing industry was a classic example of the cycle of supply and demand which dominated the free trade economics of the mid-nineteenth century. The legislative landmarks of this history are the successive Acts which gave public funds to support the education of the poor – tentatively in 1833, universally in 1870, compulsorily in 1880, without charge in 1891 – but this is merely the crude framework of the history of literacy. The inner history, in which the publishing industry and its products were critically involved, is the real story which needs to be told. The writings of Samuel Smiles (1812–1904) are full of laudatory accounts of autodidacts whose road to self-help and success began with literacy. The same impetus underlay John Cassell’s transformation from temperance campaigner to publisher in the 1840s (see above, p. 104). By that time, however, the belief in the fundamental importance of literacy was a creed with a long history behind it. Arguably, it could be traced back to the sixteenth century, when the Protestant reformers had argued that since salvation was to be attained only by a personal understanding of religion, and this could be acquired only by reading the Bible, literacy was an essential element of religious faith. To a greater or lesser extent all the Protestant churches followed through the implications of this belief. Some even engaged seriously with the education issues it

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raised. In Scotland, the Presbyterian Church developed what was probably the best general education system in Europe, so that there was widespread literacy north of the border long before it was achieved in England (Anderson 1983: 1–6; Rose 2002: 16–18). The Church of England had, in theory, required the clergy to teach the children of the parish since 1604, but in practice their efforts were at best intermittent and more often non-existent (Cruickshank 1944: 1; Cressy 1975: 31). From time to time individuals attempted to fill the gaps. At the end of the seventeenth century, Thomas Bray provided the inspiration and the money to found parish libraries in England and Wales, a movement which achieved some degree of success and was imitated by James Kirkwood in Scotland (Kelly 1966: 104–14). The eighteenth-century charity schools, especially those of the Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge, grew out of the same educational and religious impulses as the Bray libraries, but the SPCK, Bray and Kirkwood had only limited success (Armytage 1970: 74–6). It was not until the creation of the industrial cities brought together a potentially dangerous mass of illiterates that the middle classes responded with their full force to the need to educate the poor. Despite the absence of a properly organised system of basic education, a remarkable number of the children of the poor did actually learn to read in the eighteenth century (Altick 1963: 34–41). At the comparatively fluid boundary between the lower middle class and the working class, literacy was a necessity before the end of the century (Langford 1992: 91), but in the industrial towns whatever provision there had been for ecclesiastical or charitable education for the poor was collapsing by the 1780s. It is from that decade that we can date the beginnings of the new and more forceful philanthropic education movement which was to be of importance for much of the nineteenth century. The story begins with the Sunday schools, and in particular with Robert Raikes, a newspaper proprietor in Gloucester who founded a Sunday school in that city in 1780, and used his own newspaper and his connections in the London book trade to create a national movement (Altick 1963: 67). One of his followers was Hannah More, who founded not only Sunday schools, but also the hugely influential Cheap Repository Tracts. The Tracts, published between 1795 and 1798, were intended both for children and adults, and were sold largely to the middle classes who gave them to their intended beneficiaries. A combination of straightforward exhortation, Biblical instruction and moral exemplars, they were intended to provide a religious substitute for the secular chapbooks, with their popular tales and cheap woodcuts (Neuberg 1972; Watt 1991: 257–320) and children’s books which More regarded as being, at best, amoral. Like the chapbooks, which they imitated in appearance, they were written in simple and direct language for the benefit not only of children but also of semi-literate adults. The Tracts were a major success; indeed, More was overwhelmed by it, and was forced to adopt not only the style of the chapbooks, but also their methods of production and distribution. The great chapbook factory in Aldermary Churchyard was virtually

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turned over to them; tracts were produced there in tens of thousands and the networks of chapmen which covered the length and breadth of the country added them to their stock-in-trade (Spinney 1939; Stott 2003: 168–90). When More finally abandoned the series, the business was taken up by the newly founded Religious Tract Society, one of many such organisations which produced improving literature for the poor (Stott 2003: 209). The secular chapbook survived in the provinces, while in Scotland they were still being printed in the 1840s, but More had sounded their death knell, and with it the death knell of much of the printed folk tradition of the working class. The seeds sown by Raikes, More and others were not falling on stony ground; indeed they were to some extent reaching soil which was already well prepared. Alongside the efforts of the philanthropists, and the state intervention in education which they eventually inspired, there was a deeply rooted tradition of working-class self-help and mutual improvement whose origins are to be found in late eighteenth-century Scotland. It spread into England in the first decades of the nineteenth century, and residually survived until as late as World War II. Its early manifestations included secular, radical Sunday schools (Rose 2002: 62–3), and it found later expression in the trade union and co-operative movements and indeed in individual stories of persistent and almost heroic determination to learn to read. The apotheosis of the movement was perhaps Everyman’s Library (see below, pp. 160–1), which embodied the rather conservative canon which the working-class mutual improvers and self-educators had adopted (Rose 2002: 116–36). Dent, the publisher of Everyman’s Library, was himself a selfeducated man from a working-class background and the series reflected his own tastes and preferences. By contrast, the Religious Tract Society (RTS) consisted of a group of middle-class philanthropists who wrote and published literature which they deemed suitable for the working class. This was a pattern which was to be widely followed during the next hundred years. But this was not philanthropy without self-interest. More firmly believed that the purpose of working-class education was to secure the religious and social compliance of its beneficiaries, and sought to restrict their reading to authors and ideas of which she approved (Rose 2002: 19). A combination of philanthropic and political motives for encouraging working-class literacy was by no means confined to the radicals. Even those who might object to the whole principle of universal literacy were willing to exploit it by promoting patriotic support for the established order, not least among children (Colley 1992: 226–7). The RTS was essentially an offspring of the Sunday School Movement, the latter providing the means to acquire literacy and the former the means to use it. Once acquired, however, the use of literacy could not be controlled, and throughout the nineteenth century publishers and philanthropists alike competed to provide literature which would appeal to the mass market. Unwittingly, More’s Cheap Repository Tracts had demonstrated the existence of such a market, and helped to expand it until there were vast financial rewards to be reaped. The lesson was not lost

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on publishers whose interests were far from the high-flown moral principles of More. The penny-a-part novel of the 1840s, and the yellowback of the 1870s, are both direct descendants of the tracts of Hannah More. Tracts were to be a common feature of Victorian working-class life, although from the satire of Wilkie Collins (1824–89) in his novel The Moonstone (1868), and from the factual investigations of Henry Mayhew (1812–87) in his monumental London Labour and the London Poor (1861), it is clear that they were not always appreciated by those whom they were intended to ‘improve’ (Altick 1963: 102–3). Commercial publishers were, of course, involved in the production of the tracts, while some of the societies became major publishers in their own right. The SPCK, for example, was printing eight million tracts a year in the 1860s (Quinlan 1941: 124), and the publishing organisation of the Wesleyan Methodists issued over a million copies of their tracts in the single year of 1841 (Mathews 1949: 167–81). SPCK tracts were still being bought by the upper and middle classes to ‘improve’ their servants at the end of the century (Stimpson 2003: 6). These tracts were never entirely restricted to religious subjects, although there was always a Christian moral to be drawn. Nevertheless, they contributed a good deal to the general education of the working class. At the heart of the whole religious enterprise was the Bible itself, printed in millions of copies, many of them at low prices intended for working-class readers. The British and Foreign Bible Society, founded in 1804 partly in response to dissatisfaction with the work of the SPCK, existed primarily for the purpose of producing Bibles for the poor, a privilege subsequently extended through missionary work to the rapidly increasing number of British subjects in Asia, Africa and Oceania (Howsam 1991). The practices of the religious societies were imitated by secular philanthropists who considered that the education of the poor was a worthwhile objective for economic and cultural reasons. Perhaps the most important of these organisations was the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge founded in 1827 by Henry Brougham (1778–1868), a radical lawyer who was to be Lord Chancellor in the reforming Whig government of 1830 (Altick 1963: 269–77; Webb 1955: 60–73). The SDUK issued a Library of Useful Knowledge in fortnightly parts at 6d. per part. It covered a wide range of practical knowledge, chiefly scientific and mathematical, and was soon selling nearly 30,000 copies of each part. The editor, and often the author, was Charles Knight (1791–1873), the son of a bookseller in Windsor (Altick 1963: 281–3; Knight 1864–5). In 1829 Knight branched out into a more ambitious project with his Library of Entertaining Knowledge, covering topics as diverse as vegetables and the Elgin Marbles. Although the SDUK ultimately failed for financial reasons, it had proved that a demand could be created for something other than cheap popular fiction or the cloying morality of the tracts. With the final establishment of steam printing of books in the 1840s the publishers were at last able to exploit fully the huge markets which the popular educators had created. Indeed, the SDUK itself was to some extent supplementing the working-class mutual and

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self-improvement movement which had spread to England and Wales by the 1820s (Rose 2002: 70). The commercial publishers who sought to exploit the new markets no doubt had motives which were less pure than those of the philanthropists, but from the reader’s perspective they did at least have the advantage of having to publish what the market demanded. Much of that was either fictional or sensational, but non-fiction of all kinds was always a significant part of the industry. The predominance of the novel as a literary form in Victorian Britain should not be allowed to disguise the commercial and cultural significance of the rest of the publishing industry. The Victorian publishing industry was underpinned by the mass market, for it enabled it to exploit new technologies of both production and distribution by providing potential sales which were large enough to justify the capital costs involved. Publishing could not insulate itself from the broader currents of political, economic and social change. The technological changes in book production began to have a major impact in the 1840s, opening up the real possibility of cheap books for a mass audience. This development was noticed – and not always welcomed – by contemporaries. Thomas Carlyle observed that the whole industry had become more commercial in focus, and was developing new techniques of marketing and advertising to research its mass audience. It was a development which he deplored, but his condemnation is perhaps less interesting than his perception for the present purpose; it was a view shared by Karl Marx and the philosopher Kierkegaard (Erickson 1996: 106–8, 111). The impact of cheap printing was felt across the whole industry, not just among the publishers of new and reprinted fiction. Thomas Tegg (1776–1845), for example, who made his first fortune from remainders and his second from reprints of public domain titles, was also a publisher of educational books and books for children, and by the end of his long career was dealing almost entirely in non-fiction (Barnes and Barnes 2000).

The taxes on knowledge: stamp duties, legal deposit and the law of copyright Nevertheless, some obstacles remained. Although it was clear that a mass market did exist, books and other reading matter had to be produced at a price the market would tolerate. One important problem was the cost of paper which, despite the new production techniques, was kept artificially high by the continued existence of the excise duties which tended to counteract the falling costs of paper production as the industry mechanised its production methods and began to use cheaper materials. Brougham claimed that in order to sell the parts of the Library of Useful Knowledge at 6d., the highest price he felt that the market would bear, each part had to be limited to thirty-two pages because of the tax on paper (Weiner 1969: 13). Knight also argued that paper duties increased the price of books (Dagnall 1998: 360–1). This tax was reduced by

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50 per cent in 1836, but it was not finally abolished until 1861. Even more burdensome, and certainly more politically contentious, was the tax on newspapers. This had been deliberately raised to almost penal levels during the Napoleonic Wars to restrict the circulation of radical newspapers for workingclass readers, and despite reductions, it survived to be a major issue in the 1830s (Weiner 1969: 52–114). The newspaper duty was significantly reduced in 1836, but not finally abolished until 1855 when abolition was rapidly followed by the establishment of cheap newspapers for the mass market (Lee 1976: 42–9). The ultimately successful campaign against the duties on paper and newspapers was only one aspect of the interactions between politics and publishing in the middle decades of the century. The opponents of the ‘taxes on knowledge’ were a mixture of free traders, philanthropists, social liberals and various shades of radical. They included some publishers, some on principle and some (of whom Tegg was one) more from self-interest. The same loose and rather uncomfortable coalition came together on another issue which generated much heat and little light in the 1830s and 1840s – the reform of the law of copyright. There had been an extended prologue to this drama from 1805 onwards, when Cambridge University Library began to be more insistent in claiming its right to a copy of each newly published book. By that time, there were eleven libraries with such rights but there had been few serious attempts at enforcement. Cambridge’s actions drew attention to the extent of both the scope and the neglect of the law. When an attempt was made to introduce a Bill into the House of Commons which would have had the effect of making the legal deposit system more easily enforceable, the publishers began a long campaign against it. This turned into an argument about the principle of legal deposit, portrayed by its opponents as a tax on publishers and hence on the public who suffered from increased book prices as a result. After fifteen years of argument, and much lobbying from both sides, in 1818 a Select Committee of the House of Commons made various suggestions for reform which were promptly ignored. The reason was that there was a complete failure to agree on what had become the key issue: the number of deposit copies. The matter was then dropped, until in 1836 a new Bill was introduced, just a few weeks after the abolition of the newspaper duties. This was no accident. The sponsor of the Bill was James Silk Buckingham (1786–1855), one of the leaders of the campaigns against the paper and newspaper duties who saw legal deposit as another tax which kept book prices high and thus restricted their circulation. The outcome was a compromise: the British Museum, Oxford and Cambridge retained the legal deposit privilege, as did the Faculty of Advocates in Edinburgh and Trinity College Dublin. Publishers’ obligations were thus reduced from eleven copies to five (Feather 1994: 100–19). The broader significance of this episode lies in two factors: first, the link with the campaign against the newspaper duties and the identification of legal deposit as a ‘tax on knowledge’; and second, in the ability of the publishers to work together in what they saw as their common interest despite the competitive nature of the trade.

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This was even more apparent in the principal event. The law of copyright in 1810 was essentially what it had been since 1774 when the House of Lords definitively interpreted the 1710 Act. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, authors were beginning to seek something which gave them greater protection, and, above all, a longer period of copyright protection. In 1814, in the course of an unsuccessful attempt to resolve the legal deposit question, the period of copyright was extended to twenty-eight years or the lifetime of the author, whichever was the longer, but this was done without any serious consideration of the principles involved (Feather 1994: 112; see below, pp. 133–5). The real agitation for reform began after 1830, and was largely led by Thomas Noon Talfourd (1795–1854), a lawyer and man of letters who was a reform-minded MP. Talfourd’s argument was essentially that the absolute right of authors to retain their property in the form of copyright should be extended to allow them to bequeath it like any other form of property to their heirs. In essence this was an attempt to introduce (or as some were still saying, to reintroduce) perpetual copyright. But the context was wholly different. In no fewer than five Bills introduced between 1837 and 1841, Talfourd effectively opened up a debate about the profession of authorship. His leading literary supporters – especially William Wordsworth (1770–1850) – argued essentially that it was wrong for the law to deprive them of their creations. Opponents took the view that books and other writings were a public good, for which their creators should receive a reasonable reward but which should be allowed to benefit society as a whole. Talfourd originally proposed that copyright should subsist for the author’s lifetime plus a further sixty years; it was the so-called post mortem term, the innovation designed to protect authors’ families, which aroused the ire of the opposition. The opponents of the Bill linked their position to the campaign for the abolition of the newspaper duties. The trade – which did not want to see a sudden decrease in the number of public domain books available for reprinting – supported them. It was not only the publishers who were involved in this; printers, including the increasingly powerful trade unions in the printing industry, argued that their trade would also be damaged if fewer books were published, prices were forced up and sales went into decline. In the end, a sixth Bill, introduced in 1842 after Talfourd had left parliament, reached the statute book. The 1842 Copyright Act gave protection for the author’s lifetime and forty-two years thereafter. It was in many ways an ambiguous and unsatisfactory piece of legislation, but it survived for nearly eighty years, firmly embedded the concept of authors’ rights in the law and ultimately made it possible for the United Kingdom to become part of a network of international protection for copyright and other intellectual property (Feather 1994: 124–48; Seville 1999). As in the case of legal deposit, the publishers had worked with free traders, liberals and radicals to mitigate the effects of legislation which they saw as a potential threat to the trade. Quite apart from the considerable intrinsic significance of the new copyright law (which was nowhere near as bad

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for the trade as they believed Talfourd’s original proposals to have been), the lesson was learned that by working together they could exercise considerable influence (see below, pp. 124, 154–5).

The age of cheap print The reformers’ efforts were all aimed at ensuring the widest possible circulation of the cheapest possible printed matter. The newspapers were an important element in this, and especially in sustaining the hard-won literacy of the working class. Prices fell steadily during the 1840s, and dramatically after 1861. The Times, which had cost 5d. in 1855, was sold for 3d. in 1870 (Lee 1976: 279). The abolition of the paper duties also brought a proliferation of cheap newspapers in the provinces. By 1870, Liverpool, for example, had five daily papers, and even a comparatively small place like Exeter had three (Lee 1976: 277). Magazines of all kinds proliferated, some of them aimed at particular market sectors such as children (Dixon 1986) and others catering for special interest groups such as sports enthusiasts (Mason 1994). These magazines were not only cheap, but also widely available thanks to a highly efficient system of wholesaling and distribution, largely provided by W H Smith (see above, pp. 94–5). They were an important source of both education and amusement for a large number of people, many of whose grandparents had been on (or beyond) the borderline of illiteracy. The magazines and newspapers were no longer entirely a part of the book publishing industry. Some publishing houses continued the long tradition of having their own monthlies or quarterlies; indeed, magazines like Blackwood’s were an integral part of the Victorian cultural landscape. Some more recently founded houses imitated the genre, as Macmillans did after 1859 (Morgan 1943: 59; Worth 2002: 83–6), but the mass circulation journals were generally in the hands of companies which specialised in publishing them and which often combined the processes of publishing and printing. Certainly in the newspaper industry this was almost universally the case. For many of the book publishers the profits of mass literacy were to be found in the general expansion of the market which was inevitable in a literate society, and above all in educational publishing.

Publishing for mass education At every level, educational publishing became a major industry in its own right during the nineteenth century. Although it was the schools which provided the largest market, the expansion of adult and higher education also had important consequences for the trade. At the elementary level, the real boom came after 1870, when the Education Act of that year made primary education compulsory in England and Wales for the first time and created elected school

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boards at local level to manage the schools. The number of elementary schools increased by 50 per cent in the first four years after the passage of the Act, and the number of attendances rose by half a million (Armytage 1970: 145). Quantity, however, was not the only requirement. Matthew Arnold (1822–88) – poet, literary critic, and pioneering inspector of schools – was only the most eloquent of the many critics of the elementary readers and other school books available in the late 1860s (Adamson 1930: 215–16; Bell 2002: 63). It was clear that a field of publishing which promised vast profits was rapidly opening up, although Longmans and Murray had both already discovered that publishing for schools was not without problems of its own when they had tried to win the contracts to provide books for the national schools in Ireland in the late 1840s and early 1850s (Goldstrom 1986). Longmans, with their long tradition of educational publishing including a long backlist of very successful long-standing titles (Issitt 2000), entered this new market with enthusiasm; they developed many series of books for the board schools, not only in reading and literature, but also in history, geography and science (Yglesias 1974). Macmillans also acted swiftly, and such series as Teaching to Read became important to the financial stability of the house (Morgan 1943: 189–90). Both the English university presses were also recruits to school book publishing. At Oxford, a Schoolbook Committee was formed by the Delegates of the Press in 1863, and began to publish the Clarendon Press Series in 1866. At first the books were aimed primarily at the public schools, then approaching the zenith of their achievements, but many of the books were intended for use outside the confines of the classical curriculum (Sutcliffe 1978: 19–24). Cambridge University Press was rather later in entering the field, but equally successful when it arrived. In the late 1860s, it was undergoing a major reform which rescued it from near bankruptcy, and one of the new directions in which it was pointed was that of publishing for schools. Much of the Cambridge publishing was for secondary rather than elementary education, and in that sector the Cambridge Bible for Schools and the Pitt Press Series of well-edited literary texts were both of considerable educational importance. The Pitt Press Series, which began publication in 1870, was particularly significant, for it was specifically aimed at providing texts which would be useful to candidates for the Cambridge Local Examinations, the ancestor of the General Certificate of Education, which the university had been administering since 1858 (Black 1984: 158–60; McKitterick 1992–2004: vol. 3, 77–85). Successful educational publishing proved to be highly profitable; Nelson’s Royal Readers, a series used in many board schools, produced a profit of nearly £50,000 in just three years (Dempster 1983). It is hardly surprising that publishers were anxious to exploit the growing school market. Blackie’s, a longestablished but rather staid Scottish house, became a major force in the publishing world because of the 1870 Act, and other houses, notably Edward Arnold, depended for their very existence on the board schools (Norrie 1982: 55; Bennett and Hamilton 1990: 11–15).

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Academic publishing It was not only at the school level, however, that publishers were able to exploit the ever-growing market for educational books. The reform of the older universities and the establishment of new ones in the middle decades of the century had the effect not only of changing the existing curricula but also of introducing wholly new subjects. Modern history, languages and literature and, above all, the sciences, became an established part of English higher education for the first time. All of these new subjects required textbooks of one kind or another, and both the university presses and some commercial publishers were able to break into this market. Again, Longmans and Macmillan were conspicuous among the commercial houses, and both Oxford and Cambridge, not surprisingly, were very active. Once a book became a ‘set’ text, success was assured. The Anglo-Saxon Reader by Henry Sweet, which Oxford University Press first published in 1876, became a required text for undergraduates reading English almost at once, and is still so at Oxford to this day. It is still in print, having gone through several revisions over the decades. The university presses, however, never had the field to themselves; E. A. Abbott’s Shakespearian Grammar, for example, published by Macmillan in 1870, is still the standard work on its subject and is still in print. Moreover, it was not only in the universities that there was a new spirit. The ancient professions also changed their attitudes to training, and specialist publishers developed to meet their needs. A striking example was that of the firm founded by Henry Butterworth in 1818, which soon came to dominate English legal publishing through its massive output of guides and textbooks of the highest authority (Jones 1980). The professionalisation of scholarship which followed from the changes in the universities in the nineteenth century brought with it many benefits for the publishing industry. Learned journals, although never popular bestsellers, could, if successful, be steady generators of income over many decades. After a slow start, Macmillans had a major long-term success with Nature (Morgan 1943: 84–7), although many of the journals were, inevitably, published by the university presses or by learned societies, a pattern of scientific journal publishing which still prevails (Brock 1994; Meadows 2004: 91–3). The later decades of the century saw the foundation of many journals, some of which still survive; The English Historical Review, first issued in 1886, is a notable example, and there are many others. Scholarly and scientific monographs were also not without their attraction for publishers, although sales were small and perhaps slow. Two of the greatest of all British publishing enterprises date from the last decades of the nineteenth century: Leslie Stephen’s Dictionary of National Biography and Murray’s New English Dictionary. They reflect, no doubt, the confidence of the Victorians in their ability to undertake anything, but they also reflect the buoyant state of scholarly publishing in England at the end of the century. The DNB made a massive loss for Smith Elder, the original publishers, but the profits of publishing the novels of Thackeray and George Eliot

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had provided the foundations on which they could build their great succès d’estime. Indeed, the original idea for the work had come from the publisher not from the editor (Annan 1984: 82–7; Faber and Harrison 2002). Murray’s great dictionary might also have had a commercial publisher, for Macmillans were very interested in it, and would probably have taken it had not the impossible James Furnivall, the Secretary of the Philological Society, Murray’s sponsor, wrecked the negotiations by making too many demands (Murray 1977: 133–47). Eventually the NED was published by Oxford University Press, who were later to take over the DNB as well. Both are still in print; a completely revised DNB was published in 2004 and, like the Oxford English Dictionary (as the NED became) is available on-line as well as on paper.

Publishing non-fiction: a trade transformed The publishing of non-fiction took many forms in the nineteenth century from the school textbook and the popular magazine to the scholarly monograph, the learned journal and the reference book. The boundaries between them were not always clear-cut. While both university and commercial houses produced works of scholarship, many of those published by the latter also achieved sales outside the academic world. The concept of general trade nonfiction, the mainstay of many houses today, was perhaps at one time in danger of being swamped by the flood of specialist books aimed at particular markets. It became apparent, however, that an educated people seeks intelligent reading matter; despite the growing specialisation of some houses, there were enough firms in the industry to ensure not merely the preservation but the multiplication of diversity. The philanthropic belief in the value of education had been transformed into a public policy, and its success created whole new markets for the publishing industry. The mass market for leisure reading and for newspapers was as profitable as that for school books, as Newnes and Harmsworth discovered with their ‘new journalism’ in the 1880s (see below, pp. 148–50). The tabloid newspaper may not have been quite what Hannah More would have liked, but it was, like the penny dreadful and the yellowback, one of the fruits of her labours. She would have been more gratified by the massive popularity of religious books and periodicals. Although religious publications no longer dominated the market after about 1860 in the way that they had in earlier decades (and centuries) (Eliot 1998; Eliot 1994: 43–58), religious periodicals continued to be immensely popular among all classes and all denominations (Altholz 1989). By the 1870s, the publishing of non-fiction had taken on many of the characteristics which were to survive for a hundred years or more. School book publishing was becoming a specialised and highly profitable branch of the industry. Publishing for the universities – both students and their teachers – was necessarily more limited, but could offer good returns on successful titles. Scientific and scholarly journals, some with a broader appeal to an educated

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public, were not the dominant format for the publication of research which they were to become in the second half of the twentieth century, but the genre was established and beginning to flourish. Great works of reference were being compiled which partly reflected the strong sense of national identity in nineteenth-century Britain and pride in the country’s achievements, past and present. Language and people alike were celebrated. Beyond all of this, thousands of titles were published which were intended for the ‘general reader’. This creature may have been elusive but it was (and is) very real, perhaps never more so than in the late nineteenth century when the ‘man of letters’ (and not a few women) contributed to periodicals, wrote novels and short stories, dabbled in verse, churned out reviews and occasionally turned a hand to a little light travel or history or even philosophy or science. The educated and increasingly prosperous reading public of mid- and late Victorian England consumed print on an unprecedented scale, and they and those who wrote for them reconstructed the very paradigm of authorship and publishing (Mays 1995). In no domain was this more true than in that of fiction. The Victorian novel was not merely a form of entertainment; it often also had the high moral purpose exemplified in the work of George Eliot, or the political and social function perhaps best seen in Dickens. Dickens and George Eliot, however, created literary masterpieces out of moral and social concerns. In the far larger ranks of the lesser novelists there were many for whom literature was subordinated to outright polemics. A few of these are remembered for other reasons: Cardinal Newman’s fictional works, Loss and Gain (1848) and Callista (1856), are of interest for their author rather than their intrinsic merit, and indeed the Oxford Movement spawned a whole family of novels even less memorable than these (Baker 1932: 9–22). Edward Jenkins, radical MP and social reformer, was another who exploited the power of the novel to make points which were perhaps more acceptable, and certainly more forceful, by their embodiment in fictional form (Maidment 1982). These, however, were the middle classes talking to each other; the polemical purpose of fiction, like that of non-fiction, was at its most intense in the great battle for the hearts and minds of the working class.

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9 THE AGE OF THE NOVEL

The beginnings of the fiction industry The novel was the dominant literary form of the nineteenth century, and it was therefore a genre of the utmost importance to the publishing industry. Indeed, because the novel was a product of the age of printed publication, the relationship between form and text, and between author and publisher, was usually close. While the dramatist wrote for the stage, the essayist for the editor and the poet for a small literary elite, the novelists wrote for their publishers. It was the publishers who exploited the mass market which the novel could command, to the extent that they even allowed market forces to dictate the physical form in which many were produced. Throughout the nineteenth century, from Scott at the beginning to Hardy at the end, novelists commanded a large popular audience, reached through a multitude of channels. Not only the bookshop but also the circulating library was crucial to the commercial success of the Victorian novel, and the various forms in which it was published – single-volume, multi-volume, three-volume, serialised in parts or serialised in magazines – reflected changing tastes, changing outlets and changing market demands. Prose fiction had existed since classical times, but the English realistic novel was a product of the eighteenth century. Defoe, in his perennially popular Robinson Crusoe (see above, pp. 60–1), strove for an aura of authenticity which reflected his pioneering work as a journalist. The search for apparent authenticity became the hallmark of fiction throughout the century, whether in the quasi-reportage of Fielding or in the letters which carried the plot and characters in the works of Richardson, Fanny Burney (1752–1840) and others. The Gothic novel of the late eighteenth century both reflected and promoted a cultural fashion which spread across all the arts from literature to architecture. Judicious exploitation brought substantial rewards to the Nobles, John Lane and other new publishers of the period (see above, pp. 77–8). So-called ‘sentimental’ novels vied with Gothic horror for space in bookshops and circulating libraries at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The scale of the trade was small by later standards, but substantial in contemporary terms.

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By the late 1790s about eighty to one hundred new novels a year were being published in England (almost entirely in London), with a typical print run of about 500 copies; few were reprinted and at least 40 per cent of copies went to circulating libraries (Raven and Forster 2000: 26–7, 30–9, 93–4). This is to be set in a context in which the average annual output of all titles was little more than 2,500 in the first decade of the nineteenth century (Eliot 1997). The nascent fiction industry of early nineteenth-century Britain was a product of the changes in the publishing trade as a whole. It was largely dominated by ‘new’ publishers who were not hidebound by the old traditions of the trade for which some still hankered. Entrepreneurial publishers made and lost small fortunes in satisfying the growing market for undemanding but entertaining fiction. Throughout the century, fiction was to be a central concern of the publishing industry and therefore of the bookshops and the commercial circulating libraries. The story is not confined to what was to become the canonical fiction of English literature, although it is important to remember that some of the greatest writers of the period – notably Scott and Dickens – were also among the most popular and commercially successful. Other commercial successes, however, some of whom outsold even these icons, are long since forgotten and some were perhaps unknown even at the time to the middleclass readers of literary fiction. From G. P. R. James at the beginning of the century to Ouida at the end, there were popular novelists who sold in hundreds of thousands and were read by millions whose very names are now meaningless to all but the most specialised of scholars. Moreover, there were other writers, many of them probably pseudonymous, whose target audience was far from the drawing rooms of the Victorian upper and middle class. They wrote for the newly and often barely literate working class, for the mill hands, servants and myriads of workmen and working women whose labour sustained the seemingly ever-growing prosperity of Victorian Britain. Cheap fiction – some of it verging on the pornographic – was another pillar of the publishing industry.

Sir Walter Scott: three-deckers and the circulating libraries The story begins with Scott, whose popular successes with the Waverley novels transformed the publication of fiction. Previously novels had been published in editions as small as 500, but with Waverley (1814) Scott and his publisher, Archibald Constable, made the breakthrough to a far larger market. The book was a bestseller, perhaps the first work of English fiction which can be meaningfully described by that term. Constable sold the first edition of 1,000 copies in a matter of weeks, and had printed another 2,000 within three months of publication. Cheap editions followed, and by 1829 some 40,000 copies had been sold in this form. Scott’s later novels repeated this early success. In 1816, The Antiquary was published in a first edition of 6,000 copies, and Scott and his publishers looked forward to the profits both of that edition and of the inevitable cheap reprints. And so it continued. The huge editions, and the

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massive distribution problems which they created for an Edinburgh publisher, brought their own difficulties (see above, pp. 79–80). Constable’s financial disaster was partly a consequence of the costs of advertising, marketing and distribution; these were the investments which had to be made in the hope of reaping profits from reprints once the title was established as a steady seller on the backlist (Garside 1983). These ‘front-end’ costs were to be one of the perennial problems of nineteenth- and twentieth-century publishing. Despite the problems, however, Scott and Constable had demonstrated the existence of a mass market for complex and expensive novels. At first, the failure of Constable may have made some other publishers cautious about the publication of fiction, especially of new novels by unknown novelists, although it has been cogently argued that we should not exaggerate this effect (Sutherland 1987). John Murray was certainly worried, and there is evidence that both Henry Colburn (d. 1855) and Richard Bentley (1794–1871), the most prolific fiction publishers of the 1820s, were perhaps reluctant to experiment with the unknown (Sutherland 1986; Gettman 1960). When the publishing of novels revived in the 1830s, it was largely the work of a new generation of publishers, notably Chapman and Hall, Bradbury and Evans, Smith Elder and John Blackwood. Macmillan followed the trend, although somewhat reluctantly and in very special circumstances; of the old established houses only Longmans made any real impact on the publishing of novels in the middle years of the century (Sutherland 1976: 44). By that time, cheap paper and cheap printing were having a significant impact on book prices; the audience was broadening out beyond the traditional literary and cultural elite, a fact reflected by the growth in sales. It has been argued that this widening of the market base was in itself responsible for the revival of novel publishing; the new audience preferred fiction to poetry, and as a consequence the publishing of the latter suffered significantly in the 1820s and 1830s (Erickson 1996: 19–48). The success of Scott in the late 1810s and throughout the 1820s had certainly demonstrated the existence of a market for novels on a hitherto unsuspected scale. So influential was his example that even the physical form which had been convenient for Waverley became the normal form of the novel for the greater part of the century. Waverley was originally published in three volumes, for no reason other than the fact that three volumes were needed for the length of book which Scott had written. Many of Scott’s subsequent books were also in three volumes, and by the end of the 1820s, the ‘three-decker’ (an allusion to the three-decked warships which formed the core of the Royal Navy) was established as the ‘correct’ way to publish a new novel. Even the price was standardised. This again originated with Scott and Constable; in 1821, Constable priced Kenilworth at 10s. 6d. per volume, and one-and-a-half guineas (31s. 6d.) was the price of the three-decker until the end of its long reign (Ewing 1967; Griest 1970: 40–5; Lauterbach and Lauterbach 1957; Sadleir 1979: 10–11). By analogy, 10s. 6d. per volume became the normal price of

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fiction (Garside and Schöwerling 2000: 93–4). Throughout the late 1820s and early 1830s, quantities of three-deckers were published, although none of them equalled the success of Scott. Despite the existence of other formats, the three-decker was to be the dominant format of the Victorian middle-class novel. The reason for this provides a valuable insight into the world of nineteenth-century publishing in which the marketplace was the most potent force. Three-deckers were undoubtedly expensive; while a novel published in monthly parts cost the subscriber about £1 for a completed work, over a period of nineteen months, the purchase of a three-decker, usually with a somewhat shorter text, involved the outlay of over 50 per cent more all at once. This was not so close to the economics of the madhouse as it might seem, for the publishers had a captive market to whom the three-volume novel was meat and drink. That market was the circulating libraries whose influence on the Victorian novel, in both form and content, was paramount perhaps even above that of the publishers themselves. The first circulating libraries had been opened soon after the Restoration, and during the eighteenth century they had spread throughout the country until almost every bookshop had a few books available for hire. By the last quarter of the eighteenth century the circulating libraries were perhaps the normal source from which most readers obtained their fiction and it could be argued that the whole craze for the Gothic novel was sustained by circulating library demand. Formula fiction was born long before Mills and Boon (see above, pp. 77–8). The circulating library, however, was transformed in the nineteenth century from being the province of the small town bookseller to that of the national businessman. This was the achievement largely of one remarkable man, Charles Edward Mudie (1818–90). Mudie started his career in 1842 as a stationer and newsagent in Bloomsbury. In the following year, he opened a circulating library, and thereafter the company grew without interruption, although not entirely without difficulty, for fifty years. By 1875, Mudie had 125 branches throughout the kingdom, and was regularly ordering new books in quantities as great as 2,500 copies (Griest 1970: 15–27). Such an enterprise could not be ignored by the publishers, and for as long as Mudie wanted three-volume novels, they continued to publish them. And Mudie undoubtedly did want three-volume novels, for he could charge his customers three times as much for them as he could for the novels in a single volume. One-volume novels were less well advertised by Mudie and not so prominently displayed in his libraries; since he was regularly taking more than half of the print run of a middle-range novel, his wishes could not be ignored (Griest 1970: 35–57). Mudie was never entirely without competitors, however, both locally and nationally. One episode, hidden at the time even from most of the book trade, illustrates with particular force the complex relationship of mutual dependence between Mudie and the novel publishers. In 1862, a new entrant into the national circulating library market, the Library Company Ltd, undercut Mudie’s

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subscription rate by 50 per cent. The effect was immediate and potentially disastrous, especially when combined with Mudie’s extravagant personal life and an over-ambitious investment in building a new London headquarters. By 1863, Mudie was in serious difficulty, and was asking for extended credit from his suppliers, the publishers. They were in a very difficult position, for if Mudie failed, they stood to lose hundreds of thousands of pounds. Eventually a group of publishers – including Smith Elder, Murray, Longman and Blackwood – agreed to help Mudie to meet his liabilities, by lending him money and settling some of his outstanding major bills. This successful bail-out of the company was kept a close secret by the small circle directly involved. It saved Mudie, but his rescuers were able to drive hard bargains for years to come (Finkelstein 1993). There are two significant lessons to be learned from this episode; first, the circulating library market was so important to the publishers of middleclass fiction that they could not allow a major player to fail; second, and with a far wider implication, even in the free market economy of mid-nineteenth century Britain, publishers were happy to operate as a cartel, albeit secretly, if that protected their common interests. The Library Company itself went bankrupt in 1864, partly because it had failed to displace Mudie’s, in itself a consequence of the publishers’ determination to keep Mudie afloat. A potentially more formidable competitor was W. H. Smith, who had founded his own libraries in competition with Mudie in 1860. For many years, however, these were almost entirely confined to Smith’s outlets at railway stations. It was not until the development of a chain of what the company called ‘town branches’ in provincial towns and cities in the twentieth century that it became a serious player. Smith did not entirely share Mudie’s predilection for the three-decker, and gave far greater prominence to one-volume novels, including cheap reprints. Such was the power of Mudie, however, especially given his virtual cartel with some key publishers, it was not until Mudie came to agree with him that Smith was able to take steps to end three-volume publication (Wilson 1985: 357–63). Nothing illustrates more forcefully the influence of the circulating libraries than the story of the ending of the long reign of the three-decker. In the summer of 1894, the libraries were suffering financially from a decline in membership and use. This may partly have been a result of the competition which was emerging from the public libraries established in many towns under the 1850 Public Libraries Act. By the 1890s, these libraries’ holdings of fiction reflected popular taste, including such favourites as Scott, Dickens and BulwerLytton as well as contemporary but long-forgotten favourites like Besant, Mrs Henry Wood (1814–87), M. E. Braddon (1835–1915) – the ‘queen of the circulating libraries’ in her time – and Charlotte Yonge (1823–1901) (Eliot 1992). A further pressure came from the widespread availability of cheap editions of many novels, both new and second-hand, as well as the development of new forms of leisure activities easily accessible to their middle-class customers. The owners of the major circulating libraries asked that the publishers should

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reduce the price of new novels to 4s. 0d. per volume, and wait for a year before issuing cheap editions. Mudie’s announced publicly that they would refuse to buy books from any publisher which did not co-operate. This unrealistic demand was designed to disguise Mudie’s real motives. Privately, he indicated that he thought that the real solution to the crisis lay in abandoning the three-decker and publishing new novels in a single volume (Griest 1970: 171–5). Smith took a similar line (Wilson 1985: 363), and, despite objections from the Society of Authors whose members stood to lose on royalty payments (Bonham-Carter 1978: 177), the pressure on the publishers was irresistible. They were already being harassed by the booksellers about underselling, and indeed by some of their own number about net books (see above, pp. 99–103). Within a matter of weeks the major publishers were announcing their novels for the 1894–5 season in single-volume form (Griest 1970: 194–7). The end came quickly. In 1894, 184 three-deckers were published; in 1895 this fell to 52, and in 1897 there were only four (Griest 1970: 208). The three-decker was dead, and it had been killed by the circulating libraries which had sustained it for so long.

Charles Dickens: the serial novel The three-decker with its virtually fixed price was an essentially conservative component of mid-Victorian publishing. With its safe market in the circulating libraries it generated profits for author and publisher alike. Nevertheless, some of the greatest and most successful novels of the century were published in a very different form, the serial. The serial publication books had been known to the trade since the late seventeenth century, and had been something of a craze for a period in the first half of the eighteenth century (Wiles 1957). The application of the principle to fiction was not entirely without precedent either, for many novels had been serialised in magazines at the end of the eighteenth century. There were a few occasional examples in the 1820s, when Colburn published some serial novels under the general title of Colburn’s Modern Novelists (Sutherland 1976: 21). Even so, the remarkable success of the serial as a form of publication for fiction could hardly have been predicted when Edward Chapman and William Hall approached the young Charles Dickens in 1836 and asked him to write a text to illustrate a series of comic engravings which they proposed to publish over the next year or so (Vann 1991: 95–6). The success of Pickwick Papers, the book Chapman and Hall found that they were publishing, is one of the legends of the history of literature and the book trade alike. After initially slow sales, and a reduction of the print run from 1,000 copies to 500 between the first and second of the monthly parts, Pickwick Papers became the first bestseller since the death of Scott, and its author’s popularity hardly wavered until his own death over thirty years later or indeed since then. This very success has tended to obscure the originality of the exercise, and the extent to which Chapman and Hall exploited newly available

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technologies and distribution mechanisms. As sales rose rapidly from the fourth part onwards, the young publishers (barely older than their new author) were forced into using the latest printing techniques, into stereotyping to produce multiple editions, into wide advertising and into distribution by the barely opened railways. They reaped the fruits of their enterprise, for the popular success of Pickwick was as crucial to the establishment of their business as it was to that of Dickens’s reputation (Patten 1978: 60–8). Dickens continued to publish in parts for the rest of his life, and this fact has perhaps led to an overemphasis on the importance of the part-issue novel in the nineteenth century. Among the major novelists, only Thackeray (1811–63) followed the example of using monthly parts, partly because he was an experienced magazine journalist before he was a novelist; he worked well to deadlines, and planned his work carefully to meet them so as to sustain a steady income (Shillingsburg 1992: 48–50, 55). George Eliot (1819–80) used a modified form of serial publication for Middlemarch, by publishing in eight bi-monthly parts which made up four volumes. This arrangement, painfully negotiated between the novelist, G. H. Lewes (1817–78) and John Blackwood (1818–79), was unique, although Blackwood had suggested something similar to Bulwer-Lytton for My Novel in 1849 (Sutherland 1975; Sutherland 1976: 191–203). There was, however, another form of serialisation which was popular in the middle of the century: publication in a magazine. Again, Dickens was active in this field; The Old Curiosity Shop was originally published in Master Humphrey’s Clock, a magazine edited by Dickens himself. This, however, was a rather unusual example, for by that time Dickens was firmly in command of his relationships with his publishers and so great was his success that they had to do as he wished. Dickens also published the work of other novelists in his magazine: Mrs Gaskell’s Cranford, for example, was first published in his Household Words in 1851–3 (Gérin 1976: 118–26). The Cornhill Magazine, however, was a different matter. Edited by Thackeray, whom the publishers Smith Elder paid very generously to confer his name on their magazine (Sutherland 1976: 43), its serialised novels included George Eliot’s Romola (1862–3), for which George Smith had paid no less than £7,000 (Sutherland 1976: 1). Indeed, George Eliot rather favoured this form of publication, for her Scenes of Clerical Life was first issued in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1857 (Sutherland 1976: 37–8).

The one-volume and the reprint series The three-volume novel had always been intended primarily for the circulating libraries, although never entirely so; Disraeli’s Endymion (1880), for example, the only avowedly fictional work ever published by an author resident in 10 Downing Street, was a massive popular success in its three-volume form, but the circumstances were very special (Jones 1974). That was, however, something of an exception. In general, it was in single-volume form that novels

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achieved mass sales if they achieved them at all. Typically, the one-volume novel was priced at 6s. 0d. as against the 31s. 6d. of the three-decker, although many were actually reprints of books which had already been published either in three volumes or serially. The reprint series was particularly favoured by some publishers. In a sense Routledge’s Railway Library falls into this category, although it also included a good deal of non-fiction (see above, p. 106), but more typical was Bentley’s Standard Novels, which eventually ran to 126 volumes published between 1831 and 1856 (Gettman 1960: 45–54). An equally remarkable, and perhaps even more imaginative, enterprise was the singlevolume reprint series of an author’s works. In 1844, Smith Elder reissued the novels of G. P. R. James in this form, followed by Chapman and Hall’s ‘Cheap’ editions of Dickens and Bulwer-Lytton (both 1847) (Sutherland 1976: 30–5). Indeed, many of Dickens’s later novels were issued in cheap one-volume form after the initial part-publication and single-volume reprints from the plates of the parts. David Copperfield, for example, was published in parts in 1849–50, and subsequently in Bradbury and Evans’s ‘Cheap’ edition (at 5s. 0d.) and in their ‘Library’ edition (2 volumes at 6s. 0d. per volume) (Patten 1978: 378–80). Such devices kept books in the shops and on the bookstalls in a convenient form at prices which customers could afford to pay. They were also immensely profitable; Chapman and Hall sold 612,000 volumes of their ‘Charles Dickens Edition’ of the novelist’s work in 1867–70 (Sutherland 1976: 36).

Popular fiction and pornography The one-volume novel, whether a reprint or an original work, reached a wider market than the three-decker, and was a more permanent feature of the scene than the comparatively transitory serialised or part-issue work. Even so, there was a market which the great Victorian novelists, for all their popular success, could never reach. In a society which was rapidly achieving something very close to total adult literacy there was an ever-increasing number of potential readers for whom the social niceties of Thackeray or the moral power of George Eliot was of little interest. For these readers, the genuine mass market in terms of their numbers, publishers also provided vast quantities of fiction. It is forgotten, perhaps deservedly so, by literary critics, but for the publishing industry it was of crucial importance. It is not too far short of the truth to distinguish between ‘middle-class’ and ‘working-class’ fiction in this context. The dividing lines were as sharp on the printed page as they were in the social reality of mid-nineteenth-century Britain. The popular fiction of the 1840s grew out of earlier traditions of popular publishing. The ballad and the chapbook are both among the ancestors of the penny-a-part novel. Its literary antecedents include the Gothic horror stories which were the staple fare of the working-class reader long after the middle classes had moved on to a very different type of fiction, and the immensely popular accounts of crimes, executions and other real-life horrors which sold

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in tens of thousands. Indeed, the literary tastes of working-class readers for both genres and authors were typically more conservative than those of the middle classes (Rose 2002: 116–31). There were, however, some new developments. One, in the late 1830s, was the publication of plagiarisms of middle-class fiction, especially of Dickens; despite attempts to use the law of copyright against the publishers of such works, they were issued in great numbers (James 1974: 51–82). Stories of domestic life, often with overtones which could not have been so innocently presented in a post-Freudian age, were another feature of popular fiction which appealed to a mass audience. These books, almost invariably issued in weekly parts at 1d. each, were not the province of the giants of Victorian publishing who brought out the works of Dickens or Trollope. Very little is known of these publishers beyond their names (James 1974: 212–15), although one of them, Edward Lloyd, is less obscure. He was later to become a publisher of semi-respectable cheap newspapers, and in 1876 bought the eminently respectable Daily Chronicle. He was a self-educated man from a slum background who fully understood the market he was so successful in exploiting (Altick 1963: 289–93). Lloyd normally avoided outright pornography, but others were not so fastidious. Despite the moral façade of nineteenth-century Britain, more pornography was published in Queen Victoria’s reign than during any previous period. The trade in pornography was by definition sub rosa, but no account of Victorian publishing is complete without it, if only because of the long-term effects of the reaction to it (Pearsall 1969: 380–92; Porter and Hall 1995: 152–3). John Camden Hotten (1832–73) was only one of several men who straddled the worlds of respectable and pornographic publishing. He published a good deal of American literature in London in the 1860s, and wrote lives of Dickens and Thackeray which he published himself. At the same time, he was also a prolific publisher of books which his contemporaries considered to be pornographic (Eliot 2003; Pearsall 1969: 387–9). Leonard Smithers (1861–1909), a solicitor by training, became a publisher partly under the influence of Sir Richard Burton (1821–90), explorer, translator of The Arabian Nights and a connoisseur of the erotic. Towards the end of the century, Smithers was the publisher of Oscar Wilde (1854–1900), Aubrey Beardsley (1872–98) and The Yellow Book. He was also, according to contemporary gossip which has been borne out by recent research, responsible for a good deal of clandestine pornographic material (Mendes 1993: 16–19; Nelson 2000). There was also, however, a flourishing trade in pornography which was completely hidden, and quite separate from the ‘respectable’ publishing industry and bookselling trade. When it became too difficult to print and publish in London from the early 1890s onwards, the centres of English language erotic publishing moved to Amsterdam and Paris; the trade in the latter city continued until at least the 1930s (Mendes 1993: 24–41). By the middle of the century there was a sufficient degree of concern about pornography to provoke the first legislation which had ever attempted to deal

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with the subject. In 1857, an Obscene Publications Bill was introduced into the House of Lords by Lord Campbell, and it became law in the same year. The 1857 Act gave the authorities new powers to continue to do what they had been trying to do for fifty years: to suppress the trade in pornography. These powers included the right of the magistrates to issue warrants to the police to search premises for suspected obscene material, and to destroy any that was found. In itself, this was useful to the police, but it was the judicial interpretation of the Act which was crucial in establishing the law. In 1868 a bookseller in Wolverhampton was prosecuted for selling obscene material, and Mr Justice Cockburn ruled that ‘the test of obscenity is whether the tendency of the matter charged . . . is to deprave and corrupt’ (Thomas 1969: 261–4). This was to remain the law until 1959, when a defence on the grounds of literary merit was permitted for the first time (see below, p. 205). The 1857 Act and the Cockburn judgment were the most lasting legacy of the Victorian pornographers. Among many examples of prosecutions under the 1857 Act were those of Henry Vitzelly for publishing translations of Zola in 1888 (Thomas 1969: 267) and of Jonathan Cape for Radclyffe Hall’s Well of Loneliness in 1928 (Brittain 1968: 84–147).

Publishing poetry in the nineteenth century The three-decker, the cheap reprint, the working-class novel and even pornographic publications all serve to emphasise the extent to which the market for popular entertainment in the nineteenth century was dominated by books, and particularly by the novel, at least until the development of the music hall and of spectator sports. Nevertheless, other forms of literature did flourish. Scott, the first of the bestselling novelists, had been a poet before he ever wrote a word of prose fiction. His Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805) sold 27,000 copies in ten years, while Marmion surpassed even that by selling 28,000 in only four years (Johnson 1970: 225, 279). Of course, no poet ever attained, or could hope to attain, the popularity and mass sales of the novelists. Publishers always experienced some difficulties in selling verse. Lyrical Ballads, in which Wordsworth and Coleridge first came to public notice, was a commercial disaster when it was first published in 1798, although it was taken over by Longmans soon after publication, and gradually became a steady seller (Owen 1957); indeed the slow sales of poetry, even of poetry which ultimately became popular, lay at the root of Wordsworth’s passionate commitment to the reform of the law of copyright (Seville 1999: 160–1; Erickson 1996: 49–69; see also above, pp. 114–15). The scale of poetry publishing, however, can be judged by comparing the sales figures of the novels with John Taylor’s delight when 160 copies of Keats’s Lamia were ordered before publication in 1820 (Chilcott 1972: 46). Only Byron (1788–1824) among the second generation of Romantics equalled the popular success of Scott. Childe Harold (1812) sold many thousands, but even Byron never repeated this success; the much-vaunted

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publication of Don Juan (1819) only yielded the sales of a few thousand copies (Marchand 1957: 325–6, 677, 804). For lesser poets, the prospects were thin indeed (Batdorf 1951; Bloomfield 1993). Nevertheless, the poets of the first two decades of the century gradually became classics and were steadily reprinted to the benefit of their publishers if not always that of the poets themselves. In the middle of the century, Tennyson attained great fame and considerable popularity. For much of his life, Tennyson’s publisher was Edward Moxon (1801–58), who was delighted to sell 100 copies of Poems (1833) within two days of publication, a sobering contrast with the sale of the popular novelists (Martin 1983: 160). In fact, Moxon was, in general, markedly suspicious of poetry as a commercial commodity, but Tennyson was successful enough to confound his worst fears, and he was probably the leading publisher of new poetry in the middle decades of the century (Erickson 1996: 36–9; Merriam 1939: 110–87). Tennyson’s Poems of 1842 sold well from the beginning (Martin 1983: 266). After that the poet became something of a national institution, and his sales increased with each successive work. By the end of his life, Macmillan was prepared to offer him substantial inducements to change his allegiance and become a Macmillan author (Martin 1983: 549). Anthologies were, however, generally far more profitable than new poetry. The most famous of all, Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, was published by Macmillan in 1861, and was indeed a source of gold for both the editor and the publisher for many years to come; it had sold 61,000 copies by 1884 (Haass 1985). Selected verse was also found in the gift books; these were a particular vogue in the 1820s and 1830s, but they continued to be published for the Christmas market throughout the century and were profitable for both authors and publishers (Ledbetter 1994). Selections and editions for educational purposes, first found in the late eighteenth century, were another beneficiary of the spread of mass education, and especially of state education after 1870, which increased the market. George Bell thought it worthwhile to take over Pickering’s Aldine Poets as one of his many cheap reprint series in the 1860s (Weedon 1993). No doubt many selections and anthologies were bought for reluctant recipients or by reluctant school children, but they provided a steady income for their publishers and made at least some of the work of the major poets more widely available at very reasonable prices. The publication of works of literature of permanent cultural value has never been, and will never be, the most profitable area of publishing. Nevertheless, such books are published, and there was perhaps a brief period in the middle of the nineteenth century when literary merit and popular success coincided. Dickens, one of the greatest Victorian bestsellers, was a genuinely popular entertainer as well as a major novelist. No other living novelist sold on anything like a comparable scale in Victoria’s reign, but the success of Dickens symbolises the success of the novel itself. In its multitude of forms it dominated the market for imaginative literature and was the foundation stone of several successful publishing houses as well as the great enterprise of Mudie’s libraries.

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Even so, the apparent dominance of the novel should not blind us to the fact that, although fiction was one of the most profitable forms of publishing, it was never the only one, and the mass market which was discovered and exploited by men as different as Alexander Macmillan and Edward Lloyd was also open to others who approached from a very different angle. The Victorians were serious-minded men and women, who believed profoundly in the improving value of the printed word. It was in the attempt to impose a middle-class printed culture on the working classes that we can best see the publishing industry of Victorian England at work.

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10 AUTHORS AND PUBLISHERS

Payments and patronage The development of the publishing industry into the first of the mass media brought great benefits not only to the publishers but also to those who made their success possible: the authors. The author is too often the forgotten figure in the history of publishing and the book trade. It is, after all, the author who writes what the publisher publishes, and the two are dependent upon each other. By the end of the eighteenth century, this mutual interdependence was already recognised to some extent. Authorship had become an established occupation largely because the newspapers and magazines provided a source of regular, if limited, income for those who could write to a deadline (see above, pp. 56–60). In the nineteenth century, the vast increase in the output of the press created an army of writers and journalists who, unlike so many of their predecessors, could live by their pens. A successful author could expect rewards which put him among the best paid in the land. Scott set the pattern in this as in much else. Even as a poet he had made a good deal of money (Johnson 1970: 261) but with the success of the Waverley novels he made a fortune. Almost all the major Victorian novelists, a few poets and many authors who are now forgotten found themselves very wealthy indeed by the end of their careers. This created new tensions within the trade, and between the publishers and the authors, if only because there was so much more to discuss than there had been in earlier days. This tension was most obvious in the arrangements which were made for the payment of authors, and in the legal framework within which authors and publishers both worked. In the earliest days of printing, authors, if they were paid at all, received a single payment for their copy. During the eighteenth century, however, more complex arrangements emerged, notably Pope’s device of leasing his copyrights to a publisher for a specific edition (see above, pp. 55–6). Pope, however, was in an unusually strong position because of his own involvement in the trade, and for most eighteenth-century authors the single payment for an outright sale of copyright remained the usual practice. By the middle of the century, however, more complex arrangements, often more beneficial to

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the author, were beginning to be used. Typically, an author would agree to write a book on a specified subject and of a specified length in return for a fixed fee. The agreement might also, however, specify the number of copies in the edition, with provisions for additional payments in the event of a reprint and perhaps with some arrangements for revisions, paid or unpaid, for editions subsequent to the first (Bentley 1982; Feather 1981). Gradually, the typical contract became a little more generous and a few of the more enterprising publishers began to make speculative investments in books which they considered to have commercial potential. The younger Murray, for example, offered the dramatist Colman £300 for John Bull immediately after he saw it acted (Collins 1928: 156). It was by such enterprise that the new publishers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries developed their lists and their businesses. Popular authors, however, and especially those who had a reasonable prospect of reprints after the first edition, were no longer so attracted by the outright sale of their copyrights, although it was still the normal practice at the beginning of the nineteenth century (Garside and Schöwerling 2000: 83). Scott insisted from the beginning of his career as a novelist on ‘half-profits’ agreements, by which he and his publisher shared equally in the profits of an edition. Moreover, Scott would allow a publisher the rights only to one edition at a time, and renegotiated for reprints (Garside 1983: 90). Of course, Scott was in a uniquely strong position among authors of his generation, but later writers followed his example. Dickens became something of an expert in exploiting his own commercial value, again often using the half-profits system (Patten 1976: 237), although other authors, such as Mrs Gaskell, continued with the older practice of selling their copyrights outright to their publishers (Gérin 1976: 260–1). Perhaps what was most important in the long run was the growing recognition that writing was a means by which people made a living. While some could attain commercial success, there were others who needed help. The tradition of private patronage still survived up to a point, but it was in decline, and there was some recognition of the need for public support for some writers (Griffin 1996: 269–72). This was exemplified in the 1790s in the creation of the Royal Literary Fund from which some authors received ex gratia payments from public funds in recognition of their achievements (Raven and Forster 2000: 54). A generation later, the Royal Society of Literature, founded in 1820, was in effect a group of writers and others interested in literature who came together to provide support for the less financially secure. The Society had royal patronage, but it was essentially a self-help organisation and marks a significant shift towards collective patronage and support (Quigly 2000: 29–32).

Authors’ rights The new focus on authors’ incomes provoked a renewed interest in the law of copyright which made them possible. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, the 1710 Act, designed by the trade as a protection for itself, was

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increasingly seen as a tool to be used by authors, and they began to take an interest in the law and in strengthening it to their own advantage. There were two important strands of development in copyright law in the nineteenth century, one in the domestic sphere and the other concerned with protection abroad. After the House of Lords decision in 1774, and the vain attempt to reverse it in 1775, no action was taken for many years to reform the law of copyright. The 1814 Copyright Act, however, specifically acknowledged the rights of authors for the first time (see above, p. 114). This change of emphasis was the first formal recognition of the shift in the balance between the rights of publishers and the rights of authors. It was implicit in it that ‘literary property’, to use the now rather outmoded eighteenth-century phrase, was the creation of the author, and existed only because of his or her work. If that work had a commercial value, then some of the profits from it should be enjoyed by the creator. The publisher was merely the intermediary through whom the author’s creation entered the world of commerce. The decision in Donaldson v. Becket marked a discontinuity in the history of British publishing not only because it forced publishers to change the way in which they conducted their business, but also because – over a slightly longer time span – it led to a new understanding of the role of the author in the book trade. Perhaps nothing exemplifies this more forcefully than the active roles played by authors in the reform of the law of copyright between 1814 and 1842. Talfourd may have been their spokesman and their champion, but behind him stood Dickens, Carlyle, Southey and Wordsworth. The 1842 Act was as much an authors’ law as its predecessor had been a booksellers’ law (see above, pp. 114–15). Domestic law, however, was only one part of the problem, and by 1842 the less important part. The importation of foreign reprints into Britain was becoming a major problem for authors and publishers alike in the second quarter of the nineteenth century (Feather 1994: 149–72). After Waterloo and the end of more than twenty years of war in 1815, English books, and especially English novels, became something of a fashion on the continent; continental publishers were quick to exploit the new market. The Paris firm of A. and W. Galignani had been publishing a series of reprints of popular English novels as early as 1800, but when trade with France restarted in 1814–15 a new difficulty emerged as the French reprints began to be imported into England in large quantities. G. P. R. James, an immensely popular novelist, was among the first to raise the alarm, but it was not until the middle of the 1830s that some action was taken against the Paris piracies (Barber 1961). Richard Bentley employed agents to search out reprints of his books on sale in London, and when they did so he sued in Chancery. He was successful in rooting out the reprints of his own books, but others also suffered, and costly Chancery suits were clearly not a long-term solution to the loss of revenue caused by the import of foreign editions of copyright British books (Barnes 1974: 94–105). James continued to be active in the fight against foreign reprints of British books, and his efforts met with some success. In 1838, parliament reacted by

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passing the first International Copyright Act, which made it possible to reach reciprocal agreements with foreign states on copyright protection. In fact, it was not until 1846 that this law was first used; in that year, an agreement was signed with the Prussian government under which British books in Prussia and Prussian books in Britain were fully protected under the terms of each country’s domestic copyright legislation (Nowell-Smith 1968: 22–3, 41). The 1842 Act in itself, important as it was domestically, could not protect authors against foreign publishers, since any unilateral legislation would necessarily be meaningless and international agreements were difficult to reach. The provisions of the Act did, however, extend to British dominions overseas, forbidding colonial reprints of books protected by copyright in the United Kingdom, and the import into either the United Kingdom or the colonies of any foreign reprint of a British copyright book. In practice, this merely gave additional powers to the officers of the Customs, which they were unable to use to any significant extent (Barnes 1974: 116–37; Nowell-Smith 1968: 23–5). Nevertheless, there was some progress in the battle against foreign reprints. Reciprocal agreements were signed with a number of European states in the 1840s and 1850s (Barnes 1974: 119–20), and one very important continental publisher became an ally of the British authors in their attempts to reap reasonable rewards from their work. This was Christian Bernard Tauchnitz of Leipzig, who in 1841 began to issue his Collection of British Authors, a series which was to continue for a hundred years (Nowell-Smith 1968: 42–63; Pressler 1980). Tauchnitz was fastidious in his dealings with his British (and later American) authors. He bought from them, or their publishers, the right to publish their books for sale outside the United Kingdom. His honesty created business associations which blossomed into friendships with Dickens, Harrison Ainsworth, G. H. Lewes and others. The Tauchnitz editions could not be imported into the United Kingdom or the British Empire, but Tauchnitz made no attempt to do so, for he sought his market among British and American travellers on the continent and the growing number of European anglophiles. Although the success of Tauchnitz virtually excluded British publishers from the European market for their most popular titles, it was of great benefit to British authors, and provided them with the ammunition to fight the longer and more difficult battle in the other great market for English books, the United States. The battle for the recognition of British copyright in the United States will always be associated with the name of Dickens, whose relations with America and Americans were never entirely happy. Despite the great success of his books in that country and his own personal triumphs during his tours there, he was angered by the American ‘piracies’ of his works from which he obtained no income. The difficulties were largely the responsibility of the Americans, for the British government made desultory efforts to use the 1838 Act at the same time as the various European agreements were being negotiated. A treaty between the British and American governments was indeed signed in 1853,

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but it failed to obtain the necessary majority for ratification in the US Senate, partly because the British authors and publishers did not understand the need to spend large sums of money on the Washington lobbying system (Barnes 1974: 216–62). Reprinting of British books in the United States and of American books in Britain continued to be a major problem until almost the very end of the century, when in 1891 Congress at last passed an Act which made arrangements, albeit limited, for the American registration of copyright in works by non-residents and non-citizens (Nowell-Smith 1968: 68–70). Essentially, the Chace Act (so called after its sponsor, Senator Chace) was protectionist legislation, designed to ensure that books copyrighted in America were typeset and printed there, but it did afford some measure of relief to the grievances of the British authors. Before the Chace Act had passed into law, however, the European countries had already taken an important step towards the general regulation of international copyright. In 1887, many of them had signed the Berne Convention which essentially followed the principles established in the Anglo-Prussian agreement forty years earlier. Briefly, the Berne Convention states that a book which is copyright in any signatory state is also copyright in all the other signatory states under exactly the same conditions (except legal deposit) as a book first published in that country. It is on this basis that international copyright law now rests, and it ensures that authors receive a fair income from foreign reprints and translations of their works (Stewart 1983: 88–92). The great copyright debates of the nineteenth century, both domestic and international, were largely driven by the authors with the support of the publishers. Despite the tension which always exists between them, the two sides recognised that they were better able to confront the outside world if they did so together. In the course of this search for mutual benefits, they transformed the legal framework of both publishing and authorship in Britain. The law now effectively allowed for the creation and protection of a complex web of rights which related to where a book was published, where it was printed and whereby it could be sold. It was but a short step from there to the division of the rights in a work, so that a British and American publisher might have rights in their respective countries, or two publishers could have rights for editions in different formats, and so on. Adaptations, abridgements, serialisations and dramatisations attracted their own rights. The so-called ‘subsidiary rights’ came to be of great importance to publishers during the twentieth century; they began with the multiplication of media and formats in the middle of the nineteenth century as authors sought acknowledgement of their contribution to the success of the publishers.

Authors’ incomes The concern with copyright law, both domestically and internationally, was one measure of the ever-increasing sums of money which could be generated

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by successful books, both for the author and for the publisher. Dickens, who had been paid £14. 3s. 6d. for each part of Pickwick Papers in 1836–7, made a profit of nearly £10,000 from Dombey and Son in 1846–8 (Patten 1976: 63, 381). The executors of Mrs Henry Wood, one of the most successful novelists of the century, received over £35,000 in three years from a collected edition published by Bentley after her death, and she had already made many thousands during her lifetime (Gettman 1960: 114–15). Of course, not all novelists were so fortunate. With a half-profits agreement, Anthony Trollope (1815–82) had the princely income of £9. 8s. 8d. from the first edition of The Warden, published by Longman in 1855, and £100 from Barchester Towers two years later (Sutherland 1976: 136). On the other hand, it was not only novelists who made great sums of money; Macaulay received a single cheque for £20,000 as part of his share of the profits in volumes 3 and 4 of his History of England in 1856 (Briggs 1974: 15–16), while in 1856 Chapman and Hall paid Carlyle £2,800 for the right to publish 5,000 copies of the first two volumes of Frederick the Great (Bonham-Carter 1978: 57). In such circumstances, relations between authors and publishers became of central importance in the trade. Publishers found themselves in a highly competitive market, which demanded a stream of new books. At a time when Mudie was adding anything up to 100,000 volumes a year to his circulating libraries (see above, pp. 123–5), as he was in the 1850s and 1860s, the publishers needed authors who could write them. This put the authors in a far stronger position than ever before, and there were many who felt that they were not exploiting their advantages. It was easy for Dickens to manipulate his copyrights and his profits; it was a more difficult proposition for the middle-ranking writers who filled the columns of the monthly magazines or the three volumes of the circulating library novels. Since the early eighteenth century, when they first began to recognise their potential power, authors had been suspicious of publishers. They had even tried to circumvent them with their own publishing organisations such as the Society for the Encouragement of Learning, or by using the subscription system. By the second half of the nineteenth century, however, it was clear that if authors were to improve their position, it would have to be done within the existing structure of the publishing industry. The publishers had established and successful businesses; to set up a new house, or to publish one’s own work, was no small undertaking. It would be better for the authors to work together, and speak to the publishers with a single voice, rather than try to do the publishers’ work for them. The first successful attempt at founding a representative body for authors was largely a consequence of the growing feeling that there was an urgent need to enforce and extend international copyright protection. It is, perhaps, equally significant that the leading lights of the organisation were comparatively minor authors. The strongest force was Walter Besant, a novelist and journalist; at first, his associates included none of the major writers of the period. In 1883, Besant called a meeting which resulted in the establishment of the Society

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of Authors in the following year. Besant now proved a master of propaganda. His first great achievement was to persuade Tennyson, by that time Poet Laureate and a peer, to be the Society’s president. He was then able to recruit a number of other important and successful authors as active members. The Society of Authors soon established itself as a major force in the British book world, as it has remained. Its foundation coincided with the negotiations which were to lead to the signing of the Berne Convention, so that copyright questions inevitably played a large part in its activities in the early years. This was not, however, the Society’s only concern. In the 1890s, the Society was involved in the discussions between the publishers and booksellers which were to lead to the signing of the Net Book Agreement (see above, pp. 101–3, and through its journal, The Author, founded in 1890, it gave a collective voice to professional writers for the first time (Bonham-Carter 1978: 119–65). In the long term, however, the most significant role of the Society of Authors was to be in forcing publishers to reconsider their literary and financial relationships with their authors. During the first twenty years of its existence, there were three contentious issues in this area in which the Society was to play some part: the crucial question of the division of profits between author and publisher, the role of the publisher’s reader and the role of the literary agent, new players in the publishing arena who emerged in the late nineteenth century. The Society of Authors consistently argued that royalties were the most equitable form of payment to authors. Royalties are simple in theory and transparent in practice: the author is paid a percentage (determined by mutual agreement and embodied in a formal contract) of the revenue received by the publisher. A typical figure was (and is) 10 per cent, based either on the publisher’s income or on the retail value of the books sold. There is, of course, a significant difference between the two, which was naturally a matter of interest to the Society of Authors. The temptation to sell copyrights outright remained, however, especially for authors who needed an immediate injection of funds, but it was rarely a wise course of action. A typical example is that of Robert Buchanan, a novelist who enjoyed some popularity in the last two decades of the century. Short of cash in 1880, he sold his new novel, God and Man, to Chatto and Windus for £250; by 1895 they had sold some 21,000 copies, but Buchanan could gain no additional benefit from the success of his work (Nash 1999). Buchanan was not alone in selling outright; even Besant himself did so from time to time. But Besant was adept at playing the literary market, and quietly made a small fortune from serialisation and territorial rights (Eliot 1999). The establishment of royalties as the normal form of payment to the authors of books took several decades, and for contributions to magazines, translations, abridgements and other forms of authorship it was never generally adopted. Even in the first decade of the twentieth century, King and Kegan Paul were paying less than 20 per cent of their authors by this method, although that was partly because they published a large number of books on commission for authors, in what we would now call vanity publishing (Howsam 1993).

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Readers and agents The publisher’s reader was a product of the more professional attitudes which came to characterise the publishing industry in the nineteenth century. Before that time, publishers had reached their own decisions, perhaps with advice from literary friends, but more often on instinct and experience. At the turn of the nineteenth century, however, when a more adventurous approach towards new books was forced on the publishers, it became necessary for them to consider far more manuscripts, often from authors quite unknown to them. Even then, the old tradition did not die out; John Murray, for example, had a small circle of literary friends who read new work for him in the 1810s (Fraser 1996: 6–10). Although publishers continued, as they still do, to commission much of their non-fiction from authors whom they already knew, publishers of imaginative literature cannot work in this way if they are to extend their lists. All publishers have to take risks; the function of the professional reader is to mitigate the risk by assessing both the literary and commercial value of the work. The emergence of readers as employees or paid agents of the publisher is obscure, although it seems that they existed as early as the 1830s (Fritschner 1980). Their real influence, however, dates from the middle of the century. From 1841 onwards the third John Murray (1808–92) employed Henry Milton, a civil servant, as his principal reader. When Milton died in 1850, Murray took on his son, John, in the same capacity. John’s brother, a clergyman, was also employed in the 1850s and 1860s. The Miltons principally read non-fiction (which was the mainstay of the Murray list), but they were immensely influential, causing Murray to recruit authors as diverse as Charles Darwin (1808–91), the explorer and missionary David Livingstone (1813–73), and the American novelist Herman Melville (1819–91), author of the bestselling Moby Dick (1851). The Miltons were never full-time employees of the publishing house; indeed Henry and John were both employed full-time at the War Office. Nor were they authors in their own rights, although they did have literary connections, for the first of the reading Miltons was the brother of Fanny Trollope (1780–1863) a bestselling author in her day who was the mother of the novelist Anthony Trollope (Fraser 1990). In several ways, the Miltons typify the publishers’ readers of the later nineteenth century, and indeed much later: well-read and well-educated amateurs with a wide frame of cultural reference. The history of publishers’ readers in the late nineteenth century is particularly associated with two people, Geraldine Jewsbury (1812–80), who read for Bentley from 1860 to 1875 (Gettman 1960: 194–33), and John Morley (1838–1923) who was reader for Macmillan from the 1860s to 1914 (NowellSmith 1967: 161). Bentley was something of a pioneer in the use of readers for fiction. He had little choice, for in a genre where personal judgement is of such importance, he could not possibly read for himself the torrents of unsolicited manuscripts which poured into his publishing house. The reader is, by definition, an anonymous and somewhat elusive figure in the history of publishing, although there can be no doubt of the importance which some

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of them have attained. Above all, they advise on those aspects of publishing which are so important to success and yet are beyond the competence of so many authors. By being in regular contact with the publishing world, the reader knows what will sell and what will not; he or she can advise on length, on the suitability of vocabulary and even on plot or characterisation. Geraldine Jewsbury, for example, immediately recognised the commercial potential of Mrs Henry Wood’s East Lynne, which was indeed destined to be a bestseller, but she insisted on many revisions to Mrs Wood’s indifferent grammar (Gettman 1960: 204–5). Morley undoubtedly determined Macmillan’s initially cautious attitude to Thomas Hardy, which resulted in his taking his first novel, Desperate Remedies, elsewhere, although Morley helped the young novelist in other ways; he later became a Macmillan author (Morgan 1943: 87–100; Nowell-Smith 1967: 129–30; Millgate 2002: 70–2). The reader was working for the publisher, while the literary agent, another intermediary, was working for the author. Like the origins of the reader, the origins of the agent are somewhat obscure, but there seems little doubt that the first of them who was of any importance was A. P. Watt (1834–1914); he began his business in 1875 after a modestly successful career in both publishing and bookselling (Hepburn 1968: 45–66). Among the authors he represented was Besant who became a great advocate of the agency system, as did the Society of Authors itself (Eliot 1999). Watt established a pattern which others followed, notably J. B. Pinker (from 1896) and Curtis Brown (from 1899). He undertook all the negotiations between the author and the publisher, in return for a proportion, usually 10 per cent, of the author’s income from any book for which he was the agent. It was another aspect of the professionalisation of publishing. Authors were writers, not businessmen, and the role of the agent was, and is, to bring to bear on the author’s behalf the business acumen which a good publisher will certainly employ in his own dealings. There was some initial hostility within the trade, notably from William Heinemann (1863–1920) who refused to deal with agents for many years (St John 1990: 92–5; Whyte 1928: 122–3), but they soon proved to be useful, and even influential in transferring important authors from one house to another. Watt performed this service for Kipling, whom he persuaded to move from Heinemann (which may well have been the origin of his dislike of agents) to Macmillan in the 1890s (Nowell-Smith 1967: 277). It was to the agents’ advantage to win the best possible contract for their authors, since the formers’ own income was directly dependent upon the latters’. It was also, however, essential for the agent to ensure that the manuscripts which were submitted to publishers had a good chance of acceptance. This indeed has become the crucial role of agents in British publishing; from their knowledge of the trade, and of those in key positions within it, they are able to direct an author to an appropriate house, and at the same time give the author, especially the new author, the advantage of the reputation which they have earned from their earlier successes with other authors.

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Fin de siècle The agency system developed only very slowly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and indeed there are still many authors, especially of nonfiction, who prefer to deal directly with their publishers. Nevertheless, the development of agency was beneficial to all authors, for the agents joined their voices with that of the Society of Authors in an attempt to find a more equitable means of paying writers in a way which reflected their commercial success. Neither half-profits (which was often unfair to the publisher) nor outright sale of copyright (which was nearly always unfair to the author) could do this. At the end of the nineteenth century, authors and their agents increasingly pressed for royalty agreements, thus linking the author’s income directly to the commercial success of his work. The problem was to decide the basis on which the percentage should be calculated, but this was eased by the gradual acceptance of the Net Book Agreement which, because it effectively fixed prices, provided a basis on which royalties could be paid. The ideal for an author was 10 per cent (or more) of the net price of each copy sold, with the author retaining the copyright and the overseas and translation rights. It was an ideal which was rarely attained. Relations between authors and publishers can still be uneasy, but the acceptance of agents and royalties by the publishers represented a major advance in the acceptance of the author as a crucial figure in the work and success of the trade (Bonham-Carter 1978: 180–2). The changing nature of the relationship between publisher and author is symptomatic of the changing nature of publishing itself in nineteenth-century Britain. There was always room for innovation and individual flair, and indeed some of the finest publishers of the twentieth century were to show both of those characteristics. On the other hand, publishing was firmly enmeshed within the wider world of business and industry, and it had to follow conventional business practices if it was to survive. For some nineteenth-century publishers books were a crusade or a cultural duty; for others, however, and they were in the majority, books were a product, authors were suppliers and booksellers were customers. The publisher who was high-minded but incompetent could not survive in such an ethos, however good and noble his books might be. The Net Book Agreement was a recognition of the commercial realities of the book world: publishers and booksellers needed each other and both needed to make adequate profits if they were to continue trading. Similarly, the willingness, however reluctant, to deal through agents was an acknowledgement that the author too was part of this commercial world. Suppliers needed their profits, just as producers needed theirs, and it was unreasonable to expect regular supplies of acceptable goods unless the supplier was adequately and regularly recompensed for his or her work. The law of copyright merely provided a framework within which this could happen. The real revolution in British publishing in the reign of Queen Victoria was that it became a fully fledged industry, turning over millions of pounds, conducting its affairs in a businesslike

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manner and dealing fairly with the different interest groups within it and around it. By the year 1900, the publishing industry had equipped itself with the means of survival for the new century. The first trial of strength was to be whether that means could itself survive. The Net Book Agreement was designed as a rock upon which the house of publishing could be rebuilt. It remained to be seen whether the rock would, after all, prove to be sand.

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Part III THE PUBLISHING INDUSTR Y IN THE TWENTIETH CENTUR Y

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11 THE FIRST OF THE MASS MEDIA

A new century The United Kingdom entered the twentieth century as the most powerful nation on earth, and the centre of the greatest empire in history. But there were shadows at high noon. In South Africa, British troops were engaged in an increasingly bitter and costly war against the Boers, the Afrikaans-speaking ‘white tribe of Africa’. It was a war which was as divisive at home as it was bloody on the battlefield. To make matters worse, it was not obvious that it was being won. The queen herself, symbol of the age to which she had long since given her name, was old, remote and virtually a recluse. When she died in January 1901, the mourning was at least secretly tempered by sighs of relief. Her funeral procession, however, was an unforgettable political statement; it was led by emperors and kings, almost all of them her relations, and guarded by troops from every continent. Yet underneath the splendour, the British economy was beginning to lag. Germany, France and the United States had all industrialised later than Britain, but were rapidly catching up. By many measures they were outperforming the United Kingdom when Edward VII succeeded his mother (Kennedy 1989: 248–354). The country – the ‘mother country’ in contemporary imperial parlance – over which Edward reigned but did not rule was still a place in which extremes of wealth and poverty could be found. To travel on the recently built electric underground railways from the west of London to the east was to travel between two worlds. The inhabitants of the most contrasting of those worlds would not be found on the underground trains at all: the very rich did not need them; the very poor could not afford them. It was between the two extremes that the bulk of the city and the nation was to be found. The nineteenth century had been very kind to the British, and more specifically English, middle class. The status of the professions had been raised by their reorganisation and better regulation, some of it with statutory force. Success in business had never been seen as socially degrading as it was in some continental countries, and trade and industry flourished. Technological change had made life very comfortable for those who could afford it. Electricity, the telephone and the motor

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car were all becoming part of upper middle-class life by the turn of the twentieth century, at a time when virtually everyone above the level of manual worker had servants, often in profusion, to do the work which had not yet been mechanised, such as washing, cooking and cleaning (Perkin 1989: 27–61). Life had also been transformed in many ways for the lower middle classes, a fine distinction in the social order beloved of contemporaries. The ‘white collar’ workers – the clerks, shop assistants and minor officials – had their own respectability. Urban railways and tramways enabled them to move out of the centres of towns and cities and into newly developed estates in the suburbs. They too had their servants and home comforts, and their leisure time – beginning to be guaranteed by law as well as by custom and practice – was catered for in seaside resorts, public parks, concerts of popular music and, of course, books, newspapers and magazines. The late nineteenth century also saw the beginnings of professional sport in Britain, and the formation of such bodies as the Football Association and the Football League. The commercialisation of leisure, which had begun in the middle of the eighteenth century, was reaching the scale of a significant industry by 1900 (Searle 2004: 543–53). The class distinctions of early twentieth-century Britain were real enough, and had a significant impact on the publishing industry. They are directly reflected, for example, in many novels of the period, from John Galsworthy’s (1867–1933) portrayal of the wealthiest segment of upper middle-class professionals in the Forsyte Saga, of which the first volume was published in 1906, to H. G. Wells’s (1866–1946) vivid portrayals of the world of clerks and shop assistants into which he was born and from which his writing allowed him to escape. Wells’s aspirational heroes, however, tell us another truth about late Victorian and Edwardian England: despite the apparent rigidity of social distinctions, it was possible to move from one class to another, even though full acceptance might take more than one generation (Searle 2004: 98–100). The self-improvement which characterised at least some working men in the midnineteenth century (see above, pp. 110–11) created institutions which opened up routes to social change both by accident and by design. The public provision of education took this one step further, and the results were becoming intermittently apparent in the first half of the twentieth century (McKibbin 1998: 259–71). It was still a male-dominated society, despite the iconic woman at its apex. That domination was, however, being challenged. The challenge was perhaps more pragmatic than ideological, at least at the beginning. Upper- and middleclass women had always been active in philanthropic and charitable activities, and some were indeed much more than stereotyped do-gooders. For all practical purposes, Hannah More was a publisher (see above, pp. 109–10). Florence Nightingale turned a despised occupation into a highly respectable profession by both her example and her very forceful personality. Women clamoured for entry into the ancient professions of law and medicine, and indeed into the ancient universities where they could be educated for them. Women’s suffrage,

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a marginal issue in the mid-century, was coming to the centre of the national stage by 1900, and the agitation for it was a major political theme throughout the first two decades of the twentieth century. Writing had long been a familiar occupation for middle-class women; many women writers were fully professional by 1900, effectively writing for a living and to support themselves and perhaps their families. Many of the popular turn-of-the-century novelists were women (see above, pp. 137, 140). One whose work is still remembered, and perhaps sometimes read, is E. E. Nesbit (1858–1924) whose Railway Children (1906) has as a central character a woman who supports her family by her pen. While upper- and middle-class women were increasingly defining and demanding their right to take their place in society, working-class women continued to fare badly. Many were themselves working outside the home, often in appalling conditions in factories and sweat-shops. Many trade unions were unwilling to protect them, being more concerned to protect the male monopoly over skilled labour, in the printing industry among many others. Contraception was all but unknown among the working classes, and women could expect to bear children annually; although many were lost to the diseases of poverty, child-rearing was added to the many burdens of women in a society in which men did not help in such work. Even among the upper and middle classes, the education of women was a contentious issue. For the working class it was barely an option (Searle 2004: 55–81).

Education and literacy Education was the driver of change. The combination of self-help, philanthropy and religious and political fervour which had begun the process of bringing literacy to the urban working class had done much of its work – at least among men – by the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The state had intervened in education since the 1830s, but the intervention was on a small scale and often reluctant. It was bedevilled by religious rivalries as well as by political doubts. By the 1860s, however, the case for state-funded education was becoming more acceptable. When the Liberals won a clear victory at the 1868 general election, the education of the poor was on the agenda. Under the Education Act of 1870, elected school boards were created with the obligation to establish an elementary school for the children in their districts; in due course, elementary education became both compulsory and free (see above, p. 108). In 1902, further legislation imposed an obligation on the newly created local education authorities (which took over the work of the school boards) to provide for secondary education (Searle 2004: 329–31). The minimum school leaving age was gradually raised in successive Acts, a process which reached its apogee in 1944, when schooling became free and compulsory up to the age of 15, and provision was made for specialised technical and academic education at secondary level as well as a more general education in the newly created ‘secondary modern’ schools (Sutherland 1990: 158–65).

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The effect of the Victorian and later legislation on education was to complete the process of moving towards an almost completely literate society in Britain, although we should not underestimate the extent of literacy before 1870. In some parts of the country, adult literacy was almost at 90 per cent before the Education Act had any impact (Rose 2002: 65). In the rural areas, however, rates were much lower, and it was perhaps in the countryside and in the worst of the urban slums that the 1870 Act had its greatest impact. By 1900, the first generation of board school children were in middle age, and were parents and perhaps grandparents themselves. The ability to read had become a normal expectation of British life (Mitch 1992). It is easy but too simplistic to argue that this in itself created a ‘demand’ for reading matter. It is perhaps more pertinent to suggest that the newly literate masses created a new market which publishers sought to reach. This was most obviously and dramatically true in the publishing of newspapers and magazines. The newspaper industry had undergone great changes throughout the nineteenth century. It had pioneered the use of steam-powered presses, and later of mechanical typesetting (see above, pp. 85–92). The price of newspapers fell dramatically in the mid-century, partly because of the economies of scale achieved by the industrialisation of printing, and partly by the removal of the last of the duties on paper and on the newspapers themselves (see above, pp. 112–13). The penny newspaper became commonplace, and there was an exponential growth in the provincial press until virtually every town in Britain had at least one paper, and many had several, both morning and evening (Lee 1976: 131–3). These newspapers, however, were still essentially for a serious middle-class readership, and were definitely not intended as popular entertainment. They typically had seven or eight columns to the page, and sometimes more, printed in small type, with no illustrations, few headlines or other textual divisions, and a preponderance of political news. Some of them, among which The Times was pre-eminent but not unique, were powerful influences on public policy (Woods and Bishop 1983: 49–68, 113–20). If they were indeed reaching readers from all classes – and there is evidence that they were – it was at least partly because there was no real alternative for readers who sought hard news.

The new journalism and the popular press A popular press for a working-class market had also developed in the midcentury. Sunday newspapers in particular developed a tradition of sensationalism which still survives, concentrating on what would later be called ‘human interest’ stories, scandal and – by the 1880s – sport. In different hands, towards the end of the century, the sensationalist tradition spawned a new approach to middle-class journalism; it was what was to be known in the late twentieth century as ‘investigative’. Reporters, some of whom became personalities in their own right, did not merely follow events, but helped to create news. The most renowned – some might have said notorious – was W. T. Stead (1849–1912)

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whose methods in gathering information for his stories about child prostitution in London, published in his Pall Mall Gazette in 1885, put him in gaol (Herd 1952: 229–30). The so-called ‘new journalism’ which Stead and a few contemporaries and successors created was indeed new: it was socially committed, politically radical and based on first-hand investigation. Its appeal crossed some class boundaries, as it addressed both the middle-class radicals who were still typically in the Liberal Party and the working-class socialists and trade unionists who were to come together in the Labour Representation Committee (which became the Labour Party) when that was formed out of various left-ofcentre groups and bodies in 1900 (Searle 2004: 352). What was missing was a newspaper for the lower middle class, with its new prosperity, its ever-growing aspirations and no inclination towards social or political activism. It was into this gap that Alfred Harmsworth (1865–1922) injected The Daily Mail. The Daily Mail was a newspaper for the new lower middle- and upper working-class readership, both men and women, who saw themselves as superior to manual workers (including their own servants), and whose board school education had given them a working level of literacy and some knowledge of the world. It was to be a paper to be read on the tram on the way to work, or in the parlour after supper. It carried news of politics and foreign affairs and the business world, but it also had sporting and social news, much of the latter from a layer of society which its readers could only admire from afar. Moreover, it was illustrated, modestly at first, with line drawings and maps, the latter of course particularly valuable in time of war. The first issue was published in 1896. It was an immediate success, reaching a circulation of nearly a million by the turn of the century (Cranfield 1978: 219–20; Ferris 1971: 79–86). Harmsworth himself, raised to the peerage as Lord Northcliffe in 1905, became the first of the ‘press barons’ who dominated the British popular press for much of the twentieth century. Although it was genuinely innovative, The Daily Mail did not spring from nothing. Its immediate predecessors included several magazines published by George Newnes and others, notably Tit-bits, a question-and-answer journal for exactly the same class of reader. Indeed, it was the success of Tit-bits, and his own similar magazine Answers, which persuaded Harmsworth that there was a gap in the market. This gap was large enough to accommodate more than one newspaper title. The Daily Express was founded in 1900, by Cyril Pearson (1866–1921), a former Newnes employee. The Express became the principal organ for promoting the political career of Max Aiken (1879–1964), who became Lord Beaverbrook in 1917; he bought it in 1915 (Chisholm and Davie 1992: 135). Pearson’s company developed into one of the major conglomerates of British publishing, first as a newspaper group and, by the end of the century, as the owner of Longmans and Penguin Books (see below, pp. 178, 223). Northcliffe himself started another popular paper, The Daily Mirror (1909), specifically for women; it was the first to carry news photographs (Ferris 1971: 119–22). Its competitor was The Daily Sketch (1909). Many other popular

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titles followed; some still survive, others were lost in the 1950s and 1960s as the newspaper market went into decline under the impact of radio and television.

Book publishing and popular culture Universal literacy, and a general rise in disposable incomes and living standards (Boyer 2004), created new opportunities for publishers, but the competition both within and beyond the book trade was more formidable than at any time in the past. The rapid growth of mass market newspapers was one powerful indicator of this. But so too was the growth of other commercial leisure activities from football to music hall. For much of the coming century, the trade was under an apparently continuous assault from multiple innovations in communications technology – recorded sound, radio, television, the internet – each of which in turn threatened the market for fiction and general non-fiction. This threat did not entirely materialise; indeed each successive technological innovation seems to have had some positive impact on book publication and sales (see below, pp. 200–1).This was achieved, however, by radical adaptations in the trade. The first of these was the Net Book Agreement itself, symbolically coming into force on the first day of 1900 (see above, pp. 101–3). From the perspective of the turn of the twenty-first century, the Agreement was to seem conservative and ultra-cautious. In 1900, however, it represented a genuinely innovative mechanism for protecting the future of publishing by helping to maintain a chain of stock-holding bookshops while giving the publishers sufficient confidence to publish new titles. Its efficacy may have been doubted in some quarters, but it was afforded the compliment of being vigorously attacked during the first decade of its existence; the attack was successfully repulsed (see below, pp. 153–5). Nevertheless, until after the end of World War I (1918), the casual observer could have been forgiven for thinking that little was changing. Under the surface, however, change was happening, some of it in response to the same social, political and educational forces which underpinned the success of Harmsworth and his competitors. By 1900, the genres of popular fiction which were to be common for much of the coming century were already familiar. Detective fiction, for example, which can trace its origins to the work of Edgar Allen Poe (1809–49) and Wilkie Collins (see above, p. 111) in the middle of the nineteenth century, reached new heights of popularity in the work of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930), whose Sherlock Holmes first appeared in The Strand Magazine in 1888, and whose popularity in print has never waned; it was indeed enhanced by his hero’s later manifestations on stage, screen and television throughout the century (Bloom 2002: 117–18). Many others followed where Conan Doyle and Holmes led; before 1914 they included Sax Rohmer (one of the pseudonyms of the more prosaically named Arthur Henry Sarfield Ward (1883–1959)), who created Fu Manchu, another future film favourite,

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and Edgar Wallace [1875–1932] (Bloom 2002: 128, 130–1). Out of the detective story came the thriller; in the work of E. Phillips Oppenheim (1866–1946) and Erskine Childers (1870–1922) (particularly The Riddle of the Sands [1903]), and indeed in a late Sherlock Holmes story (His Last Bow [1917]), we can see the precursors of James Bond, George Smiley and Jack Ryan in the second half of the century. Popular fiction was aimed, in part, at the library market. The end of the three-decker had been a powerful demonstration of the influence of the commercial circulating libraries (see above, pp. 121–5), and they continued to hold sway over some parts of the popular fiction market until the middle of the century. Until after 1919, there was no real competition from public libraries for middle-class readers (see below, p. 155); for genre fiction aimed at women – romances and historical novels – the library market was crucial (Bloom 2002: 52). The importance of the library market for some fiction should not be allowed to disguise the fact that the custom of individual book buyers was critical to the success of the trade. Cheap reprint series continued to proliferate and were the mainstay of many bookshops. Until the advent of the paperback in the mid-1930s (see below, pp. 172–80), the sixpenny or shilling hardback novel was an important product of popular publishing.

The twentieth century: themes and contexts British publishing in the twentieth century has to be understood against a wider background. Throughout the century, it was to be faced with a series of challenges. The development of new media may seem the most obvious in retrospect, but there were many others. Internally, the trade developed commercial structures which protected profit margins, but which needed to be justified by the provision of cost-effective services to customers. Externally, the mass market could only be exploited by finding the books which would appeal to it. That led to the development of new genres, and new modes and forms of publishing. Experiment and innovation were necessary for the continual renewal of the trade. There is no great discontinuity in the history of British publishing at the turn of the twentieth century. The Net Book Agreement itself was an attempt to resolve issues which were, by then, the better part of a century old. For publishers the central task was the same as it had always been: to publish books which people wanted to buy at prices they could afford. That was the challenge which now had to be faced.

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12 THE PUBLISHING INDUSTR Y

The Net Book Agreement The Net Book Agreement (NBA) was the principal support upon which the whole structure of the British publishing industry rested for almost the whole of the twentieth century. Macmillan’s concept was a good one for its day and achieved precisely the objective for which it was designed: the stabilisation of prices and the de facto regulation of profit margins to guarantee a reasonable income to both publisher and bookseller (see above, pp. 101–3). It is important to recognise that it was always a voluntary agreement. Publishers were not obliged to put a net price on their books, and it was always doubtful whether the Agreement was enforceable in the courts. Whatever legal force it might have had derived from the fact that it was embedded in the contract between publisher and bookseller. Net books were sold to booksellers subject to, in the usual phrase, ‘the standard conditions of sale of net books’. If a bookseller then broke the rules, by selling at less than the net price, publishers would not supply that bookseller on trade terms. This was critical, for it was the trade terms – a discount of between 30 and 40 per cent on the net retail price – which made it possible for the bookseller to make a profit. Before World War I, the trade continued to be divided about the merits of the NBA. In the background to this was one of the great debates of early twentieth-century British politics: while the Liberals adhered to the free trade principles which their party had espoused since its emergence in the late 1840s, the Conservatives were increasingly converted to what was called ‘tariff reform’, that is, the introduction of duties on imports. During the first third of the century, the Conservative Party was badly divided between free traders and tariff reformers (Barnes 1994: 333–6). This was a significant factor in their loss of power at the 1906 general election, when the Liberals won a landslide victory and formed what was to be their last government of the century (Searle 2004: 258–61). The publishing industry, by introducing a system of price regulation (which could easily be presented as price fixing by a cartel), had entered into stormy political waters. In the circumstances it was only to be expected that the NBA would not have an easy passage to universal acceptance.

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The book war and The Times The first serious challenge to the Agreement came from an unlikely source. In the first few years of the twentieth century, The Times was in financial difficulties. Although the paper which John Walter had started as an advertising sheet for a new and improbable typesetting process in 1785 had become the voice of the Victorian establishment, it had suffered badly from competition in the 1890s. There were many reasons for this: unfortunate libel suits had cost a great deal of money, The Times was unable or unwilling to invest in new printing technology, its price was high and its style was distinctly oldfashioned in a world in which Newnes, Harmsworth and Pearson were creating a new kind of journalism which was affecting even The Times’s rivals among the serious newspapers such as The Daily Telegraph (Cranfield 1978: 204–21). In an attempt to overcome these problems, the Walter family, who still owned The Times, installed Moberley Bell (1847–1911) as manager at the office in Printing House Square. Bell had many ideas for the revival of the newspaper’s fortunes. These plans included The Times Literary Supplement, one of his abiding successes, and The Times Book Club, which almost brought total disaster (Woods and Bishop 1983: 183–8). The origin of the Book Club can be traced to two American booksellers, Horace Hooper and W. M. Jackson, whom Bell met in 1897 (History 1947: 443–4). They had their background in the very different book trade traditions which had developed in the United States, where direct selling by mail was almost a necessity given the vast distances between cities in that country and the difficulty of travel between them. They also brought with them a knowledge of the advertising techniques which had been developed in the USA to support mail-order operations (Tebbel 1972–8: 2, 109–12, 150–70). It was quite unlike the staid world of British publishing, and to Bell it spelled the salvation of The Times. In 1904, The Times reduced its annual subscription to £3. 0s. 0d. in an attempt to win back lost readers. In the following year it raised it again to £3. 18s. 0d., but this new price included automatic membership of The Times Book Club, a combination of circulating library and postal bookseller. The principle on which the Club operated was a simple one: members could borrow books from the Club, but they could also buy, at greatly reduced prices, books which had been withdrawn from the Club’s lending stock. It was this latter point which was to be the bone of contention with the book trade, for in practice virtually new books were thus made available for public sale at huge discounts on their net prices (Taraporevala 1969: 74–80). Bell himself was a keen supporter of the Book Club, not only because of the immediate advantages which it seemed to offer to The Times, but also because he believed that the NBA was keeping the prices of books artificially high (History 1947: 448–9). Bell and Hooper succeeded in negotiating a number of favourable agreements with major publishers to supply The Times with books for the Club at huge discounts on their net prices. Some publishers believed – or claimed to

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believe – that The Times had actually signed the Net Book Agreement, and that they were therefore free to supply on trade terms (Kingsford 1970: 24). It was soon apparent, however, that whatever may have been tacitly understood, the Club was actually selling books which were only a month old at a 331⁄3 per cent discount on net, and Edward Bell, the president of the Publishers’ Association, met with Moberley Bell (to whom he was not related) in May 1906 to discuss the matter (Macmillan 1924). The response of The Times was to increase its advertising for the ‘second-hand’ books withdrawn from the library. It also published a series of articles attacking the trade for its attitude to cheap books. Edward Bell claimed that the publishers even then were ready to reach an agreement, but that The Times refused to co-operate with them (Macmillan 1924: 39–40). Whatever the truth of the matter, it is certain that in October 1906 the publishers agreed among themselves not to supply any more books to The Times, either for the Book Club or for review in the Literary Supplement (Macmillan 1924: 49). Throughout the winter of 1906–7, there was a bitter struggle between the book publishers and the proprietors of The Times. The trade accused The Times of bad faith, and of subterfuge in obtaining books. The Times, with a good deal of public support, reiterated its view that book prices were too high, and that the publishers were making excessive profits. When John Murray refused to supply the Club with The Letters of Queen Victoria, which he published in the autumn of 1907, The Times printed a vitriolic attack on him. He sued for libel and was awarded damages of £7,500 (Kingsford 1970: 33–4). This was a further serious financial blow to the ailing newspaper and its increasingly concerned proprietor. Walter now decided that he had to sell The Times, and he looked around for a suitable purchaser. After several months of secret negotiations, he sold it to Harmsworth, recently raised to the peerage as Northcliffe (History 1947: 509–72; Ferris 1971: 145–8; see also above, pp. 149–50). Northcliffe knew that in order to restore the profitability of The Times he had to modernise both its management and its production, and extraneous diversions like quarrels with the publishers were the last thing he needed as he faced this unenviable task. In October 1908, The Times signed the Net Book Agreement, and the Book War was over (Kingsford 1970: 34–5). The Book War was a strange episode in the history of the trade. It arose largely out of the efforts of Moberley Bell and his American colleagues to rescue The Times without letting it slip from the hands of the Walter family. In this they failed, although The Times itself survived with little or no loss of authority. From the publishers’ perspective, however, the results of the ‘War’ could not have been better. The Net Book Agreement had successfully survived what was to prove to be its most serious challenge until after World War II. At critical moments in the fight, the publishers had held together, and the benefits of using the Publishers’ Association as a collective voice for the trade were visible to all. As it happened, 1907 was the first year in which more net than non-net books were published, and by 1914 over two-thirds of new books were published on

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net terms (Taraporevala 1969: 56). Gradually, the Agreement spread throughout the trade, even extending to include HMSO from 1917 (Taraporevala 1969: 57). By the end of World War I, most fiction was also being published on net terms (Taraporevala 1969: 59–60), a development which was to lead to the next conflict in which the publishers had to defend their position.

The publishers and the public libraries The NBA, with its implicit threat of the withdrawal of trade terms, was always broadly acceptable to the booksellers. It was, indeed, largely for their benefit that it had been devised, in the sense that Macmillan wanted to protect their profitability so that they could continue to provide the retail outlets which the publishers needed. It was less obviously beneficial, however, to some major groups of customers who could themselves exercise some economic power, and whose custom the trade could not afford to lose. For this reason, the Publishers’ Association found itself forced to confront a number of issues in the 1920s and 1930s. Eventually, it had to modify the Net Book Agreement to take account of the realities of the industry. The first challenge came from the public libraries (Taraporevala 1969: 149–69). The Library Association, the professional body of British librarians, took an interest in the NBA as early as 1902. At that time, and for many decades to come, the Association was dominated by public librarians, and particularly by a comparatively small group of chief librarians from the larger towns and cities (Johansen 2003). These institutions were very significant buyers of books, both fiction and non-fiction. When the Library Association began to seek means whereby public libraries could obtain discounts on their purchases of net books, the Publishers’ Association felt obliged to listen. After somewhat dilatory negotiations, the publishers finally refused the librarians’ request in 1908. When the subject was reopened after World War I, the situation on both sides had changed considerably. In 1919, county councils were, for the first time, empowered to run rate-supported libraries, and they quickly followed the example of the urban areas which had long since taken advantage of their similar powers under the Public Libraries Act of 1850 (Munford 1951: 23–30, 113–21). The number of libraries, and consequently their collective importance as buyers of books, had thus substantially increased by the middle of the 1920s. The county libraries, unlike their urban equivalents, were used by middle-class readers. They began to eat into the market of the commercial circulating libraries. In particular, they stocked middle-brow fiction in considerable quantities, and were thus increasingly important as customers for many general trade publishers. From the trade’s point of view, the mid-1920s were not a happy time. A decline in sales immediately before 1914 (Eliot 1994: 7–15) had been reversed during and after the war. Indeed, one contemporary regarded the early 1920s as something of a boom period for the trade (Unwin 1960: 165). This was,

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however, a temporary phenomenon, and this phase was over, according to another publisher of the period, by 1924–5 (Faber 1935: 80). In the circumstances, the publishers could not afford to alienate an important market sector which was supported by public funds. When the Library Association made a new approach to the trade in 1925, it found itself being received much more sympathetically than it had been twenty years earlier. Nothing was achieved immediately, but in 1929 the Library Association succeeded in persuading a joint committee of the Publishers’ Association and the Associated Booksellers to sign the Library Agreement. Under this agreement, a public library authority could obtain a licence from the Publishers’ Association which granted it a 10 per cent discount on its book purchases from named suppliers, provided that it transacted business to a minimum value of £100 per annum with each supplier. It was a compromise which laid the foundations for many years of cooperation between the trade and its most important single group of customers. Indeed, the library market increased during the century. By the 1970s public library purchases represented about a quarter of all domestic sales of British books, and far more than that of much fiction (Mann 1982: 98). The Library Agreement survived as long as the NBA itself; as the NBA was in its death throes in the mid-1990s (see below, pp. 226–7), the Library Agreement was still operative and public libraries and the libraries of local authority colleges were still the largest group of institutional book buyers (Fishwick 1995: 18–19).

The publishers and the book clubs Public libraries were important customers of the trade, but they were not, at least directly, its competitors. The case with book clubs was quite different. Like the techniques which had provoked the Book War, book clubs were American in origin. A few had existed in the USA in the nineteenth century (Tebbel 1972–8: vol. 3, 6, 182), but it was with the foundation of the Book of the Month Club in 1926 that their modern history began (Tebbel 1972–8: vol. 3, 287–95). The Book of the Month Club, and its rival the Literary Guild which was founded in the same year, were publishing organisations. They were quite different from the co-operative book-buying schemes which had existed in Britain during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Kaufman 1964–5). The mid-twentieth-century American clubs bought from the owners of the copyright in the chosen title the right to issue their own edition. The sale of this edition was restricted to registered members of the club. Distribution was by post, and indeed the book clubs themselves grew out of the American tradition of mail-order bookselling. Club editions were considerably cheaper than the publishers’ (or ‘trade’) editions, but members were obliged to take a specified number of books during their membership, and they had little choice of titles. The selection was made by a panel of literary experts. In the USA the clubs were firmly established by 1930, and it was perhaps inevitable that they would be imitated in Britain.

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The first British book club, the Book Society, was founded in 1929. It followed the American example to some extent, most notably in the appointment of a panel of literary experts to select the books; this panel included the popular novelists J. B. Priestley (1894–1984) and Hugh Walpole (1884–1941) (Kingsford 1970: 134). There was, however, one important difference. The Book Society was essentially a retailing organisation rather than a publisher, unlike its American progenitors. It bought new books from the publishers, often in large quantities, for sale to its members. Provided these were then sold at the net price, which they were, the Society was given the usual trade terms. There was a predictable reaction in the trade. Apart from publishers like George Harrap (1867–1938) who objected on cultural grounds to panels of authors telling readers what to read (Harrap 1935: 124–5), the opposition came from the booksellers. They saw this as a new form of competition, at a time when they thought that the NBA had solved at least some of their problems. In the very year in which the Book Society was founded, the Associated Booksellers voiced their objections at their annual conference (Taraporevala 1969: 179). The publishers, however, did not take the same line. Indeed, there were significant potential benefits to them. In effect, the publishers of a title chosen by the Book Society had sold a substantial proportion of the edition at the time of publication, and thus eased the age-old problem of beginning to recoup their pre-publication investment as quickly as possible. The tensions between publishers and booksellers may have been papered over by the Net Book Agreement, but they were certainly not dissolved. In the 1930s, publishers, far from opposing the development of the book clubs, saw them as a valuable source of income. Indeed, several leapt on the bandwagon themselves, led by Victor Gollancz (1894–1967), one of the most remarkable of inter-war British publishers. Gollancz, who had founded his business in 1928, had two great passions in his publishing life: detective fiction, of which he published some of the best examples in the golden age of the British detective story, and left-wing politics. In 1935 he founded the Left Book Club, which was to become something of a legend in British life and has more than once been credited with having had a significant influence on the Labour Party’s victory in the 1945 general election (Hodges 1978: 117–43; see below, pp. 167–8). The Left Book Club was, however, crucially different from the Book Society, and not merely in making its appeal to a particular interest group. Its books were specially published for members of the Club, and available only to members directly, and not through the bookshops. Gollancz was primarily a publisher, and his book club was a publishing operation. A new general book club, Reader’s Union, followed this example in 1930 by reverting to the American practice of buying rights for a reprint for sale only to members at a far lower price than the net price of the trade edition (Kingsford 1970: 137). Again, the Associated Booksellers protested, but the publishers were still lukewarm in their response, and it was not until the very eve of the outbreak of World War II that they finally agreed to regulations to

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control the operation of the clubs. By that time, however, another general club had been founded, the Reprint Society, which was actually a consortium of five trade publishers (Howard 1971: 165). The Book Club Regulations of 1939, in which the agreement between the Publishers’ Association and the book clubs was embodied, represented a compromise acceptable to both sides of the trade (Taraporevala 1969: 237–41), but also exposed their conflicting interests. The most important clause regulated the time which must elapse between the publication of the trade and club editions; this was to be not less than one year, except for political or religious clubs. It is difficult to judge what effect the regulations of 1939, and their rather less draconian successors (Davies 1979: 89–97), had on the growth of book clubs in Britain. Certainly, the clubs greatly expanded in the 1960s, when W H Smith added a whole stable of them to its many other enterprises (Wilson 1985: 422–5). By the end of the twentieth century, after the abandonment of the NBA, they were significant players in the book market (see below, p. 226).

Publishing at the beginning of the twentieth century The Net Book Agreement should be seen as part of the framework within which the twentieth-century British publishing industry operated. So far as the domestic market was concerned, it had the broad effect of ensuring the continued, although often precarious, existence of bookshops in most towns. Independent bookshops, most of them small and family-owned, were able to survive from the 1920s to the 1980s because their profit margins were protected by the provisions of the NBA and they were not exposed to price competition from larger retailers, notably W H Smith. The NBA was defended because it brought stability to the trade, and by the 1920s, as governments pursued tariff reform policies, it seemed less unusual than it had when it had first been promoted by Macmillan. Like any stabilising factor, however, it contained within it the seeds of conservatism and complacency. The players in the British book trade in the years between 1919 and 1939 had cosy and comfortable relationships which were not always beneficial to their customers. The institutional structures which British publishing developed during much of the twentieth century was intended to preserve rather than to change. The Net Book Agreement was essentially an instrument designed to counteract a specific problem of the late nineteenth century and used to maintain a stable structure in the twentieth. In itself, it had little effect on what was published, despite the later argument that it allowed publishers to be more adventurous than they might have been in a wholly unprotected market. Indeed, its principal effect, as Macmillan and its other early promoters had intended, was to allow the trade to continue in familiar ways; a suspicion of innovation, and of innovators, was to be a characteristic of the industry throughout the first seven decades of the century.

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In the inevitable spirit of self-examination which followed from the beginning of both a new century and a new reign, the latter as unfamiliar as the former in 1901, businessmen in many fields began to reassess their methods and their performance. Publishers were no exception, but with the new power of the Net Book Agreement to protect them, and the developing collective strength of the Publishers’ Association to sustain them, few felt the need for innovation. The trends which had been apparent in the late nineteenth century continued up to 1914. The separation of the various functions of the book trade was almost complete. One of the few printers which still had a publishing division retreated into its own field in 1909, when Bemrose of Derby, a pioneer of high quality colour printing, sold its small publishing division to the rising star of George Allen (Mumby and Stallybrass 1935: 79). Bemrose were quite clear that the reason for this was that publishing was not an appropriate activity for a printer (Hackett 1976: 37). Some of the late nineteenth-century developments continued to attract suspicion in the trade. Arthur Waugh (1866–1943), then an employee and later managing director of Chapman and Hall, was still unhappy about literary agents in the years before World War I, considering that it was the agent who now ‘called the tune’ in relations between author and publisher. Waugh, unlike Heinemann (see above, p. 140), dealt with them, but there is a clear suggestion that he found it a distasteful business (Waugh 1930: 203–6). Some agents were still a little defensive about their profession as late as the 1960s (Sissons 1969: 9). Although there was a steady annual increase in the number of books published each year between 1900 and 1914 (Eliot 1994: 7), many were reprints and most came from firms which were doing what they had always done. It was a recipe for steady success. Publishers who sought out and followed the taste of the reading public could not fail. A later generation of social critics might complain about the literary consequences (Leavis 1932), but the bestseller and the steady seller made the fortunes of many publishers (Bloom 2002: 55–9). Ward Lock, an unexciting and modestly successful house founded in 1854, was typical. It began to concentrate on solidly middle-brow books in the first decade of the new century. Among its authors was Rider Haggard; Ward Lock published his Ayesha (1905) when he was at the height of his fame, and later took on Edgar Wallace, E. Phillips Oppenheim, Leslie Charteris and other popular novelists. Like any successful house, it also had its steady sellers from the backlist; in Ward Lock’s case this included the hardy perennial of Mrs Beeton’s Household Management, first published in 1861, and still popular in the 1920s. To support the whole enterprise there was the famous series of redcovered travel guides which survived both the turn of the century and two world wars (Liveing 1954: 69, 77–80, 91–3). The bestsellers of the first two decades of the twentieth century, like those of any period, include a handful which long outlived their contemporary success, and others whose very authors and title are now forgotten by all but a few scholars. Those who are still remembered, and perhaps still read, in addition

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to Ward Lock’s Haggard, include Arnold Bennett (1867–1931), whose Five Towns novels began to appear in 1902; John Buchan (1875–1940) whose Thirty-nine Steps (1915) is perhaps now better known as a classic British movie; Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875–1950) whose Tarzan of the Apes leapt through the jungle for the first time in 1914; Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, already famous (although perhaps not as famous as his creation) and now perhaps nearing his swan song; Baroness Orczy (1865–1947) who is less well remembered than her greatest hero, The Scarlet Pimpernel (1905); and Edgar Wallace, perhaps the most prolific of all of them (Bloom 2002: 110–31). Every generation of publishers and authors since Constable and Scott have made their own contributions to the stock of seemingly perpetual bestsellers. Some of them eventually drop out of fashion (Scott is an example of this) while others are kept alive largely because they are studied at school and university. But there is a genuine tradition of popular fiction which is renewed in each generation. The publisher’s Shangri-la (another creation of Rider Haggard) is to find them. The move to the middle, the appeal to the popular taste of the educated middle class and its upper and lower borderlands, lay at the heart of the success of J. M. Dent (1849–1926) in one of the first publishing experiments of the new century. Everyman’s Library had its origins in 1904, when Dent conceived the idea of a series of reprints of classic texts with introductions by leading experts, to be retailed at the lowest possible price. Dent always claimed that this was a wholly original idea, but in fact he had many predecessors in the field. Everyman’s Library was, in one sense, just another reprint series of the kind which had been familiar since the late eighteenth century (see above, pp. 72–4). More specifically, Dent employed Ernest Rhys (1859–1946) as his series editor. Rhys had worked for the Newcastle publisher Walter Scott, and had made a great success of his Camelot series which served as a model for Everyman’s, not least in the idea of regular publication of batches of titles with specially written introductions. Dent claimed that three million volumes were sold in the first eighteenth months after publication actually began in 1906. There is no reason to doubt his word (Turner 1992). Everyman’s Library was so successful that Dent ran into production problems and had to establish his own production facilities in the new garden city at Letchworth to meet the demand. By the end of 1906, 152 volumes were in print, and Everyman’s Library was clearly a major triumph for its publisher (Dent 1938: 123). By 1975, 60 million had been sold (Rose 2002: 135). Everyman’s Library was so successful – and so good – that it all but drove its competitors out of the field of classic reprints. But not entirely, and others were tempted to try to replicate Dent’s success. Humphrey Milford, charged by the Delegates of the Oxford University Press with establishing a commercial branch of the Press’s publishing business in London, bought the World’s Classics series from Grant Richards (who had gone bankrupt), and began to publish them under the OUP imprint in 1906. The series was the foundation of the Press’s successful venture into the competitive world of London

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publishing, and, like Everyman’s Library, was important both educationally and culturally (Richards 1934: 101–5; Rose 2002: 132–5; Sutcliffe 1978: 140–4). Innovation, however, was a minority activity, as it has always been in the book trade. Indeed, the very success of Everyman’s Library was partly dependent on the fact that many of the great Victorian writers were beginning to come into the public domain under the terms of the 1842 Copyright Act (see above, pp. 114–15). When Waugh arrived at Chapman and Hall in 1901, he found that the house depended almost entirely on continuing sales of Dickens and Carlyle, both of whom they had published in their heyday. He recognised the need for new authors, and indeed new staff, but neither was easily found (Waugh 1930: 197–201). A. and C. Black, who had moved to London from their native Glasgow in 1891, published no fiction other than Scott, and largely survived on the profits of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Even that asset was sold in 1897, and by 1900 the firm was living on little more than its past earnings from dead authors (Newth 1957: 56–61, 64–9). For both of these houses, and for others, what was needed was rescue rather than revival. Waugh saved Chapman and Hall by overcoming his dislike of agents and using them to recruit new authors, most notably H. G. Wells who came through J. B. Pinker (Waugh 1930: 208–16). Black was saved by the purchase of the rights in the title of the almost defunct Who’s Who at one of the last of the trade sales in 1896, and by a subsequent venture into publishing illustrated books for the gift market (Newth 1957: 70–81). The sorry state of British publishing on the eve of World War I is at least partly explained by the trade’s absorption in its own affairs. The Book War had taken its toll, and when the very survival of the trade seemed in doubt, innovation was hardly a prudent course.

1911: a new Copyright Act Copyright law, like the Net Book Agreement, is part of the environment in which publishers have to operate. For publishers, the purpose of copyright is a simple one: it protects their investments. During the nineteenth century, however, as we have seen, legal, social and economic developments, at an international as well as at national level, created many more interested parties. Agents, for example, were primarily concerned with ensuring that their clients exploited the intellectual property which they created to their maximum financial advantage. The author–publisher relationship became more overtly commercial, and perhaps more confrontational as a result. By the early years of the twentieth century, it was clear that some of the intrinsic faults of the 1842 Copyright Act could no longer be ignored (see above, pp. 114–15). Its imprecision on some key points had been acceptable in the past, but circumstances were changing. The growth of both export markets and publishing in British colonies and dominions (see below, pp. 181–93), the final settlement of a copyright agreement with the United States, and the development of the Berne Convention all meant that change was becoming inevitable. This was compounded by

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changes in publishing practice. A greater awareness of the value of rights in cheap reprints, colonial editions, newspaper and magazine serialisations and so on was one factor. The development of new media, including sound recording, broadcast radio and cinema, was another (see below, pp. 164–5). In the event, it was developments in the international arena which forced a revision of British law. The amendments to the Berne Convention, which were agreed at a conference in Berlin in 1908, included various clauses which were incompatible with the 1842 Act. It was, however, essential to incorporate them in British law in order to ensure continued international protection for British publishers and authors. Hence, the 1842 Act had to be revised. It was actually almost entirely superseded. A Board of Trade committee established in 1909 heard evidence on a wide variety of topics, many of them reflecting new concerns about such matters as the rights in recorded performances of music. The playwright Bernard Shaw (1956–1950) raised the question of film rights and other performing rights in plays. The Bill which emerged from all of this was comparatively uncontentious, although it was truly radical. Above all, copyright was, for the first time in British law, linked to the lifetime of the author (the issue in the Berlin amendments which had created the anomaly in 1908), and explicitly derived the rights from the author’s creation of the property. This was a triumph for the Society of Authors, but publishers also benefited. All copyrights were now protected for fifty years after the death of the author, and both authors (and their heirs) and indeed agents were in a far stronger position to negotiate with publishers. Typically, the newly acknowledged rights of authors would be best exploited by reaching an agreement with a publisher, but it was a far less one-sided transaction than had often been the case in the past. Moreover, in recognising the arrival of the gramophone and the cinema, the authors of the Act had created a framework within which other subsidiary rights for other – as yet uninvented – media could be developed (Feather 1994: 199–204).

World War I The outbreak of war in the autumn of 1914 presented many additional difficulties to the book trade. Output was already declining from its peak in 1913, and did so annually until the end of the war in November 1918, by which time it had reached the lowest level since 1902 (Eliot 1994: 7). In this case, the war may possibly have exacerbated a trend which had already begun, but there were some problems which were specific to wartime. Paper supply was a major issue, because both the finished product and raw materials for domestic production had been imported, sometimes from Germany (Evans 1955: 182–3; Shorter 1971: 164–5). On this matter, the value of having a collective voice through the Publishers’ Association soon became apparent. The Board of Trade, which was responsible for the allocation of paper, ignored many of the trade’s arguments, but on one crucial matter the publishers were victorious, when the Board conceded the absolute necessity of a continuous supply of paper on

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which to print school books. Nothing, however, could prevent the rise in the price of paper, which was inevitably reflected in an upward movement of the prices of books themselves (Kingsford 1970: 52–7). Raw materials were not the only difficulty. Both production and distribution facilities were interrupted by war production and war transport. Black’s had to abandon their new and successful venture into colour books (Newth 1957: 91). All firms lost many key employees to the services, in many cases permanently. Despite lobbying by the Publishers’ Association, publishing was not classified as a trade of national importance whose employees were exempt from military service, and both in the initial enthusiasm for voluntary recruitment in 1914–15, and in the later conscription to the forces, many good and essential men went. Batsfords, for example, found themselves with only two of their permanent staff remaining, and the firm inevitably suffered (Bolitho 1943: 52). Stanley Unwin (1885–1968), who had recently bought out George Allen and established Allen and Unwin, had lost three of his fellow directors to war service by 1918 (Unwin 1972: 66). The whole trade found itself in difficulties. Sales fell, and profits fell even more heavily in the face of wartime inflation (Attenborough 1975: 81–2). The total labour force in the paper, printing, book and stationery trades fell from 397,000 in 1911 to 314,000 in 1921, the first decennial decrease since records had begun in 1841 (Eliot 1994: Table F6). For an industry whose state in 1914 had been less healthy than many had assumed, the post-war world would not be easy. In 1918, unlike 1945, it was assumed that there would be a rapid reversion to the conditions of ‘pre-war’. The land fit for heroes sounded remarkably like an idealised vision of the England of Edward VII and Queen Victoria. The reality was to prove very different from the dream, for Britain, and indeed the whole industrialised world, was about to enter two dreadful decades in which a brief period of prosperity was followed by a catastrophic economic and political crisis. The overwhelming victory for the wartime coalition at the 1919 election set the tone. Despite the continued presence of Lloyd George, a Liberal, as Prime Minister, it was in all but name a Conservative government, and conservatism was the dominant trend of the period. This was as true in the publishing industry as it was elsewhere in national life.

Publishing between the two world wars: the competition to books For much of the inter-war period from 1918 to 1939, British publishing was as similar as it could be to the pre-war years. There were, of course, some institutional developments, notably the partial modification of the Net Book Agreement for the benefit of public libraries (see above, pp. 155–6). The period also saw the first attempts at the collective promotion of books. In 1925 the National Book Council was formed to promote books and to encourage the habit of leisure reading. The Publishers’ Association was lukewarm at first and

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for many years to come (Kingsford 1970: 95), but this was the beginning of a long-term trend which gathered force in the 1950s and 1960s. It was, perhaps almost unconsciously, a recognition of the changing world in which the publishers were working. For the first time in nearly 500 years, the printed word was no longer the only means of mass communication or mass entertainment. The cinema had been increasingly familiar in Britain since before the turn of the century, but its real popularity is a phenomenon of the 1920s. After the further boost of the introduction of sound in 1927 cinema attendances went up rapidly. In 1935, there were nearly 4,500 cinemas in Britain. In that year some 907 million tickets were sold; ticket sales peaked at 1,635 million in 1946 (Cunningham 1990: 311–12; Perelli 1983: 372, 375). There was a positive side to this. The sale of film rights was a direct benefit to authors and publishers, and the ‘film of the book’ could stimulate sales of the book itself. Indeed, some popular books of the first half of the century are probably better remembered as films than as books (see above, pp. 159–60). The cinema was nevertheless a challenge to the book industry. It made inroads into both the time and the money available for leisure. Other social changes tended in the same direction, as a greater variety of leisure activities became available to more people. The motor car, and all that it implied in taking families out of their homes, was not really available to the majority until the 1960s, but there was one threat within the home itself which the publishers could not ignore. Radio broadcasting began in Britain in 1922, but came of age with the establishment of the BBC in 1926. In that year, 2.1 million licences were issued; the number had risen to over 9 million by 1939. In 1935, 98 per cent of the population already had access to a radio set (Briggs 1965–95: vol. 2, 253). Even newspapers suffered from the incursions of the radio, for news broadcasts of a very high standard were a feature of the BBC from its earliest years. Alternative leisure activities were a threat to the publishing industry; some other developments worked in its favour. The generally higher standard of lighting in most homes, as electricity replaced gas, made reading easier for those who wanted to read. Educational standards were rising, and almost total adult literacy had been attained. Public library provision, although still inadequate by later standards, was improving, bringing more people into contact with books and creating more libraries which had to buy them. The commercial circulating libraries were also going through one last period of success before the improvements in public libraries (and their increased social acceptability among the middle classes) finally killed them. The problem for the publishers was how to meet these challenges and how to exploit the opportunities they offered. One critical factor was that both the cinema and the radio, and later television, brought additional direct revenue into the book trade through sales of rights. As early as 1922, the Society of Authors proposed a scheme for recompensing authors whose works were read or dramatised on the radio, and they duly reached an agreement with the BBC. The authors were not entirely happy

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with it, but it did represent an acknowledgement of the need to pay authors whose works were used at second hand (Bonham-Carter 1978–84: vol. 2, 205–12). In 1938, a further agreement included the publishers as represented by the Publishers’ Association; in addition to increasing the levels of payment, it proposed that the BBC should mention the publisher as well as the author when a book was broadcast or referred to in a broadcast. Negotiations on the latter point were still not concluded when war broke out in 1939, but the publishers were not dissatisfied with their efforts (Kingsford 1970: 124–5). The right to make a film of a book was of course protected under the 1911 Copyright Act (see above, pp. 161–2). These rights began to be exploited for the benefit of both authors and publishers even before 1914, and their importance grew with the popularity of the cinema itself (Weedon 1999: 200–3). In 1933, for example, Hugh Walpole was able to sell the rights in his Vanessa to MGM for $12,500 (Bonham-Carter 1978–84: vol. 2, 256). The invention of the ‘talkies’ provided another opportunity and provoked another crisis. The production companies needed script-writers, and many authors were able to supplement their incomes from that source; in 1937 a British Screenwriters’ Association was formed under the auspices of the Society of Authors (BonhamCarter 1978–84: vol. 2, 256).

Publishing between the two world wars: some innovations and innovators Despite the general conservatism, which sometimes seemed like inertia, not all publishers in the 1920s and 1930s were afraid of risk-taking. Indeed, there were some notable innovators. Like their Victorian predecessors, they were individualistic and sometimes highly idiosyncratic. The most successful of them were able to break into the charmed circles of the publishing world and to make their marks on it. Three men are outstanding in the history of British publishing in the first half of the twentieth century, and each of them demonstrates how an innovative publisher could succeed even against a background of general economic gloom. These three were Stanley Unwin, Victor Gollancz and Allen Lane (1902–70). They were in many ways very different from each other, but they have some intriguing characteristics in common. All of them began their careers in comparatively conventional publishing houses. Unwin indeed came from a book trade family. His grandfather, Jacob Unwin (1802–55), had founded a printing firm in 1826, which was to become one of the few major book printers of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Unwin 1976). His uncle, Thomas Fisher Unwin (1848–1935), had branched out on his own as a publisher in the late 1870s, having been apprenticed to Hodder and Stoughton. T. Fisher Unwin ran a notable house; his early authors included Joseph Conrad (1857–1924) and W. B. Yeats (1865–1939); his willingness to support new writers until they became profitable rarely deserted him. He was later to be

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the first publisher of both the romantic novelist Ethel M. Dell (1881–1939), and Dorothy Sayers (1893–1957), the creator of Lord Peter Wimsey and translator of Dante (Unwin 1972: 40). Dell was a discovery of Edward Garnett (1868–1937), Unwin’s principal reader who played a critical role in the development of the T. Fisher Unwin list (Collin 1991); he was also responsible for bringing Joseph Conrad. Unwin’s own talent was for taking risks when he felt that they were a worthwhile commercial or literary proposition. Stanley Unwin joined his uncle in 1904, and was later to claim for himself much of the credit for the firm’s success in the ten years before World War I (Unwin 1972: 57–61). Be that as it may, there is no doubt that the younger Unwin showed both a talent for his new profession and an impatience with his uncle’s methods of pursuing it. He learned his trade from Fisher Unwin, and was to put his lessons to good use. Unwin might well have felt that he had chosen an unpropitious moment for his leap to freedom, for it was in 1914 that he began his career as an independent publisher. He did not start entirely from scratch; his first action was to buy the ailing house of George Allen. Allen’s had a strange history. It had been founded in 1871, largely at the instigation of the critic John Ruskin (1819–1900) who wanted an outlet through which to publish his own works. Although Allen expanded his list, it was the Ruskin copyrights which were its only real strength (Mumby and Stallybrass 1935: 53–63, 75). In the early years of the twentieth century, Allen’s sons bought a number of other small houses, including Swan, Sonnenschein, a modestly successful publisher of social science and philosophy books, who are chiefly remembered as the publishers of the first English edition of Das Kapital in 1887 (Mumby and Stallybrass 1935: 25–7). By 1913, the firm was bankrupt, and it was this company which Unwin bought, renaming it George Allen and Unwin, which it has remained ever since (Mumby and Stallybrass 1935: 83–4; Unwin 1972: 62–4). From the beginning of his independent career, Stanley Unwin proved adept at attracting authors and at selling serious books. An early recruit was the mathematician and philosopher (and much else) Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), who was an Allen and Unwin author for the rest of his long life. At a later date he published both Gandhi and Harold Laski, building his list on a solid foundation of contemporary non-fiction, while at the same time exploiting his growing backlist, including, of course, the still valuable Ruskin (Unwin 1972: 70, 90). Unwin was always active in the general affairs of the trade. He was president of the Publishers’ Association in 1933–5, and involved in most of its many initiatives in the 1920s and 1930s, especially in relation to the everincreasing complexities of subsidiary rights. He has also left a small legacy to historians of British publishing; his Truth About Publishing, first published in 1926 and revised for seven further editions (Unwin 1926), is an invaluable if sometimes biased insight into the industry in the middle decades of the twentieth century. His autobiography, however, is commonly believed to belie its title (Unwin 1960).

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Victor Gollancz began his career in an even more conventional house than did Unwin, and at an even less propitious time. After a short time as a schoolmaster, he joined Benn Brothers in 1921, where he found the formidable Sir Ernest Benn (1875–1954) at the height of his considerable powers. Benn published magazines and technical books. It was in this department that Gollancz chiefly worked, and he transformed it by his adventurous policy of publishing books for collectors as well as technical manuals. The company developed a large general list and increased its turnover tenfold, largely thanks to Gollancz’s efforts. Perhaps because of this, he and Benn quarrelled, and he left to form his own house where he could follow his own interests (Edwards 1987: 142–59; Hodges 1978: 16–17). Gollancz left Benn in 1928, when the book trade, like the country as a whole, was about to plunge into the Great Depression. The economic crisis took its toll on the publishing industry as much as it did elsewhere. Between 1930 and 1937 the number of new titles published each year fell consistently, while the number of reprints rose dramatically (Norrie 1982: 220). The record of a single house vividly illustrates the problem: in 1928, Hodder and Stoughton had sales worth £637,770; by 1939 this figure had fallen to £289,375 (Attenborough 1975: 122). The message was, apparently, clear. New books did not sell, and publishers could survive only on a flourishing backlist. It was not a good start for a firm which had no backlist, and whose founder had a commitment to publishing large numbers of new books. In a sense, however, it was the economic crisis that was the making of Gollancz, for with it came the revival of the political left in Britain, a revival which was further impelled by the establishment of a Nazi government in Germany in 1933. From the beginning, Gollancz, who had always been a political animal, had intended to publish political books, but he can never have imagined that they would form so important a part of his business. In the early 1930s, Gollancz had already published a number of important books by left-wing writers. John Strachey’s The Coming Struggle for Power and G. D. H. Cole’s What Marx Really Meant were both published in 1932, but it was Hitler’s accession to power which provided the impetus for the next development. Gollancz himself was involved in the agitation for a Popular Front, the idea that the democratic left should work with the communists as a united force against Fascism. It was out of this that there emerged his idea for the Left Book Club. The Club started in 1936 with a membership of 9,000; by 1939 it had reached 50,000 and its publications included some of the classics of modern polemics. It is still unclear to what extent it was dominated by communists, although there is little doubt that the official history of the Club (Lewis 1970) deliberately plays this down (Edwards 1987: 117–43; Hodges 1978: 194–329). Gollancz himself was remarkably naive about communist influence in left-wing organisations in the mid-1930s, and indeed about the views of some of his own close associates. As a commercial enterprise, the Left Book Club was never straightforward. There were some titles which

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barely covered their costs even at the height of the Club’s success, and the various ancillary activities, such as public meetings and newsletters, took up not only a great deal of Gollancz’s time but also great quantities of money. There is no doubt of Gollancz’s sincerity in his political and charitable activities. What might be doubted, however, is his business acumen. He was rescued from the possible consequences by a loyal staff, and by the unfailing instinct for success which he had displayed during the first eight years of his firm’s existence. It would, however, be quite wrong to think of Gollancz only as a publisher of political propaganda. Publishers who tried to build a business on a cause had often found themselves in commercial difficulties, as John Cassell had discovered a hundred years earlier (see above, pp. 104–5). Gollancz was far too good a publisher to make any such mistake. He was an inspired selector of both books and authors. His first bestseller, in the firm’s first year, was the autobiography of the ballerina Isadora Duncan (Edwards 1987: 39). He brought with him a number of ‘his’ authors from Benn. These included Dorothy Sayers, whose contract with Fisher Unwin had gone to Benn when the latter bought the former in 1926 (Edwards 1987: 39–42). Detective fiction became something of a feature of Gollancz lists, as did middle-brow fiction in general. Gollancz, however, recognised that there was more to publishing than choosing good books. They had to be sold. In this aspect of publishing he was a genius, and it is perhaps here that his true originality lies. All Gollancz books had a distinctive yellow and black cover, and the firm’s logo became familiar through regular newspaper advertisements. He took advice from the great typographer Stanley Morison (1869–1967) (Barker 1972: 33), who ensured that Gollancz’s books, as well as his advertisements, were always decently designed and printed (Hodges 1978: 50–1). By the outbreak of World War II, Gollancz had built a list and a firm which could survive the vagaries of its founder. He had revolutionised the advertising of books, and demonstrated that the popular wisdom of the trade – which was that newspaper advertising was a waste of money – was wrong. He had shown that even in the straitened circumstances of the 1930s a publisher of genius could carve out a new way for the trade. Unwin and Gollancz were not the only new publishers of the 1920s and 1930s, although, with Allen Lane, the founder of Penguin Books (see below, pp. 173–7), they were probably the most influential. Others included Jonathan Cape, who started his own business in 1921 (Howard 1971: 420), Frederic Warburg, who revived the fortunes of Martin Secker as Secker and Warburg (Norrie 1982: 59; Warburg 1959; Thomson 1986), Geoffrey Faber, who distinguished himself by publishing poetry without going bankrupt and by employing T. S. Eliot to edit the list (Norrie 1982; 63–4), and Michael Joseph. The difficulties of breaking into the trade are well illustrated by Joseph. His early career was quite different from that of either Unwin or Gollancz. He was a moderately successful and very prolific author who, in 1924, left Hutchinsons, where he had worked as advertising manager, to join the literary agents, Curtis Brown.

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Here he rapidly made a name for himself as a shrewd and perceptive judge of a book, gaining the respect of authors and publishers alike (Joseph 1986: 103–26). His ambition, however, was to be a publisher himself, and in 1935 he left Curtis Brown to set up his own house. Gollancz was one of the many publishers who had benefited from Joseph’s work at Curtis Brown, and he willingly invested in the new firm (Edwards 1987: 197). By the time Gollancz left the Michael Joseph board three years later (in rather acerbic circumstances), Joseph was reasonably well established, with a growing backlist and a few successes. His individuality was shown by his first catalogue, which was the first publisher’s list ever to have colour illustrations. Above all, Joseph had one great talent without which no publisher can succeed: his ability to spot a book. Despite this, however, the firm was never prosperous in the pre-war period, although it published some important books, and a few bestsellers (Joseph 1986: 134, 142–4).

On the brink of war: British publishing in 1939 Unwin, Gollancz and Joseph were connected in many ways, through their firms, their authors and, above all, through their attitudes. They were all willing to take risks, both literary and commercial, and they were all somewhat iconoclastic in their attitude to the trade. Unwin and Gollancz are particularly prominent in the story of British publishing between the wars, because so much that was new and exciting was happening because of them. On a broader scale, however, the fact is that very little was happening that was either new or exciting. The older houses went on much as they always had. Small firms which could no longer compete in a more cut-throat market were bought up by larger ones, for the process of amalgamation which has created the giants of contemporary British publishing was already happening before 1939. American money was coming into the British publishing industry. Indeed, it had been influencing the British publishing scene since before World War I; its importance continued to grow. In about 1895, Chapman and Hall became sole European agents for the New York firm of Wiley, publishers of scientific and technical books. At first, Chapman and Hall may have seen this as little more than a profitable agency, but in fact the success of the Wiley books began to influence their own publishing policy; by 1914 the Wiley connection was an essential element in the financial stability of the house (Waugh 1930: 252, 273–4; St John 1990: 167–81). After the war, some firms found themselves even more deeply enmeshed with American partners. Doubleday Page and Company of New York bought Heinemann in 1920, although they continued to run the English side of the business as a separate operation (Norrie 1982: 54). Dent’s Everyman’s Library was also a beneficiary of American willingness to invest in British publishing; E. P. Dutton and Co. were Dent’s partner, and had a contractual obligation to take 2,000 copies of every title issued (Dent 1938: 143). In difficult times, the need to find money to invest in new books

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was often paramount. The hard-pressed directors of Cassells sold their company to the Berry brothers, the newspaper magnates who were later to be Lords Camrose and Kemsley. The sale was necessary because the effects of the General Strike of 1926 brought Cassells close to bankruptcy, although in fact the book publishing side of the business was re-established as an independent entity, and achieved perhaps its greatest period under the brilliant direction of Newman Flower in the 1930s (Nowell-Smith 1958: 211–12). The involvement of newspaper groups in book publishing and working arrangements with American companies were both attempts to find capital from which to fund the increasingly costly business of book publishing. There was also a constant effort by many publishers to find overseas markets, especially in the United States and the British Commonwealth and Empire. The importance of the United States as a consumer of British books was at the root of the great copyright disputes of the nineteenth century (see above, pp. 135–6). Once this problem was solved, the way lay open to agency agreements, amalgamations, rights deals and other explorations of the vast American market. Indeed, some of the links antedated the conclusion of the copyright disputes. Macmillans had had a branch in New York since 1869 (James 2002a: 9), which in 1896 was reorganised as the Macmillan Company of New York and began to publish on its own account as well as being the American representative of the parent company (James 2002b; Morgan 1943: 82–3, 163–5). In the same year, 1896, Oxford University Press, abandoning a former arrangement for American distribution, opened its own New York business, which, like Macmillans, soon began to assume a considerable degree of independence (Sutcliffe 1978: 89–91). Lesser houses were equally attracted to the United States. Ward Lock opened a branch in New York in 1882 (Liveing 1954: 55). Those who could not afford a branch could at least use British publishers who were established across the Atlantic as their sole agents, as Black’s used Macmillan until they established their own agency in 1893 (Newth 1957: 61–2). British publishing during the first forty years of the twentieth century offered many contrasts. On the one hand, it reflected Britain’s dominance of a world far beyond her own shores, and even in 1939 the impermanence of that domination was still not generally recognised (see below, pp. 181–93). On the other hand, it sometimes seemed almost as insular as it had been in Caxton’s day. Victor Gollancz, one of the giants of the modern British publishing industry, made his name and his fortune by publishing two archetypally English genres: detective fiction, and mild and humane left-wing politics. The great houses which could trace their names back to the reign of Queen Victoria and beyond still seemed to dominate the publishing world. The newcomers were noisy and brash, and were perhaps doing some things right, but the established houses felt no need to imitate them. All of this was to change. Some of the change came from great geopolitical forces far beyond the scope of the industry itself, but at least one, which was revolutionary in its own way, had already come from within. One man was to recognise that there was a need to find new

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markets which had never been explored before: a market of those who went to the cinema, who listened to the radio, who used the libraries and who read newspapers, but who never bought a book. His idea was simple: publish cheap and attractive books, but publish good books, and sell them where people bought other goods. He was the third of the great innovators, and, beyond question, the most influential of all of them; his name was Allen Lane, and his legacy was the modern paperback.

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13 PAPERBACK PUBLISHING

Precursors The 1930s was not a good decade for new enterprise in British publishing, which was certainly not exempt from the general economic malaise (Eichengreen 2004). Despite the achievements of Unwin and Gollancz, the general ethos in the trade was conservative rather than radical, and favoured retrenchment rather than expansion. Yet what was perhaps the greatest single innovation in twentieth-century publishing emerged during this discouraging time: the mass market paperback. The paperback revolutionised the commercial world of books. By the 1970s, it was ubiquitous, and had become a familiar presence where books had rarely been seen before. From an historical perspective, however, although the material from which its cover is made has given its name to the paperback, this was not actually the great innovation. The key to an understanding of the history of the modern paperback is to consider how the market for it was identified and developed. Paper-covered books have a much longer history than the modern paperback. The earliest known example dates from the late fifteenth century, and books were regularly issued in paper covers from the late sixteenth century onwards. Some were elaborately decorated, others were intended only as temporary covers before the owner had the book ‘properly’ bound (Cloonan 1991: 3–13). Paper covers were used in eighteenth-century England, sometimes for cheapness (as with children’s books) and sometimes because it was assumed that the item would eventually be bound (as in the case of part books). The gradual mechanisation of bookbinding made them easier to manufacture, and they gradually became more common (Malavieille 1985). Paper covers were normal in France for almost all books in the nineteenth century (and to some extent still are), while in Germany they were used by Tauchnitz from the beginning of his series (see above, p. 135), and by many other publishers. The Tauchnitz example has an important place in the history of the modern paperback. It familiarised some British book buyers with the concept of the paperback book. More importantly, through one of its German competitors, the Tauchnitz model directly influenced the format and design of the mid-

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twentieth-century British paperback. In addition to these continental examples, however, there were both British and American precedents for books having been published in paper covers in the nineteenth century. In the United States paper-covered books were a familiar sight on the bookstalls by the 1850s (Tebbel 1972–8: vol. 3, 210–14), and some were issued in Britain during the nineteenth century including the familiar ‘yellowbacks’ of popular fiction to be found by the score on station bookstalls (McLean 1983; Sadler 1930). The significance of the modern paperback, however, lies not only in its physical form. To some extent the use of paper rather than boards and cloth saves money, and the intention was indeed to use the paper cover to ensure cheapness. This desire links the paperback with one of the great traditions of British publishing, the reprint series, which can be traced back to Bell’s British Poets and its late eighteenth-century competitors. It was a tradition which was continued with vigour throughout the nineteenth century, especially after the railways provided a whole new market of travellers who wanted cheap light reading for their journeys (see above, p. 94). The early twentieth-century contribution to the tradition included, of course, Everyman’s Library and World’s Classics (see above, pp. 160–1). These were among the more high-minded examples, but there were few publishers who did not have a series of cheap reprints of their own books, especially of novels or of works whose copyright was in the public domain. It was out of these two traditions – the paper-covered book and the cheap reprint series – that the modern paperback was born.

Allen Lane The progenitor of the ‘paperback revolution’ was Allen Lane, who, like Gollancz and Unwin, had been brought up in the trade before he broke away to form his own house. Lane, however, learned his trade from someone very different from Fisher Unwin or Sir Ernest Benn. His uncle, John Lane (1854–1925), had been the enfant terrible of British publishing in the 1890s. The elder Lane, with his partner Elkin Mathews (1851–1921), had established a bookshop at the sign of The Bodley Head in Mayfair in 1887, and they soon turned to publishing. Lane and Mathews, both jointly and later separately, were adventurous and innovative publishers. Bodley Head’s early publications included the notorious Yellow Book (see above, p. 128), with contributions from, among others, Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley and Richard Le Gallienne (1866–1947). But for its publishers, The Yellow Book was more than just an avant-garde literary magazine. It was also a tool which they used for promoting both the authors and the titles that they published. It has been cogently argued that they were consciously creating what a later generation would call a ‘brand’ (Stetz 1991). Lane broke with Mathews before the end of the nineteenth century, and set up a firm in his own name. In the years before World War I he continued to publish with some success and often in the vanguard of literary taste.

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Moreover, unlike most British publishers, Lane was never afraid to publish contemporary foreign authors, including, for example, André Maurois and Anatole France. Mathews meanwhile went on to publish James Joyce and Ezra Pound among other modernist writers (Lambert and Ratcliffe 1987; Nelson 1989). When Allen Lane joined his uncle at The Bodley Head in 1919 (Morpurgo 1979: 17), he was not joining a staid and conventional publishing house. He was, however, joining one which had problems on the horizon. He learned his trade there, soon became an essential part of the business and duly inherited The Bodley Head when John Lane died. By that time, however, it had declined from its former eminence. Although its books were still elegantly produced, as Lane had always insisted that they should be, they were no longer in the forefront of the literary and artistic world. Allen Lane had actually inherited a house with a great, but somewhat decayed, tradition of innovative and imaginative publishing. He revived The Bodley Head by reverting to what his uncle had been doing in the 1890s, both by publishing adventurous books and by making sure that they were well publicised. Indeed, he proved to have a considerable talent for publicity. Perhaps the most remarkable episode was that of the publication of the first British edition of Joyce’s Ulysses in 1936. Lane had been trying to obtain the British rights for some years, and eventually succeeded after T. S. Eliot had declined the offer on behalf of Faber and Faber. Ulysses was duly published by The Bodley Head, and no prosecution ensued, despite the long-standing practice of British customs officers of seizing copies of the book which were brought into the country (McCleery 2002; Morpurgo 1979: 75–8; Thomas 1969: 303). It was a major triumph for Lane, and brought him, not for the last time, wide public attention.

From Albatross to Penguin By that time, however, Lane had embarked on his greatest enterprise. Despite a few successes, and despite the vigour of both Lane himself and his brothers, who were with him in the business, The Bodley Head was in trouble. Although later in life he was always to maintain that the paperbacks grew out of popular demand for cheap books (Lane 1957: 101), the fact is that the Lanes were trying to find a way to save their publishing house. To do so, Lane looked to the tradition of cheap reprints, but decided to go even further than his predecessors by adopting a new physical format and at the same time trying to find unconventional channels of sales. Lane’s original plan was to issue a series of low priced reprints of good books under The Bodley Head imprint. In the end, he decided instead to make his series different from the others by using a different format and a new imprint. There can be little doubt that this decision was influenced by the form of the Albatross series, issued in Germany from 1932. Albatross was the brainchild of John Holroyd-Reece, an Englishman who had spent his publishing career on the continent, where the tradition of

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paper-covered books was so well established. Holroyd-Reece had set out to compete with Tauchnitz, now nearly a century old and beginning to look distinctly old-fashioned. He designed a new format for the books, slightly taller and less broad than Tauchnitz. It was essentially the same size and shape as the familiar mass market paperback of today; this was the first use of the format. Holroyd-Reece’s books had brightly coloured covers which were made of paper slightly thicker than that used by Tauchnitz, and using a different colour for different subjects and genres. This was the source of Lane’s physical conception of Penguins, and perhaps even the inspiration for the title of the series (Schmoller 1974: 298–300). Lane’s true originality lay in his confidence that good books could be sold in large numbers, and in his willingness, at least at first, to use unconventional channels of distribution in order to achieve this. The original plan was to publish ten titles, and to sell them through chain stores and any other outlet which would accept them. The book trade was generally very sceptical, not least because in order to hold the price down to sixpence Lane would have to produce print runs of at least 20,000 copies (Schmoller 1974: 299), which presented a serious problem of distribution and sales. Jonathan Cape (1879–1960) was one of those who doubted the viability of the scheme. Lane had discussed the whole matter with Cape before deciding to proceed; the latter’s attitude was that the young man was welcome to bankrupt himself in any way he chose. Cape sold the cheap reprint rights in some of his books to Lane; indeed, six of the first ten Penguins came from Cape’s list. He soon recognised that his original assessment was wrong; while he welcomed the rights income, he later told Lane that ‘You’re the bugger that has ruined this trade’. As a consequence, Cape was generally rather reluctant to sell any more paperback rights, an attitude he maintained until long after World War II (Howard 1971: 164–5). Unwin was equally convinced that Lane would fail (Unwin 1976: 241), but Gollancz was a little more perceptive. He saw the possibility of real competition from Penguin if Lane made a success of it, and his reaction was to refuse to allow any of his books to be published in paperback at all (Edwards 1987: 365). His own Mandamus series, a very small collection of paperbacks issued in 1930 and 1931, had been a failure precisely because he was not willing to take the same risks as Lane, especially in ordering long print runs (Hodges 1978: 50–4). Ironically, Gollancz failed with Mandamus because he was too conventional. He had intended it to be a series in which he would publish novels of which he owned the copyright. Lane, on the other hand, sought to buy rights specifically for a paperback edition. This established an important pattern in modern paperback publishing. Although some houses are linked to a parent company, most of the great mass market imprints buy rights from the original publisher or direct from the author or through his agent. Lane of course had the example of both Tauchnitz and Albatross for this approach, but he was the first publisher to operate such a system in Britain. At first he succeeded because, like Cape,

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many publishers had little faith in Penguin, but believed that it could do no harm. Later, both Lane and his competitors found that other publishers were only too anxious to reap the great, and sometimes vast, rewards of successful paperback publication. The success of Penguin, as Lane knew, would depend on choosing the right books and making the right impact when the first titles were launched. He chose well. Lane was a man of middle-brow tastes, and he published books for people like himself. The first ten Penguins, published simultaneously in July 1935, included novels by Mary Webb (1881–1927), author of the then famous and immensely popular Precious Bane (Bloom 2002: 141–2), Compton Mackenzie and Dorothy Sayers. On the other hand, like any good publisher, Lane was also looking for titles which would have some permanent value. Also among the ten were Ariel, André Maurois’s life of Shelley, and Ernest Hemingway’s Farewell to Arms. Within a year the list also included Samuel Butler’s Erewhon and George Moore’s Esther Waters, originally published in 1872 and 1893 respectively. These choices have been argued to mark the beginning of Penguin’s long and continuing policy of providing cheap and accessible editions of neglected classics (Schmoller 1974: 298–300). They also, however, lie in the tradition in which Lane had been raised in the trade. Both titles were a little unconventional, and had been shocking in their day; Moore had indeed been in John Lane’s circle, was associated with The Yellow Book and had publicly supported the elder Lane in some of his clashes with wouldbe moral censors (Lambert and Ratcliffe 1987: 64, 147–8). Allen Lane was creating an imprint which was consciously positioned to the left of the political centre, and on the side of a liberal approach to moral issues. It was to be one of the major cultural influences on mid-twentieth-century Britain.

Paperbacks in the marketplace Selecting titles, buying rights and producing books was, however, only the beginning. These unfamiliar and often unwelcome objects now had to be sold, and the booksellers were at least as sceptical as many of the publishers. Some of them certainly feared that the sixpenny books would not generate enough cash from sales. They might sell in greater numbers than hardbacks because they were cheaper, but would the numbers be sufficiently greater to generate comparable or better cash flows? To break even, Lane calculated that he had to sell 17,500 copies of each of his first ten titles as soon as possible after publication. The reluctance of the booksellers to deal in his innovative product meant that he took an average of 7,000 orders for each despite extensive promotional efforts (Schmoller 1974: 299). By the middle of 1935, there was a distinct possibility that Penguin Books was heading for disaster even before it was fully launched. In June 1935, however, Lane persuaded Woolworth’s to place a large order. A mythology has accumulated around this episode, particularly about the part allegedly played by the wife of Woolworth’s chief

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buyer. She is alleged to have been attracted by the books which her husband had rejected, and to have encouraged him to change his mind. The truth seems to be that Lane had been negotiating with Woolworth’s for some time, and this was only one of a number of factors which made the negotiations successful (Morpurgo 1979: 92–3). The order was important, however, for it ensured that Penguin survived its first few weeks. The books then rapidly became a favourite with a far wider public than had ever bought books before. The paperback revolution had begun. Lane had taken the first crucial steps in making this revolution possible, for in three ways he had discovered how very cheap books could be made both attractive to the mass market and profitable to the publisher: visually distinctive covers, unconventional sales outlets and rights bought from hardback publishers by a house which was involved only in paperback publishing. Lane himself was to deviate from all three in later life. He resisted pictorial covers long after they had been adopted by his rivals, despite the fact that they were a key marketing tool in Britain by the late 1950s, as well as in the United States where they had originated (Schreuders 1981: 31–6). Penguin retreated into the bookshop, and eventually Lane opened his own (Norrie 1982: 160). Lane even went back to his original trade as a hardback publisher, when he started publishing new titles in hardback under the Allen Lane imprint (Morpurgo 1979: 343–4). In short, towards the end of his life, Lane became something of a conservative in his approach to the business of publishing, although he remained a man of the left, and never lost his taste for the innovative title or indeed for publicity. For twenty years, however, Lane’s Penguin Books dominated the British paperback market, and ‘penguin’ itself became a synonym for ‘paperback’.

The mass market paperback It was, however, on the other side of the Atlantic that most of the later developments in paperback publishing originated. Even before Lane opened his own American branch, he had an American competitor. Pocket Books was founded by Robert de Graaf in 1939, partly influenced by what he had seen of the success of Penguin during a visit to England. De Graaf, however, extended Lane’s principle of marketing outside the bookshops. From 1941 he worked through the independent wholesalers who dominated book distribution in the USA, especially to department stores and news-stands (Tebbel 1972–8: vol. 3, 508–10). By that time Penguin was established in the United States, but his American experiences were unhappy for Lane. Penguin Books Inc. of New York was a separate company, owned jointly by Lane and Ian Ballantine, an American economics graduate who had been impressed by Penguin’s success while he was studying in London in the late 1930s. The American business was established in 1939, but the outbreak of war caused many difficulties. These were exacerbated by personality clashes between Ballantine and Lane;

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eventually, Ballantine resigned. In his place, Lane installed Kurt Enoch, who had been involved with Albatross before leaving Germany as a refugee (Morpurgo 1979: 183). The later history of Penguin Books Inc. (and to some extent that of the parent company as well) is a sad story of Lane’s inability to work with others or to trust them. It was the brasher approach of de Graaf at Pocket Books which was to point the way to the future. Pocket Books, and other American imprints which followed in its wake in the mid-1940s, set the pace for the development of the paperback industry in the United States, and soon found imitators in Britain. They were unashamedly popular, with no pretence of the cultural mission which was (genuinely) proclaimed by Lane. They used gaudy pictorial covers. They were designed to compete in the leisure market and to attract the casual buyer; they were hugely successful (Cole 1984: 16, 21 n.6; Schreuders 1981: 18–31). The manifest success of the American paperbacks, which were making significant inroads into the traditional hardback market by the late 1940s (Hackett 1975: 114), inevitably attracted imitators in Britain. Penguin had the field to itself for less than a decade. During World War II, two other paperback imprints were founded in Britain, Pan and Panther (Morpurgo 1979: 183). Pan began in 1944 as an offshoot of the Book Society, a members-only book club. But it soon attracted the attention of the conventional publishing industry. Macmillan, Collins and Hodder and Stoughton joined forces to buy a share in it (James 2002a: 4). The Pan imprint – or brand name as we should perhaps begin to call it – slightly distanced the books from the highly respectable publishing houses which were its parents. It developed an image of its own without damaging theirs. As a business proposition, buying into Pan was a prescient move. It captured a good share of the popular market. In the early 1970s, its annual sales were estimated at some 17 million books (Attenborough 1975: 150–1). Panther was a true outsider. The firm was started by two ex-servicemen with no previous experience of the book trade. By the mid-1960s, they had succeeded to such an extent that they were able to sell the company to the Granada group for over £500,000 (Blond 1971: 84–5). Other companies learned from these examples, and by the early 1950s the British paperback industry had begun to develop the patterns it was to retain for much of the rest of the twentieth century. On the one hand, there were those paperback houses (or imprints) which followed the Penguin pattern of buying rights in books published by others, often after highly competitive ‘auctions’ at which they bid large sums for the rights in potential bestsellers (Blond 1971: 87). By the end of the century, most of these imprints had been incorporated into larger publishing organisations, a fate which even overcame Penguin in 1970 when it became part of the Pearson Longman Group (Morpurgo 1979: 362; Pearson Group 2003). Many, however, essentially continued to operate as independent entities so far as their publishing and marketing policies were concerned, not least because of the differences between traditional publishing and bookselling and the mass

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market paperback trade. It was a gap which did not begin to close until the 1990s (see below, pp. 225–6). The alternative arrangement was that a paperback imprint was part of a single house, and was the channel for the paperback publication of that house’s books. Much of this paperback publishing was not true mass market publishing at all. The so-called ‘trade paperback’ was really no more than sets of the printed sheets of the hardback edition bound in soft covers, and hence sold at a slightly cheaper price. It was a ploy which proved attractive to publishers of academic books hoping to attract a student market, and indeed in the United States trade paperbacks have come to be known as ELHI (Elementary to HIgh School books) or ‘egghead’ paperbacks. The practice became common in Britain during the 1960s, when there were few houses, even among such giants of the trade as Macmillan, who did not have their own paperback series for their own books. Even Cambridge University Press went into this market in 1959 when it experimentally reprinted a few of its own titles in paperback. The venture was extremely successful, and rapidly expanded to become an important part of Cambridge’s business (McKitterick 1992–2004: vol. 3, 324–7). Oxford followed suit (Sutcliffe 1978: 173–4).

Paperbacks in society The paperback revolution took books into far more homes than had ever had them before, partly by catching the last remnants of traditional working-class self-improvement and partly (especially after 1945) by exploiting the new markets in a wealthier post-war Britain (Sutherland 2002: 9–48). Paperbacks are cheap by comparison with hardbacks, and even when Lane’s sixpenny books had become a distant and faded memory in the last quarter of the century, there were still mass market paperbacks which sold for two or three pounds. Above all, they sold in huge quantities. In 1985, some 48 million mass market paperbacks were produced in Britain, generating a turnover of more than £50 million (Publishers’ Association 1986: 40). They were sold by newsagents, at airport and railway station bookstalls and in a host of other ‘non-bookshop’ outlets. The distribution of paperbacks, unlike that of any other substantial part of the post-1945 British book trade, came to be dominated by wholesalers. Bookwise of Godalming, for example, one of the most important of the wholesaling houses in the 1970s and 1980s, claimed to stock all the titles of the major paperback publishers. Like the other wholesalers, Bookwise was an essential link between the publishers and the non-bookshop outlets which sustained the mass market paperback industry (Price Commission 1978: 36). These outlets, largely stationers and newsagents, were responsible for about 20 per cent of all book sales in Britain, and nearly all these sales were of paperbacks (Mann 1979: 17). The paperback, despised by some and deplored by many when it was first introduced, had come a long way since Allen Lane devised it as a means to solve the financial difficulties of his publishing house. It became the basis of

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a sub-industry within publishing, linked to the major houses, but with its own traditions and its own marketing and distribution arrangements. The mass market paperback houses brought into the trade new techniques of selling and promotion which, although they may not always have seemed attractive to some of the more staid publishers, nevertheless put books into the hands of many who would otherwise never buy or read a book at all. They brought customers into the bookshops, and in doing that they have proved to be a major benefit to the whole trade. Allen Lane’s idea was not only profoundly influential, it was also, as it turned out, very timely. Just four years elapsed between the foundation of Penguin Books and the outbreak of World War II. That war and its aftermath wrought profound changes on the trade; these changes were to bring about the abandonment of many cherished customs, and to take the publishing industry into a new and harsher world.

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14 PUBLISHING FOR THE EMPIRE

Introduction The English began to establish a presence in Asia, Africa and the Americas before the end of the fifteenth century. It was an enterprise which began slowly and expanded only fitfully. By the beginning of the seventeenth century, however, there were some clear patterns emerging. Exploration and colonisation were, for the most part, driven by trade rather than by mere curiosity; the flag followed trade. Indeed, in some parts of the globe where English (and in some places Irish and Scottish) influence became significant, there was no serious effort to exercise suzerainty. If trade could be guaranteed by treaty, or indeed if local rulers were strong enough to resist military incursions but wanted to deal with Europeans, then successive regimes in London were willing to allow developments to be led by merchants rather than soldiers. In this way, three distinctive groups of British spheres of influence emerged. In south-east Asia, in India and briefly in Japan, British merchants traded with local merchants in sophisticated and well-developed regional economies. The main target – and indeed the motive for a presence in those place – was spices, although other goods, notably silk and cotton fabrics and some luxury foodstuffs (such as tea) became important. Trade did, however, begin to lead to a more permanent presence. Merchants needed protection; soldiers – often mercenaries employed by the merchants themselves – built forts and defended the traders. Rivalries between European powers (the Dutch and the British in Japan and Indonesia; the British, the French and others in India) merged with local conflicts and led to a more formal military and naval presence. Spheres of influence gradually evolved into annexation and conquest. By the middle of the eighteenth century, India was a patchwork of British and French possessions, with a few other European enclaves including the Danes and the Portuguese; client states of the European powers; and the successor states of the rapidly disintegrating Mogul Empire. The French were expelled by the British in the Seven Years War (1757–63), and after that British influence spread rapidly across the sub-continent. After 1857, the whole of India (including modern Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, as well as some bordering regions now in

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other countries) was embedded in the British Empire, and Queen Victoria was transformed into an Empress (Lloyd 1984: 13–14, 73–7, 94–5; Moore 1999; Washbrook 1999). In Africa, the pattern was different. Exploration and trade began early; indeed, the Portuguese were working their way down the Atlantic coast before the end of the fourteenth century. A series of trading posts gradually created a route of stepping stones along which Portuguese sailors found their way to the Cape of Good Hope in 1497, and then across the Indian Ocean. The old land routes across Asia rapidly went into decline, and the European powers who sought trade and influence in the east now had to defend their routes through two oceans and around the littoral of another continent. From the fifteenth century to the eighteenth, the Portuguese, Spanish, French, Dutch and British all established fortified trading posts along the coasts of Africa. The trade of the west coast was largely in human beings, for the great economic attraction of the African trade was to buy slaves who could be sold at vast profits to European settlers in the Americas. Even after this trade was abolished from 1807 onwards, slavery still remained a driving force of European involvement in Africa. Now, however, the motive was sometimes rather different: philanthropy and religion. Christian missionaries, the majority of them British, opened up the interior of the continent to Europeans in the second half of the nineteenth century. They thought they found anarchy as well as paganism, and gradually the states of west, central and east Africa – many of them with a history of centuries – were absorbed into European empires. This had happened long before in the south, where the Portuguese had been ousted by the Dutch in the late seventeenth century, only to be partially ousted by the British two hundred years later. The conflict between their descendants, and between both groups of Europeans and the indigenous inhabitants of the southern end of the continent, continued in various forms until almost the very end of the twentieth century (Newbury 1999). By the end of the nineteenth century, the British ruled great swathes of Africa. From the Cape Colony (South Africa) in the south, through the areas which now comprise Botswana, Lesotho, Zimbabwe, Kenya, Zambia and Uganda, the British were the colonial masters; Tanganyika (Tanzania) was added in 1919 having formerly been a German colony. In the west of the continent, Nigeria and the Gold Coast (Ghana) were effectively British creations; and there were other British possessions along the Atlantic coast. Elsewhere, British influence was paramount; Egypt was a joint Anglo-French colony in all but name, and Sudan followed in its wake. The red in which the British Empire was conventionally portrayed on maps (at least on British maps) crossed Africa from north to south and east to west. And in the twentieth century even more was to be added. On the other side of the Atlantic, the English were latecomers. The Spanish and Portuguese pioneers of the Atlantic trade routes destroyed the existing states of south and central America and divided the continent between them

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with the divine blessing of a papal decree. The English and French fished (literally) in the less wholesome waters of the north Atlantic. A few early French and British settlements in the future Canada were there primarily to exploit natural resources, especially fish and fur. Later developments, however, were the first British manifestation of conscious colonisation. After some earlier attempts (all of them more or less disastrous), the Pilgrim Fathers, religious exiles from the Anglican England of Charles I and Laud, succeeded in establishing a colony in Massachusetts in 1620. Other colonists followed. Some were dissidents; others were sponsored by the state or by successive monarchs. The eastern seaboard of north America gradually turned into a group of British colonies. But European rivalries manifested themselves there as they had in Asia. The Spanish moved northwards into Florida and along the northern shores of the Gulf of Mexico; the French were well established in Canada and were expanding their influence and control southwards through the heartlands of the continent towards the Spanish dominions (Lloyd 1984: 14–53). The same war which drove the French out of India drove them out of America as well, and French influence gradually collapsed, although it residually survived in the south until the early nineteenth century, and culturally for somewhat longer. Little more than twenty years after the great triumphs of the Seven Years War, however, the British found themselves fighting to defend the thirteen coastal colonies which were the pride of their Empire. They failed, and the United States, which the European powers recognised in 1784, gradually spread across the whole continent, absorbing British, French and Spanish alike, and throughout the nineteenth century taking in millions of new immigrants from the length and breadth of Europe. Britain retained Canada, although it was increasingly subject to American influences (Lloyd 1984: 66–102). On top of all of this, the British discovered a continent of their own. This time, exploration was driven in part by scientific curiosity, although considerations of trade never lay far behind. The search for the fabled continent in the southern ocean led eighteenth-century British navigators to realise that the shorelines which had been discovered by Dutch sailors in the seventeenth century were the coasts of what were to be called Australia and New Zealand. Distinctive and ancient cultures were ruthlessly annihilated by the British, in a schizophrenic pursuit of dumping grounds for criminals, production sites for crops and animals, and places in which to create a Protestant paradise (Dalziel 1999; Denoon and Wyndham 1999). In all of this long history of global expansion, the British took with them cultural as well as commercial and military baggage. Above all, they took their language. In 1600, English was barely known outside its native island; by 1700 it could be heard on every continent. By 1800, it was the language of government, commerce and religion in British India, Canada, a few settlements in Africa, south-east Asia and isolated places on the shores of Australia, and in the new and rapidly expanding United States. By 1900, it was the most widely spoken language in the world; in 2000 it was perhaps the nearest thing

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to a universal language since the Chaldeans had been chastised for building the Tower of Babel (Crystal 1997).

Books in the colonies: the beginnings Books were to be found in the earliest English settlements overseas, particularly on the north American mainland. Indeed, it was in the very nature of the first English colonies there that there was a book-based culture. Particularly in the Puritan settlements of New England, the emphasis on Bible Christianity transferred to the new world the drive towards literacy that characterised the religion which had driven the settlers to cross the Atlantic. From the early seventeenth century onwards, literacy was an essential element in the colonial enterprise (Hall 2000). Printing was introduced into English-speaking north America very soon after the establishment of what were to be the first permanent settlements. A printing press was brought to Cambridge, Massachusetts, along with his wife, family and servants, by José Glover in 1638; Glover died on the voyage, but his press survived and under other ownership was operated by Stephen and Matthew Daye. The father and son team produced the so-called Bay Psalm Book in 1640; this was the first English book printed on the American continent. A few other books followed, and a small commercial printing and publishing trade developed in nearby Boston in the late seventeenth century (Amory 2000). Although the colonists still looked to England for most of their book needs, these early ventures into the trade marked the beginning of English language printing outside Europe (Amory 2002). By the time of the War of Independence in the late eighteenth century, the book trade was well established. Imports were still an important element of the trade (Raven 2000), but printing and publishing were well established in all the thirteen colonies, and there was a flourishing book culture at least in the large cities (Wolf 1988). In other parts of the world, there were similar developments. The East India Company introduced printing into British India. The first substantial English book they produced was A Grammar of the Bengali Language, published at Hoogly in 1778. But it was Calcutta, the company’s commercial home, which became the centre of English printing in the sub-continent. Calendars and almanacs were printed there from 1778 onwards, or possibly even the previous year. From the 1780s onwards, the output of English books, first in Calcutta and then elsewhere, steadily increased (Shaw 1981). Before the end of the eighteenth century, and only a few years after the first convict settlement, a printing press was established in Sydney in New South Wales in 1795. The missionaries who dominated the early colonisation of New Zealand established a press there as one of their first actions in 1840 (Salmond 1995). Similarly, the missionaries who opened up central Africa and the south Pacific in the nineteenth century took the Bible with them, although little resembling a book trade developed in those places until after World War I.

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Exporting British books The presence of British books was never confined to British overseas settlements and colonies, although until the late seventeenth century the export trade was very limited. Indeed, it largely consisted of books in Latin, because of the almost complete ignorance of the English language in the rest of Europe (Hoftijzer 2002). Bacon, Milton and Newton all wrote in Latin when they wanted to address an audience outside England. Locke was perhaps the first English thinker who was influential abroad through books written in his native language. His works on education and on civil government helped to lay the foundations of the enlightenment of the eighteenth century, although even they were widely translated into modern languages and into Latin for continental audiences. But the late seventeenth century marks the time when a knowledge of English became more common in continental Europe, and English books, writers and ideas began to be better known. By the mid-eighteenth century, there was a flourishing trade in books between Britain and Europe, at least in peacetime (or with allies in wartime), including the export of books in English, import of books in European languages and in Latin, and translations of English books into various foreign languages (Barber 1982). The balance of trade in books, which had almost certainly been one of imports exceeding exports until the end of the seventeenth century (see above, p. 20), gradually reversed. The English reluctance to learn foreign languages was reinforced by the growing knowledge of English in the circles in which English travellers moved. Some books were of course imported during the eighteenth century, but the most notable characteristic of the trade in foreign books in England was the development of foreign language publishing in London, largely within exile communities. Such communities had existed since the middle of the sixteenth century, when, after the accession of Elizabeth I in 1558, continental Protestants found in England a reasonably safe place of refuge. Political and religious upheavals brought in successive generations of exiles, from the Spanish and Portuguese Protestants and Jews and French Huguenots in the late seventeenth century, through aristocratic escapees from the French Revolution in the late eighteenth century, to a great variety of (usually left-wing) political exiles from Germany, Italy, Russia and elsewhere from the early nineteenth century onwards. A small but flourishing trade in foreign language publishing in London, some of whose products were intended for surreptitious export to the countries from which their authors and printers had fled, developed around these refugee communities which availed themselves of British liberties (Taylor 2002). During the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1793–1815), British business and industry had to look for new overseas markets to replace those which were effectively lost by the closure of Europe to British goods and merchants. Britain’s own colonies were, of course, the most important of these, but there were others. The gradual rapprochement with the United States,

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despite the explosion of tensions into a brief war (1812), gradually opened up the vast and expanding American market. But it was in central and south America that the most adventurous and improbable export trade in British books began to be established. Spain’s American colonies rebelled against their mother country from 1808 onwards. Despite the attempt to reimpose colonial rule after 1815, they had all gained their independence by 1824. The British saw this as both a political and economic opportunity. British capital poured into south America, as it continued to do throughout the nineteenth century, to support mining and later the development of the railways. In the 1820s, the London publisher Rudolph Ackermann (1764–1834), who was of German origin and had fled from Paris where he was in business in 1790, published a number of books in Spanish specifically intended for central and south America. The venture was difficult and not wholly successful, but it laid the foundations for a long-term trade with the new republics (Roldán Vera 2003). When continental Europe reopened to British trade and travellers in 1815, there was a new and significant demand for English language books. As the leader of the coalition which had defeated Napoleon, and as the only country which had fought against France from the beginning to the end of the twentythree years of war, Britain was the dominant power on the continent. British culture and British institutions, admired by European elites in the eighteenth century, now became the envy of a much wider public; and the English language began its progress towards being the lingua franca of Europe. The reprinting of English books by foreign publishers was aimed partly at travellers from Britain, and partly at their own domestic markets. The post-war pioneers were the Galignani brothers in Paris who had been in the business since about 1800, but whose trade greatly expanded after 1815 (Barber 1961). Others followed, especially in Germany, where Tauchnitz initiated in 1841 his series of reprints of British books (chiefly novels) which continued until World War II (see above, pp. 134–5). The continental reprints of British books, whether they were licensed or pirated, took care of some but not all of the European demand for them. Since the 1820s, continental Europe has become a major export market for British publishers; by the end of the twentieth century, Europe was actually a larger market for British book exports than the USA (Feather 2003: 36–7). The development of export markets for British books, and of English language publishing in countries where English was not normally spoken, were both important aspects of the internationalisation of the British book trade and of British culture in the nineteenth century. There was, however, another trend of great importance for the publishing industry in the practice of some British publishers of establishing overseas branches, particularly in British colonies and dominions. This process began as an export trade; the expanding Empire was a key area of activity for British publishers until the second half of the twentieth century. But a British presence in publishing in many countries outlived the imperial and colonial relationships which had been responsible for that presence in the first place.

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Two kinds of books predominated in this aspect of British publishing: Bibles and other religious books, and educational books. The British and Foreign Bible Society, a wealthy missionary charity, began to set up agencies outside Britain as early as 1804, a practice which continued throughout the nineteenth century and beyond (Howsam 1991: 159). But commercial publishers were also beneficiaries of the missionary activities which accompanied British colonialism everywhere and indeed provided the rationale for it in much of Africa. Educational publishing was entirely in the hands of the commercial publishers, including the university presses which, whatever may have been true of some aspects of their work, were certainly wholly commercial in their approach to overseas activities.

India During the first half of the nineteenth century, India was by far the largest export market for British books, to be succeeded by Australia after about 1850 (Weedon 2003: 41). Macmillan, Cambridge University Press, Longmans and Oxford University Press were among those who established a significant presence in the market (Weedon 2003: 120). The pioneer was Macmillan, which became involved in India from 1864 onwards. Macmillan dominated the market for educational books, especially school textbooks, in the sub-continent for much of the rest of the century. Some of the books that were written for it, especially in the Textbooks for Indian Schools series which began in 1874, were still selling steadily at the time of Indian independence (1947). When Macmillan’s Indian ventures began, the firm was closely associated with Cambridge University Press, and it was the Cambridge connection which ensured that a steady supply of authoritative books was available. Both parties benefited, for Macmillan gave CUP an important outlet for its growing list of school books (Chatterjee 2002: 154–6; McKitterick 1992–2004: vol. 2, 382–408). The history of the Macmillan company’s involvement in India can be taken to typify the changing relationship between British publishers and their colonial offspring. The opening up of the export market in the 1860s led to contracts with government agencies for school textbooks in the 1870s, and the appointment of local agents to handle the business. As the Macmillan business with India grew – and became increasingly important to the firm as a whole – agents could no longer promote it effectively. Following a visit to India by Maurice Macmillan in 1885–6 (he combined it with his honeymoon), the firm took over the operation itself. By 1900, Macmillan had branches and warehouses in Bombay, Calcutta and Madras (Chatterjee 2002: 156–9). The twentieth-century problem for Macmillan in India was sustainability. Significant local competition in the publishing of textbooks began to develop in the 1920s and 1930s. State governments became more reluctant to favour British over Indian publishers in selecting their textbooks, a trend inevitably exacerbated by the growing nationalist feeling which was to lead to

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independence after World War II. By the mid-1930s, British publishers in India were competing against each other in a diminishing and difficult market, and they even began to work together in an attempt to preserve it (Chatterjee 2002: 162–4). But in the long term the position was unsustainable. Oxford University Press, which formally established its Indian branch in 1912, was a comparative latecomer in a crowded market. It soon discovered that selling Oxford books in India could not support its operations there, and the branch began to work as a publisher in its own right. Greater sensitivity to the local market enabled OUP in India to produce books which had an appeal in the sub-continent as opposed to being seen as an agent of the former colonial power. After World War II, the business effectively became an independent publisher (Sutcliffe 1978: 115, 200–2, 258). OUP India has published some 3,000 titles in English and in Indian languages, and claims to be the leading scholarly publisher in the country (Oxford University Press India 2004). The same process happened at Macmillan; Macmillan India, although it remains part of the Macmillan group, effectively operates as an independent business, remaining the leading publisher of English language textbooks in the subcontinent (Macmillan India 2004).

Australia The pattern of development from being an exporter, through the use of agents and then the establishment of branches, to ultimate independence of operation (even if there was still a commercial relationship) was one which was to be repeated in different ways throughout the British Empire and Commonwealth. The similarities, however, should not be allowed to disguise the differences, some of which still resonate in British publishing at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The history of British publishers’ involvement in Australia exemplifies this. During the second half of the nineteenth century, Australia became the largest market for British book exports (Weedon 2003: 41). In 1884, Cassells became the first British publisher to open an office in the country (Nowell-Smith 1958: 265–8); they were soon followed by Collins, Hodder and Stoughton and several others. At first, they operated mainly in the educational market, most of them working through George Robertson in Melbourne (Weedon 2003: 122–5). It was not until the 1890s that Australian firms began to enter the market, and that Sydney became the centre of the Australian book trade, as it remains. But the British continued to be a major presence, and many Australian authors actually looked to London rather than Sydney to find their publishers. In the 1920s, Australia was still an important export market, although Australian production was gradually increasing by the outbreak of World War II in 1939 (Lyons 2001). It remained the case, however, that this was still essentially a colonial culture, and that Britain was both the source of that culture and the place to which Australians looked to establish their own cultural presence (Nile and Walker 2001).

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The British presence in Australian publishing grew throughout most of the twentieth century. Oxford University Press established its first Australian branch in 1908 (Sutcliffe 1978: 115). Even after World War II, British publishers continued to be a major presence (Arnold 2001: 127–9). Heinemann, for example, did not establish its Australian branch until 1952 (St John 1990: 317–18); typically, it was led by an Englishman, not an Australian, who turned it into a very successful enterprise which promoted many important Australian books and authors (Hill 1988: 97–115). But it was still essentially a colonial enterprise despite the genuine recognition of difference by the London firm and its employees in Australia. In Australia – and indeed in New Zealand – the dominance of British over local publishing was reinforced for thirty years in the second half of the twentieth century by the British Market Rights Agreement. In essence, this Agreement stated that when British publishers sold US rights to an American publisher, they would retain for themselves the rights to sales and editions within the British Commonwealth. Furthermore, a British publisher who acquired rights in an American book would do so for the whole of the Commonwealth, and not just for the United Kingdom. The Agreement was very popular among British publishers, for whom it represented a significant commercial advantage (Unwin 1976: 140–1). The booksellers in Australia and New Zealand were less happy since it tied them into buying British editions at a time when the prices of British books were being forced up by the high cost of both labour and materials. In 1976, the Agreement collapsed when the US Department of Justice indicated that it considered it illegal under the American anti-trust laws (Curwen 1981: 75–6), but by then it had had the effect of protecting the position of British publishers in Australia for several decades. For British publishers, the real significance of the end of the Agreement was that they had to compete with American publishers in Australia and other Commonwealth countries, which they signally failed to do (see below, pp. 192–3).

Canada The Market Rights Agreement was a rare, but important, example of an international framework within which the publishing industry and the book trade operated in the British Empire and its successor states. Another important area was that of copyright. The 1842 Act (see above, pp. 114–15) effectively applied throughout the Empire, except in India and Canada which already had some limited legislative powers of their own. Similarly, the United Kingdom signed the Berne Convention on behalf of all its colonial possessions throughout the world. Canada was the important exception to this predominance, as indeed it was an exception to many of the general statements which can be made about the operation of British publishers in other parts of the Empire and Commonwealth. The reason was, of course, its proximity to the United States. The Canadian market was a permanent temptation to American publishers, both before and after Britain and the US reached formal agreements about

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mutual recognition of each other’s copyright laws (see above, pp. 135–6). From 1847 onwards, the Canadian Foreign Reprints Act imposed an import duty on reprints of British books which were brought into the country. In practice, this meant that American reprints (legal, of course, in the US at that time) were subject to a charge; the dues which were collected were passed on to the British publisher of the original edition, provided that it had been registered with the Canadian authorities. Some money did reach British publishers through this circuitous route, although it was small compensation for the massive losses of potential revenue caused by the reprinting of their books in the United States. The effect of the 1847 Act, however, was that British publishers could not easily find export markets in Canada. American books, whether originals or reprints of British titles, were cheaper and were easier to obtain. A. and C. Black, Longmans, Oxford University Press and others did establish agencies or branches in Canada (Weedon 2003: 44–5; Sutcliffe 1978: 115) but the market did not develop well. The educational market – the mainstay of British publishers in India and to some extent in Australia – was very small because of both American and local competition, complicated by the bilingualism of Québec.

The African continent The British presence in sub-Saharan Africa has a long history. It began with the acquisition of trading posts along the west coast to develop and protect traders, principally slave traders in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. But this was not the only motive. The protection of the vital sea routes to India drove much British expansion from the mid-eighteenth century onwards, and this included the acquisition of territory on the route round the Cape of Good Hope, the only practical route to the east before the Suez Canal was opened in 1869. This led to conflicts with the Dutch, and with the settlers of Dutch descent who had settled in the Cape from the late seventeenth century onwards. Britain captured the Cape Colony in 1806, but conflict continued throughout the nineteenth century, reaching its climax in the Boer War (1899– 1902). Although this resulted in British victory, in the sense of confirming Britain’s rule over the whole of what is now South Africa, it left a bitter legacy of division between whites and blacks, and between the two groups of whites. The Afrikaans-speaking Boers, who dominated South African politics from World War II until the early 1990s, were fundamentally anti-British, and the gradual isolation of their state from international trade and politics from the mid-1960s onwards had serious repercussions on those British publishers who had been involved in the country. The British domination of much of east and central Africa has a later origin. It was driven partly by a genuine missionary urge, but principally by political and economic motives. The British (including British South Africans) were seeking minerals and land, as well as using their African possessions to protect

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what were seen as vital national interests, including, once again, the routes to India and Australia. The division of much of Africa – still largely unexplored by Europeans – into British, French, German and Belgian spheres of interest and control, confirmed by the Treaty of Berlin (1878), effectively created the now familiar map of Africa. Decolonisation began in 1957 when the British colony of the Gold Coast became Ghana; in Britain’s case, the process was largely peaceful and consensual, and was effectively complete by the end of the 1960s, with the conspicuous and difficult exception of Southern Rhodesia which did not attain legal independence (as Zimbabwe) until 1980. Africa was far less fertile territory for British publishers than India, Australia or even Canada. The reasons for this lay deep in the roots of African culture, which was largely oral rather than written; the printed word was essentially a colonial imposition. The early history of the European book in Africa south of the Sahara is linked indissolubly to the history of conquerors and missionaries. The comparatively late development of educational policies meant that – unlike in India – there was a very limited market even for the educational books which were so important elsewhere in the British Empire. There was no commercial publishing in Africa before the establishment of Oxford University Press’s branch in Ibadan, Nigeria, in 1949. African writers sought publishers in Europe, principally in London. Every aspect of the trade was difficult and complicated further by poor communications and comparatively low levels of literacy in English (Kotei 1981: 11–30). Nevertheless, some publishers did establish a presence on the African continent. Oxford’s venture into Nigeria was followed by branches in Accra (Ghana), Nairobi (Kenya), Dar-es-Salaam (Tanzania), Salisbury (Southern Rhodesia – now Harare, Zimbabwe) and Lusaka (Malawi), as well as Cape Town and Johannesburg in South Africa. The Kenyan, Tanzanian and South African branches in due course became publishers in their own right. Other British publishers also became active in Africa in the middle of the twentieth century. Perhaps the most notable was Heinemann which established a presence beyond South Africa (where a number of British publishers operated) by creating an educational subsidiary based in Nairobi in 1968 (St John 1990: 475). So too did Macmillan, which followed the Oxford pattern of turning some branches into independent publishers retaining links with the parent group (Macmillan 2004b). Foreign and multinational publishers continued to be a major factor in publishing and the book trade in post-colonial Africa (Kotei 1981: 87–100), although indigenous language publishing, particularly for primary education, has seen some successes, notably in Nigeria which has developed a significant publishing industry (Feather 2003: 31). From the perspective of British publishers, anglophone Africa was, throughout the twentieth century, an attractive but difficult market. Moreover, it was increasingly competitive. Quite apart from legitimate competition from American publishers after 1975, African countries were among the principal targets of those responsible for illegal reprints of British (and indeed American) educational books in

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the 1970s and 1980s. The Paris Amendments to the Berne Convention were intended to address this problem (see above, p. 136), but answering the political and cultural case against expensive western books, by firm action in some of the producer countries (notably Singapore) from the mid-1980s onwards was, in the end, probably more effective.

The aftermath of Empire The United Kingdom withdrew from its Empire between 1947 (India) and 1980 (Rhodesia/Zimbabwe), but the unique institution of the Commonwealth enabled this global group of disparate nations linked by some common history to remain together at least for some cultural and educational purposes. The former colonial presence is still very visible in the links between British and foreign publishers. As we have seen, in India, Australia and many African countries there are publishing houses which are the descendants of British publishers, and in many cases still linked with them. That is the book trade’s inheritance from the British Empire, but the process of transition was sometimes painful. After decolonisation, a substantial part of the traditional market for British books was open to competition from new sources. India, which had so often generated money for Longman, Macmillan, Oxford University Press and others, set the pattern. After independence, an indigenous publishing industry was developed. Offices which had once been dependent branches of the parent company began to turn into semi-independent houses. The commercial trends, first in India, and then in many of Britain’s African colonies as they gained their independence in the 1960s, were reinforced by nationalist sentiment which preferred that there should be a substantial infusion of local ownership and local expertise into these publishing operations. The developing nations of the Third World potentially offered a vast market, especially for school textbooks and English language teaching materials, but political pressures gradually began to work against British publishers in many countries (Attenborough 1975: 173–6). Such pressures came not only from the developing countries themselves, but also from the United States. British publishers had agreed among themselves to abide by the Market Rights Agreement in 1947, when the state of the trade, and indeed of the British economy, was still parlous. But it was a double-edged sword, in that it aroused resentment. The Agreement worked well so far as the British trade was concerned. Its collapse marked the formal end of the preferential treatment afforded to British books in her former dominions and colonies (Curwen 1981: 75–6). From the perspective of the British publishing industry, this could not have come at a worse time. Rampant inflation in Britain – one of the causes of the high prices to which Australasian booksellers in particular took such exception – was damaging domestic and export sales alike. Indeed, one of the reasons for the creation of the Book Development Council was so that the publishers had an organisation through which they could work

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together to develop new markets in western Europe and in countries where there was no traditional British presence such as China and Indonesia. For British publishers, the widespread use of English for political, professional and commercial purposes throughout the Commonwealth (and of course beyond it) is a great, although not entirely unique, advantage. They have never quite lost their former colonial markets. It was not until the very end of the twentieth century that Europe overtook the USA and the Commonwealth as their principal export market (see above, p. 186). Competition with American publishers may be intense, but British publishing continues to be a major player on the world market. That is the book trade’s real legacy of Empire.

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15 THE TRADE IN WAR AND PEACE

The book trade at war The United Kingdom’s position as a European and world power was put to its harshest test in modern times during World War II. In its own small domain, the book trade’s experience of war was strangely ambiguous. The triumphant progress of Penguin books through its first four years (which, as it turned out, were the last four years of peace) showed that there was a market to be tapped outside the limited range of those who normally bought books. Far from being a dying art in the age of cinema and radio, reading was still a form of entertainment and enlightenment which could command a mass audience. The underlying power of the attraction of the printed word was to be graphically demonstrated during the five years of World War II, when the demand for books rose to an unprecedented level, and the difficulties of supplying them were equally unprecedented. Stanley Unwin was later to claim that World War II was a good time for publishers; demand increased, and almost any book would succeed because demand far outstretched supply (Unwin 1960: 260–1, 272). In fact, it seems that in the first two years of the war demand actually fell somewhat, but in 1941 it began to recover (Howard 1971: 190–1). From then onwards, there was certainly a steady increase in demand. The problem was on the supply side of the equation. In 1937, some 11,300 new titles had been published; by 1943, the annual figure had fallen to 7,500 (Norrie 1982: 220). In some categories there was an increase which reflected the exigencies of war. Books on naval and military matters were, not surprisingly, popular: only 62 had been published in 1937, but there were no fewer than 229 in 1943. Books on wireless (19 in 1937; 34 in 1943) showed a similar trend while the number of books published on veterinary science, animal husbandry and agriculture nearly doubled as Britain dug for victory. Later in the war, general publishing revived, as it began to be realised that people wanted to read about something other than the battle which was being fought all around them every day. From 1943, when victory seemed certain if still distant, books about the post-war world came to be as popular as books about the war itself and its origins (Sutcliffe 1978: 256).

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Some other categories, however, collapsed; the lavishly illustrated gift books which had been a feature of the Christmas market since before World War I vanished and were never really revived (Norrie 1982: 221). But luxury books – or at least well produced books – did not entirely disappear; both Penguin and Phaidon managed to produce some high quality art books during the war, despite all the limitations imposed by the conditions (Holman 1999). There was certainly no problem in finding customers. Public libraries flourished throughout the war (Russell 1999: 41–8). The trade found itself able to sell everything it could produce; the problem was how to produce enough. As in World War I, the publishers had to cope with both a shortage of materials and the loss of staff; unlike in World War I, however, there was the additional problem of the destruction of existing stocks of books and of offices and records because of enemy action in the United Kingdom itself. It was the materials problem which arose first. Britain imported much of her paper, and almost all of her raw materials for domestic papermaking. From April 1940, paper was rationed, and imports of foreign paper were banned in the November of the same year (Evans 1955: 213–21). Supplies were allocated to publishers on the basis of their use of paper during the last full year of peace from September 1938 to August 1939. The ration was initially 60 per cent of consumption during that period. The Publishers’ Association’s initial hopes that this would be eased proved to be over-optimistic when the German invasion of Norway in the late spring of 1940 closed the principal source of supply of the paper industry’s wood pulp imports (Kingsford 1970: 162–3). The paper rationing scheme was intended to reflect as fairly as possible the likely demands from individual houses. Inevitably this caused a good deal of resentment in the trade, some of it directed towards HMSO which was partially exempted from the regulations (Barty-King 1986: 76–7), but rather more towards Allen Lane. Penguin was in a uniquely favourable position because of the way in which the regulations were framed. A publisher’s allocation was based not on the number of books produced, but on the tonnage of paper consumed in the designated period in 1938–9. It so happened that this had been a very successful time for Penguin, especially in the huge sales achieved by the first Penguin Specials on various subjects of topical interest. Consequently, the company had a very generous allocation. This was compounded by the fact that the production methods for paperbacks were far more economical in their use of paper. As a result, the output of Penguins could be maintained almost unchecked throughout the war (Morpurgo 1979: 156–7). Paper rationing was only the beginning of government intervention in the publishing industry, although the Publishers’ Association achieved a number of successes in restraining the government from acting on some of its more extreme proposals. The Association prevented both the halving of the paper ration and the attempt to impose purchase tax on books in the summer of 1940. In the following year, the trade negotiated the Book Production War Economy Agreement, under which both the quality of the paper and the size

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of type were reduced in order to achieve savings. The books which were produced were hideous, but they were at least produced (Kingsford 1970: 165–6, 168–71). Despite all these efforts, however, the publishers could not meet the demands of the public. There were real shortages even in such crucial areas as educational books (Unwin 1960: 267–8), although there was eventually some relief for that sector (McKitterick 1992–2004: vol. 3, 284–6). The problem of controlling the use of paper, as opposed to its distribution to publishers, was not solved until after the end of the war (see below, p. 197).

War damage The critical shortage of the most basic raw material of the publishing industry would have been bad enough in itself, but the position was made far worse by the destruction of large quantities of books which already existed. Most publishers were still based in the City of London, and stored their books in warehouses there. During the Blitz (1940–1) they shared in the general misery of that orgy of destruction. Unwin was later to estimate that some twenty million books were destroyed by enemy action during the war (Unwin 1960: 278–9). His own company lost its stock in 1940 (Unwin 1972: 121), and they were not alone. Some twenty houses lost everything, many of them on the night of 29–30 December 1940, when the losses included Ward Lock (Liveing 1954: 98–9). Throughout the winter of 1940–1, the devastation continued; Hodder and Stoughton and Harraps both went in 1941, as did innumerable bookshops not only in London but throughout the country (Norrie 1982: 88). But those who escaped did well, benefiting from wartime demand and limited supply. Heinemann, for example, increased its turnover and profits significantly between 1940 and 1945, and in the latter year was able to pay an unprecedented 20 per cent divided to shareholders (St John 1990: 296–7). Some escaped by evacuating their operations to the country; Batsford, for example, went to Malvern, but it did not make their work easier, since they still had to face the problems of distribution through a disrupted transport network (Bolitho 1943: 90–3). Some provincial cities were almost as badly hit as London; in the autumn of 1940, most of Michael Joseph’s stock was destroyed when his printer’s warehouse in Plymouth was hit during a raid on that city (Joseph 1986: 157). Other houses remained in London on principle, and were lucky; Macmillan was one of these (Morgan 1943: 236–8). Stationers’ Hall was destroyed in October 1940, and with it the historic heart of the book trade; the Hall which now stands in Paternoster Row is a post-war reconstruction (Saunders 2001: 164–8; Unwin 1978: 43–5). Worst of all, Simpkin Marshall was hit, and with their warehouse was lost not only a substantial part of the trade’s stocks, but also, as it was to turn out, the wholesaling and distribution arrangements which had sustained the trade for a century (Norrie 1982: 91–2; Saunders 2001: 165–6). By the end of the war, some 52,000 titles were waiting for reprinting to replace lost stock (Unwin 1972: 138).

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The end of the war did not bring with it the end of the trade’s problems, for recovery was to prove slow and difficult. The wartime controls remained intact as the newly elected Labour government struggled with the appalling task of restoring Britain’s shattered economy and battered infrastructure. The publishing industry was not in the forefront of the government’s priorities. Paper rationing continued until 1949, although the supply situation had gradually eased before then (Unwin 1972: 139), and a higher percentage of the quota was earmarked for the educational books which were by that time in disastrously short supply (Kingsford 1970: 167–8). There was a gradual recovery in publishers’ output; from 5,800 new books in 1945, the total rose to 11,600 in 1950, and, in addition, many of those 52,000 lost titles were reprinted (Norrie 1982: 22). The trade was recovering, and in the early 1950s something like normality was restored. The controls had gone, and some firms began to register successes. The post-war recovery, however, took place in a very different world from that of 1939. The war had seen the final establishment of the paperback as a cheap and convenient form of reading, and publishers who had once doubted its capacity to survive Lane’s first list of ten titles were now forced to issue their own (Norrie 1982: 209–10). Another and even more serious rival loomed over the horizon when BBC television reopened in June 1946; by 1951, over one million licences were current (Briggs 1965–95: vol. 4, 198, 252–3). The publishers thus had to face new forms of competition in a situation which was already difficult for them.

Post-war wholesaling and distribution Domestically, not the least of these difficulties arose directly out of the Blitz. When Simpkin Marshall’s warehouse and stock were destroyed in 1941, the effects were not only physical. Immediately after the disaster, the company’s directors made it clear that they could not meet their liabilities. In wartime conditions it was impossible to raise the capital which would have been needed to rebuild the warehouse and stock it, so that voluntary liquidation was the only option open to them. The trade worked together to try to protect its long-established system of wholesaling and distribution. A new company, Simpkin Marshall (1941) Ltd, was formed by a consortium of publishers, operating through the Economic Relations Committee of the Publishers’ Association. It was envisaged that this consortium, headed by Sir Isaac Pitman (1901–85), would function as a central distribution house for the trade. Many publishers were not convinced that the scheme was viable. Its owners persevered until 1951, but it was never a success. In that year, the company was sold to Robert Maxwell (1923–91), an ambitious and profoundly unscrupulous Czech exile who was beginning to use the book trade as one of his routes to the political power he craved. He saw Simpkins as giving him a central role in the trade; but many key players had little confidence in him. The business only fitfully

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revived, and was probably never technically solvent. In 1955, it failed and went into the liquidation which had been threatened fourteen years earlier (Bower 1992: 71–99; Norrie 1982: 86–7; Thompson and Delano 1991: 91–3, 97–9). The end of Simpkin Marshall was not merely the end of a great institution; it was the end of an era. The trade was left with a distribution problem which was not fully resolved for decades. It had proved impossible either to revive Simpkins or to establish another wholesale house. A wholesale house made sense only if it could do what Simpkins had done for a century by keeping in stock enough books to satisfy all but the most esoteric orders from booksellers as soon as they were placed. As the output of new titles rose throughout the 1950s, the possibility of large-scale wholesaling receded even further, and publishers were forced to develop their own arrangements. W H Smith began to expand the book side of their wholesale operation, although in the immediate post-war years their principal concern was still with newspaper wholesaling and distribution. It was not until the 1960s that book wholesaling became a truly significant part of the business (Wilson 1985: 403–9). The gap created by Maxwell’s failure to revive Simpkin Marshall eventually forced the trade to recognise the need to look for new systems of distribution rather than to revive old ones (Coleridge 1957). Out of this recognition, there arose a number of distribution organisations, which were really joint warehousing arrangements between groups of publishers. Such organisations proved to be useful intermediaries between the publishers and the booksellers, but many difficulties remained and were to do so until almost the end of the century (see below, pp. 225–6).

The leisure market: promoting reading and book buying Distribution, however, was not the only problem the trade encountered after the end of World War II. Perhaps even more significant were changes in the social and economic structures of Britain which profoundly affected the publishing world. The leisure market, where publishers of books, magazines and newspapers once held unchallenged sway, was transformed both by affluence and by technology. Reading was seriously challenged by television as a home leisure activity from the early 1950s onwards. In the face of this and other challenges to its very existence, the publishing industry began to analyse its markets more closely than ever before. As a result, we have a clearer picture of the British reading public in the decades since World War II than at any previous time in history. These findings can be very briefly summarised: British book readers were predominantly middle class and well educated, which in itself is hardly surprising. More alarming was the fact that over one-third of the population never read books at all, and that, of those who did read, nearly half obtained their books from libraries rather than bookshops; the libraries made a substantial contribution to the financial health of the trade, but this tended to be through the specialist library supply companies rather than the retail bookshops (Mann 1979: 5–6, 21–2, 24).

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The trade’s reactions to such findings, from the mid-twentieth century onwards, was to make attempts to promote the very idea of reading and buying books (Curwen 1981: 79–81). It was keen to continue to produce books in ever increasing numbers, and indeed the continuous rise in output has been one of the most striking characteristics of the British publishing industry in the second half of the twentieth century. In 1950, the number of new titles exceeded 10,000 for the first time since before the war; by 1960 production was running at over 17,000, by 1970 at 23,500, and in 1980 no fewer than 37,382 new titles were published, and over 10,000 reprints (Norrie 1982: 220). By the mid-1980s, the annual output was in excess of 40,000 titles; in the last year of the twentieth century, it was 110,000 (Feather 2003: 36). In the immediate aftermath of the war, the government was concerned to encourage exports across the whole range of British goods. Foreign exchange was desperately needed to replenish Britain’s funds after she had paid for her war effort. Publishers who had looked abroad for markets for decades before 1939 now found themselves encouraged to revive their contacts. The traditional markets for British books were, however, increasingly open to competition from both indigenous publishers and American publishers who were at least as aggressive as their British counterparts in seeking overseas markets. The withdrawal from Empire led to significant losses of markets, despite the temporary protection afforded by the Market Rights Agreement from 1947 to 1975 (see above, p. 189). Exports were, however, one of the success stories of the post-war British book trade, although in the long run this was to prove a dangerous exposure to fluctuations in currency and indeed international politics. As Britain emerged from ‘post-war’, with its insistent longing to return to the conditions of ‘pre-war’ (well reflected in the book trade), and became more prosperous in the 1950s, the publishing industry and the book trade had wellestablished patterns of domestic activity. The publishing houses were essentially the same as they had been in 1939; many were of course the comparatively small family houses whose names had been familiar in the pre-war period. The young radicals of the 1920s and 1930s were now, in many cases, the conservative (commercially, not politically, in many cases) leaders of the trade. Protected by the Net Book Agreement and the Market Rights Agreement, they saw little reason to change their ways. The demise of Simpkin Marshall was in some ways a boon to the publishers: eliminating the middleman increased their profits. The booksellers to whom they sold their products were equally content with the old ways. Like much of 1950s Britain, the publishing industry seemed to be stable, contented and perhaps a little smug.

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16 NEW COMPETITORS

Television and the publishing industry The mass media of the twentieth century had a major impact on the publishing industry. The industry which developed in nineteenth-century Britain, building on the foundations of the early modern book trade, was critically dependent on a mass market. The mass market was created by the growth of both literacy and prosperity. By 1900, Britain was close to having achieved universal adult literacy, and, despite the inevitable consequences of economic cycles, was fundamentally a wealthy country in which leisure time was a part of most people’s lives. The commercialisation of leisure, a process which began in the eighteenth century, was a noticeable feature of the second half of Queen Victoria’s reign. Cheap rail travel, the growth of popular entertainments such as the music halls, and the professionalisation and commercialisation of many sports (especially football and boxing), opened up new horizons, both literally and metaphorically, to millions of people. The new journalism of the late nineteenth century, and the emergence of a genuinely popular newspaper press (see above, pp. 148–50), was a manifestation of a similar phenomenon. In the book publishing industry, the proliferation both of cheap reprint series and of primary and secondary educational textbooks were consequences of the same pattern of simultaneous growth of incomes and leisure. Any development, whether cultural, commercial or technological, which had an impact on the commercial provision of leisure activities and services would necessarily have an impact on publishing. That was true of the evolution of the cinema and of broadcasting from the beginning of the twentieth century onwards. On the whole, however, this impact had not been negative. There is no evidence that the mass popularity of radio and cinema had any serious impact on book buying and reading in the 1920s and 1930s, partly because the mass audience for both was so much greater than the market for all but a handful of books, newspapers and magazines. After World War II, however, a far more potent competitor emerged, as television services were re-established. From being the plaything of a wealthy metropolitan elite during the few pre-war years when there were broadcasts, television developed into the most

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widespread medium in the history of communications within a matter of a few years. In Britain, the turning point was the coronation of Elizabeth II in 1953. Sets proliferated; numbers of viewers overtook numbers of radio listeners for the first time in 1955. By the end of the decade, there were more than 10 million television licence holders (Crisell 2002: 81–2). If 1953 was the year in which television became a mass medium, 1955 was the year in which it genuinely began to appeal to the masses. The opening of the independent (i.e. commercial) network gave the BBC a domestic competitor for the first time. The ITV franchisees had to appeal to a mass audience in order to attract the advertising on which they depended. There was some high quality programming, which successfully competed with the BBC even in arts and current affairs, but the staple fare of the ITV companies was soap opera and quiz shows. The opening of BBC2 (1964) and Channel 4 (1982) gave additional scope to both the BBC and the ITV companies to provide minority programmes (Crisell 2002: 119–22, 206–9). Channel 4 was the last of the line; by the time the next terrestrial channel was launched in 1997, both networks were living in the barely controlled competitive environment of satellite and cable. By 1970, television was nearly universal in Britain, accessible everywhere, and found in all but a handful of homes. In that year, researchers found that 23 per cent of the adult population described television viewing as their ‘chief’ leisure occupation, as against 5 per cent of men and 9 per cent of women who put reading books into that category (Social Trends 1970: 78). By 1980, twenty million households had television licences (Social Trends 1980: 179), and in 2000, 99 per cent of the population watched television regularly (Social Trends 2000: 210). Television was, of course, only one dimension of profound social change. The old working-class culture, which had underpinned so much popular publishing in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, all but vanished. The last generation of autodidacts just overlapped with the new radicals of the 1960s, but the younger generation were the product of universal access to secondary and higher education which was the consequence of the 1944 Education Act. As the formal literary culture became more and more removed from everyday life, people turned to television for the entertainment which had once come from popular magazines and perhaps even from reading the classics (Rose 2002: 439–64).

Publishing in the 1950s and 1960s The publishing world of the 1950s and 1960s could be seen as retreating into its middle-class heartland, and into safe pre-war orthodoxies. At one level, it is impossible to deny the truth of that. A whole generation of publishers had now come to maturity who had never known the world without the comfort blanket of the Net Book Agreement. As the Agreement became part of the fabric of the trade in the inter-war years (see above, pp. 152–8), librarians,

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booksellers, educational suppliers, book clubs and others all became enmeshed in its provisions. It was virtually unchallenged within the book trade itself, and to customers the idea of fixed prices for books was so familiar as to be unremarkable. The wording of the Agreement was revised in 1956, to take account of the Restrictive Trade Practices Act of that year. This legislation was designed to stimulate competition for the benefit of consumers. Some apparently restrictive practices were, however, exempt if it could be shown that their products were socially desirable and that their availability and cost would be adversely affected by the application of the Act. In 1959, and again in 1962, the Registrar of Restrictive Practices challenged the Publishers’ Association and the Booksellers’ Association in the special court established under the Act. The Restrictive Practices Court heard the case in June and July 1962. The trade argued that if the Net Book Agreement were abolished, the principal victims would be small booksellers who would no longer be able to trade profitably because larger competitors would be able to undersell them. This was, of course, essentially the argument which had driven the two sides of the trade to make the Agreement in the 1890s and 1900s. It was further argued that unrestricted price competition would lead to a loss of diversity in publishing. Publishers would no longer be willing to publish experimental literary work, for example, or high level academic books, because there would not be sufficient demand for them in a wholly free market. The argument was encapsulated in a phrase which was to become a defining statement about the British publishing industry in the third quarter of the twentieth century: ‘books are different’. They were argued to be different because of their cultural and educational significance, but the underlying assumption was that in a free market the publishing industry could not flourish because so many of its products had little or no market appeal. The Court accepted the arguments of the two trade associations almost without question. Indeed, much of the judgment consists of near-quotations from the evidence of the trade’s witnesses and counsel. Books are Different became the title of the account of the affair which was edited and published by the secretaries of the two trade bodies (Barker and Davies 1966). The Net Book Agreement was not seriously challenged for forty years after this successful defence (see below, pp. 226–7). The conservatism and caution which underlay the trade’s almost frenetic defence of the Net Book Agreement in the early 1960s was reflected in the output of many publishers in the 1950s and the following decade. Many of the bestselling authors of the 1950s were men and women who had established their reputation before World War II and had not significantly changed their style or approach. The perennially popular detective stories of Agatha Christie (1890–1976), for example, had contemporary post-war settings but their psychological world is that of pre-war England; perhaps that explains their appeal, which did not diminish even after her death in 1976 (Bloom 2002: 132–3; Sutherland 2002: 102–3). Other favourites who were mainstays of

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public libraries and paperback publishers alike included Daphne du Maurier (1907–89) and Ethel M. Dell (1881–1939), both of whom were writing the same sorts of books in the 1950s and 1960s that they had written in the 1930s (Bloom 2002: 134–5, 147–8). Of course, new authors did emerge, and with them there were sometimes new kinds of book. The espionage novel, which was a product of the growing concern about the power of Germany before World War I (see above, pp. 149–50), took on a new lease of life during the Cold War years, most famously perhaps in the hands of Ian Fleming and John le Carré, although it reached its literary apogee in the work of Graham Greene (Bloom 2002: 217–18; Sutherland 2002: 42–6). James Bond’s lifestyle, first explored in Casino Royale (1954), may have been different from that of John Buchan’s Richard Hannay in The Thirty-nine Steps (1915), but their attitudes and assumptions were not all that different. The orthodoxy of the bestselling fiction of the twenty years after World War II is an interesting indicator of the general ethos of the publishing industry in those years. Nevertheless, beneath the surface radical social change was evolving to be reflected in a new generation of publishers and writers. The stories of two very different aspects of publishing illustrate both the diversity of the industry, and how old assumptions were being challenged.

Scientific publishing The post-war boom in scientific publishing was, in a sense, a product of the same culture as James Bond – the Cold War, and the perception that the Soviet Union and her allies were competing with, and perhaps overtaking, the west, a perception confirmed by a series of Soviet successes from the manufacture of her own atomic bomb (in 1949) to the launch of the first earth-orbiting satellite (in 1957). The traditional mode of publication for scientific research, which can trace its history to the late seventeenth century (see above, p. 56), was in scholarly journals typically published by learned societies. Although English language publishing had a role in this sector from the late nineteenth century onwards, until 1939 Germany was at least as important. This reflected the long history of scientific research in that country’s universities and research institutes. With World War II this tradition of German language publishing came to an end. Indeed, some of the German publishing houses which were revived after the war, notably Springer Verlag, began to publish in English (Goetz 1997; Hundt 2001; Sarkowski 2001). At the same time, Dutch publishers were moving into the field of English language scientific publishing, and doing so with some success (van Leeuwen 1980). In the post-war chaos, the field was wide open to an enterprising British publisher. Such a publisher appeared in the person of Robert Maxwell, the would-be rescuer of Simpkin Marshall (see above, pp. 197–8; Bower 1992; Thompson and Delano 1991). Maxwell was born in 1923 in Czechoslovakia, one fact

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about his life on which all accounts agree. During World War II he was involved with the Czech resistance, and eventually found his way to Britain where he was engaged in intelligence work. After the Soviet Union entered the war against Germany in 1941, this work brought him many contacts in eastern Europe, some of them in the communist parties which took power in his native country and others in the late 1940s. These contacts in the parties – and hence the governments – of the socialist countries were to prove critical to Maxwell’s career as a publisher. In 1947, Maxwell – who was fluent in several languages in addition to Czech, German and English – began to act as a distributor for the newly refounded Springer Verlag, and became involved in the dissemination of German and central European scientific work in the west. Some of this was wartime work which could not be published at the time, but some was new. In 1949, Springer formed an alliance with the British publishing house of Butterworth, long renowned for its scientific (and indeed law) publishing, but the joint venture ran into difficulties. In 1951 Maxwell bought it and renamed it Pergamon Press (Jones 1980: 131–5; Miranda 2001: 78–80). Pergamon remained the centre of Maxwell’s business and interest for the rest of his publishing career. It published scientific textbooks and monographs, and, above all, scientific journals. At first, the journals were largely of Soviet and east European origin, sometimes in the original and sometimes in translation. It was through the Pergamon journals that western scientists (and governments) gained much of their knowledge of research in the Soviet Union throughout the period when there was an almost paranoid concern about what the Russians were doing. For a publisher, this was a sure formula for success. Moreover, Maxwell’s unique contacts at the highest levels in eastern Europe effectively gave him a monopoly of the business. Pergamon soon added its own periodicals to the stable as science became more complex and more specialised than ever before as well as being more widely practised and studied. The later history of both the company and its founder is complex and still controversial; possibly the truth about Maxwell’s involvement with intelligence services (and on which side), and indeed the precise cause of his death, will never be fully known (or if known, revealed). From the narrow perspective of publishing history, however, the significance of his career is unquestionable. Pergamon Press brought east European science to the west, and, along with Elsevier and a handful of other companies, laid the foundation for the vast expansion of scientific publishing in Britain and the USA in the later 1950s and into the 1960s and beyond (Cox 2002; Ennals 2001). Scientific publishing – known in the trade as Science, Technology and Medicine (STM) – was one of the great growth areas of the second half of the century. Despite losing some of the scientific initiative to the USA, Britain retained a world role in the field as a publisher of both books and journals. Some 20,000 STM titles were published in Britain in 1999, nearly 20 per cent of the total output of the industry (Feather 2003: 39).

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A new diversity In a very different part of the publishing spectrum there were comparably great changes afoot under the calm surface of post-war publishing. In the 1920s and 1930s there were many books, some of great literary importance, whose publication in Britain was either impossible or very difficult. These included works by James Joyce (1882–1941), Norman Douglas (1868–1952) and D. H. Lawrence (1885–1930) which had been published in the United Kingdom only in abbreviated versions or in very expensive editions available only to subscribers. Trade editions of their works published on the continent were regularly seized by customs and the importers prosecuted (Travis 2000: 74–127). This began to change in 1959. The Obscene Publications Act of that year changed the century-old definition of obscenity (see above, pp. 128–9). The new law allowed a defence on the grounds of literary merit. Allen Lane, always a man of the left and still willing to challenge orthodoxies, decided to test the limits of the Act. In 1960, Penguin published an unexpurgated version of Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which had been banned in the United Kingdom ever since it was first published in Florence in 1928 (Travis 2000: 128–65). Prosecution predictably followed, and after a six-day trial, Lane, his company and the book were acquitted using the newly allowed defence which had included evidence from an array of distinguished literary critics and scholars (Morpurgo 1979: 314–25). The acquittal of Penguin Books marked a turning point in the history of British publishing, and, some would argue, of British society. In the publishing world, it was never again possible to suppress books on moral grounds as freely as had been the practice for decades. In the next few years, books which were unsuccessfully prosecuted included Naked Lunch (by William Burroughs, 1964) and Last Exit to Brooklyn (by Hubert Selby Jr, 1968). Nabokov’s Lolita was never subject to legal attention; it was actually published before the Penguin Lady Chatterley’s Lover. It has been credibly argued that Lolita avoided prosecution because Weidenfeld and Nicolson published it in hardback at £1.12s.6d, and not in provocative paperback at an accessible 3s.6d. (Sutherland 2002: 49–53). More widely, the failure of the Lady Chatterley prosecution was taken by friend and foe alike to mark the beginning of the Sixties and a new culture of freedom and liberation, the so-called ‘permissive society’, when, as Philip Larkin famously put it, ‘Sexual intercourse began . . . / . . . Between the end of the Chatterley ban / And the Beatles’s first LP’. The virtual abandonment of literary censorship in Britain from about 1960 onwards certainly created a more liberal climate in which publishers could operate. Previously unmentionable subjects could be freely discussed in print, and new areas of publishing began to open up. Women had played a part in the book trade since the seventeenth century (see above, pp. 51–2), and women were important as buyers and borrowers of books, especially of certain kinds of ‘library fiction’ such as romance and historical novels. Publishing houses

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had female employees, but usually in comparatively lowly positions, even though they might be more influential than their status suggested. The beginning of feminist publishing in Britain is marked by the foundation of Virago in 1973 by Carmen Callil, Rosie Boycott and Marsha Rowe, a brave venture at a time when feminism was only just entering the general consciousness of British women. It proved to be a great commercial success, as well as having significant literary and cultural influence. In 1994–5, when it became part of the American company Little, Brown it was sold as a profitable concern with an international reputation (Virago 2004). One of the co-founders of Virago was also deeply involved in setting up an industry-wide group called Women in Publishing, established in 1979. This became an influential counterbalance to the traditionally male informal networks of the trade (Women in Publishing 2004). Another sexual movement of the 1970s also had its impact on publishing. Somewhat later than the same phenomenon was seen in the United States, gay publishing became a feature of the British book trade. The key year was 1979, which saw the foundation of Gay Men’s Press (Gay Men’s Press 2004) and the opening of the London bookshop Gay’s The Word (Gay’s The Word 2004).

Small presses and big publishers The major publishing houses of the 1950s and early 1960s were essentially those which had existed before World War II. They were typically independent, based in London and had very clear identities. Publishers – and particularly the people in publishing houses responsible for the selection of books for publication – had very clear ideas about what was, and what was not, ‘our kind of book’. This was a long-standing practice. In 1926, Stanley Unwin wrote that ‘the tradition of the house’ was a factor in selecting material; the phrase stands in the eighth edition of his book, revised and published by his nephew fifty years later (Unwin 1926: 27; S. Unwin 1976: 27). Contemporary writers had no difficulty in identifying such a ‘tradition’. One such commentator cheerfully used phrases such as ‘illustrious, academic and institutional’, ‘the busiest literary publisher in London’, ‘still pumps out exciting thrillers’, and so on, to describe his fellow publishers (Blond 1972: 121–35). Even the big publishers were not, by later standards, really very big. Few published as many as 100 new titles a year, and those that did (Longman, and Macmillan, for example, by the late 1970s) were usually involved in educational publishing and in providing English language teaching materials for the export market. Structurally, many were still family businesses, including some of the oldest and most famous. Longman was the outstanding example. The firm could trace its history back to the late seventeenth century, and had been in the Longman family since 1724 (see above, p. 75). In 1964, the seventh generation of the family took control in the person of Mark Longman (1916–72); he was in his early fifties and had been on the board for nearly twenty years. The future seemed assured, but his early death in 1972 was a

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blow from which the firm never entirely recovered. A series of mergers and takeovers led to the Longman name vanishing from British publishing before the end of the twentieth century (Wallis 1974: 36–9; see also below, p. 223). The vagaries of heredity and health are inevitable hazards for family businesses. In publishing, where so much traditionally depended on the taste and interests of one or two people in the company, this was particularly true. Penguin Books survived as an imprint – indeed some might say a brand – but only because it went through a series of financial and business restructurings after Allen Lane’s death in 1970. The imprint still has some of the characteristics of the firm which Lane founded, but has never recovered (and perhaps never could recover) the sense of vision and enterprise which he had brought to it (de Bellaigue 2004: 28–61). Macmillan survived as a family business until the end of the century, but only just, and was eventually absorbed into a Germanbased multinational (see below, p. 224). Examples could be multiplied. There is a pattern here which needs to be understood. It is perhaps best explained by considering the ambiguity of some of the language we use to describe it. The word ‘publisher’ can be variously used (and is throughout this book) to mean a person or a company. As a person, it may be the owner of the company, or the chief executive or even the senior editor who takes decisions about what to publish. Publishing companies are typically known by the names of their founders or owners, although this perhaps became a little less common in the second half of the twentieth century. Some of these founders started their businesses simply to make money; they saw business opportunities and exploited them. Others saw the possibility of promoting a cause or an interest without actually losing money. Most probably fell somewhere between the two extremes, but general trade publishing houses probably tend towards the former rather than the latter. The problems arise when the founder, the driving force of the enterprise, is no longer able to take charge. Some firms have of course been handed down from generation to generation; but for every Murray or Macmillan there have been many more Heinemanns, Cassells or Gollanczs which did not survive as a family enterprise beyond a single generation. Names and imprints survive – as Penguin has done – when the product is distinctive and can command a significant market. The dominant theme in the economic history of British publishing since World War II has been the emergence of hundreds of small publishing houses, of which a handful have been true commercial successes. The majority of those have been absorbed into larger companies in a process which began in the 1960s, gathered pace for forty years and shows no sign of coming to an end. But in each generation, the industry is renewed by the emergence of more small companies willing to take risks that large companies cannot take, and ensuring the continuing diversity of the industry and its products. The great multinational media conglomerates which dominated British publishing by the beginning of the twenty-first century are the consequence of this cycle of development (see below, pp. 222–5).

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The market for books It is against this background that we must consider changes in the book market in Britain in the late twentieth century and its impact on the publishing industry. The output of books continued to grow dramatically throughout the period. In 1950, 11,738 new titles were published; in 1960 there were 18,794, in 1970 23,512, and in 1979 32,854 (Curwen 1981: 19). By that time, some contemporary commentators were either sceptical of the soundness of the commercial base of the industry (Bingley 1972: 145), or were puzzled by the apparent contrast between the overall statistical data and the performance of individual companies (Mann 1982: 70–6). Yet growth continued; by 1989 there were 61,196 titles published in Britain, and in 1999 this figure reached 110,155 (Feather 2003: 36). A number of factors underlay this expansion. There was an increase in the British population from just over 50 million in 1951 to just under 60 million in 2001, but a key figure, the adult literacy rate, remained essentially unchanged at more than 95 per cent. Education and employment patterns, on the other hand, changed significantly. The 1944 Education Act made secondary education compulsory to the age of 15, extended to 16 in 1972. The same Act opened up routes to university entrance for children from all socio-economic backgrounds, with the result that throughout the 1960s and early 1970s there was a steady growth of higher education. Between 1963 and 1967 several new universities were founded, and some higher level municipal colleges became polytechnics. The latter themselves became universities in 1992. The net effect of all of this was that there was a growth in participation in higher education from about 3 per cent of school leavers immediately after World War II to between 30 per cent and 40 per cent by the end of the century (depending on how the numbers were counted) and with a target of 50 per cent. This created both a much larger market for educational books at secondary and tertiary levels, and a far larger number of highly educated people who were readers of books as well as newspapers and magazines. It was also a prosperous period, with intermittent recessions and economic downturns (Kitson 2004). Much of the new wealth was spent on housing and consumer goods, but from the 1980s onwards, the leisure market, including the book industry, was a major beneficiary of prosperity. When some of the more enterprising and entrepreneurial booksellers began to take a new and more aggressive stance towards high street sales in the mid-1980s, the publishing industry was positioned to be a significant beneficiary of economic growth and stability (see below, pp. 225–7). Well-educated and prosperous people are the core market of the publishing industry. The broad patterns of book buying, reading, borrowing and ownership have barely changed since the first modern systematic surveys were made in the 1960s and 1970s (Mann 1979). Simply summarised, the typical book buyer is a graduate professional with an income significantly in excess of the national average. As the number of people in these

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categories continually increased during the second half of the twentieth century, the publishing industry found a second new market for its products; in addition to selling more books to the educational establishments, they were also able to sell more to those whom those establishments educated. The overall growth of the British book market in the second half of the twentieth century contains a number of lesser strands which are worth considering. Some involved significant change from historic patterns. First and foremost, this was the age of the paperback. The mass market paperback made its way into the British publishing scene in the 1950s and has remained a significant feature of it ever since. By the mid-1960s, most publishing houses either had their own paperback imprints, or were issuing selected titles in soft covers or were selling paperback rights to other publishers (see above, pp. 178–9). In any case, the paperback had become respectable and was increasingly the format in which most book buyers bought their books. Some of the traditional reprint series, with their long generic pedigree which went back to the end of the eighteenth century (see above, pp. 72–4), survived only by joining the paperback revolution. Both World’s Classics and Everyman’s Library were paperback series by the year 2000. The hardback did not, however, go into complete or terminal decline. Indeed, there was a widespread belief among the more traditional publishers that no book could be commercially successful if it did not appear in hardback first. It was argued that shops were reluctant to take paperbacks which had not proved their marketability, and that reviewers, especially in the commercially crucial upmarket Sunday newspapers, were reluctant to deal with them. To some extent this was sheer snobbery; but it became something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. By the end of the century, however, simultaneous publication was becoming the norm, and even much fiction was appearing as ‘paperback originals’. The market for hardback fiction was sustained for decades by the libraries, as indeed it had been since the late eighteenth century. ‘Library fiction’ had been a familiar genre since the generation of the Nobles and the Minerva Press (see above, pp. 77–8). But both the libraries and the fiction changed in the second half of the twentieth century. The commercial circulating libraries – the mainstay of the fiction trade for nearly two hundred years – gradually faded away in the 1950s. Smiths closed in 1961, and the last of them, Boots, in 1966 (Wilson 1985: 373). Their working-class equivalents had vanished long before. All had been replaced, to some extent, by public libraries which after 1964 were no longer provided at the whim of ratepayers but which were an obligation on all primary local authorities (Black 2000: 123). Despite the alternative attractions of television and the burgeoning leisure industries, book reading consistently remained as a leisure occupation for about 25 per cent of men and over 40 per cent of women even at the beginning of the twenty-first century (Social Trends 2004: 202). Indeed, by the end of the 1970s, television had become an ally. Popular serialisations of novels could revive sales; a spectacular BBC version of the Forsyte Saga, by the long neglected John Galsworthy,

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turned the Penguin editions of the books into bestsellers. Documentary series by academic popularisers like Kenneth Clark and Jacob Bronowski, as well as by professional broadcasters such as David Attenborough, created a new genre of beautifully illustrated but learned coffee-table books as spin-offs from the series. The BBC itself was a publisher, but increasingly worked closely with the mainstream houses to benefit from their marketing expertise. Far from being an enemy dealing a fatal blow, television had become an ally of book publishing.

Conclusion From the early 1950s to the early 1970s, British publishing was evolving rather than radically changing. The familiar pre-war imprints continued to dominate mainstream publishing. Television and other potential competitors were not only held at bay, but actually helped the book industry by the titles and the audience that they generated. Yet the book world did change. It was more competitive, and in some ways more professional. It was also more international. Pergamon pointed the way to the future. This was an essentially international enterprise despite its British commercial base. It drew its material from eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, and its most important market was in the United States. Domestically, however, change was less visible. The retail book trade, the shop window of the mainstream publishers, was well protected and deeply conservative. Paperbacks were – somewhat reluctantly – accepted, but there were few other innovations even in styles of retailing. New genres of publishing – feminist books, for example – were largely created outside the mainstream and absorbed only as they became profitable and respectable. The industry looked safe and established, and so in many ways it was. But it was also vulnerable. The tradition of family businesses at the heart of the publishing industry was both the source of its stability and a time-bomb waiting to explode. An unexpected death, a generation in which no one was interested in the business, or the failure to produce an heir could have a devastating effect. In companies whose shares were rarely held outside a small family circle, financial difficulties would be multiplied if extra capital could not be found. A family quarrel could devastate a business. As the generation which had brought the trade from wartime devastation to the prosperity of the 1960s began to die or retire, all of these factors and many others came into play. There was a technological revolution which changed the processes and economics of book production and information distribution. And there was a commercial revolution with deep political roots which forced the book trade to re-examine some of its fundamental tenets. These two topics are the themes of the most recent part of the long history of British publishing.

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17 THE SECOND INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

Introduction Printing is the technological foundation of the publishing industry. Despite the existence of a trade in books in western Europe before the invention of the craft, the development of a mass market industry was possible only when there was a technology of mass production. Pre-industrial printing was a hand-craft process. This began to change in the early nineteenth century with improvements to existing machinery and equipment followed by the development of new devices which effectively mechanised printing. Much later in the century there were similar changes in typesetting and ultimately bookbinding (see above, pp. 85–93). Since the early seventeenth century in England, publishers (or ‘booksellers’ in earlier parlance) had been clients and customers of printers rather than printers themselves. Printing evolved as a distinct industry, and for most of those engaged in it book printing was only a small part of their businesses if it featured at all. Across the industry as a whole, jobbing printing and magazine and newspaper work were of far greater economic importance. Indeed, by the end of the nineteenth century, book printing was regarded as a specialised branch of the trade in which comparatively few firms were engaged (see above, pp. 92–3). By the mid-twentieth century, these distinctions were clearly understood and were indeed considered to be appropriate to the industry (Delafons 1965: 59–67). Publishers and book printers are interdependent, but only coincidentally connected to the other branches of the printing industry. Technical change in printing and related industries has a significant effect on how publishers work and on what they can do. As we have seen, the development of methods of mass manufacture of cheap paper, and the more or less simultaneous development of high speed steam-powered printing presses, made it possible to manufacture large numbers of low price books from the 1830s onwards with significant consequences not only for the publishing industry itself but also for the book trade in general and for society at large (see above, p. 112). Indeed the general impact of technical developments throughout the nineteenth century was to bring down, or hold down, the price of books at

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a time when the potential market was in any case expanding because of a growing population and increasing rates of literacy. It was the potential for price competition, facilitated in part by extensive and cheap production facilities, which drove the publishers and the booksellers to agree to control the market through the price control mechanism of the Net Book Agreement in 1900. For the first half of the twentieth century, there was little change. New designs of printing press were perhaps marginally more efficient than their predecessors, and the mechanical typesetting systems were widely adopted by the book printers. The system adopted by almost all British book printers was Monotype, established in Britain in 1897 (Wallis 1988: 5); its use was a matter of comment at the turn of the twentieth century (Moran 1974: 78–9, 97–9), but was regarded as normal for book work by 1914 (Child 1967: 182). From the mid-1950s onwards, however, a series of technical innovations wrought profound change on the business of publishing in almost every respect. The first phase of change, up to about 1985, largely consisted of developing and adopting new ways of doing old things; but from then until the end of the century and beyond, wholly new technology made a radical difference to the very fundamentals of the publishing industry.

Innovations in printing The basic principle of letterpress printing remains unchanged from that invented by Gutenberg; ink is applied to a relief surface on which there is a reverse image of the matter to be printed, and the ink is transferred under pressure to an appropriate medium. This was the normal form of all printing from the fifteenth to the mid-twentieth century. It was a simple and effective system, but it had inherent problems, especially in dealing with non-western alphabets (such as the Chinese pictograms or the Japanese syllabary), ‘special’ symbols (such as musical notation) and graphic illustrations (whether symbolic or representational). The problem was partly, but very expensively, solved by the invention of lithography (see above, pp. 90–1). During the nineteenth century, lithography was adopted for maps, music and illustrations in books, but it was always a complex, difficult and expensive process involving a high level of craft skill. It was rarely economic to use it for text work (Twyman 2001). In the course of the nineteenth century, other techniques were developed for graphic reproduction, some of which were compatible with relief printing. These typically involved etching a plate so that a raised surface was created which had the lines of the image which was to be reproduced. In the late 1870s and early 1880s methods of reproducing photographs on relief blocks were developed. This practice was rapidly and widely adopted in book printing, usually in the process known as ‘half-tone’ which gives reasonably high quality reproductions using shades of grey. These processes, generically called photomechanical printing, remained the usual means of reproducing illustrations in text for some seventy years, although they were still expensive as they involved

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manual intervention at several points before the print run could begin (Wakeman 1973: 130–40). Although photomechanical techniques were a significant technical and economic advance on the various hand-craft methods, they did not solve the underlying problem: the cost of high quality illustrations and graphics. For three hundred years, there had been a demand for prints bought as separate items and in books, which could only be met by various methods involving engraving on metal. In these techniques – generically called intaglio – lines are gouged out from the surface of the plate, either manually or chemically, and the plate is printed under extreme pressure which forces the ink into the lines. A whole trade in prints developed from the seventeenth century onwards, reaching its climax in the nineteenth century by which time it was only peripherally connected to book publishing (Dyson 1984; Myers and Harris 1984). The underlying problem, however, still remained. While it was possible to achieve high quality reproductions, whether from hand-drawn work or from photography, until it was also possible to use high speed printing processes for illustrated and graphic work illustrated books would continue to be prohibitively expensive for most publishers of most titles. The solution lay in the use of lithography. The advantages of lithography over relief printing were always obvious, and revolved around the key point that no type was involved and that any kind of material could be reproduced from the same plate. The difficulty was in generating the textual matter. The use of photography was an obvious solution, if a system could be evolved which effectively permitted type to be ‘set’ by photographic methods. Experimental work began in Germany in the 1920s, but with no practical outcome (Münch 2001). The search for a viable system was taken forward in Britain by the Monotype Corporation in the 1930s; a working device was patented in 1936 (Boag 2000: 58). Although this system was technically viable, it was still clumsy; it was not until 1957–8 that the first phototypeset book was published in the UK. It was in that same year that the word ‘phototypesetting’ began to be used in the industry (Wallis 1988: 29). The delay was only partly caused by the problems in developing phototypesetting itself. World War II inevitably inhibited research and development work with no immediate military applications. But the core of the problem lay in finding a suitable printing machine. Traditional methods of rotary printing brought the printing surface into direct contact with the paper. With relief and intaglio plates this was not a problem. For plates with a plane surface (the essence of lithographic printing), there were, however, a number of technical difficulties. The practical consequence of these difficulties was that the press had to be operated at comparatively low speeds, print runs took a long time and the product was consequently expensive. This was resolved by adopting a technique which had been invented in the early twentieth century, but rarely applied: offset printing. In offset, the plate makes an image on a intermediary surface from which it is then transferred

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to the paper. The result is a printed page of a commercially acceptable quality even when the press operates at high speed. Offset lithography and phototypesetting were gradually introduced into book printing from the late 1950s onwards. Letterpress printing from relief surfaces survived into the 1970s, but by the end of that decade had all but vanished from commercial book work (Hutchings 1978: 86–109). For publishers, the general adoption of phototypesetting and offset lithography was a form of liberation. Aesthetically, it gave designers far greater freedom in planning page layouts and indeed whole books. It was now easy to combine text, photographs and graphics on the same page, which was precisely what had been most difficult and expensive in all previous printing systems. From school textbooks to art books, the physical appearance of the page was transformed. Moreover, unlike its predecessors, offset lithography offered a comparatively cheap form of colour printing. Using the basic principle of separating the image into the three primary colours and black, making four plates, and running the paper through all four consecutively, colour printing became a meaningful possibility for comparatively low value work. Colour illustrations had previously been bound in separate sections of the book, and often printed on more expensive coated (or ‘art’) paper. This was no longer necessary. For the first time, publishers could exploit all the possibilities of full-colour printing without pricing their books out of the range of many would-be purchasers (Williamson 1983: 243–55). The printing revolution of the third quarter of the twentieth century, despite the complaints of some traditionalists in the printing industry, opened the way for books which were more exciting to look at, and had a wider market appeal. The general adoption of offset lithography also opened up other possibilities. In simple terms, anything which could be photographed could be printed without any intervention other than plate-making. This, of course, included existing books, journals and other printed and written documents. From the late 1960s, in Britain, Germany, the Netherlands and the United States, a new branch of the publishing industry developed which focused on lithographic reprints of out-of-print material. In particular, this was aimed at the growing and initially wealthy market of new educational institutions, especially new universities which wanted to stock their libraries. Runs of learned journals, monograph series and individual academic texts were reprinted by offset lithography, often by small specialist publishing houses established for the purpose. The same principle was applied to primary source material for historical and literary studies. First and other early editions of important works could be reproduced without fee, except whatever minimal charge might be made by the library which owned the copy of the book that was being reproduced. These reprints proved invaluable to new university libraries seeking to develop research collections quickly and comparatively cheaply. With minimal commentary, indeed often little more than a one-paragraph introduction, books were created which proved to be popular and up to a point profitable. The same

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practice was adopted by the major academic publishing houses themselves. Even Oxford University Press followed the trend, with photolithographic reprints of some of its core reference works such as the Oxford English Dictionary (1978) and the Dictionary of National Biography (1963–5). Cambridge, with less offset litho equipment, found itself at a disadvantage (McKitterick 1992– 2004: vol. 3, 421). A less reputable application of the same principle was in the illegal reproduction of books – piracy – by publishers in some parts of Asia, especially Taiwan, India and, until the practice was ruthlessly eliminated in the 1980s, Singapore. A second new area of publishing which was opened by offset lithography was that of producing books using ‘camera-ready copy’. All lithographic plates are created from camera-ready copy, normally the output of a phototypesetting machine. In the late 1960s and 1970s, however, there developed a practice among some publishers of requiring authors to submit their books in a predetermined format ready for photography. This was made possible by the development of the electric typewriter, and in particular of the IBM Selectric which reached the market in 1961 (Wallis 1988: 32). The Selectric, and the various competitors which followed, differed from mechanical typewriters in two essential ways. First, it was possible to make more or less invisible corrections using a special ribbon, and secondly, the ribbon was only used once, thus giving a completely even appearance to the type. Although the lines were typically unjustified, and the general appearance was that of typescript rather than print, it was technically possible to make a plate from which a legible printed page could be reproduced. For some academic publishers, and indeed for vanity publishers, this was a significant development. The expenses of typesetting and proofing, traditionally among the highest costs incurred in the book production process, were effectively transferred to the author. The problem, of course, was one of quality, and there was a general (and broadly justified) perception that books and journals produced in this way did not meet the highest standards that the book printing and publishing industries expected. The adoption of the practice, however, did at least demonstrate that there was a need to rethink some of the traditional dynamics of the relationships between the various parties in the production and publishing processes.

The impact of computers The most radical development of the last third of the twentieth century, however, was the application of computing to typesetting and printing. The first British book with computer-aided typesetting was an edition of the Collected Poems of the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas published in Everyman’s Library in 1966; the phrase itself is first recorded in 1963 (Wallis 1988: 33). The application of computing in the printing industry seems inevitable in retrospect, but there were many blind alleys, false trails and expensive failures before the reliable systems which were common by the end of the century came into

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widespread use. The technical press, especially in computing, began to carry descriptions of experimental systems in the late 1960s (Bozman 1966; Goldman 1969), but the first true computer typesetting systems were not developed until the 1970s. They were characterised by keyboard-controlled machines whose memories held large stores of type designs, fonts and sizes as well as the multitude of other visual devices needed to produce a printed page, many of which were not to be found on even the most sophisticated electric typewriters. At about the same time, word processing systems were also coming into use in offices, although they did not fully displace typewriting until the later 1980s (Kunde 2004). At first, it was envisaged that word processors would have an important direct role in publishing (Miller et al. 1985); this has turned out not to be true, although they have been indirectly of great significance. CAT – to use the common acronym of computer-assisted (or aided) typesetting – was first used on a large scale in the newspaper industry, where so many technical innovations had been pioneered from steam presses to hotmetal typesetting (see above, pp. 88, 93). The process was not painless, especially in terms of industrial relations. Indeed, the new technologies, in which journalists could keyboard their own input rather than handing copy to the compositors, caused major disruptions in the industry in the late 1970s and during the 1980s. Ultimately, the power of the unions was broken, the newspaper industry moved from its historic Fleet Street location to new facilities on the periphery of central London and the industry underwent a major business restructuring which brought it closer to book publishing than it had been for centuries (Smith 1980; and see below, pp. 223–4). The key event was the purchase of The Times by the Australian newspaper magnate Rupert Murdoch (b. 1931) in 1981. Not for the first time in its history, the paper’s prestige was not reflected in its financial position, and it proved an ideal means for Murdoch to fulfil his ambition of entering the quality newspaper market in Britain. But the takeover had other implications, since Murdoch had agreed with the unions that there would have to be significant changes in production practices (Grigg 1993: 571–5). This proved to be deeply controversial when Murdoch moved The Times to state-of-the-art facilities at Wapping in east London in 1986. The rest of the newspaper industry followed (some geographically), and the product was revolutionised. Newspapers could have more pages, colour illustrations, multiple supplements and parts, and so on. All this was made technically possible by the adoption of advanced information technology, which effectively meant that everything from the input of content, the editing processes and page make-up through to printing, collation and binding was supported by computers. Thousands of jobs were eliminated, costs were slashed and in some cases profits vastly increased (McNair 1994: 123–43). The 1980s were not a happy decade in the newspaper industry, but the technical revolution which was wrought then had a massive, if indirect, impact on book publishing. In part, this was because of growing common ownership of newspaper titles and publishing houses, not least by Murdoch himself (see

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below, pp. 223–4). It was also the case, however, that the sophisticated technologies developed for the newspaper printers could be adopted and adapted in various ways in book publishing. Probably the most significant of these was the growing practice – first found in the early 1980s and normal by the end of that decade – of expecting authors to submit copy in the form of wordprocessed output. It was during this period that the now familiar PC became ubiquitous, and the Microsoft operating system with its Word word processor came to dominate the market to the point of becoming a virtual global standard (Winston 1998: 232–40). As it became normal for authors to use PCs rather than typewriters, and as almost all of them used the same software and systems, publishers could ask for the electronic files rather than hard copy, and these files could be used as input for the CAT devices. The effects of this change were profound. At one level authors gained a degree of control over their texts that they had never previously enjoyed in the age of the printed book. On the other hand, they also acquired a new range of responsibilities, as editing, proof-reading and even design became processes which were sometimes sacrificed to the economic necessity of publishers (Feather 2003: 162; see also below, p. 224). By the end of the century, a typical commercial word processing package included a wide range of fonts and type sizes and had the capacity to allow the user to format the text to simulate a conventional printed page. The more sophisticated desk-top publishing (DTP) packages, which first appeared on the market in the late 1980s, gave an even wider range of facilities and generated output which was effectively indistinguishable from CAT. These developments had an impact across the whole publishing industry. Electronic copy saved both time and money for traditional publishing houses; DTP and even word processing opened up a whole new range of opportunities for self-publishing and for small publishing houses, although for the latter the problem of distribution and sales remained acute (see below, pp. 224–5). The impact of computers in publishing, however, was not only to be found in typesetting and the generation of copy. Many aspects of the business processes of the trade were transformed. Some of these were common to all businesses, in, for example, financial management, stock control and internal records management. But some were unique to the book industry. The most obvious of these was the development of the Standard Book Number (SBN) system, introduced in the UK in 1967, and subsequently adopted throughout the world. An SBN is a unique number assigned to every new book, with a code for country of origin and publisher and a number unique to the particular title. This then becomes the means by which publishers, booksellers, wholesalers, librarians and others can identify the title. The advantage is that a string of numbers is easily processed by a computer and can serve as the identifier for the book at every stage at which an electronic record is needed from the publisher’s catalogue onwards. Book numbers are assigned by national agencies under an international scheme (hence the usual acronym ISBN). A similar

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system exists for serial publications (ISBN 1993). The use of the ISBN facilitated the development of on-line ordering systems within the trade, pioneered as teleordering in the early 1980s, and which were commonplace by the mid-1990s.

Electronic publishing and the use of the internet The use of computers to support traditional activities in the publishing industry in both production and distribution had a significant economic and social impact. There was, however, from the 1960s onwards, a growing desire to use computers as an alternative to printed output. The advantages seen by the proponents of such systems revolved essentially around the fact that the output would be more current than printed output could be because there was no reason why there should be any delay between content creation and putting the content into the public domain. During the 1980s, the internet became a familiar feature of life for academics and researchers – and to a lesser extent for others – throughout the industrialised world. As a result, developmental research on electronic publishing products focused on the learned journals. The e-journal, in which papers were submitted, peer-reviewed, edited and published electronically using the internet for both pre-publication communications and as a publishing medium, became a widely shared goal which was gradually realised in the late 1980s. It had some impact on the market for printed journals, although in practice there was a good deal of parallel publication, in which there was both a printed and an electronic version, partly because of unresolved issues about pricing and charging policies on the one hand, and archiving on the other (Feather 2003: 171–6). Not all electronically published products, however, are accessed through online networks. The CD-ROM, developed from a technology originally devised for audio recordings in the 1970s, was in widespread use by 1990 in conjunction with the PC (Winston 1998: 137–8). It became the preferred medium for certain kinds of published products, especially reference works, where it overcame many of the obvious disadvantages (especially in terms of price and physical bulk) of conventional print-on-paper products. Perhaps the most revolutionary change of all came in the last decade of the century. In 1990, Tim Berners-Lee wrote the first code for what was to become the World Wide Web. It was launched in 1991; by 1995 it was already the most widely used system on the internet. By 2000 it was universal (Naughton 1999: 230–52). The Web is, in effect, a publishing tool. It allows anyone with access to a server and minimal technical skills to put content into the public domain. There is no editing in any sense that a publisher would understand. There are few legal controls, although they are increasing. Above all, there is no quality control, no peer-reviewing, no functionary equivalent to the role of the publisher’s reader. For publishers, as for other businesses, the Web offers huge opportunities, especially in terms of marketing and promotion, and in

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developing e-commerce systems. But it is also a real threat. Professionally published products, whether printed or electronic, will always be expensive because of the cost of the specialised labour forces and intellectual input which underpins them. To compete in a networked environment, publishers will have to ensure that they maintain the standards which are their unique selling-point. The printed book still has – and perhaps will always have – its place in a networked world, but new technologies are forcing a redefinition of what that place might be (see below, pp. 227–8).

Conclusions The technological changes which have transformed the printing industry, and the development of new technologies which have revolutionised the whole information industry, have inevitably led to significant changes in what publishers do and how they do it. The adoption of a universal technology across many formerly different sectors – book publishing, newspaper publishing, audio recording and movie-making to take but four examples – brought a convergence of activities in the information and media industries in the wake of technological convergence. We shall now examine the impact of all of this on British publishing in the most recent phase of its long history.

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18 BRITISH PUBLISHING IN A GLOBAL ECONOMY

Introduction The technical innovations which revolutionised printing and began to have a significant impact on publishing in the last three decades of the twentieth century had wider consequences, and were themselves only a small part of a process of economic and social change. Historically, British publishing had been structured around one-person or family businesses often passed down from generation to generation until the succession failed. This pattern essentially subsisted for four hundred years from the middle of the sixteenth century. The whole organisation of the British book trade was built around a fragmented publishing industry consisting of a large number of firms, many of them very small and few of them very large. The retail trade, which was the essential outlet for the publishers’ products, was even more fragmented. Since the final separation of bookselling and publishing at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the typical British bookselling firm had been a family business with a single shop. Despite the growth of W H Smith as a national retailer in the middle decades of the twentieth century, bookselling, even more than publishing, essentially consisted almost entirely of small businesses. Economic, political and social change in the last twenty years of the century wrought radical change on both sides of the trade. The political driver was embodied in the election in 1979 of a government determined to push back the boundaries of the state and to create a market-oriented free trade economy. This was to prove to be a painful process, and was not entirely successful, but it certainly changed the economic climate. Like the 1840s, the 1980s were inimical to price control and regulation of the market (Kitson 2004: 49–52). This had serious implications for the Net Book Agreement, and hence for the whole business of bookselling and the relationships between publishers and booksellers (see below, pp. 226–7). British domestic considerations, however, were only part of a wider global process of change. British publishing by 1980 was British in the sense that it was based in Britain, and – at that time – substantially British-owned. But its markets were worldwide. During the 1970s, exports had reached as high as

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40 per cent of total sales; the attraction of the English language, and the traditional links with so many countries which survived the ending of the formal Market Rights Agreement (see above, pp. 191–2), ensured that this would be so. Competition, however, was intense; relationships between British and American publishers were undergoing significant change, bringing to a climax a process of growing together which had been quietly gathering pace for most of the twentieth century (see above, pp. 169–70). Against this background of macro-economic and structural change, the industry underwent internal transformations. Well into the second half of the twentieth century, the small and medium-sized houses which typified British publishing were dominated by the tastes, personalities and capacities of individuals. This was not only true of obvious ‘characters’ like Maxwell. It was also true of some key editors in major houses, certain managing directors and chief executives of firms which were technically limited companies, and so on. Publishing was still a highly personalised business; authors knew their editors, and editors knew their authors. Profit margins were small but acceptable. Names had changed, but the structures and many of the customs and practices of pre-World War I publishing were still essentially intact. In the 1980s all this changed.

Transatlantic competition and co-operation The relationship between British and American publishers had been fraught with difficulties throughout the nineteenth century. The great copyright disputes, which were not resolved until the end of the century (see above, pp. 134–6), led to bad feeling on both sides of the ocean. As British publishers began to establish themselves in the United States from the third quarter of the nineteenth century onwards, partly to circumvent what they saw as the inadequacy of American copyright law, publishers in the two countries were increasingly in competition. Even when the copyright issue was, in broad terms, resolved, the competition was still there; indeed it was perhaps intensified. Moreover, it continued even after American capital began to come into British publishing at the beginning of the twentieth century (see above, pp. 169–70), because for many decades this inflow of capital had only a marginal impact on the industry as a whole, despite some American acquisitions of British publishers in the 1960s and early 1970s (de Bellaigue 2004: 3–4). The battleground for competition after World War II was actually not in north America itself, or in Britain, but in the rest of the world. The end of the Market Rights Agreement in 1976 (see above, pp. 191–2) was unequivocally welcomed by the American publishers who, according to contemporary analysts, began to compete successfully in former British colonies and in the Commonwealth (Coser et al. 1982: 371–2). This was probably inevitable at the time; labour costs in Britain were high, and British goods were expensive (despite the comparative weakness of sterling). American books were

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considerably cheaper in real terms in many countries. In addition, anti-British feeling probably helped American sales efforts. Even before 1976, one Australian commentator noted that American books were rapidly overtaking British imports in that country, despite the continued existence of the Market Rights Agreement (Page 1970: 95–112). The British perception of the transatlantic relationship was rather different; the United States was seen essentially as an export market rather than a competitor for markets in third countries (S. Unwin 1976: 137, 145–6). American rights were regarded as significant by British publishers, agents and authors; it can be doubted whether their American colleagues ascribed the same significance to the British market. The end of the Market Rights Agreement effectively deregulated the trade in British books globally, and the book industry in the United States itself. Given the importance of the USA as an export market, it is perhaps not surprising that some British publishers began to fish more deeply in American waters. Penguin acquired its long-standing American rival, Viking, in 1975, although it was itself already part of the Longman Group. Some British publishers which had been acquired by the Americans in the 1960s were actually bought back by British companies (de Bellaigue 2004: 4). What was really happening under the surface was that the publishing industries of the two major English language publishing countries were becoming inextricably interlinked. Capital, rights and indeed personnel were flowing backwards and forwards across the Atlantic. As imprints changed hands and new companies were created and dissolved with ever-growing rapidity, competition was increasingly between different parts of the same group rather than between truly independent companies. By the early 1980s, publishers were increasingly seen by their holding companies as just another generator of an income stream, and were identified with the media and entertainment industries rather than as the distinctive category of book publishing. Takeovers and mergers became common throughout the industry, and subject to the vagaries of corporate strategies. It was out of this process that there emerged the global media and communications corporations which dominated British publishing at the end of the twentieth century.

Conglomeration and globalisation Although many of the familiar historic names of British publishing were still in use in the first years of the twenty-first century, few of them were still companies in their own right. They were merely ‘imprints’ which served the purpose of a mega-corporation. Some of these corporations came together by a process of merger, acquisition, restructuring and rationalisation; others were essentially the product of personal ambition. By the mid-1980s, many publishing houses were finding real difficulty in competing in both domestic and global markets. Even companies which were large by industry standards were small in terms of contemporary businesses.

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Those which were public limited companies with shareholders to satisfy were under great pressure at a time when dividends and hence share prices were increasing across the stock market as a whole. The environment of technical change reinforced the message to be derived from the business environment: British publishing was old-fashioned, slow to react and unbusinesslike. It was globally exposed without always having the management to control global businesses, a fate which befell Heinemann, for example. At the same time, the generational change problem which besets all family businesses, even those with shareholders outside the family, hit some key businesses particularly hard. The early death of Mark Longman was the de facto end of his family company (see above, p. 206), but even those who lived into comparative old age could leave problems behind them if there were no heir. Penguin, Collins, and Weidenfeld and Nicolson all lost their independence (while retaining their identity) for this reason. The traditional British publishing house was ripe for takeover. There was a more than adequate supply of potential purchasers. The first real indicator of future developments was the gradual submergence of Penguin and Longman into the Pearson Group, which also included a major chain of provincial newspapers and other interests. Pearson’s origin lay wholly outside the book trade, but by 1985 it was a major player (de Bellaigue 2004: 36–58). Pearson was atypical in one crucial respect: it was a British company. Most of the global companies were American in origin. Acquisition and merger was a characteristic of the industry in the USA as much as, and perhaps even more than, it was in Britain in the 1970s and 1980s. The imperatives of corporate financial goals were seen by some as wreaking havoc with the quality and values of the industry (Schiffrin 2000: 73–103), but the process was unstoppable. The ethos of corporate America was becoming the ethos of worldwide English language publishing simply as a consequence of the American publishers’ acquisitions in the 1980s (Abel 1996). By the mid-1990s, the agglomeration of publishing companies seemed like the natural order of things (de Bellaigue 1995a). The new corporations were exemplified by Time Warner. At the end of the twentieth century the group included some of the most venerable American publishing houses, but was actually dominated by America On-Line, one of the world’s largest internet service providers (Time Warner 2004). British and American publishing houses had become all but indistinguishable in the global marketplace. Random House, an American company dating from the nineteenth century, was part of the German Bertlesmann Group; HarperCollins, itself the product of a merger between the American Harpers and the British Collins imprints, was owned by News Corporation, the overarching company of Rupert Murdoch. Examples can be multiplied. News Corporation, which called itself ‘the only vertically integrated media company on a global scale’ (News Corporation 2004), exemplified the globalisation and agglomeration of the publishing industry. Its interests included newspapers, cable and satellite television companies, movie production and distribution and magazines as well as book publishing. It was at the same time

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Australian, American and British, and effectively supra-national. This was a long way from the closed and introspective world of British publishing even as recently as the early 1980s. The search for profits in a global marketplace was very different from traditional publishing. Some people in the industry claimed that the changes were so profound that the fundamental principles of high quality publishing were being forgotten. Some left the mainstream publishing industry altogether; they included some distinguished senior editors (Epstein 2001; Schiffrin 2000). Perhaps the pressures were worse in the even more commercial climate of New York publishing than they were in London. Certainly in Britain, there were those who argued that literary publishing could survive in the new corporate climate if it was conducted in a businesslike way (Paten 1996). Editors were not the only stakeholders who were concerned about the impact of commercial developments on the practice of British publishing. Authors felt that the conglomerates cared less about them than traditional publishing houses had done, and it was argued that the transfer of lists and imprints between companies was leaving both authors and books stranded with no real sense of commitment in the company (Curtis 1998: 9–14; de Bellaigue 1995b; de Bellaigue 1995c). Literary agents became even more important as individual authors found themselves dealing with multinational companies. To work in this new climate, agencies on both sides of the Atlantic (an increasingly meaningless distinction in publishing by the turn of the twenty-first century) became larger. They too, therefore, also became more impersonal businesses (Curtis 1998: 21–6). The overall effect was the widespread perception within the book trade, and perhaps even among readers, that publishers and their products had become more homogenised and less distinctive. Perhaps this was partly a reaction to the obvious loss of the culturally privileged position which the printed word had occupied for centuries (Willison 2000); but it was also a reasonably accurate observation and a valid interpretation of what was happening. The commercial pressures on the traditional medium-sized businesses which were actually the larger end of British publishing were almost irresistible by the turn of the century. Macmillan became part of the Holtzbrink group in 1999, the end of a process which had seen the German company buying shares in the firm over several years (Macmillan 2004b). In February 2002, John Murray, the first of the modern British publishing houses, was sold to Hodder Headline when the fifth generation Murray decided that there was no future for the independent general publishing house trying to compete in international markets (Ezard 2002). Of the mainstream houses, only Faber and Faber remained proudly independent and still pursuing its tradition of literary publishing, sustained by a backlist of many of the twentieth century’s most important writers (especially poets), a continuing policy of encouraging younger poets and novelists, and its share of the royalties from Cats. Independent houses could, however, flourish if they did not outgrow their strength. Canongate for example, an Edinburgh-based house, which regained

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and guaranteed its independence through a management buy-out in 1994, went from strength to strength, developing a varied list which showed that quality and sales were not incompatible in an organisation where targets could be set at an achievable and sustainable level (Canongate 2004). The company had a number of advantages, including its location in the Scottish capital at a time when Scotland was experiencing a political transformation and becoming ever more confident of its culture. Some independents were very small indeed, specialising in new poetry, for example, and some were regional in their orientation, producing guide books, local histories and the like. But there was great diversity. Even without moving into wholly new modes of publishing by using the Web, small publishers could benefit from the ready availability of cheap and easy-to-use technology and software to produce short runs of books of specialist interest at a profit. In short, the diversity which had characterised British publishing for centuries was not lost; it was rather that its manifestation changed.

The retailing revolution By the middle of the 1980s, the retail book trade in Britain was also undergoing significant change. Indeed, the changes in bookselling and publishing were intimately related. The large publishing houses created by mergers and takeovers were most comfortable when dealing with larger customers. The traditional British bookshop placing orders for a few copies of a large number of titles, and demanding a rapid turnaround time on single-copy orders, was very far from being the client with which a conglomerate wished to deal. Two things happened as a result of this. First, there was something of a revival of wholesaling, especially on the paperback side of the trade; publishers were thus able to sell in bulk and dispose of a large percentage of a print run more or less at the time of publication. Even in transactions which did not involve a wholesaler, it became increasingly common in the late 1970s and early 1980s to use book distributors who made their money from providing warehousing and transport services for the trade. The small bookshops, however, were dealing with companies which were quite different from themselves, and which had different cultures and priorities. In that climate, some change was inevitable, but it was quicker and more radical than might otherwise have been the case because of the influence of one or two key individuals. Tim Waterstone (b. 1939) opened his first London bookshop in 1982, and pioneered a new style of bookselling (Waterstones 2004). The shop – like its many successors – was light, airy and customer-friendly. Staff were young, enthusiastic and, at least in theory, reasonably well informed about the books they were selling. Displays were eye-catching; the traditional distinction between hardback and paperback was largely abandoned. This was retailing 1980s-style, owing more to Sainsbury than to Hatchard, although arguably in the entrepreneurial tradition of Lackington. But Waterstone – the man and his

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business – looked forward not back. Bookselling became a vigorous and visible part of the high street and the shopping mall, integrated into the revolutionary changes which overcame British retailing in the 1980s. Waterstones soon became a familiar name and logo in most British cities and towns. It even took over the shop of the successors of John Hatchard, where the West End revolution in bookselling had begun at the turn of the nineteenth century. Meanwhile, Terry Maher (b. 1935) was re-engineering Pentos, a group which had grown rapidly during the 1970s and now included some historic shops and chains, including Dillons, the London academic booksellers, and Hudsons, a Birmingham-based company (Maher 1994). Maher, like Waterstone, recognised the need to change the nature of book retailing by adopting contemporary methods and a style of presentation which would appeal to a new and younger market. Using the Dillons brand, Maher made Pentos into a national chain of bookshops, competing with the chain which Waterstone was developing at the same time. Until the mid-1980s, chains were all but unknown in British bookselling, with the exception of W H Smith. And W H Smith was different. Its shops were still primarily newsagents and stationery stores rather than bookshops, and had diversified into audio and video rather than developing their bookselling. In many towns, however, Smith’s was the only town centre book retailer except for a small traditional bookshop which was not attractive to the casual customer. In the mid-1970s, Smith’s share of the retail book market was about 14 per cent; its nearest competitor, John Menzies, commanded about 4 per cent (Price Commission 1978: 42). For all practical purposes, this was a monopoly position in all but the largest towns, and it gave the company a uniquely strong hand in negotiating with publishers for discounts. Its hand was further strengthened by its involvement in both wholesaling and distribution and in book clubs. The development of the new chain booksellers in the 1980s had some impact on the traditional independent bookshops, but in commercial terms the potential damage to W H Smith was far greater. The initial response was to compete by imitation, not least in the physical transformation of their shops. But in the end, like the other chains, W H Smith had to look at the whole structure of the trade. The Net Book Agreement was the inevitable target. Maher had been looking to change it – or better still end it – since the mid-1980s. Free market economists could easily develop a credible theoretical and intellectual case against it. The political climate was certainly antipathetic to what could easily be represented as a cartel which worked against the best interests of the consumer (Allan and Curwen 1991). It was, however, the power of the chains, now dominating the retail book trade, which destroyed the Agreement. In 1994, Maher announced that he simply intended to ignore it. After some hesitation, W H Smith followed suit. The Publishers’ Association and the Booksellers’ Association, the joint guardians of the Agreement, were powerless and in any case probably divided on the issue. After ninety-five years, the Net Book Agreement simply collapsed within a matter of weeks (Feather 2003: 140–1).

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The dire consequences predicted by both sides of the trade in 1964 (see above, p. 202) did not happen. This was, in part, a measure of change in the previous thirty years. The multinational corporations which dominated mainstream publishing, and the national chains which had the lion’s share of the consumer book market, were far more comfortable operating without restraints. The consequences were immediate and dramatic. For the first time since the 1890s, bookshops competed against each other on price. New kinds of deal (three books for the price of two, £2 off the title of the week, and so on) had the effect of increasing the sales of books to the benefit of publishers and the chain bookshops. The independents may have benefited a little from the spinoffs from this new trend in bookselling. Publishers, agents and authors certainly did (Dearnley and Feather 2001). As a result, the British book trade in general, and British publishing in particular, entered the twenty-first century in an optimistic mood in a growing market.

Conclusion The British publishing industry in 2000 was very different from the industry which had existed in 1900. Yet there were also obvious continuities. The product – the printed book – was essentially the same. It was produced differently, to some extent it looked different, and its predominant format – the paperback – was new, but it had not undergone fundamental change. The industry which produced and sold books also had real continuities. Names which were familiar in 1900 – Macmillan was perhaps the most obvious – were still on the scene in 2000. Others had come, and many had gone, but the concept of the publishing house, the business which revolved around the selection of books for publication and the management of the process of producing and selling them, remained. Ownership had changed, and many of the customs and practices of the trade had changed as well, but the fundamental principles – selecting titles which would sell, and then selling them – were not really different. What had changed profoundly was much that was beneath the surface. The publishing industry of 1900 was essentially an industry of small firms. Despite the imperial and international ambitions of some firms (and achievements of a few of them), it was introspective. The family publishing business of 1900 was not all that different in structural terms from the family businesses which dominated the London book trade in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It was during the twentieth century that new players came into the arena: accountants, professional managers, shareholders, holding companies and all the apparatus of modern business. That did lead to real change. Publishing good books was no longer enough; modest profits were often inadequate. The search was for the bestseller rather than the steady seller, and for books which would command the vast international English language market. The new technologies of communication, from broadcasting to the internet, also had their impact. They competed for leisure time and leisure money. Although the

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publishing industry developed a modus vivendi with each in turn, the late twentieth-century convergence of technologies led to a fusion of businesses. By the end of the century, British publishing was part of the global network of media, entertainment and leisure industries, as well as the burgeoning information industry in its multiple manifestations. This was reflected in ownership, in business priorities and in the cultural ethos of the industry. The turn of the twenty-first century, like the middle of the fifteenth century, seems to have marked the beginning of a genuinely new era in human communications. The publishing of books will continue to be a vital part of that era, but it has lost the position of cultural privilege which it enjoyed for so long. The book is no longer the uniquely prestigious symbol of western culture and civilisation. Neither it nor the industry which produces it can continue to expect the political and economic privileges that they enjoyed for so long. In the narrow context of British publishing, the end of the Net Book Agreement – and the fact that commercial Armageddon did not follow from it – can be taken to symbolise this change. But the broader context is that it is increasingly the case that the concept of British publishing is not very meaningful. There are publishing houses based in Britain; there are some which are wholly British-owned. But the large mainstream houses which produce most of the more than 100,000 new ‘British’ titles every year are almost all a part of multinational conglomerates which have no real ‘national’ identity in the conventional sense. Within the publishing houses, some ‘British’ conventions survive, not least in the language which is used (including this usage of ‘house’). But people move around the world as easily as ideas and much more easily than books; distinctions are blurring and distinctiveness is being lost. At the same time, however, the diversity which has characterised the British publishing industry since before it was an industry and before it was called publishing still survives. Throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, new people have started their own publishing businesses to pursue an idea or perhaps to promote a cause. Many have failed; some – Penguin, Virago – have spectacularly succeeded. There are no formal qualifications for being a publisher, and indeed information and communication technologies have made it easier than ever to put material into the public domain. In an industry dominated by the mega-company, the small can still survive and can still bring diversity, quality and innovation. In that respect, at least, one of the great traditions of British publishing is flourishing at the beginning of the third millennium.

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A NOTE ON FURTHER READING

General historical background The relevant volumes of the New Oxford History of England are invaluable sources of reference and a general overview of English history; they all have comprehensive bibliographies: Hoppen, K. Theodore (1998) The Mid-Victorian Generation, 1846–1886. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hoppitt, Julian (2000) A Land of Liberty? England 1689–1727. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Langford, Paul (1992) A Polite and Commercial People. England 1727–1783. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Searle, G. R. (2004) A New England? Peace and War 1886–1918. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Williams, Penry (1995) The Later Tudors. England 1547–1603. Oxford: Clarendon Press. For Wales, Scotland and Ireland, see: Devine, T. M. (1999) The Scottish Nation 1700–2000. London: Allen Lane. Foster, R. F., ed. (2001) The Oxford History of Ireland. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jones, G. E. (1995) Modern Wales. A Concise History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

The book trade The only comprehensive general history is Plant (1965); it is still useful. The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain is in progress; at the time of writing only two volumes have been published: Barnard, John and McKenzie, D. F., eds (2002) The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain. Volume IV. 1557–1695. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hellinga, Lotte and Trapp, J. B., eds (1999) The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain. Volume III. 1400–1557. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. For Wales, see: Jones, Philip Henry and Rees, Eiluned, eds (1998) A Nation and its Books. A History of the Book in Wales. Aberystwyth: National Library of Wales. For Ireland, see: Pollard, M. (1989) Dublin’s Trade in Books 1550–1800. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

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For Scotland, there is no comprehensive history. A multi-volume History of the Book in Scotland is being written at the time of writing, and will be published by Edinburgh University Press. For the period up to and just after the Act of Union, see: Mann, Alastair J. (2000) The Scottish Book Trade 1500–1720. Print Commerce and Print Control in Early Modern Scotland. East Linton: Tuckwell Press.

Specialist studies: some key works Before 1660 Bennett, H. S. (1965) English Books & Readers 1558 to 1603. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bennett, H. S. (1969) English Books & Readers 1475 to 1557. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2nd ed. Bennett, H. S. (1970) English Books & Readers 1603 to 1640. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Blagden, Cyprian (1960) The Stationers’ Company. A History, 1403–1959. London: Allen and Unwin.

1660–1800 Foxon, David (1991) Pope and the Early Eighteenth-century Book Trade, revised and edited by James McLaverty. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Rivers, Isabel, ed. (1982) Books and their Readers in Eighteenth-century England. Leicester: Leicester University Press. Rivers, Isabel (2001) Books and their Readers in Eighteenth-century England. London: Continuum.

Nineteenth century Altick, Richard D. (1963) The English Common Reader. A Social History of the Mass Reading Public. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Barnes, James J. (1964) Free Trade in Books. A Study of the London Book Trade Since 1800. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Bonham-Carter, Victor (1978–84) Authors by Profession. London: Society of Authors/ Bodley Head, 2 vols. Sutherland, J. A. (1976) Victorian Novelists and their Publishers. London: Athlone Press. Weedon, Alexis (2003) Victorian Publishing. The Economics of Book Production for a Mass Market, 1836–1916. Aldershot: Ashgate.

Since c. 1900 Bloom, Clive (2002) Bestsellers. Popular Fiction since 1900. Basingstoke: Palgrave. de Bellaigue, Eric (2004) British Book Publishing as a Business since the 1960s. Selected Essays. London: The British Library. Norrie, Ian (1982) Mumby’s Publishing and Bookselling in the Twentieth Century. London: Bell and Hyman, 6th ed.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

The following abbreviations are used throughout the Bibliography ALJ Ariz. Q. BH Bibl. BJECS BMQ ECS ed. EHR GJ J. Libr. JPHS LH Libr. LJzB LP OBSP occ. PAAS PBSA PH PRQ PSIANH pub. rev. SB SCJ SEC ser. suppl. SVEC TBS TCBS TEBS tr. VS

Art Libraries Journal Arizona Quarterly Book History The Bibliothek British Journal for Eighteenth Century Studies British Museum Quarterly Eighteenth Century Studies editor/edition English Historical Review Gutenberg Jahrbuch Journal of Librarianship Journal of the Printing Historical Society Library History The Library Leipziger Jahrbuch Zur Buchgeschichte Learned Publishing Oxford Bibliographical Society Papers occasional Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America Publishing History Publishing Research Quarterly Publications of the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology and Natural History publication(s) revised Studies in Bibliography Sixteenth Century Journal Studies in Eighteenth-century Culture series supplement Studies in Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century Transactions of the Bibliographical Society Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society Transactions of the Edinburgh Bibliographical Society translated/translator/translation Victorian Studies

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INDEX

Abbott, E. A. 117 ABCs 27, 35 academic publishing 117–19, 179, 203–4, 214–15 Ackermann, Rudolph 186 Addison, Joseph 57, 58 advertising 74, 75, 77 Africa 181, 182, 183, 187, 190–2 Aiken, Max 149 Ainsworth, Harrison 135 Albion press 89 Albratross series 174–5 Aldine Poets 106, 130 All for Love (Dryden) 49 Allen, George 159, 163, 166 Allen and Unwin 163 almanacs 21, 27, 28, 35, 44, 48, 73, 184 American colonies 64, 72, 182–3, 184, 186 Anglo-Saxon Reader (Sweet) 117 annaliste school 2 Annus Mirabilis (Dryden) 49 Antiquary, The (Scott) 121 Apollo Press 73 apprentices/apprenticeship 30, 37, 51, 52, 93 Arnold, Edward 116 Arnold, Matthew 116 Asia 181, 183, 215; see also India Associated Booksellers 102, 156, 157 Athenian Gazette, The 56–7 Athenian Mercury, The 57 Athens 9 Austen, Jane 78 Australia 183, 188–9 Author, The 138 authors 4, 27–8, 55–6, 67–8, 83–4, 132–42; payment of 132–3, 136–8, 141; rights 133–6; see also copyright

Baldwin, Abigail and Richard 58 ballads 48, 127 Ballantine, Ian 177–8 banking practices 92 Barchester Towers (Trollope) 137 Barker, Christopher 35, 46 Baskerville, John 87 Batsford 163, 196 Bay Psalm Book 184 BBC 164–5, 197, 201, 209–10 Beardsley, Aubrey 128, 173 Beaverbrook, Lord 149 Beckford, William 61, 78 Beeton, Mrs 159 Bell, Edward 154 Bell, George 130 Bell, John 73, 74, 105 Bell, Moberley 153, 154 Bemrose of Derby 159 Benn, Sir Ernest 167 Benn Brothers 167 Bennett, Arnold 160 Bentley, Richard 122, 127, 134, 137, 139 Berne Convention (1887) 136, 138, 161, 162, 189, 192 Berners-Lee, Tim 218 Berry Brothers 170 Berthelet, Thomas 20, 26 Bertlesmann Group 223 Besant, Walter 102, 124, 137–8, 140 Bible 13, 27, 35, 44, 109, 111, 184 Bill, John 46 binding see bookbinders; bookbinding Bing, Isaac 40 Black, A. and C. 80, 161, 163, 170, 190 Blackie 80, 106, 116 Blackwood, John 122, 124, 126

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Blackwood’s Magazine 115, 126 Board of Trade 162, 163 Bodley Head, The 173, 174 Boer War 145, 190 Boethius 19 Bohn, Henry 106 Book Club Regulations (1939) 158 book clubs 153–4, 156–8 Book of Common Prayer 35 Book Development Council 192–3 Book of the Month Club 156 book prices 99–103, 112, 122–3, 127, 211–12; fixed or net 59, 100–2, 138, 141; see also Net Book Agreement Book Production War Economy Agreement 195–6 Book Society 157, 178 Book War 153–4 bookbinders 9, 13, 30, 99 bookbinding 86, 91–2, 98, 99 Books of Hours (Horae) 20 booksellers 4, 24, 30, 37, 152, 220, 225–7; and book prices 99–103; copyowning 40, 45, 52–5, 56, 72, 83, 97; provincial 62–3, 65–6; wholesaling 52–5, 80–1, 94–5, 179, 197–8, 225 Booksellers’ Association 101, 202, 226 Bookselling Regulations (1829) 100, 101, 103 bookshops, independent 93, 158 Bookwise 179 Boots circulating library 209 Boycott, Rosie 206 Boyer, Abel 53 Bradbury and Evans 122, 127 Braddon, M. E. 124 Bray, Thomas 109 British Empire 170, 181–93 British and Foreign Bible Society 111, 187 British Magazine, The 61 British Museum 113 British Poets, The (Whittingham) 105 British Screenwriters’ Association 165 British Theatre, The 73 Brougham, Henry 111 Brown, Curtis 140 Buchan, John 160, 203 Buchanan, Robert 138 Buckingham, James Silk 113 Buckley, Samuel 58 Bulwer-Lytton, Edward 106, 124, 126, 127

Burney, Fanny 61, 120 Burns, Robert 79 Burroughs, Edgar Rice 160 Burroughs, William 205 Burton, Sir Richard 128 business practices 92 Butler, Samuel 176 Butterworths 117, 204 Byron, George Gordon, Lord 129–30 calendars 184 Callil, Carmen 206 Cambridge 19; university of 10, 113 Cambridge Bible for Schools 116 Cambridge University Press 116, 117, 179, 187, 215 camera-ready copy 215 Campbell, Lord 101 Canada 183, 189–90 Canongate 224–5 Canterbury 19 Cape, Jonathan 129, 168, 175 Carlyle, Thomas 101, 112, 134, 137, 161 Carnan, Thomas 73, 79 Carnan, William 74 Cassell, John 104, 108, 168 Cassells 170, 188 Castle of Otranto (Walpole) 78 catechisms 27, 35 Catholic Church 13 Cave, Edward 59, 74 Cawood, John 38 Caxton, William 4, 9, 14–16, 20, 22, 23 CD-ROMs 218 censorship 25–6, 41, 42, 50, 205; Ireland 63; pre-publication 32, 33–5, 41, 48, 55 Chace Act (1891) 136 Chambers, William 104 Champion, The 59 chapbooks 109–10, 127 Chapman and Hall 122, 125–6, 127, 137, 159, 161, 169 Charles I, (King) 41, 42–3, 183 Charles II, (King) 43, 45, 46 Charteris, Leslie 159 Chase Act 136 Chatto and Windus 138 ‘cheap’ editions 89, 112, 121, 124–5, 127, 173 Cheap Repository Tracts (More) 109–10 Childe Harold (Byron) 129

256

INDEX

1111 2 3 4 51 6 7 8 9 1011 1 2 13 4 5 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 44111

Childers, Erskine 151 children’s books 75, 91 Chiswell, Richard 75 Chiswick Press 105 Christie, Agatha 202 church 13, 14, 26, 29, 33, 34, 41, 108–9 Church of England 34, 35, 109 cinema 162, 164, 200 circulating libraries see libraries, circulating Civil War 43–5 Clarendon Press Series 116 Clarissa (Richardson) 60 class 146; see also working class Cockburn, Mr Justice 129 codex form 9, 13 Colburn, Henry 98, 122, 125 Coldock, Francis 40 Cole, G. D. H. 167 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 129 Collins, Wilkie 111, 150 Collins, William 80, 104, 178, 188, 223 Colman, George 133 colonies 135, 161; American 64, 72, 182–3, 184, 186; see also British Empire colour reproduction 90, 91, 214 Commonwealth 170, 189, 192, 193, 221 communications circuit 2, 3 communism 167 competition 37, 97–103, 221–2 compositors 88, 93 computer technology 215–19 Conan Doyle, Sir Arthur 150, 160 congers 52–5, 81 conglomeration 207, 222–5, 228 Conquest of Granada, The (Dryden) 49 Conrad, Joseph 165, 166 Conservative Party 152 Constable, Archibald 79–80, 98, 121–2 Cooke, John 105 co-operative movement 110 Cope, G. W. 89 copy ownership 33, 39–41, 52–5, 97; see also rights in copies copyright 40, 55–6, 63, 64–8, 113–15, 129, 133–6, 138, 161–2, 221; international 135, 136, 137, 161–2, 189; leasing of 132; perpetual 66–8, 73, 114; sale of 132, 133, 138, 141

Copyright Act: (1710) 55, 56, 63, 64–5, 66, 67, 133–4; (1814) 134; (1842) 114, 134, 135, 161, 189; (1911) 161–2, 165 Cornhill Magazine, The 126 Covent Garden Journal, The 59 Cowley, Abraham 49 Cranford (Gaskell) 126 Crashaw, Richard 48 Creech and Elliot 79 Critical Review 60 Cromwell, Oliver 43, 45 Cromwell, Thomas 26 crown and booktrade: 16th century 25–7, 29–30, 32, 33; 17th century 41–3 Curtis Brown 168–9 Daily Chronicle 128 Daily Courant, The 58 Daily Express, The 149 Daily Mail, The 149 Daily Mirror, The 149 Daily Sketch, The 149 Daily Telegraph, The 153 Darnton, Robert 2, 3 Darwin, Charles 139 David Copperfield (Dickens) 127 Day, John 35, 36, 38 Daye, Stephen and Matthew 184 Defoe, Daniel 57, 60, 120 de Graaf, Robert 177 Dell, Ethel M. 166, 203 Denham, Sir John 48 Dent, J. M. 110, 160, 161, 169 desk-top publishing 217 Desperate Remedies (Hardy) 140 detective fiction 150–1, 157, 168, 170, 202 Dickens, Charles 101, 107, 119, 121, 124, 128, 130, 133, 134, 161; and US copyright issues 135; David Copperfield 127; Dombey and Sons 137; Old Curiosity Shop, The 126; Pickwick Papers 125–6, 137 Dictionary of National Biography (DNB) 117, 118, 215 Diderot, Denis 87 Dillons 226 Dilly, Edward 73–4 Disraeli, Benjamin 106, 126 distribution systems 94–5, 197–8 Dockwray, Thomas 38

257

INDEX

1111 2 3 4 51 6 7 8 9 1011 1 2 13 4 5 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 44111

Everyman’s Library 74, 107, 110, 160, 161, 169, 173 Exclusion Crisis (1679–81) 47 exile communities 185 export markets see overseas markets

Dodsley, Robert 56, 81 Dombey and Son (Dickens) 137 Don Juan (Byron) 130 Donaldson, Alexander 66 Donaldson v. Becket 67, 68, 73, 97, 134 Donne, John 48, 49 Doubleday Page and Company 169 Douglas, Norman 205 Dryden, John 49 Dublin 63, 80 Du Maurier, Daphne 203 Duncan, Isadora 168 Dunton, John 56–7 Dunton, Richard 52 Dutton, (E. P.) and Co. 169 East India Company 184 East Lynne (Wood) 140 economic cycles 97–9 Edinburgh 63, 79 education 12, 86, 108–12, 130, 146, 147–8, 164, 208; adult and higher 115, 117, 208; self- 78, 99, 105, 110, 201 Education Act: (1870) 107, 115–16, 147; (1944) 201, 208 educational publishing 27, 106, 107, 115–19, 187–92 passim, 196, 197, 200, 206, 208, 214–15 Edward IV, (King) 14, 15, 16, 25 Edward V, (King) 14 Edward VI, (King) 26 Eisenstein, Elizabeth 3 electronic publishing 218–19 ELHI (‘egghead’) paperbacks 179 Eliot, George 117, 119, 126, 174 Eliot, T. S. 168 Elizabeth I, (Queen) 30, 33 Elsevier 204 Encyclopaedia Britannica 80, 161 Encyclopédie 87 Endymion (Disraeli) 126 English Historical Review, The 117 English language 183–4, 185, 193 English Rogue, The (Kirkman) 49 English Stock 36–7, 39, 40, 43, 44, 45, 48–9, 50, 73 Enoch, Kurt 178 ‘Entry Book of Copies’ 34 epistolary novels 61 espionage novels 203 essay periodicals 57–60

Faber, Geoffrey 168, 174 Faber and Faber 224 Facques, William 26 Faculty of Advocates, Edinburgh 113 Fairfax, Thomas 45 fairs 17 farming 21 Fascism 167 Febvre, Lucien 2 feminist publishing 206, 210 fiction 60–1, 62, 83, 103, 119, 120–9, 130–1, 137, 176, 205–6; popular 78, 127–8, 150–1, 202–3; publishers’ readers 139–40; see also detective fiction Fielding, Henry 59, 61, 120 film rights 162, 164 Fleet Street 24 Fleming, Ian 203 Flower, Newman 170 foreign language publishing 185 foreign reprints 134–6, 186 Foreign Reprints Act (Canada, 1847) 190 Forsyte Saga (Galsworthy) 146, 209–10 Fourdrinier machines 87–8 France, Anatole 174 France 14, 134, 145, 172, 181, 182, 183, 186, 191 Frankenstein (Shelley) 78 Franklin, Benjamin 74 Frederick the Great (Carlyle) 137 free trade 97, 100–1, 152 Freez, Frederic 19 French Revolution 72, 185 Furnivall, James 118 Galignani, A. and W. 134, 186 Galsworthy, John 146, 209–10 Gandhi, Mahatma 166 Gant, John 15 Garnett, Edward 166 Gaskell, Elizabeth 126, 133 gay publishing 206 Gentleman’s Journal, The 57, 58 Gentleman’s Magazine, The 59, 60, 64

258

INDEX

1111 2 3 4 51 6 7 8 9 1011 1 2 13 4 5 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 44111

Germany 14, 18, 145, 172–3, 174–5, 186, 191, 203 Glasgow 63 global economy 220–8 Glorious Revolution 47 Glover, Jos‚ 184 God and Man (Buchanan) 138 Golden Treasury (Palgrave) 130 Goldsmith, Oliver 74, 75 Gollancz, Victor 157, 165, 167–8, 169, 170, 175 Gonneld, James 40 Goody-Two-Shoes (Goldsmith) 75 Gothic fiction 61, 78, 120, 127 Grafton, Richard 26–7 Granada group 178 Great Depression 167 Greene, Graham 203 Grote, George 101 Guild of St Luke 63 guilds 4, 9, 18, 23, 97; see also Stationers’ Company Gulliver, Lawton 56 Gutenberg, Johann 9, 13 Haggard, H. Rider 159, 160 half-profits system 133, 141 half-tone process 212 Hall, Radclyffe 129 Hardy, Thomas 140 Harmsworth, Alfred 118, 149, 154 HarperCollins 223 Harrap 157, 196 Hatchard, John 81–2, 226 Hazell, Watson and Viney 92 Head, Richard 49 Heinemann, William 140, 159, 169, 189, 191, 196, 223 Hemingway, Ernest 176 Henry VI, (King) 14 Henry VII, (King) 14, 16, 22 Henry VIII, (King) 25, 26, 33 Herringman, Henry 48–9 High Commission 34, 43 Highley, Samuel 77 histoire totale 2, 5 historical novels 151, 205 History of England (Goldsmith) 75 History of England (Macaulay) 137 History of the Works of the Learned, The 56 Histrio-Mastix (Sparke) 44 Hitler, Adolf 167

HMSO 155, 195 Hodder Headline 224 Hodder and Stoughton 165, 167, 178, 188, 196 Hollis, Thomas 74 Holroyd-Reece, John 174–5 Holtzbrink group 224 Homer 56 Hooper, Horace 153 Hotten, John Camden 128 House of Commons 43, 44, 45, 59 Household Words 126 Hudsons 226 Hunt, Thomas 18 Idler, The 58 Iliad, The (Homer) 56 illuminators 9, 13 illustration techniques 90–1, 212–13, 214 imported books 13, 17, 20, 21, 25–6, 134–6, 185; from Ireland 63–5; from Scotland 63, 64–8; illegal 63–8 incomes, authors’ see payment of authors India 181–2, 183, 184, 187–8, 192 Indian Emperor, The (Dryden) 49 industrial relations 93, 216 industrial revolution 71, 78, 85–96 intaglio 213 International Copyright Act (1838) 135 International Standard Book Number (ISBN) 217–18 internet 218–19 Ipswich 19 Ireland 19, 63–5, 68, 80, 85, 97 iron press 89 Irving, Washington 105 Italy 14, 18 Ivanhoe (Scott) 79–80 Jackson, W. M. 153 James, G. P. R. 127, 134 James I, (King) 41, 42 James II, (King) 47 Japan 181 Jenkins, Edward 119 Jewsbury, Geraldine 139, 140 John Bull (Colman) 133 Johnson, Samuel 58, 59, 73–4 Jonson, Ben 49 journnalism, `new’ 118, 149, 200

259

INDEX

1111 2 3 4 51 6 7 8 9 1011 1 2 13 4 5 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 44111

Joseph, Michael 168, 196 Journal des Sçavans 56 journals, learned 117, 118–19, 203, 204, 214, 218 Joyce, James 174, 205 Jugge, Richard 38 Kapital, Das (Marx) 166 Keats, John 129 Kenilworth (Scott) 122 Kevall, Steven 38 Kierkegaard, S. 112 King and Kegan Paul 138 King’s/Queen’s Printer 26–7, 35, 46 Kingsley, Charles 103 Kipling, Rudyard 140 Kirkman, Francis 49, 62 Kirkwood, James 109 Knight, Charles 111 knowledge, diffusion of 107, 108–19 Labour Party 149, 157 Lackington, James 82, 95 Lady Chatterley’s Lover (Lawrence) 205 Lamia (Keats) 129 Lane, Allen 165, 168, 171, 173–8, 195, 205 Lane, John 120, 173, 176 Lane, William 78, 81 language 13–14, 183–4, 185, 193 Lanston, Tolbert 88 Larkin, Philip 205 Laski, Harold 166 Last Exit to Brooklyn (Selby) 205 Latin 12, 13–14, 20, 185 Laud, William 43, 183 Lawrence, D. H. 205 Lay of the Last Minstrel (Scott) 129 learned journals 117, 118–19, 203, 204, 214, 218 Le Carré, John 203 Left Book Club 157, 167–8 legal deposit system 113 legal publishing 11, 16–17, 20, 21, 26, 27, 35, 117 Le Gallienne, Richard 173 leisure 78, 146, 150, 164, 198–9, 200, 209 L’Estrange, Roger 46–7 letterpress printing 89–90, 212, 214 Lettou, John 16 Lewes, G. H. 126, 135 Liberal Party 149, 152

libraries 10; circulating 49, 61–2, 77, 95, 120, 121, 123–5, 130, 137, 151, 164, 209; deposit 113; parish 109; public 124, 151, 155–6, 163, 164, 195, 198, 209 Library Agreement 156 Library Association 155, 156 Library Company Ltd 123–4 licensing 30, 34, 36–7, 43, 46–7; Ireland 63; Stationers’ Company 39–40, 50 Licensing Act (1662) see Printing Act Lilburne, John 45 Lilliputian Magazine, The 75 Linotype 88, 89 Lintot, Bernard 55, 56 literacy 4, 10–12, 21, 27, 86, 99, 108–9, 110, 147–8, 184, 200, 208 literary agents 140, 141, 159, 224 literary canon 68 literary copies 48–9 Literary Guild 156 lithography 90, 91, 212, 213, 214–15 Little, Brown 206 Liverymen 30, 37 Lives of the Poets (Johnson) 73–4 Livingstone, David 139 Lloyd, Edward 105, 128, 131 Lloyd’s List 60 Locke, John 185 logography 88 Lolita (Nabokov) 205 London 9, 10, 18, 22, 23, 29, 51–2, 62, 64–6, 68–9, 97 London Booksellers’ Society 102 London Labour and the London Poor (Mayhew) 111 London Scale of Prices 93 Longman, Mark 206–7, 223 Longmans 76, 79, 80, 97–8, 106, 124, 206–7, 222; colonial markets 187, 190; educational publishing 116, 117, 206; novels 122, 137; and Pearson Group 149, 223; poetry 129 luxury books 195 Lyrical Ballads (Wordsworth and Coleridge) 129 Mabbot, Gilbert 45 Macaulay, Thomas Babington 101, 137 Machlinia, William de 16 Mackenzie, Compton 176 McKenzie, D. F. 2

260

INDEX

1111 2 3 4 51 6 7 8 9 1011 1 2 13 4 5 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 44111

Macmillan, Frederick 101–2 Macmillan 102, 103–4, 106, 115, 118, 139, 140, 178, 196, 227; educational publishing 116, 117, 187, 188, 206; export markets 170, 187, 188, 191; novels 122, 131, 140; as part of conglomerate 207, 224; poetry 130; in US 170 magazines 56–60, 83, 115, 126, 132, 148, 149, 211 Maher, Terry 226 mail-order bookselling 153, 156 Mandamus series 175 manuscript books 3, 9–10 maps 90, 91 Margaret, Duchess of Burgundy 15 Market Rights Agreement (1947) 189, 192, 199, 221 Marmion (Scott) 129 Marriage à-la-mode (Dryden) 49 Martin, Henri-Jean 2 Marx, Karl 112, 166 Mary I, (Queen) 26 Master Humphrey’s Clock 126 Master Printers 35, 38–9 Mathews, Elkin 173, 174 Maurice, F. D. 103 Maurois, André 174, 176 Maxwell, Robert 197–8, 203–4 Mayhew, Henry 111 mechanisation 87–90, 99, 211 medicine 20, 21 Melville, Herman 139 Menzies, John 226 Mercers’ Company 23 Mergenthaler, Ottmar 88 mergers and takeovers 207, 222–5 Merler, Anthony 26 Methodist church 111 Middlemarch (Eliot) 126 Milford, Humphrey 160 Millar, Andrew 66, 79 Millar v. Taylor 67 Milman, H. H. 101, 105 Milton, John 45, 48, 185 Milton family (publishers’ readers) 139 Minerva Press 78, 209 missionaries 182, 184, 187 Moll Flanders (Defoe) 60 monasteries 9, 10, 18–19 monographs 117, 214 monopolies 26–7, 33, 42, 73 Monotype 88, 89, 212

Monotype Corporation 213 Moonstone, The (Collins) 111 Moore, George 176 More, Hannah 109–10, 146 Morison, Stanley 168 Morley, John 104, 139, 140 Morning Post, The 73 Moseley, Humphrey 48 Motteux, Peter Anthony 57 Moxon, Edward 130 Mudie, Charles Edward 123–4, 125, 130, 137 Mudie, George 79 Murdoch, Rupert 216, 223 Murray, John 77, 79, 98, 105–6, 116, 117, 118, 122, 124, 133, 139, 154, 224 music 27, 60, 90, 91 Nabokov, Vladimir 205 Naked Lunch (Burroughs) 205 Napoleonic Wars 185 National Book Council 163 Nature 117 Nelson’s Royal Readers 116 Nesbit, E. E. 147 Net Book Agreement (NBA) 102, 138, 141, 142, 150, 152, 153–6, 157, 158, 201–2, 212, 220, 226; and public libraries 155–6, 163 New English Dictionary (NED) 117, 118 `new journalism’ 118, 149, 200 New Zealand 183, 184, 189 Newbery, John 74–5, 77, 91 Newbery, Ralph 40 Newman, Cardinal 119 Newnes, George 118, 149 News Corporation 223–4 newsbooks 44 newspaper groups 170 newspaper production 211; technological change and 88, 89, 93, 216–17 newspapers 58, 83, 95, 132, 148, 164; London 64; popular/tabloid 118, 148–50, 200; prices 115, 148, 153; provincial 62, 85, 148; tax on 113 Nichols, John 60 Nightingale, Florence 146 Noble brothers 77, 81, 82, 120, 209 Northanger Abbey (Austen) 78 Northcliffe, Lord (Harmsworth) 118, 149, 154

261

INDEX

1111 2 3 4 51 6 7 8 9 1011 1 2 13 4 5 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 44111

Norton, William 40 novels see fiction Obscene Publications Act: (1857) 129; (1959) 205 Odyssey, The (Homer) 56 offset printing 90, 213–15 Old Curiosity Shop, The (Dickens) 126 one-volume novels 126–7 Oppenheim, E. Phillips 151, 159 Orczy, Baroness 160 Osborn, John 76 Oswen, John 19 overseas markets 161, 170, 185–93, 199, 220–1 ownership of copies see copy ownership Oxford 18 Oxford English Dictionary 118, 215 Oxford Movement 119 Oxford, university of 10, 113 Oxford University Press 89, 116, 117, 118, 160–1, 179, 215; overseas markets 170, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191 Palgrave, Francis Turner 130 Pall Mall Gazette 149 pamphlets 58 Pan books 178 Panther books 178 paper 9, 17–18, 86, 87–8, 98, 162–3, 195–6, 197 paper tax 112–13, 115 paperbacks 94, 151, 171, 172–80, 197, 209, 210 Paris 9, 128, 134 Paris Amendments 192 parliamentary reporting 59 part books 85, 103, 126 patent medicines 75 patents, printing 26–7, 35–6, 39, 41, 42, 44, 50 patronage 16, 19, 21, 22, 28, 133 payment of authors 132–3, 136–8, 141 Payne, Thomas 81 Pearson, Cyril 149 Pearson Group 149, 178, 223 Penguin Books 74, 107, 149, 168, 175–8, 194, 195, 205, 207, 222, 223 penny-a-part novels 111, 127 Pentos 226 performing rights 164 Pergamon Press 204, 210

periodical press 56–60; see also learned journals; magazines Phaidon 195 philanthropists 108, 110, 111 Philological Society 118 Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 56 photography 90, 91, 212–13 phototypesetting 213, 214 Pickering, William 98, 106, 130 Pickwick Papers (Dickens) 125, 126, 137 Pinker, J. B. 140, 161 piracy 35–6, 44, 50, 63, 73, 215; see also reprints, illegal Pitman, Sir Isaac 197 Pitt Press Series 116 plagiarism 128 Pocket Books 177, 178 Poe, Edgar Allen 150 poetry 122, 129–30, 168, 224 Poets of Great Britain, The (Bell) 73, 74 political awareness 99, 107 politics, left-wing 157, 167–8, 170 Pope, Alexander 55–6, 132 popular culture 150–1 pornography 105, 128–9 Portuguese 182 postal services 94 postcards 91 Pound, Ezra 174 prayer books 27, 35 Presbyterian Church 109 press see `new journalism’; newspapers; periodical press presses, printing 89–90 prices see book prices; newspapers; prices Priestley, J. B. 157 print runs 14, 24, 89, 98 printers/printing 3–4, 9, 13–27, 30–1, 35, 38–9, 40, 99, 159; illustrated and graphic work 90–1, 212–13, 214; jobbing 86, 88, 211; provincial 86; socio-economic relationships 92–3; technical developments 89–91, 99, 211–19 Printing Act (1662) 46, 47, 49, 50, 55 Prior, Matthew 57 privileges, printing 26–7, 35–7, 39, 50 Privy Council 26 prognostications 21, 35 provincial trade 17, 19, 62–3, 79, 83, 85, 97

262

INDEX

1111 2 3 4 51 6 7 8 9 1011 1 2 13 4 5 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 44111

Prussia 135 Prynne, William 44 Psalms 35 Public Libraries Act (1850) 124, 155 publisher 4, 207 Publishers’ Association 162, 163–4, 165, 166, 195, 197; and book clubs 158; and Net Book Agreement 102, 154, 155, 156, 159, 202, 226 Publishing History 3 Pynson, Richard 20, 23, 26 Queen’s/King’s printer 26–7, 35, 46 radio 162, 164–5, 200 Raikes, Robert 109 `Railway’ books 94, 106, 127 Railway Children (Nesbit) 147 railways 94–5, 173 Rambler 58 Random House 223 readers, publishers’ 139–40 Reader’s Union 157 reading 10–12, 61, 99, 104–5, 194, 198–9, 209 recitation 10, 11 Recuyell of the Histories of Troy 15 Rees, Owen 76, 79 reference books 80, 87, 117–18, 119, 161, 215 Reformation 25, 26 relief printing 212, 213 religion 13, 26, 108–9 religious publications 13, 15, 20, 26, 27, 35, 108, 109–11, 118, 184, 187 religious societies 109, 110–11 Religious Tract Society 106, 110 remaindering 82, 106 Renter Wardens 37 reprint series 73–4, 105–7, 127, 151, 160–1, 173, 174–6, 209 Reprint Society 158 reprints 167, 191–2; foreign 134–6, 186; illegal 63–8, 191–2, 215; see also piracy; lithographic 214–15; Scottish and Irish 63–8 Restrictive Trade Practices Act (1956) 202 Review, The 57 Reynolds, G. W. M. 105 Rhys, Ernest 160 Richard II, (King) 14 Richard III, (King) 14, 16, 22, 25

Richards, Grant 160 Richardson, Samuel 60, 61, 120 Riddle of the Sands, The (Childers) 151 rights: authors’ 133–6; in copies 40–1, 42, 48–9, 50, 55, 63, 66; subsidiary 136, 162, 164–5, 166; see also copyright Rivington family 75–6, 80, 81, 97–8 Robert, Nicholas-Louis 87 Robertson, George 188 Robinson, George 80–1, 95 Robinson brothers 80, 98 Robinson Crusoe (Defoe) 60, 76, 120 Rohmer, Sax 150–1 romances 151, 205 Rome 9 Romola (Eliot) 126 Rood, Theodoric 18 Routledge, George 94, 106, 127 Routledge and Kegan Paul 106 Rowe, Marsha 206 Royal Dictionary (Boyer) 53 Royal Library 10 Royal Literary Fund 133 Royal Society 56 Royal Society of Literature 133 royalties 138, 141 Royston, Richard 52 Rushworth, John 45 Ruskin, John 166 Russell, Bertrand 166 Rye House Plot 47 St Albans 18–19 Sayers, Dorothy 166, 168, 176 Scenes of Clerical Life (Eliot) 126 Schollers purgatory (Wither) 42 schools 12, 107, 109, 110, 115–16, 118, 147 science 20–1, 60, 117, 203–4 scientific societies 56, 60 Scintilla (Sparke) 44 Scolar, John 19 Scotland 19, 63, 64–8, 78–80, 83, 85, 86, 97, 109, 110 Scott, Sir Walter 79–80, 121–3, 124, 129, 132, 133 scribes 9, 10, 13, 23 scriveners 23, 29 scrolls 9 Secker and Warburg 168 Sedley, Sir Charles 57 Selby, Hubert Jr 205

263

INDEX

1111 2 3 4 51 6 7 8 9 1011 1 2 13 4 5 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 44111

self improvement 78, 99, 105, 110, 146, 179 Senefelder, Alois 90 sensationalism 148 sentimental novels 61, 120 Seres, William 35, 38 serial publication 61, 125–6 Shakespeare, William 48, 49, 73 Shakespearian Grammar (Abbott) 117 Shannon-Weaver model 1, 3 share-book system 53–5, 72, 81, 83 Shaw, George Bernard 162 Shelley, Mary 78 Siberch, John 19 Simpkin, Marshall 95, 102, 196, 197–8, 199 Sir Lancelot Greaves (Smollett) 61 Skolokar, Anthony 19 slavery 182 Smiles, Samuel 105, 108 Smith Elder 117, 122, 124, 126, 127 Smith, George 126 Smith, W. H. 94–5, 115, 124, 158, 198, 209, 220, 226 Smithers, Leonard 128 Smollett, Tobias 59–60, 61, 74 social awareness 99, 107 Society of Authors 102, 125, 137–8, 140, 141, 162, 164, 165 Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge 111–12 Society for the Encouragement of Learning 137 Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge (SPCK) 76, 109, 111 socio-economic relations 92–3 sound recording 162 South Africa 190 South and Central America 182–3, 186 Southey, Robert 105, 134 Soviet Union 203, 204, 210 Spain 182, 183, 186 Sparke, Michael 43–4, 45 Spectator, The 57–8 sport 146, 200 Springer Verlag 203, 204 stamp duties 112–13 Standard Book Number (SBN) 217–18 Stanhope, Earl 89 Star Chamber 36, 38–9, 41, 42–3 state intervention 29, 32–50, 97, 195; see also crown and booktrade stationers 4, 9, 10

Stationers’ Company 4, 18, 23, 29–31, 34–5, 36, 37–41, 43, 44, 47, 49, 51, 73; Court of Assistants 30, 34, 36, 37–8, 39, 40, 41, 43, 44, 45, 46; licensing system 39–40, 50; officeholders 37–8; Royal Charter 29–30, 33, 37 Stationers’ Register 34, 43, 46, 50, 55 Stead, W. T. 148–9 steam printing 89–90, 99, 211 Steele, Richard 57, 58 Stephen, Leslie 117 stereotyping 89, 105 Sterne, Laurence 60 Strachey, John 167 Strahan, William 79 Strand Magazine, The 150 subsidiary rights 136, 162, 164–5, 166 Sunday schools 109, 110 Swan, Sonnenschein 166 Sweet, Henry 117 Talfourd, Thomas Noon 114, 134 tariff reform 152, 158 Tatler, The 57, 58 Tauchnitz, Christian Bernard 135, 172–3, 175, 186 taxes 112–13 Taylor, John 129 Taylor, Robert 66 technological change 85–96, 98, 112, 145–6, 150, 211–19, 225 Teetotal Times, The 104 Tegg, Thomas 112, 113 television 197, 198, 200–1, 209–10 Tennyson, Alfred 101, 130, 138 Tenores novelli 16 textbooks 106, 107, 116, 187, 188, 192, 200 Thackeray, William Makepeace 107, 117, 126, 128 Thirty-nine Steps, The (Buchan) 160, 203 Thomson, James 66 three-deckers 122–3, 124, 125, 126–7 thrillers 151 Time Warner 223 Times, The 89, 148, 153–4, 216 Times Book Club, The 153–4 Times Literary Supplement, The 153, 154 Tit-Bits 149 Tonson, Jacob 56, 58

264

INDEX

1111 2 3 4 51 6 7 8 9 1011 1 2 13 4 5 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 44111

Tottell, Richard 26, 27, 35, 38 tracts 109–11 trade paperbacks 179 trade publishers 58 trade restraints 99–103 trade sales 54, 72 trade unions 93, 110, 114, 216 transport 94–5 travel books and guides 83, 159 Trinity College, Dublin 113 Trollope, Anthony 107, 137, 139 Trollope, Fanny 139 True Patriot, The 59 Truth About Publishing (Unwin) 166 typefounding 86 typesetting 24, 86, 88–9; computer-aided 215–16, 217; photo- 213, 214 typewriters 215 Ulysses (Joyce) 174 Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe) 104 United States 72, 145, 153, 169, 183, 192, 221–2, 223; book clubs 156; copyright issues 135–6, 161, 189–90; as export market 170, 185–6, 193; paperback industry 173, 177–8 Universal Chronicle, The 58 universities 10, 12, 14, 19, 89, 113, 116, 117, 118, 208, 214 Unwin, Jacob 165 Unwin, Stanley 163, 165–6, 169, 175, 194, 196, 206 Unwin, Thomas Fisher 165–6 Unwins 92 Vanessa (Walpole) 165 vanity publishing 138, 215 Vathek (Beckford) 78 Vaughan, Henry 48 vernacular books 15, 20–1 vernacular languages 13 Victoria, (Queen) 145, 182 Viking 222 Virago 206 Vitzelly, Henry 129 Wales 19 Wallace, Edgar 151, 159, 160 Waller, Edmund 48, 49 Walpole, Horace 61, 78 Walpole, Hugh 157, 165 Walter, John 89, 153, 154 Warburg, Frederic 168

Ward, Arthur Henry Sarfield 150–1 Ward Lock 159, 170, 196 Ward, Roger 35 Warden, The (Trollope) 137 Waterstones 225–6 Watt, A. P. 140 Waugh, Arthur 159, 161 Waverley (Scott) 121, 122 Waye, Richard 38 Webb, Mary 176 Weidenfeld and Nicolson 205, 223 Well of Loneliness (Hall) 129 Wells, H. G. 146, 161 Westward Ho! (Kingsley) 103 Whatman, James 87 Whiston, John 65 Whittingham, Charles 105 wholesaling booksellers 52–5, 80–1, 94–5, 179, 197–8, 225 Who’s Who 161 Wild Gallant, The (Dryden) 49 Wilde, Oscar 128, 173 Wiley 169 Wilkes, John 74 William III, (King) 47 Wither, George 42 Wolfe, John 35–6 Wolfe, Reyner 38 women 40, 51–2, 60, 146–7, 149, 151, 205–6 Women in Publishing 206 Wood, Mrs Henry 124, 137, 140 Woolworth’s 176–7 Worcester 19 word processing systems 216, 217 Worde, Wynkyn de 15, 20, 23, 24, 26 Wordsworth, William 114, 129, 134 working class 99, 105, 108–12, 127–8, 146, 147, 179, 201 World War I 162–3 World War II 194–7 World’s Classics series 160–1, 173, 209 Wright, John 56 Yeats, W. B. 165 Yellow Book, The 128, 173, 176 yellowbacks 111, 173 Yeomanry 37 Yonge, Charlotte 124 York 19 Zola, Emile 129

265