The Culture of the Publisher's Series, Volume 1: Authors, Publishers and the Shaping of Taste

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The Culture of the Publisher’s Series, Volume One

10.1057/9780230299368 - The Culture of the Publisher's Series, Volume 1, Edited by John Spiers

Brycchan Carey et al. (eds), Discourses of Slavery and Abolition: Britain and Its Colonies, 1760–1838 Gail Marshall and Adrian Poole (eds), Victorian Shakespeare, Vol. 1: Theatre, Drama and Performance, Vol. 2: Literature and Culture Andrew Nash (ed.), The Culture of Collected Editions Jerome McGann, Radiant Textuality: Literary Study after the World Wide Web Elizabeth James (ed), Macmillan: A Publishing Tradition Elizabeth Maslen, Political and Social Issues in British Women’s Fiction, 1928–1968 Angelique Richardson and Chris Willis (eds), The New Woman in Fiction and Fact: Fin-de-Siècle Feminisms Warren Chernaik, Martin Swales and Robert Vilain (eds), The Art of Detective Fiction Rebecca D’Monte and Nicole Pohl (eds), Female Communities 1600–1800 Isobel Armstrong and Virginia Blain (eds), Women’s Poetry in the Enlightenment: The Making of a Canon, 1730–1820 Isobel Armstrong and Virginia Blain (eds), Women’s Poetry, Late Romantic to Late Victorian: Gender and Genre, 1830–1900 Warren Chernaik and Martin Dzelzainis (eds), Marvell and Liberty (July 1999) Andy Leak and George Paizis (eds), The Holocaust and the Text: Speaking the Unspeakable Warwick Gould and Thomas F. Staley (eds), Writing the Lives of Writers Ian Willison, Warwick Gould and Warren Chernaik (eds), Modernist Writers and the Marketplace (1996) John Spiers (ed.), George Gissing and the City: Cultural Crisis and the Making of Books in Late Victorian England Mary Hammond and Shafquat Towheed (eds), Publishing in the First World War (2007) Mary Hammond and Robert Fraser (eds), Books without Borders, Volume 1: The Cross-National Dimension in Print Culture (2008), Books without Borders, Volume 2: Perspectives from South Asia (2008) Gina Potts and Lisa Shahriari (eds), Virginia Woolf’s Bloomsbury, Volume 1: Aesthetic Theory and Literary Practice (2010), Virginia Woolf’s Bloomsbury, Volume 2: International Influence and Politics (2010) Robert J. Balfour (ed.), Culture, Capital and Representation (2010)



Other publications by Palgrave Macmillan in association with the Institute of English Studies

Authors, Publishers and the Shaping of Taste Edited, and with an introduction by John Spiers Senior Research Fellow, Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London and Visiting Professor, School of Humanities, Social Sciences and Law, University of Glamorgan

In association with the Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London



The Culture of the Publisher’s Series, Volume One

Selection and editorial matter © John Spiers 2011 Individual chapters © contributors 2011

No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978–0–230–28402–9 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne



All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission.


For my dear grandsons Byron, Lukas and Oscar




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List of Illustrations

ix

Acknowledgements

xi

Notes on Contributors

xiii

Introduction: Wondering about ‘the Causes of Causes’: The Publisher’s Series, Its Cultural Work and Meanings John Spiers

1

1 Market Forces and Modernisation in the French Book Trade in the Last Century of the ‘Ancien Régime’ and in the Early Nineteenth Century: Some Reflections on the Emergence of the Publisher’s Series Wallace Kirsop

62

2 The Paperback Revolution in France, 1850–1950 Isabelle Olivero

72

3 Canonicity, Reprint Publishing, and Copyright Gordon B. Neavill

88

4 ‘To Undertake Such Works as They Find to Be Wanted’: The Early Years of the Clarendon Press Series Simon Eliot

106

5 Personality, Appreciation and Literary Education: Harrap’s Poetry and Life Series, 1911–1930 Patrick Buckridge

125

6 Excavating Original African American ‘Pulp Fiction’: W.W. Norton’s Old School Books Cécile Cottenet

141

7 The Symbiotic Relationship of Thomas Nelson & Sons and John Buchan within the Publisher’s Series Kate Macdonald

156

8 The Series as Commodity: Marketing T. Fisher Unwin’s Pseudonym and Autonym Libraries Frederick Nesta

171

vii



Contents

9 Sifting out ‘Rubbish’ in the Literature of the Twenties and Thirties: Chatto & Windus and the Phoenix Library Andrew Nash

188

10 Behind the Scenes at the Albatross Press: A Modern Press for Modern Times Michele K. Troy

202

11 ‘Sound Information and Innocent Amusement’: John Murray’s Books on the Move Barbara Schaff

219

Index

237



viii Contents

I.1 The four successive bindings of Richard Bentley’s Standard Novels series, 1831–62, showing Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility (1833), Theodore Hook, Jack Brag (1839), James Fenimore Cooper, The Water Witch (1850) and The Hon. Eleanor Eden, Easton and Its Inhabitants (1860) I.2

I.3

27

Charles Mackay, Longbeard. Or The Revolt of the Saxons (London, George Routledge & Co., 1850), Railway Library, No. 17

33

Madame Charles Reybaud, The Old Convents of Paris and George Sand, The Haunted Marsh (London and Belfast, Simms & M’Intyre, 1847), The Parlour Library, Vol. VIII

41

1.1 One of the most popular titles from the Ménard et Desenne Bibliothèque Française 2.1

3.1

68

Émile Zola, L’argent, Paris, 1891. The book cover of one of the most successful titles in the series Bibliothèque Charpentier

77

August Strindberg, Married. One of the first twelve Modern Library titles published in May 1917

97

4.1 Clarendon Press series, 1865–1900

111

4.2 Clarendon Press series and other titles, 1865–1900

112

4.3 Clarendon Press series, 1865–1900: Dewey 5 (pure science)

114

4.4 Title page of the first volume of Maxwell’s Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism (with kind permission of the Senate House Library)

115

4.5 Clarendon Press series, 1865–1900: Dewey classes

116

4.6 Clarendon Press series, 1865–1900: Dewey 82 (English literature)

117

4.7

Shakespeare Select Plays Hamlet, Clarendon Press series, Oxford, 1876

4.8 Front cover of OUP’s first general catalogue 1916–17 (private collection)

118 120

ix





4.9

A list of series mentioned in OUP’s first general catalogue 1916–17

5.1 William Henry Hudson (1862–1918) 6.1 7.1 8.1 9.1 10.1

121 127

Donald Goines, Daddy Cool (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997)

147

Advertisement of Thomas Nelson’s from 1907, showing a sample of the authors placed in two of their series

162

Poster by Aubrey Beardsley for T. Fisher Unwin’s children’s books, including The Children’s Library, 1894

179

Some volumes from The Phoenix Library (London, Chatto & Windus)

195

The Albatross Almanac, 1935

206



x

In editing these two volumes concerned with the complex relationships between knowledge and culture, the market and the historical individual reader I have contracted many debts – notably, to my splendid colleagues, the contributors. I am most especially grateful to my good friend Professor Warwick Gould, Director of The Institute of English Studies, for encouraging me when I first suggested a conference on ‘The Culture of the Publisher’s Series’ (held at the IES on 18–19 October 2007), and for all his support over my seven years (so far) at the IES. He has actively aided this project at every turn. His exuberance and intelligence, wisdom and guidance have, indeed, been the basis of one of his own greatest creations, the Institute of English Studies itself. My thanks, too, to another colleague at the IES, Professor Simon Eliot, for his encouragement and advice, and for his friendship. My friend and colleague Professor Robert Fraser of the Open University has read the Introductions to these two volumes and given me advice of pure gold concerning the content and structure of an earlier version. I am deeply grateful to him for our discussions and for helping me shape (and reshape) my arguments, not all of which he approves. He will, I hope, forgive me where I have demurred. What is printed inevitably remains my responsibility. I also owe much to my colleagues at the Institute of Economic Affairs, Professor Philip Booth and the late Arthur Seldon, as too to my first tutor in economics at Sussex, Professor Donald Winch. My dear wife Leigh has, as always, given me constant help. I am grateful, too, to those who chaired the original conference sessions, and to each of the patient contributors to these volumes. My friend and colleague Dr Mary Hammond was very supportive and encouraging in co-organising the original event, and in suggesting possible speakers and approaches to the issues. Palgrave Macmillan’s reader has, too, been of enormous help. Paula Kennedy, Publisher, Literature, Theatre and Performance Studies at Palgrave Macmillan, has been all that an editor could hope for, and has earned the gratitude of all those involved in the xi



Acknowledgements

xii Acknowledgements

John Spiers Twyford, Sussex



project. I am grateful, too, to Ben Doyle, Editorial Assistant at Palgrave Macmillan, and to Linda Auld of Linda Auld Associates for their detailed care and guidance in seeing the project through the press, and to John Taylor for his excellent copy-editing.

Patrick Buckridge, Associate Professor, School of Humanities, Griffith University, Australia. Cécile Cottenet, Assistant-Professor, Université de Provence, AixMarseille I, France. Simon Eliot, Professor of the History of the Book, Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London, UK. Wallace Kirsop recently retired as Director of the Centre for the Book, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. Kate Macdonald, Senior Researcher, Department of English, University of Ghent, Belgium. Andrew Nash, Senior Lecturer in the School of English and American Studies, University of Reading, UK. Gordon B. Neavill, Associate Professor, School of Library and Information Science, Wayne State University, USA. Frederick Nesta, University Librarian, Lingnan University, Hong Kong, and a Visiting Research Fellow, Institute of English Studies, University of London, UK. Isabelle Olivero is in charge of collections on the history of the book and the history of reading and publishing, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, Paris, France. Barbara Schaff is Professor of Literature and Culture at Göttingen University in Germany, and was formerly Visiting Research Fellow, Centre for Tourism and Cultural Change, Leeds Metropolitan University, UK. John Spiers, Senior Research Fellow, Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London; Visiting Professor, School of Humanities, Social Sciences and Law, University of Glamorgan, UK; founder and chief executive of The Harvester Press academic publishing group, 1969–88. Michele K. Troy, Associate Professor of History, Hillyer College, University of Hartford, USA. xiii



Notes on Contributors



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Wondering about ‘the Causes of Causes’: The Publisher’s Series, Its Cultural Work and Meanings Part One: The Methodologies of Series and the Limits of Knowledge John Spiers

[For Part Two: The Series, the Academy, and the World, please see The Culture of the Publisher’s Series, Volume 2] A focus on the culture of the publisher’s series can do much to help us learn what we don’t know we don’t know. It can show us, too, what happened next in the past. It can illustrate what worked and spread, and what did not succeed and persist. It can assist us in developing a number of cultural narratives which can make more detailed sense of many elusive aspects of change in book publishing, in readerships and in society. It can prove invaluable in unravelling the fabric of meaning which constitutes culture, and of cultural change itself. It can assist us especially, too, in the words of the economist Alfred Marshall, in probing ‘the causes of causes’ (Winch 2009: 282). These two volumes offer papers that range very widely in time and place. They are much concerned with two fundamental cultural and economic questions that book historians put to structures and to publishing houses, and that we need to ask of the publisher’s series: ‘How did it work?’ and ‘Why did publishers make particular decisions?’ By way of reply there is much significant new material about national and international cultures, social relations, subjective practices and the role of the series both as actor and mirror. The series is seen as greatly influencing the power of commodities to affect the activities and attitudes of readers and their experiences in many cultures. These studies help us to understand publishing as a commercial, risk-taking, competitive, practical and entrepreneurial enterprise. They also appreciate publishing as a fundamental cultural venture which poses the largest of all social and economic questions about meanings and events in different nations, 1



Introduction

John Spiers

regions and times. As Lynne Tatlock has stressed, for example, with regard to nineteenth century Germany, for many writers distinctive ways of writing about their context, seeking to represent specific circumstances and to make critical judgements about them, were a key yardstick of a sense of nationhood. (Tatlock 2010: 1). In my separate introductions to each of these two volumes I highlight some problems of the historiographical analysis of events, and the economic and cultural work done by series, together with the wider cultural implications of this work. I am mindful of what Clifford Dyment wrote in 1943, that ‘Collective urgency thinks only of action; poets, however, are always wondering about causes.’ The stress of these two volumes is on culture as an evolutionary concept, and on the connections between objects, their production and their influence. The essays thus focus perspectives on the whole way of life and consciousness of particular times, places and people as evidenced by the context of the culture of specific (and often prismatic) publishers’ series. They explore, too, what we can know of the inward mental processes and the individual consciousness of the individual reader’s experiences in commercial society, which we seek to recover. Critically, we are examining the cultural work and impact of the series, its purposes, strategies and contexts. In these two collaborative volumes we offer twenty-two entirely new papers focused on these polarities of cultural discourses. These papers examine relationships and processes as well as institutions. They are concerned with the mental life and motivations of the publisher and the individual reader, and with the consequences both of investment decisions by producers and of purchasing decisions by consumers. They deal with the creation, distribution, exchange, expense and effects of books published in series. And they prompt key issues about the life of the individual and what we can know of cultural and economic actors. The complexity of many interlocking themes is evident, as is the analysis of motive and the causes of actions. There is an ever-shifting historical process of new relations between literary facts, social, and cultural determinants. Each element conditions the others, and is conditioned by them. These papers carefully scrutinise these day-to-day dynamic practices in the ebb and flow of the processes of literary and economic production and exchange in which publishers have worked with particular series. The series is thus both metaphor and source concerning the individual and the social body, and its resilience, mobility, continuity and renewal. Our essayists examine these explicit themes as they are focused and highlighted by individual series as cultural structures. These include the stresses and contradictions seen in the ways in which various social and



2

economic discourses were formed, differentiated themselves and competed. They thus raise fundamental questions concerning the priority of demand, and of culture and value – including the sources and meanings of the ‘exchange value’ of commodities, power and its sources and definitions, competing assumptions about life and feelings and accounts of human behaviour, and competing ideas about society, morals and conduct. And, in the terms of Catherine Gallagher’s valuable study of The Body Economic (2006), of those differing philosophic and economic analyses implied by the series and its cultures. So we confront concepts of wealth, production, class, labour and value, and the functions in a market-place of individual felicific utilitarian pleasure and pain gained from reading and book-buying. Here we open out the challenges of recovering those elusive choices which people made as readers and book buyers. We do so together with the varying cultural and economic contexts and the consequences of decisions made by publishers. Each of these ‘players’ are seen as creative and productive economic actors and subjects. The two volumes of this set thus explore different analogies and social visions about the relationships and functioning of market, society, state and individual in differing times and nations, which determine ideas about human behaviour and culture that are implied as we seek the experiences of the individual reader. Any series is a niche. Here, we need to work with a definition of a niche which is helpfully ever-present in discussions of the series and which is actively explanatory. Paul Colinvaux, in his The Fates of Nations (1980), offered ‘A niche is a specific set of capabilities for extracting resources, for surviving hazard, and for competing; coupled with a corresponding set of needs’ (Colinvaux 1980: 232). The essays are especially concerned with the social processes by which competing publishers have sought to occupy greatly varied niche-spaces, in response to changing opportunities and when a publisher has extrapolated from the experience of their recent past. For a series publisher to recognise, learn and master a niche, to occupy it as a fresh environment in a culture, to respond successfully to contextual change, was and is to seek fitness for purpose and survival. From the late eighteenth century onwards – and, very strikingly from the late nineteenth-century – there was a proliferation of niches, and many new markets which asked for new ways of addressing readers. Reading cultures and the modes of consumption associated with them changed radically. Reading became a much more individual and individualistic activity, with series offering an enormous range of opportunities. As Lynne Tatlock has said, there



Introduction 3

John Spiers

were books ‘catering to a variety of tastes, promising the consumer erotic titillation, entertainment, self-help and self-fashioning, education, status, moral edification, information, and aesthetic pleasure. Even as the contents of books catered to a wider range of interests and tastes, their makeup, too – illustrations, covers, print, paper – appealed to different tastes, age groups, and pocketbooks. Books thus served increasingly across a broad spectrum of society as signifiers of taste, affiliation, and, to use Pierre Bourdieu’s term, “distinction”’ (Tatlock 2010: 9–10). As to my own role as editor, let me say that introductions to such volumes commonly tell you what the authors of the following papers then tell you. I do not envisage my role as to try to steal the thunder (or the lightning) of contributors by summarising their best points in a few cursory sentences. Instead, I offer an introduction in two halves, each of which precedes a volume of the two-part set and which instead attempts some wider contextual work. The two volumes can stand alone, but the reader will gain much from studying the two as a whole. In the first volume I provide some basic definitions and observations – of what we mean by a ‘niche’, a ‘series’, a ‘library’ etc., as well as a ‘culture’, a ‘classic’ or a ‘canon’. In the second I particularly emphasise the importance of taking entrepreneurship, publishing as a business, markets, and the role of the sovereign consumer seriously if we are to understand the actual dynamics of risk-taking, the calculations of odds and probabilities made by publishers and the wider context and agencies of book publishing and of individual choices made by readers. As Jennifer Alison has recently emphasised, in her important study of the Australian firm of Angus & Robertson (which was a significant series publisher), ‘What a publisher publishes is only half the story and the other half concerns how his business is operated but the importance of the part played in publishing by commercial activities is not often recognised.’ (Alison 2009: 2). As Alison says, Peter Mann’s earlier comments bear repetition, too: ‘Publishing is a numbers game. It is based on editorial flair for picking the right book to publish in the first place, but that decision must be dovetailed into other quantitative decisions about print-runs, pricing, export sales, sales of rights and so on which are essentially businesss decisions. It is just as important in successful publishing to be able to get rid of books as it is to creating them in the first place’ (Mann 1982: 89). Coleridge may, indeed, have composed Kubla Khan in his sleep, but for the publisher the task of producing and selling the books was and is certainly conscious work. It is also a task which demands thought and skill, persistent energy, judgement and focus over time in the production of value, as determined by consumers.



4

Yet the phenomenon of the publisher’s series – which demonstrates these qualities, among others – has generally been neglected by all but a few scholars working on individual publishing houses or specific series. Few book-trade studies index ‘series’, although most index ‘serial’ and ‘part-works’. The series has never before been considered holistically as part of the changes in culture and the production, pricing and distribution of books in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and as something with precedents in earlier periods and ramifications in later ones, and in many nations and cultures. As my friend and colleague Dr Mary Hammond said, encouraging the project, in this two-volume set the different contributors’ voices emerge as complementary methodological systems: engaging with archival research, cultural theory, literary, paratextual and bibliometric analysis, and often with each other. They demonstrate a wide range of approaches which scholars of book history have come to recognise as essential in the task of excavating texts and readers of the past, and in assessing which trends reflected general patterns of change. The papers in these two volumes were first presented to the conference ‘The Culture of the Publisher’s Series’, held at the Institute of English Studies at Senate House in central London on 18–19 October 2007. They celebrate the series in its complex diversity. Appropriately, each of the eleven essays in the first volume examines a particular historically eminent series in relation to tradition and the market-place, concentrating in each case on the early years of its inception and emergence. These essays open out fundamental principles, problems and new learning. Wallace Kirsop compares the French book in the last phase of the ‘Ancien Regime’ and in the early twentieth century. Isabelle Olivero examines the invention of the Book Series in France from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. Gordon B. Neavill considers issues of canonicity, reprint publishing and copyright, which from England in 1710 and from 1790 with the first federal copyright law in the USA (following the first copyright law in America, in Connecticut in 1783) – and then gradually in other countries – created a property right which could be assigned or sold to a publisher. This made the author’s work a commodity and gave it a value in the marketplace. Simon Eliot examines the early years of the Oxford University Press’s ‘Clarendon Press’ series and Patrick Buckridge Harrap’s ‘Poetry and Life’ series of 1911–30. Cécile Cottenet looks at W. W. Norton’s ‘Old School Books’ series and Kate Macdonald at John Buchan’s relationship with his publisher Thomas Nelson and Sons of Edinburgh, for whom he also worked as an editorial adviser. Frederick Nesta considers T. Fisher Unwin’s ‘Pseudonym’ and ‘Autonym’ libraries and Andrew Nash



Introduction 5

John Spiers

Chatto & Windus and the ‘Phoenix Library’. Michele Troy looks behind the scenes at the Albatross Press, and Barbara Schaff follows John Murray’s books on the move. In the second volume there is a change of focus. There we consider the role of particular series in the formation of national canons, in influencing the meanings of citizenship and identity. Contributors consider how series have influenced how people have developed a sense of common identity and nationhood. Benedict Anderson famously argued, in Imagined Communities (1991) that the key mechanism was print, by which many diverse readers gained a collective awareness and were united by shared values (or imagined so). Trish Loughran, however, has queried the allegedly determinant role of print culture in the cross-generational, cross-regional processes of nation formation and of those ‘imaginary relations’ which influence these. Loughran’s view is more significantly archivally-based, challenging Anderson’s ideas as ‘ahistorical, a post-industrial fantasy of preindustrial print’s efficacy as a cross-regional agent’. (Loughran, 2007, xix). Nations, too, she notes, have formed in the absence of a national print culture. (Loughran, 2007, 447–8). We may also think that few nations attain a close social identity that is (or was) contentedly consolidated and homogeneous. We see, too, that publishers’ series reflect the competition for legitimacy as we seek to unravel the historically specific and diverse spaces, scales, influences and meanings particular to localities, regions, cultures, consciousnesses, serialities and times. All these influence the matrix of a nation. Loughran (2007) and Linda Colley (1992) have both sought a more nuanced interpretation of nationalism’s diverse genesis. Anderson’s definition of a nation as ‘an imagined political community’ admits of further subtle and particular re-imagination – as Loughran has demonstrated. Like Loughran, our contributors explore actual archives for answers. Paul Colinvaux’s The Fates of Nations (1980) showed how and why nations competed for resources, and how they sought to occupy specific and changing niche-spaces in the world’s polity and economy. These were learned-niches in national struggles to secure extra resources. They are fundamental to our understanding of the dynamics of such national strategies as colonialism, trade and the onset of aggressive wars – analysed by Colinvaux as deliberate efforts to change a nation’s niches to increase its resources. By implication this study suggests many insights into the social mechanism which was and is the publisher’s series. Many series have explicitly been concerned with acculturation. They have often hinged on cultural definition, cultural practices and



6

reconstruction, as our contributors essay. The papers here help us to see how some inhabitants of some countries actually saw themselves, and how ideas and people were differentiated within historical and temporal frontiers, and by ethnicity, class and gender. Series thus helped revive, confirm, and elevate local culture and nation. Joan Scott, too, has previously given us the representative contention that ‘gender is one of the recurrent references by which political power has been conceived, legitimated and criticized’ (Scott 1988: 48). Series also emphasise cultural disparities as well as homogeneities, alignments and re-alignments, and the variety of identities among different groups at different times, as the papers by Gupta, Kuitert, Panofsky, Rukavina, Tilley, Viro and Yakovaki each show in Volume 2. Self-image has been a crucial factor in those comprising what they have accepted as a nation, and this is itself reflected in many series. Linda Colley properly draws attention to the words of the French historian Georges Duby, who noted that ‘The attitudes of groups of individuals to their own situation in society and the conduct these attitudes dictate are determined not so much by actual economic conditions as by the image in the minds of the individuals and groups’ (Colley 1992: 45; Duby, in Briggs 1985: v). Divergencies due to different geographies (and economies), too, have to be taken into careful account, including the powerful influence of island status. Similarly, the fact that a nation is not made (nor securely settled over time) by ruling a line on a map. In the formation of nations ambiguities abound. Smaller nations, too, regularly seek to re-emerge from larger formations. And nations thought by some to be ‘peripheral’ have made themselves central, while ‘colonies’ have evolved completely autonomous identities. The contribution of the ‘peripheral’ Irish to ‘English literature’ (and to much else characteristic of Britain) is well known. We see that, since the eighteenth century at least, invention and investment in series have constantly shifted in response to the formation of national and regional identities, with people uniting in feeling – often bound by mutual self-interest – and to the opportunities for the exercise of many kinds of power that these identities have offered. The publisher’s series has concerned ideology and sociology in the theatre and temper of the times. It has reflected differing senses of identities, and the extent to which they have been serviceable and usable resources in national expression, as Linda Colley has investigated for Britain from 1707 to 1837. Colley points out, too, ‘the unsoundness of any single platonic notion of what constitutes nationalism and nationhood’ (Colley 1992: 408). Colinvaux (1980: 231–54) offers a complex and impressive ecological analysis of the basis of the rise and waning of national power.



Introduction 7

John Spiers

Certainly, the drivers to secure niches for many ‘modern’ nations have been many and diverse: notably, the pressures of revolutions in industry and transport, for speed broadened and extended markets, as did maritime strength which produced trade and wealth and power (and its obligations). Here was what Wolfgang Schivelbusch (1988: 10) called ‘the annihilation of time and space’. Other key factors have been the geographical mobility of a nation’s or a region’s inhabitants, elite attitudes and the privileging of minorities, the rise of the bourgeoisie, the patriotic influence of organised religion, networks of self-interest and of credit, the urbanisation of a population and its demographic development, the growing volume and complexity of internal and external trade (including exporting, importing and re-exporting), the operations of free trade and the realities of entrepreneurship, financing and profits. Then there was the impact of imperial tides, of naval investment to gain access to markets and to capture and then to protect trade – which in the colonial period was most obviously the transfer of resources from distant places to the militarily stronger partner. When Pitt the Elder, 1st Earl of Chatham, died in 1778 the City of London raised a monument to him at the Guildhall upon which Edmund Burke’s words were inscribed: ‘A statesman by whom commerce was united with and made to flourish by war’ (Plumb 1966: 25). Aggressive wars secured new niche-space and raw materials. As Plumb says, ‘war not only increased trade, but also freed money and multiplied it. Cheap money stimulated speculation, new enterprises, invention; a risk was cheap; the effect on the industrial revolution was profound. Plentiful money created demand – for goods, for food, for those small personal luxuries that are the symbols of affluence’ (Plumb 1966: 26). Explorers, too, were the harbingers of changing destiny (Plumb 1966: 223). So, too, there was emigration to remove surplus people, which changed the original nation – including its unwilling and formerly aboriginal and Amerindian hosts (Colinvaux 1980: 190). For those newly settled in places distant from Europe such as Australia (and New Zealand) there were, too, the consequences of what historian Geoffrey Blainey (1968) has called ‘the tyranny of distance’, on which Alison Rukavina reflects in Volume 2 of this set. The range of networks of communications and the proliferation of print (tracts; religious works; almanacs; newspapers and periodicals; broadsides and broadsheets; pamphlets; business directories; cartoons; plays; poetry; books of fact and fiction) have been fundamental in any culture, and in the evolution of its ‘political personality’. So, too, have been shifts in religious belief and influence, as have been political upheavals, wars and invasions and the national bonding they encourage. The yields of peace and prosperity, educational change and other



8

modernising agents form a major part of the canvas, too, as these studies again show. We see that one of the great interests of the culture of the publisher’s series is to examine what were common frameworks among series publishers and what was peculiar to time, to the inventive entrepreneur in invented nations, to those identifying with a nation, as well as to place, and why. Our contributors examine the role that the series has played in many aspects of collective identity. In the second part of my introduction, which prefaces Volume 2, I examine the implications of series in their wider political, economic and social context. In both halves of my introductory essay I consider the cultural and economic work of the series as a publishing phenomenon, and what it has achieved and continues to achieve. Of course, contributors do not all take the same point of view, nor do they necessarily agree with what I say here, nor with one another. However, the debate is itself valuable. Necessarily, some axioms of best historical practice open out in the process. Such principles embrace both the arts and the sciences too, in accordance with precedents set by James A. Secord, Aileen Fyfe, Bernard Lightman and others in their examination of different communities of scientific readers and their reading practices. (Secord 2000; Fyfe 2002; Lightman 2007).1 The essays in each volume do much to illuminate questions helpfully summarised by Mary J. Jackson in her compelling study of children’s literature and entrepreneurship. Here, too, there remain many opportunities for research on individual series of children’s books both in prose and in poetry – and of many innovative minor publishers and printers of juvenile books who showed persistent vitality. These books (and series) ‘represented the enormously powerful collusive efforts of parents, producers of books, and indeed most adults’ ( Jackson 1989: 16). She poses a basic framework of questions about the evolution of assumptions concerning the nature of children, and of taste, moral values, reading habits and the use of books in real lives. Thus, ‘what were the various conditions and events, beliefs and ideas, that lay behind book trade developments, and how thoroughly did they account for the trade’s evolution? Could we determine some of the manifold influences over the years that induced writers to express the attitudes they did and to give their books a specific form?’ (Jackson 1989: x). I offer here with some preliminary remarks concerning the scholar in relation to the available base of bibliographical knowledge, where, alas (as Jackson stresses) we still know too little of many defunct, smaller and forgotten publishers, their fields of value and action, and their books. There remains much of which we need to ‘inquire within’ as we unravel social, cultural and economic developments including the rise of literacy,



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industrialisation, urbanisation, a new sense of nationhood and the emergence of modern mass markets. Richard Ohmann, in his influential Marxist study Selling Culture: Magazines, Markets, and Class at the Turn of the Century, posed basic questions about the transforming capitalist social relations of marketing and advertising: ‘When did mass culture arise? Why? What has it done for and to its various participants?’ (Ohmann 1996: 340, 10). In Ohmann’s answers we hear Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, Gramsci and Althusser speak in the accents of the Frankfurt school and in later Marxist tones. This body of work was notably taken up in Britain by Raymond Williams and by some of his successors. These ‘Theorists’ saw an alien apparatus of hegemonic mental production, commodity consumption, a new ‘literacy of goods’ and ‘self-transformation through purchase’, which changed class relations, reshaped people as consumers and reconstructed society. As Ohmann wrote, on American magazines, ‘Publishers mass-produced a physical product, which they sold at a loss, and used it to mass-produce an immaterial product, the attention of readers, which they sold at a profit’ (Ohmann 1996: 346).

Knowing what we don’t know we don’t know The series is one geological accumulation of past lives and cultures. The cultural history of the publisher’s series records past decisions and poses present choices about the most fundamental issues of human activity and organisation, about how we live together, and about our impact on the globe. In terms of our own cultural, national and personal history it can help us to consider major questions of society and also to think about those teasing dilemmas about readers and reading which are the pension-rights of book historians. The series is itself a cultural formation. It is a material artefact, and a component of cultural hierarchies. It has been a factor in questions of literary and scientific value, ideologies of authorship and the complicities, opportunities and compromises of markets. It has been the site of first publication, and of last resting place. It has been a perennial home for the survivor advanced to the canon – and the proclaimed site for the recovery of excluded texts, the highlighted haven for revivals of interest in feminist, black, gay, colonial and other writing. It has, too, made an important contribution to democratic change, and to the numbers who could gain access to cheaper books.2 The series has everywhere been a carefully crafted, particularised and instrumental means of publishing. It has been a national and an



10

international agent of intellectual and cultural exchange. It has been responsible for serial transmission – of texts and of cultural values and production, consciousness and preference, structures and agencies. The ‘blurbs’ used in presenting series have reflected and reproduced assumptions and conceptions about texts, writers and constituencies. The series, too, has influenced the careers of authors. It has introduced new writers and new ideas, and more widely harkened older works – for example, in the two-tier arrangement of the Victorian novel and then the cheap edition (often issued in a series) following the expensive three-decker (Griest 1975; Eliot 1985). It has played a major part in framing competing agendas. It has thus been a key aspect of cultural production, access and control, shaping values and behaviours, the potential of the individual and who should have what (and who says so). Influential factors have included the material aspects of the presentation of a text (including series publication) and its impact on how a text is perceived, purchased and read – both privately and socially. Series have, indeed, played many roles. They have competitively disseminated ideas; offered free choices to consumers; expressed a variety of conflicting and biddable values; represented ‘dominant cultures’; acted as gate-keepers without holding any monopoly keys; reflected a host of social changes; influenced an endless possibility of discourses; distinguished major categories for debate; retained, revised, rediscovered and revived, repressed and restored reputations. Series have been involved in a continual selection and reselection of inherited works, and changes in free choices which reflected contemporary changes in tastes and values. In this respect series have been an institution engaged with keeping available and alive (as well as popularising) large areas of past and current culture. Series have launched (and relaunched) careers, changed cultures, defined and defied constant values, remodelled the old as new and enriched many imaginative lives and meanings in conflicting ways. They have offered sustenance to ‘high culture’ and to ‘popular’ success – in modernist times, effecting unlikely marriages. They have been indexes of alternative cultures and of competencies, of a social hierarchy of writers and audiences, and of the social universes (and quality, or qualities) they represent. Being designed, they have therefore been ideological constructs themselves. They have, in addition, helped to shape the visual aesthetics of commerce in modern culture. In ‘the technocracy of sensuality [which] governs the display of objects [they] are at their most captivating, exhibited in aesthetically appealing guises’ (Miller 1995: 122–3). They have influenced the structure of the global field of literature as a



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whole – notably, they have contributed to major re-orderings of genres and canons, as structures of authority, in many countries. I have previously expressed my enthusiasm for series in my volume Serious about Series. And, as these two new volumes demonstrate, there are very substantial benefits from studying series. These concern central issues of cultural formation and of economic and intellectual structures and power, of systems of cultural governance and control, of changing ideas and publishing structures, of differing theories (or preferences) about links between reading and readers, ideologies and expectations, books and mentalities. This cluster of cultural issues (which have always determined access to printed texts) includes political economy and value, distribution and the production and then the exchange of wealth, economic growth and income distribution, productivity and the diffusion of property, individual improvement and opportunity. So, too, the vital capital accumulation which has been the continuing basis for other social improvements, including the education, independence and new careers of women, and the social benefits of ownership, self-development and non-dependency in extensio. The issues, too, concern artistic and commercial originality, which is not to be downgraded or despised in the large task of what Adam Smith called (in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 1759) keeping ‘in continual motion the industry of mankind’. Series were spider’s webs. The study of series – and the terms of their offerings – can help us to build an account of many aspects of the changed culture of the past two centuries. They aid us in seeing the shape of a changing society and its processes of learning. They help us to isolate questions in the theory of culture, in the historical analysis of cultural institutions, social processes, forms and assumptions. And to examine the connections between art, learning – or the meaning of things and experiences – and politics. Series have had great influence on making ideas available, in framing or endorsing ‘the creative imagination’, and in dispersing arguments throughout societies. They were one form which contributed to a reorganisation of audiences and of communications between individuals. They can tell us much, not least in helping us to learn which books were widely and consistently available and likely to be read. They help us to see, too, that the conditions of intellectual production were not accidental, and that such book trade structures as circulating libraries, price fixing, metropolitan cartels, copyright protection and until late in the nineteenth century in England (but not in the USA) publishing for the relatively few did much to define what was possible in literary art (St Clair 2004; Raven 2007).3



12

Several major themes emerge from the two volumes in the present set. The cumulative power and the new knowledge presented emphasises the value and importance of empiricism, the centrality of markets and the necessity to study them closely in daily fact and impact. Thus, the importance of addressing publishing as a business, and the publisher as an entrepreneur. Equally, the value of traditional (and sceptical) historical skills in doing so. So, too, the necessity of a concern with a publisher’s books as an archive in themselves – especially for those cheaper books not usually gathered by copyright deposit libraries and in the absence, too, of much conventional archival material. When treated as an archive, these books can speak. They can bring us closer to the readers’ hands and minds. Their price, production values, design, format, series information, the perennial drive to use new materials and to reduce costs, and any evidence we can gather of the actual use of books are all necessary signals – as they were to the buyer or borrower, so, too, to the historian. This is particularly the case as we try to grasp the experiences of those many millions of perhaps impossibly elusive shadows cast by the historical reader. For we have few useful records of the enormously diverse but specific circumstances of the reading of the vast host of dead readers, and of what Jason Scott-Warren has called ‘the obstinate, irreducible individualism’ of the reader (Scott-Warren 2000: 381–402). The great majority of people, too, have not read with a pencil in hand, and have left no record of their experiences. We lack the guiding evidence of the logic and the illogicalities which mark most lives. We lack the living voices which made the choices. We inherit the consequences and the benefits of the ‘invisible hand’, but too few actual fingerprints. Yet we must still struggle to explore these silences, and to recover echoes from this cumulative past to enhance book history. There are, however, these fundamental difficulties in this historical recovery of the processes of consciousness, the perceptions of self which individuals had, how these were expressed in different times, how people were and felt socialised (for example, in ‘male’ and ‘female’ roles), and how different people related to ideas, to one another and to different experiences. Thus, we have all kinds of problems as historians as we seek to recover behaviour and responses in past everyday existence and consciousness, exemplified by the processes of reading and of responses to this. We know little of what people thought and did in personal terms in response to and with their reading (and re-reading, with new eyes?), and how this affected their lives. First, we are limited in our lives in our own present – as children, as adolescents, as adults – both by the



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difficulties and the differences of how we each struggle to structure and express and record our responses and how we each do this differently. For each of us, too, individual words and ideas assume different meanings. There are for us all many distinctions between different ways of knowing. There are no common certainties. For example, the feminist historian Sheila Rowbotham shows in her autobiographical memoirs of the 1960s how she had ‘sought to find words which could express inner feelings and experiences, while reaching towards outer worlds of politics, social existence, culture. This is much easier said than done’ (Rowbotham 2001: xv). She observes too that ‘Judith Okely, in her biography of Simone de Beauvoir, relates how as a young girl de Beauvoir would read books as a means of translating herself into other worlds, employing “the word de´payser (to change scenery or disorientate) to describe what they did for her”. The precision of the French language provides words for mental processes which remain an ambiguous mush in the Anglo-Saxon consciousness’ (Rowbotham 2001: 8). And even the French language finds it hard to capture the resonance of silences. Second, inner worlds, too, function as personal secrets and defences, and remain unrecorded in history for many different reasons. Third, we each read differently the symbols of power embedded in the culture of daily life, depending on our cultural background, ethnicity, gender and historical time. Fourth, as historians we are limited by the evidence which people chose to record, and by the accidents of destruction and survival which subvert whatever have been the recorded particulars of the experience of the individual.4 However, we need to go on doing the groundwork, and walk the monographic walk with what sources we can discover. Here Simon Eliot has emphasised that it is the research process from which we can learn much, no matter the individual views of workers on cultures. It is this work which can produce the necessary data-sets (Eliot 1999). In using this data we need to keep in mind what David Aaronivitch reminds us about – that historical research requires us to be alert to a common error. That is that (in David Hackett Fischer’s words) we should not assume ‘that a man [or woman] who has a given historical experience knows it, when he has it, to be all that a historian would know it to be, with the advantage of historical perspective.’ As we consider what and why series publishers did we remind ourselves that those acting in historical dramas did not know at the time what was coming next. And they often had to consider signs and signals which pointed in several different directions at once (Aaronovitch 2009: 256; Fischer 1970: 209–11). We must at least try to follow Professor Eliot’s advice. We must be severely disciplined in asking precise historical questions. So, too, my



14

hope is that these two volumes meet what Lynn Hunt has called the two characteristic approaches to the challenge of writing cultural history: that there should be a close examination of actions, texts and attitudes, and that this empirical work should be accompanied by an open-mindedness as to what their examination reveals to us (Hunt 1989: 22). Facts, carefully ascertained, can be made to give their own evidence, but the empirical evidence we find does need wary interpretation – for example, of the many aspects of the emergent awareness of changing society and of many separate cultures reflected by publishers’ series. Oscar Wilde may have thought that ‘the only duty we owe to history is to re-write it’. But this itself involves examining the ways in which we today impose a pattern upon what we have discovered and retrieved. In her own social investigations, for example, Beatrice Webb recognised that it was ‘silly to suppose that facts ever tell their own story – it is all a matter of arranging them so that they may tell something – and the arrangement is purely a subjective process’ (Webb Diary 10 July 1894, fo. 1317, original italics; Englander and O’Day n.d.: 56). For Beatrice, the process of deriving an explanatory framework was largely an intuitive one. Intuition, and imaginative sympathy, indeed, may be sufficient as a guide to where to look for evidence before we savour it. But we often differ in interpreting both qualitative and quantitative data. We need, too, when making use of theory, to remember that ‘ideology’ (including our own) is itself a cultural production. Facts are not value-free. And to discover an order first and the facts later closes rather than leaving ajar scholarly doors. The historian François Furet has rightly emphasised that the study of the printed book ‘crystallizes all the difficulties of the historian’s craft: the passage from the individual to the collective, the relation between the intellectual and the social, time’s judgements on time, the measure of innovation and inertia’ (Furet 1984: 99). The narrative method is essential for the single case, but we then need to ally theory to applied researches. Without empirical work there can be no modelling of an entire publishing economy. But if an entire social revolution is the chief objective – as it evidently is for many academics – then sheltered literary critics may not be the best marshals, nor the most reliable guides to the meanings of the evidence which book historians seek to recover and to study. At all events, the present essays show that we need to study specifics to reveal generalities; to understand those contemporary choices otherwise concealed by averages and by aggregates purged of human values and stories; to consider both institutions and specific individuals; and to puzzle out perennial cultural dilemmas and choices for ourselves, and without a priori prejudice. The professional historian enables the



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context to be created from evidence drawn from diverse sources, and not used merely to substantiate or enrich an a priori argument. These essays enable us to see the options that changing cultures offered individual publishers in their own real historical time – those they endorsed or opposed, and what these choices represented. Central here are issues of ‘quality’ and values, and the problem of agency – or of how huge social changes can be led, how they happen and what they cost. These detailed studies – of publishers, of cultures, of series, of strategies, of publishing practices (by which a house could sustain its volume of sales, needed for the expansion of a business), of taste, of buying habits, of intellectual trends – are essential to make the necessary distinctions in understanding what happened and why. And then to enable us to theorise the whole picture. Here, economics is critical to a secure methodology by which we analyse the real and contingent causes and consequences of events. We are fortunate that historians and critics with an understanding of economics – and who have taken political economy and its consequences seriously – have made major contributions to book history and shown what can be asked and answered in this way. Notably, these include Jennifer Alison, who recently wrote (of her study of Angus & Robertson) that ‘This work is a business study of a publisher rather than a straight out chronological history’ (Alison 2009: 17). The most recently published work in the multi-volume A History of the Book in America is impressively concerned with entrepreneurship and with publishing as a business (Gross and Kelley 2010). In spite of the anti-business bias of much English-language, French and German literary criticism, there have, too, been a number of book historians who have laid an emphasis on understanding publishing as a business. These include Paul Delany, Simon Eliot, Lee Erickson, David Finkelstein, Robert Fraser, W. Hamish Fraser, Regenia Gagnier, Catherine Gallagher, Royal Gettmann, Mary Hammond, Wallace Kirsop, James Raven, William St Clair, Mark Shell, Sarah Wadsworth, Alexis Weedon, James L. West III, Michael Winship and Martha Woodmansee. These scholars do not necessarily reach the same conclusions or share the same cultural assumptions or values. Few, for example, would describe themselves as proponents of the ‘rational choice’ school of economics, which is my own perspective (Seldon 1990). But they do take economic questions seriously. The establishment of the necessary statistical framework – and of respect for empirical data and the relationships of raw data in relation to other facts and perspectives – is essential too, and is necessarily ongoing, as Eliot (1994, 2001) and Weedon (2003) have both shown for the UK in the nineteenth century.



16

William St Clair and James Raven are leading exemplars who have demonstrated the extent to which simple, well understood and empirically well tested economic models – such as price and quantity, the ratio of supply and demand, and the functioning of monopoly and of competition – are observable as having operated in the economic behaviour of the historic printed book industry. These have accounted for many of the patterns of readerly access to particular texts. Thus, basic economic analysis has helped to explain, for example, how ‘the reading nation’ in one culture came to be divided into overlapping layers of readers, differentiated by income, by socio-economic class, by educational attainment and by the degree of obsolescence of the print to which each layer had access (St Clair 2009: 711). This work offers insights, across an enormous range of material. As our papers show, too, such an appreciation of the functional centrality of markets and the necessity to study them closely with a full economic understanding of the sources of dynamism in an economy – and some sympathetic comprehension of its purposes and procedures – is essential in addressing the perennial cultural and economic challenges that the series sought to meet. Alienation from economics and from the consumer, a priori, is itself a destructive alternative in terms of fuller enquiry and understanding.5 One chief purpose of this Introduction is to examine the cultural and economic work that was and is done by the series, and to suggest some alternative ways of seeing. The issues for the series publisher in this chancy business where the rate of failures were always high were, critically, ever thus: how to ensure that costs and prices gave cost-effective entry into a market on a sustainable economic basis. Thus, staying solvent and profitable; raising capital; keenly competing in an open market; limiting risks; building a reliable client base; keeping a close watch on accounts (and on staff ); turning over stock while also building saleable inventory; marketing it, storing it, and ensuring the survival of the enterprise. An important benefit was gained if a singular and particular group of buyers could be singled out and served, identified by and with a series, like Charles Knight’s ‘Library of Useful Knowledge’, Longman’s ‘Cabinet Encyclopaedia’, Loeb’s ‘Classical Library’, or the ‘Family Library’ published by John Murray in London and stereoplated by J. & J. Harper for the American market. Every publisher has sought to so structure their series to enable demand to be better predicted. As markets stratified and segmented such niches multiplied. The publisher’s series and the series profile and management captured these assessments and decisions, as publishers selected a target market,



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and sought to predict the responses of readers and the rate of sale. One key indicator was the decision on the best price to charge, and the pace and time-frame for recovering investment. One possible strategy was to amortise capital costs over more than one print run. George Routledge was one nineteenth-century British publisher who appreciated this and benefited from such a strategy with his ‘Railway Library’ from the 1850s ( James 1997). Carey & Lea in America took the same view about some projects – for example, with the first edition of Cooper’s The Pirate in 1822, where they ‘viewed the costs of copyright and stereotyping as a capital investment that would pay off only in subsequent editions’, as demonstrated by a note in their cost book: ‘Copyright and plates free of cost’ (Green 2010: 114). Another strategy with a much more extensive history was to avoid loss-leaders and instead to price to enter a market for prompt and once-off sales, with a short-run at a high price. In the USA, for example, ‘Only in the 1830s did publishers begin to experiment with lowering prices to spur sales’ (Green 2010: 112). Overall, whatever the selected competitive strategy, the requirement was always for sustained, longer-term success. Economics showed that the discharge of fixed costs was achieved in different ways. The longer the run, the lower the unit cost and the wider the profit margin – if the larger quantity could be sold. But there was, too, at least until late-Victorian times, most safety in a strategy of effectively printing too few and charging too much, taking the view that you do not go bust on the books you do not print. Stereo plating could, too, release the publisher from the consequences of having been too hesitant to start with. In rigged monopoly markets, there were artificially sheltered sectors like the production of the three-volume novel at a high price in a short run. This was a happy method, except for the impecunious reader. But this ceased to be the safest of profitable publishing havens in the 1880s and 1890s in Britain (Griest 1970; St Clair 2004). Every publisher has tried to reduce the risks of inevitable gambles in coping – in Catherine Gallagher’s words – with ‘the constant pressure of necessity’. Here series have helped publishers to gauge likely costs, assess demand, track rate of sale, enlarge audiences, raise returns, and sustain margins and profits. But not every publisher has had a gift for sales, and books do not sell themselves. There have always been winners and losers. In addition to variances in abilities, many publishers have had insufficient capital, competed in a structure rife with market inequalities, lived in precarious indebtedness, misleadingly over-valued their stock, lived on credit, and haphazardly slid into bankruptcy. One entrepreneureial task of the series publisher has been to try to reliably



18

offset these risks. This has involved acquiring or selecting titles, providing funds and deciding print runs and prices, building current cash and essential back-list income, generating steady demand through series identities, supporting new and reprinting older titles, commissioning entirely original work and sustaining supportable financial ‘gearing’, and staying in business. The publisher has had to construct a back-list which would absorb and clear most fixed costs while such new ventures were chanced. The back-list also demonstrated to the market – and especially to ‘the trade’ – the personality and tone of the house, its preferences and commitments. Again, the series was often an important part of this essential scaffolding. For example, the nineteenthcentury publisher in many different national territories and languages confronted such economic questions as the difference between average and marginal costs, together with the need to manage credit, money transfers and interest (notably, for long-date overseas sales). Monopoly practices, cartels, copyright controls and short runs at high prices were long the preferred means to security. But as markets grew under social pressures for change the series became a major device for feeling a way towards security, step by step. Feedback was crucial. The series (and ‘branding’, or pattern-recognition) thus helped to build the reputation of an imprint, including the publisher’s decisions of where and how to site publications on the demand curve, how to hold prices firm and when (if at all) to tranche downwards to different markets. The series also helped publishers to consider the relationship between the speed of financial returns from front-list and back-list sales, in managing both cash-flow and cash-ebb. There is a significant literature on the historical reader.6 But we cannot ‘know’ or relive the past. To achieve any progress in recapturing the feeling of life as it changed, and to secure any access to individual subjective realms and reader experiences, we must make the fullest use of every kind of evidence, including the series in all its aspects. This is essential, given the obtuse difficulties of discovering what Eliot and Rose (2007: 5) call the problem of finding evidence ‘of something so internal and non-material as reading’. These enquiries ask us to try to conduct some fragment of a genuinely historical (if necessarily often too random) procedure which the historian J. R. Vincent (1967: ix) called ‘door-to-door interviews with the dead’. Similarly, John Burrow has spoken of intellectual history as ‘eavesdropping on the conversations of the past’. Here, too, quantitative and qualitative (or cultural) study is necessary – although, as Vincent noted, ‘Numbers do not record fervour, and they do not directly record



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effort, a rather different quality’ (Vincent 1967: 5). We need, too, to keep in view J. H. Plumb’s warnings against conceiving history as ‘a purposeful past’. As Plumb noted in his discussion of the problem of historical memory, the idea of ‘the past’ is ‘always a created ideology with a purpose, designed to control individuals, or motivate societies, or inspire classes’. As he says, ‘Nothing has been so corruptly used as concepts of the past’ (Plumb 2004: 12, 17). As ever, the difficulty is in preparing the questions by which to query what documents ‘tell us’, and to recover the voices of those long-dead. Here we need to consider what can count as evidence, and its status and value, and origin. As Marc Bloch (1928: 15–50) said, ‘A document is a witness, and, like most witnesses it does not talk unless it is questioned.’ Quantitative and qualitative (or cultural) study is equally necessary. In considering these issues, the value of traditional historical skills includes proper scepticism about ‘evidence’ and ‘facts’. However, what we regard as ‘normal’, or of which we approve, affects how we recognise, examine and place ‘facts’. We need to be more suspicious of our own a priori assumptions, as well as of traditional and unquestioned narratives. We are interested, too, both in how individuals, structures, forms and feelings changed and in why; and in finding ways to analyse what survives of these, whose shadows (and contradictions) we inherit. Chance, too, controls choices. We need to exercise historical imagination and disciplined understanding while being aware of why and how the known facts and archival sources are limited. Then, too, an important global point. Ian Willison has emphasised the need to study dynamic and very various ‘cultural nations’ (Willison 2007: 107). These two present volumes respond to that call. They are not mapped by Mercator’s projection. Our essayists seek instead to get inside nonEuropean ways of framing, thinking about and enclosing issues. Neither all of the questions nor all of the answers lie in Europe. The modern book publishing industry is based on the reproducibility and efficient distribution of the product. These technologies have spurred enormous international investment and extraordinary diversity and adaptive, experimental, trial-and-error change, including adaptive responses to consumer preferences both before and after the launch of a series. The contingent, the unplanned, the unexpected have been creative essentials in adaptive change. As the innovative eighteenth-century entrepreneurial potter (and philanthropic reformer) Josiah Wedgwood wrote, ‘Everything yields to experiment’ (Plumb 1966: 27). Publishers, of course, have relied on aggregate data from the market, which is comprised of individual consumer responses to their books, and they



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have sought to be alert to the many diverse reasons for purchasing or not. They have, too, often seemed to have learned more from market experiences than from prior calculation. Experience itself built intuition, a flair for spotting good material and a sense of what would work, which was itself rooted in experience – including good and bad previous judgements. But reconstruction – conceiving the new from the old – has always followed construction in the compensatory processes of trialand-error. And, as Petroski has said, ‘designed objects themselves change the future into which they will age’ (Petroski 1985: 219). Series, driven by economics and experience and the necessary pressures of innovation and competition, have here remained important functional structures within publishing in many countries and times. Many are well known ‘brands’. We examine the role of a publisher’s ‘brand’ images as definitions of quality and identifiers, for all the agents of the trade itself, for authors and for consumers, as Michele Troy, for example, shows. All of these factors require searching analysis, in the work of a critical anthropology of the book trades. This approach informs cultural analysis, in what Stefan Collini has called ‘the constant journeying between strangeness and familiarity which is the historian’s task’, appreciating that ‘the thoughts and feelings of the historical agents being studied are theirs not ours, and that a certain empathy and interpretive clarity are essential if the activity of historical understanding is to involve anything more than merely confirming one’s appearance in a mirror’.7

The prospectus of cultural questions There is a formidable list of claims that can be made for the significance of the series, whether prescriptive, didactic, descriptive or for entertainment. The series has been for the best part of two centuries one of the common cultural conventions of publishing in many countries – an aesthetic, a purposeful and a generic system. Publishers have tried to market books (however distinctive individually) in sets, groups, series or ‘libraries’. Thus the importance of ‘brand’ name and its concomitant advertising and uniform packaging, notably with the late nineteenthcentury orientation around the reader as consumer in transformed ‘commodity’ markets. The attempt through the series to achieve carryover from one purchase to the next was part of this evolution. Even so, most books were individual and discrete commodities – a challenge to which the series itself sought to respond.8 The prospectus of these two volumes is thus that publishers’ series open many windows, in asking and offering some answers to complex



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and perplexing cultural questions. They are prismatic. They help us to conceptualise and contextualise possibilities, positions, publishers, processes and cultural forms. They provoke understandings of the structure of publishing fields – and of what publishers actually do with their days – with the logic of their functioning, with how and why they change, with the social spaces in which creative projects originate, and with the relationships between several active agents and different audiences. They do so while considering individual strategies – by authors, by publishers, by booksellers and others who made their living from books and by readers. These seek to be historically specific. Who published? Who bought? What did they pay? Why? What were the benefits – economic, social, psychological – and what were the opportunity costs? How can we know? Publishers’ series go back a long way on our shelves, to the pocketsized Aldine editions of the classics published at the end of the fifteenth century. Thoreau, in his commentary on reading in Walden, wrote of the classics that they were ‘the noblest recorded thoughts of man … the only oracles which are not decayed…’ (Thoreau 1854: 92). George Orwell, too, wrote of ‘books that one reads over and over again, books that become part of the furniture of one’s mind and later one’s whole attitude to life… .’ (Orwell 1946; 2008: 5). Thoreau’s idea is now a much controverted thought. Series are, however, a map of maps. In Britain, Europe and North America some of the most famous and influential of publishing projects have been series. These have been a constant contributor to national and international culture. They have also been the forum in which enormous numbers of cheaply priced books have been distributed. The series has been one aspect of guidance to the bookseller and to the reader, a cue or clue offered as authoritative by publishers, just as it was part of the search for ‘brand’ loyalty, even when every new book is necessarily a new item in itself in an industry of constant variance. In the later nineteenth century, as Richard Ohmann has said, publishers ‘began to shape their product and create its market, rather than just publishing what appealed to them and hoping for the best’ (Ohmann 1996: 23). Here, the series has been an important communicator to the trade (at which most publisher’s advertising has always been directed), to libraries, to authors and to readers. And, as J. M. Dent showed with the ‘Everyman’s Library’ from 1904 (which Terry Seymour’s paper expertly studies), there was room for surprising successes, if a series was shaped, selected, edited and advertised at the ‘right’ historical moment. It was one solution to the ever-present worry of distribution. It also encouraged



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buyers to prefer a particular edition, differentiating otherwise similar productions by paratextual and aesthetic appeals as well as price. Who responded and in which numbers was itself market information and research. It was, too, an aspect of what Friedrich von Hayek called the adult challenge of learning to choose, which was a wider and more nuanced notion than the Marxist one of ‘learning to consume’.9

Definitions: ‘niche’, ‘series’, ‘culture’ and ‘the canon’ We need to clarify some basic definitions. We have already adopted Paul Colinvaux’s definition of a ‘niche’ as ‘a specific set of capabilities for extracting resources, for surviving hazard, and for competing; coupled with a corresponding set of needs’ (Colinvaux 1980: 232). What do we mean by ‘a series’? The Oxford Reference Dictionary gives a series as ‘a number of things of the same kind, or related to each other in a similar way, occurring, arranged, or produced in order’. The term is most often used by book historians to mean books in a named cluster of books, a programmatic and cohesive approach with an overall title and growing cumulatively, such as Hachette’s ‘Bibliotheque des chemins de fer’ (from c.1852) or Routledge’s ‘Railway Library’ in England (from 1849). A working definition thus identifies a series (or ‘library’, or ‘Collection’, or the German colporteur novels) as a set of uniform volumes with a distinctive look, often (but not always) uniformly priced, usually comprised of titles by different authors, sequentially unified as an artistic or intellectual project by an individual and specific character described in an accompanying ‘blurb’. Usually (but not always) issued under a general collective title; sometimes (but not always) numbered (inside the book; on the spine; in a list on the back-cover or in an advertisement), with titles issued in succession and in relation to one another and being offered by the same publisher. Sometimes (but not always) with a named series editor or supervising cultural patron. The usual implication, too, has been that the sum of the collected books was greater than the individual parts, together with the quality of one title reassuring readers about the others. Yet series have also been offered without a series title, with other books merely being listed as ‘Uniform with this volume’.10 ‘Series’ is also used to mean a group of books by a single writer – such as Anthony Trollope’s six parliamentary fictions, or his eight tales concerned with the county of Barsetshire, which he cited as ‘a series’ in his Autobiography. Or the prolific ‘Peter Parley’ books on both sides of the Atlantic. Or J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books. It is also used as a term for a novel which appeared as a part-publication or as a serial in



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a periodical, such as a number of the novels of Charles Dickens, or the American bicentennial series of the fictional Kent family chronicles by John Jakes, ‘packaged’ deliberately for the popular market. Some books, too, have – by virtue of sharing the same characters – been regarded as a series although they have none of the above characteristics. Balzac and Zola offered such ‘sequence’ novels on a grand scale.11 As we have seen, the series has been an important element in helping to address the publishing problem that every book is different, and so publishers have tried to market books (however distinctive individually) in sets, groups, series or ‘libraries’. Thus the importance of ‘brand’ name and its concomitant advertising and uniform packaging, notably characteristic of the late nineteenth-century orientation around the reader as consumer in transformed ‘commodity’ markets. The attempt through the series to achieve carry-over from one purchase to the next was part of this evolution. In widely separated North American markets – served by very few booksellers in the 1830s, for example – Scott E. Casper has recently noted that ‘Library series were a critical way in which Harper & Brothers made itself nationally known, suggesting that all the firm’s works were “valuable standard literature”’. And: ‘The benefits of library series did not belong to the publisher alone. Surviving evidence suggests how the Harper’s series at once served and helped shape readers’ objectives and desires in an age of proliferating print’ (Casper 2010: 134). Second, ‘culture’. Here, in the quicksands of sociology, I have taken ‘culture’ to mean those systems of meaning that people invest in their social forms. Those habituated meanings – of social relations, preferences and practices, beliefs and values, ideas and identities – include the nineteenth-century ‘romantic’ concern that there was an inherent contradiction between literature and commerce, high and popular culture, literary value and popular appeal which the cheap series enormously extended. The Oxford Reference Dictionary gives ‘culture’ as ‘refined understanding of the arts and other human intellectual achievement’, and as ‘the customs and civilisation of a particular time or people’. Matthew Arnold’s famous advice in Culture and Anarchy was to ‘recommend culture as the great help out of our present difficulties, culture being a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world; and, through this knowledge, turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits, which we now follow staunchly but mechanically, vainly imagining that there is a virtue in following them staunchly which makes up for the mischief of following



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them mechanically’ (Arnold 1869: viii). For Arnold, ‘true culture [is] the representation of the best self formed through an acquaintance with true representations of the nature of things’ (Gallagher 1985: 249). This, of course, started more rabbits running than it snared. Raymond Williams, in Culture and Society, 1780–1950, stressed five main points, which have much influenced all subsequent sociologies of culture and underpin much of the discussion in this two-volume set. First, a major change took place in the nineteenth century in the nature of the relationship between a writer and the readers, most notably with the growth of a new and large middle-class reading public and a complex market. Second, a different habitual commercial attitude towards the ‘public’ established itself. Third, the production of art came to be regarded as one of a number of specialised kinds of production, subject to general commercial systems. Fourth, a theory of the ‘superior reality’ of art as the seat of imaginative truth received increased emphasis. Fifth, the idea of the independent creative writer or autonomous genius became a kind of rule. In his later and separate study of Culture Williams described the territory again: ‘What the cultural sociologist or the cultural historian studies are the social practices and social relations which produce not only a “culture” or “an ideology” but, more significantly, those dynamic actual states and works within which there are not only continuities and persistent determinations but also tensions, conflicts, resolutions and irresolutions, innovations and actual changes’ (Williams 1986: 29). Such analysis includes historical criticism in which intellectual and imaginative works are analysed in relation to particular traditions and societies. It also includes analysis of the organisation of production, the structure of the family, the structure of institutions which express or govern social relationships, and the characteristic forms through which members of the society communicate (Williams 1961: 57–8). We can easily see why Williams wrote that ‘culture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language’ (Williams 1983: 87). Its modern emphasis has been concerned with ‘lived culture’, which has been primarily determined by other social processes. It summarises the ‘informing spirit’ of a whole way of life and an emphasis on ‘a whole social order’. The ‘culture of the publisher’s series’ is then, in any specific historical moment, a particular manifestation, a part of this whole, the direct or indirect product of an order primarily constituted by other social actions. On this view, culture is ‘the signifying system through which necessarily (though among other means) a social order is communicated, reproduced, experienced and explored’ (Williams 1986 10–13).



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We are as historians part of a selective and interpretative tradition of values and emphases. We reinforce selections by our own research decisions. But we are too often blindfolded visitors from the future, outside the culture we study, itself only partially recorded, lived by others different from ourselves, and whose experiences are only occasionally on record. If the analysis of culture is the attempt to discover the nature of the ways in which individuals experienced and felt the social organisation which is the complex of many relationships, then analysis of particular works, institutions, organisations, and relationships is essential, even if inevitably always inadequate. … When we have grasped the fundamental relation between meanings arrived at by creative interpretation and description, and meanings embodied by conventions and institutions, we are in a position to reconcile the meanings of culture as ‘creative activity’ and ‘a whole way of life’, and this reconciliation is then a real extension of our powers to understand ourselves and our societies. (Williams, 1961, 56) Here, series help us to retrace many steps, few if any of which were inevitable. What we think culture is, and how it works, provides one answer to a call made to book historians by Simon Eliot for a ‘context for meanings’ (Eliot 2002: 284; italics in original). In 1814 Jane Austen said in Mansfield Park (1814) that Shakespeare was ‘part of an Englishman’s constitution’. A central focus in these essays is on the cultural (and political) roles played in the formation of ‘the literary canon’, with its implication of informed and collective consent and fixity and its influence on different national self-imagery. Arnold Bennett, in Riceyman Steps (1925) wrote of those works which ‘have passed through decades of criticism into the impregnable paradise of eternal esteem’ (Bennett 1925: 4). Since then there has been much debate about inclusion and exclusion, and many recent correctives offered. Series help in understanding the historical conditions of knowledge itself, and the formation of the canon, and the multitudinous opportunities that larger markets offered, including those for women writers12 William St Clair has invaluably analysed the ‘old canon’ and its influences (St Clair 2004). Not all critics, however, have accepted feminist and other radical critiques and dismissed ‘the canon’ and its values. Here William G. Rowland comments:



Williams says in The Long Revolution that, in trying to decode cultures and past lives,

Figure I.1 The four successive bindings of Richard Bentley’s Standard Novels series, 1831–62, showing Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility (1833), Theodore Hook, Jack Brag (1839), James Fenimore Cooper, The Water Witch (1850) and The Hon. Eleanor Eden, Easton and Its Inhabitants (1860)

A canon is a useful pedagogical tool that must be, as it has been, examined, critiqued, brought to consciousness, historicized, evaluated, added to and subtracted from. All this has been going on with a vengeance, not simply for the last twenty years [he was published in 1996] but ever since the beginning of literary pedagogy. But a canon serves one valuable function that is sometimes ignored – it keeps people reading authors and works on whom and on which they might otherwise give up. If they were not canonical works, I doubt that I as a young reader would have made it through to understanding and enjoyment of King Lear or Paradise Lost. And how can we say what the ultimate fate of Jerusalem or Prometheus Unbound would have been if admirers had not supported these works and eventually saw them canonized? … An Uncle Tom’s Cabin can make it on its own, and was written with the full intention that it should. But so were large parts of Moby-Dick, yet it was not until the high-modernist-led revival of the 1920s that that work was canonized. Today’s attacks on and defences of ‘the canon’ seem to



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In addition, the canon may be seen as the cumulation of human experience and the lessons learned by generations past, which we risk marginalising in the drive to redesign what counts most. We confront, here, ‘all the instances of consecration and legitimation which make cultural products what they are’ ( Johnson 1979: 9). Series are thus directly entwined with ‘legitimacy’. They usually seek to fix texts by giving them the authority of permanence, both to make sales and to transmit texts. They do so, too, in terms of a wider posterity. They have often sought to be ‘canonical’. In retrospect they inform us of how the canon has changed in a permanent feedback loop which, as Simon Eliot has noted, ‘can change the form and meaning of what is re-transmitted’ (Eliot, in Eliot et al., 2007: 6). Eliot has characterised this process as ‘this dance of the texts between control/uniformity and release/diversity: Centre and Periphery, Cosmopolis and Vernacularization, High Culture and Popular Culture, the patron versus the market, cultural fidelity versus cultural promiscuity, and so on’ (Eliot, in Eliot et al., 2007: 6).

The historical reader, and the impact of books This concerns that dashing and erratic butterfly, the real historical reader. Who and what was the historical reader? Coleridge complained of ‘the luxuriant misgrowth of our activity: a Reading Public!’ But Stephen Railton has observed that ‘the audience presides over the space in which literature happens’.13 The critic William Rowland thought, too, that with Herman Melville ‘the energy of his greatest work had been generated by the need to address a large, undefined, and democratic public, to bring the audience into being along with his work’ (Rowland 1996: 169–70). But the poet Shelley wrote that ‘I shall console myself with what I may call, if I please, the suffrage of the chosen few’ (Shelley 1839: 352). Yet, as the economist Tyler Cowen has pointed out, Beethoven loved composing music, but would probably have enjoyed it less if no one had ever listened to the product. Adam Smith, too, viewed the search for approval as ‘the end of half the labours of human life’ (Cowen 2000b: 2). And as one modern biographer and critic, Michael Holroyd, has written, ‘My identity was shaped by what I wrote’ (Holroyd 1999: 8). The series can be analysed as one sign of the increasing productive and coordinating power of capital in the making of meanings. Or, in Raymond Williams’s terms, in ‘ways of seeing’. Here, as Jon P. Klancher



me to ignore how historically fluid and inclusive the various canons of the past and present have usually been. (Rowland 1996: 196–7)

told us, the classification known as ‘audience’ is a crucial body of social and cultural apprehension. But who read what, when, how, why and with which results? Who attached which meanings to which books? What were the ‘effectual values’ of a text? How did people consume books? We hardly know, and – with unrepresentative exceptions – we may never know, even though from the eighteenth century onwards books came into private ownership on an unprecedented scale. Alas, books which included within their covers lists of subscribers (and sometimes including their professions, too) are relatively few. But the quantifiable results of series publishing do, however, tell us something important about ‘patterns of consumption’, even when we lack the insights into individual lives which we seek. Book buyers and readers supported writers and publishers with their money, their time, their feelings, their pleasure and their critical responses – even if they left no other record than their impact on the cumulative sales figures or profitability or continuity in print of titles and series. This evidence, however, is communication, even if we have too few other individual accounts by specific readers to supplement (and contradict?) George Eliot’s view that buyers consumed without pleasure, that readers ‘complain, but pay, and read while they complain’ (Pinney 1963: 440). Those working-class autodidacts (such as Harry Snell, one among many) who have left us autobiographies do not commonly endorse Eliot’s view (Snell 1936). Individual consumption was in itself a highly personal, creative and dynamic act, supported by willing revenues and reflecting choices about opportunity costs for the consumer. For the publisher and the reader, editorial and commercial acts integrated each into a complex cultural and economic system. This concerned the lived and embodied experiences of individuals, and the motivating force of those choices expressed by the mass of the people. This task of historical recovery, too, rests within an old radical tradition, taking seriously the lives and feelings, pains and pleasures of ‘ordinary’ people. These are important points about willing revenues, and about the problem of examining subjective desire in political economy, as we seek to understand why people take particular decisions, and (in Adam Smith’s words) ‘what everything is really worth to the man who has acquired it’ (Smith 1759: 47). Charlotte Brontë noted, too, that ‘the desire of acquisition, is one of the original principles of human nature, which often and most generally kindles and keeps that spirit alive’ (cited by Miller 1995: 63). Any focus on the ‘commodification’ of social processes and of objects in any study of a system which, with cheaper books and wider educational opportunity, advanced democratic utilitarianism needs



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to admit these impulses. Nor were purchases of commodified objects necessarily negative or destructive. Many were indeed very liberating, and especially so to the working classes. As Margaret Drabble noted in her biography of Arnold Bennett, ‘He came from a world where badly paid skivvies spent entire lifetimes on their hands and knees scrubbing floors and steps, and living in cold basements. Why not hail the vacuum cleaner, central heating, washing machines? They have liberated a whole social class. Who would not rather work on a conveyor belt packing biscuits than scrubbing, with one Sunday a month off, and no followers allowed? … How much pleasanter, thought Arnold Bennett, to be a shorthand typist, or a girl in a millinery department, than a slave in a cellar. And he was right’ (Drabble 1974: 119–20). Voluntary purchases, too, let us see in aggregate what we find so hard to see individually in terms of the particular reader and their ideas and values, preferences and benefits. We can see in the aggregate the expression of value and desire in a market of supply and demand, the positive value placed on a book by a buyer at a particular time. As Catherine Gallagher points out, ‘Use value seems altogether personal.’ She cites De Quincey’s words, saying that it is ‘the utmost sacrifice to which you would ever submit … under the known alternative of losing [the commodity] if you refuse’ (Gallagher 2006: 29). But by taking the market seriously we can thus try to restore some part of the life in the shadows where individuals were making choices; thus, to borrow words used by Sheila Rowbotham when commenting on E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class, ‘catching an emergent awareness in movement’ (Rowbotham 2001: 75). Here we have the problem of the relation between value and the ‘marginal utility’ of a commodity to a consumer (on which I say more in the Introduction to Volume 2 of this set). There is also the issue of whether production or the consumer’s preference is the source of value, and whether aesthetic value can be wholly independent of economic value, which Guillory and Gallagher, among many others, have explored (Guillory 1993: 315; Gallagher 2006: 30–1). Jonathan Rose has recently shown us much that we had not appreciated concerning autodidact groups supporting literacy and self-education (Rose, 2003). But we still know extraordinarily little about the individual reader, and of how the majority of past readers responded. Yet the expression of many individual (and, of course, perhaps contrarily motivated) individual expressions in purchase provides an aggregate of willing revenues, in purchasing series volumes. This tells us something that matters about ordinary, unknown people, even without the individual



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purchaser emerging from the shadows. This information – including what stayed in print, for example, when and why, and at which prices – can be set alongside what the self-conscious autobiographer, the affluent, the unusual and the activist tell us in their letters, diaries and memoirs. Here we need to be careful to notice the obvious, to take account of the conventional which is beneath visions, to pay attention to the myriad voices which we can perhaps only ever hear in the aggregate. Certainly, it was individual and cumulative purchasing decisions and consumption which directly and specifically influenced the preservation and dissemination of cultural creations. And willing purchasers also had the prerogative of saying ‘no’. It is this direct and implied information which we can overlook if we are guided by a bias against business and liberal capitalism and a disdain for working markets and the sovereign role of consumers. For example, once fiction publishing in Britain in the late 1880s moved from borrowing to buying, consumer demand very directly financed and changed the market for fiction and for other works. Reception then meant much more than Charles Mudie’s moral perspectives and market judgements in his ‘select’ circulating library. (Griest 1970; Sutherland 1976; Stewart-Murphy 1992). It meant publishers seeking individual consent and active personal participation in purchasing, and across a rapidly growing range of competing leisure opportunities. This participation can be seen, too, as one means of the individual consumer demanding a broader access to citizenship. To borrow a phrase from Daniel Defoe, a ‘union of affection’ – and of utility – is evidenced by the series book, the link between the purchaser and the provider, in a market where individuals had free choices and where marginal utility ruled. The series and its culture is central here, then, to the issues of who read what, when, how and with which results. This opens another large box full of questions. What did the reader bring to the text? What difference did telling the stories make to the tellers, and to their identities? What can we deduce of the reader from the text? What do we mean by the shift from intensive to extensive reading? When did people read silently, aloud, in groups? What can we know about what people thought about books in the past? How did readers influence textual production? Who bought, owned, read, gifted (or stole, or smuggled, or pirated) which books and which periodicals? Who sold them, and to whom, and with which cultural and personal results? In which ways do different material forms influence how readers read texts? Do men and women read differently? Does the experience of reading books written by women differ from that of readings books written by men? Do books embody ‘elite controls’ and so are to be ‘resisted’ ideologically? How were



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the conditions for our own reading created, and how changed by the rise of visual imagery? What are the limitations of text-based analyses? And what do we mean by such piratical and value-loaded phrases as ‘the masses’ and ‘popular’? We may, however, only ever and at best be able to imply answers. As Leah Price (2000: 11) has noted, ‘Discourses are easier to describe than practices.’ Edward Said has said, too, that writers and texts are anchored in a complex system of cultural relationships, all of which require independent and coordinated historical study. These embrace the ‘status of the author, historical moment, conditions of publication, diffusion and reception, values drawn upon, values and ideas assumed, a framework of consensually held tacit assumptions, presumed background and so on’ (Said 1983: 174). Even so, we need to look at series publishing and at appeals by publishers to readers and ‘their stories’ and self-images. We need to do so, too, with sympathetic understandings about consumers, markets, prices and preferences. These are all aspects of self-definition by book buyers. Personal identity and life narrative are factors in book-buying – which includes ‘aspirational’ and ‘display’ purchasing or signifiers of status, as well as the wish to share a common experience or to be in control of one’s self and one’s decisions.14 Many have tried to claim the reader under a marching banner. In contradiction, Stanley Fish has suggested that no reader is like any other, nor can ever be, and that the reader is both more and less himself or herself once they are reading, ‘not as leading to meaning but as having meaning’ (Fish 1976: 465–86; 2001). Yet our contributors seek to recover and read readers, and to use the series as a means by which to approach this key problem. At best, if we can only achieve partial answers, we need to draw on every kind of evidence. Here, we need to be serious about series. We need, too, to combine the analysis of systems and of processes – as well as of broad ideas and of detailed events – which series make more visible; and to address systems and processes as they related to one another by function, as well as the relationships which came together sequentially through cause and effect. So we need to freeze the frames and at the same time to see moving events, to consider active processes in the dynamics of change. Here, as Professor Wallace Kirsop observed in the first volume of Book History in 1998, ‘Disciplined imagination and close observation of detail are fundamental attributes of the historian of books’ (Kirsop 1998a). Professor Wallace Kirsop’s contribution, indeed, has been massive, highly original and research-based. With Richard Altick he was one of the trailblazers of practical book history from the 1960s. He encouraged



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the study of books and book history as a matter of individual experience and social phenomena, in the Annales style. He stressed that publishing is an activity whose business opportunities and problems need close archival study, including the critical topic of distribution. In the 1960s, too, Professor Kirsop emphasised that every text has a context, and that every context promotes specific values in an interpretative frame. Material form and frame affects how we receive, respect and read texts. In addition, to understand why publishers behaved as they did, it was vital to follow the money trail in what was both a cultural and a commercial business. There was, too, much to be learned from bookseller lists, trade press, auction records, private library catalogues and those documents which even the

Figure I.2 Charles Mackay, Longbeard. Or The Revolt of the Saxons (London, George Routledge & Co., 1850), Railway Library, No. 17



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careful leave behind: court reports, birth, marriage and death certificates, wills and probate records. Professor Kirsop argued, too, that it was crucial to gather and study the books themselves as both cultural and physical artefacts, to understand the role of the many separable but interlinked agents (and filters) in the book business.15 The papers offered here, too, show the many benefits of seeking to work with the specifics of publishing work rather than with aggregates. Series help us to examine assumptions, and they provide empirical information with which to work. They show us signs and signals, commercial and cultural – including the physical forms of the texts, designs, packaging and the ‘look’ of the book – and their impact on choices and taste. All these occurred in the lives of active and real individual people in history. These made their own interpretative decisions, which we now seek to recover and to understand. Our papers help us to improve and adjust our understandings of knowing how to use, or to read, what evidence does survive. We know we know too little about the real historical reader. Another constraint is that we do not know enough about the individuals who have worked in the various agencies of print, who have been the decision-makers, who have taken the measured chances, who have offered the books to these past readers, and what they thought of their likely reception. Alistair McCleery has urged the necessary rediscovery of ‘the human element’ in print, of ‘the individual’s power to affect, to act, to choose’, and of ‘the significant role of the prominent individual as an agent of change’. (McCleery 2002: 161–85). We need to pursue this agenda to enquire about the host of ‘ordinary’ working people employed in the business, influencing its processes day by day;16 and both for those firms whose archives survive, and for those publishing firms and other book trade agencies which have left no archives. We would like to see the workings of day to day activities, and what is behind the bright façade of every publisher. Facing these demands, book historians have lined up many readers as targets for enquiry. We thus have the common reader, the professional reader, the implied reader envisaged by the author or reflected in the paratext, the mock reader, the model reader, the travelling reader, the emblematic reader, the woman reader, the gay reader, the resisting reader, the careless and but semi-interested reader, the forgotten reader, the super-reader, the conscripted reader, the critical reader, the receptive reader, the inscribed or encoded reader, the ideal reader, the informed reader, the annotating reader, the autonomous reader, the angry reader, the reader (or scanner) of advertising and ephemera, of street-signs and



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posters, the reader in the seven ages of child, man and woman, the reader with a new text, an older work, a book bought, borrowed, gifted or stolen, bright and new or second-hand. All this as we seek the actual reader. We can, however, only sometimes see the specific individual reader on the radar, or recover actual evidence of the subjective evaluations of buyers and sellers, and know the gains they had in mind. These were usually unknown and unknowable to the partners in an exchange. Much, too, dies with each of us, as one of the frustrations of providence. In the words of the economist William Jevons, ‘Every mind is … inscrutable to every other mind, and no common denominator of feeling seems to be possible’ ( Jevons 1879: 15). And so we have to employ less direct methods of interpretation. Yet even psychological explanations do not fill the gaps left by absent evidence. Motives in reading surely varied hugely. Some book purchasers were perhaps deliberate in exercising a carefully considered weighing of alternatives, others were probably impulsive – perhaps in a hurry, or attracted by a yellowback cover of a cheap novel at a railway station bookstall. But many, too, may have been poor judges of satisfactions, and (to other minds) ‘irrational’ in their choices. It seems unarguable, too, that there have been and remain many gender differences in responding to stimuli and in defining satisfactions. Certainly, we cannot reliably measure the strength of motives or individual satisfactions at the point of purchase of a book purchase, nor after the event. Nor can we reliably gauge the different satisfactions of members of differing classes, or different readers within the same class, or the additional satisfaction that one person will consider they gain from a pound spent when compared with another book buyer’s pleasure. Series sales measure only aggregate market demand, and the total success or failure of attempts to encourage additional purchases at one or more points on the demand curve. We can try, however, to gain sufficient individual focus on the specific reader or readers in the cloudy lenses that are the text and paratext, the series and its apparatus, all of which imply a hoped-for reader. ‘Series’ studies thus try to construct new maps of all of this territory, and to construct quantitative measures of decision-making and consumption about books and reading – for both personal and public interest. These problems are, in part, those of imagining and recovering historical horizons and the past relations between ideas, things and people. The series represented a narrative of the past to the present as it claimed contemporary attention, and so it offers to us a picture of how the world as it was presented the world as it used to be. Series which comprised reprints and those which offered new books each encoded cultural



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inheritances, understandings and assumptions, telling a society what it was and had been as well as what it might become.

The core of these enquiries and the centre of significance of the series concerns the cultural and economic work it does. The series has been a way to sell books, attract authors, lure booksellers, revive old titles, sell new ones, earn trust in the marketplace, create cultural capital, form identities and produce meanings. In the cultural and economic work that they do series seek information, and they supply it. They are essential builders and renewers. They reflect movement by choice and by chance. They offer openings to what proved to be long-lived formats and to what turned out to be ephemeral. They offer both the complications and the simplifications typical in the erratic instability of evolution. They show every possible identity and capacity in the system, exploiting possibilities, adapting to successive demands. They document experimentation and later standardisation; the notion that improvements stick, while prompting further innovations. They are opportunistic colonisers as new horizons appear. Clearly, publishers, distributors and booksellers only survive by attracting consumers. Here series have always offered advantages to all the agents – including productive and distributive intermediaries as well as book buyers – involved in the networks of the book business and who, in a market, bring together producer and consumer: for publishers, some predictability and financial foreknowledge, as well as a means of marketing a cluster of titles together and attracting new authors and publicity; for authors, good company to keep; for booksellers, a known quantity; for readers, the trust they placed in a reputation, and even perhaps some sense of a relationship with a publisher or editor and their selections and arrangements. Where cash is concerned, credibility matters. Where economic decisions are concerned, the symbolism transmitted matters too. These were and are, of course, all market engagements (and divorces) as aspects of cultural systems, of the production of culture, and of social life. As we examine publishers’ series as one of the processes that produce culture, together with the particular forms and content of series intended for particular consumers, we unravel the cultural and economic work which the series does. The effort in launching a new series has always been to create a distinctive marketing tool, to reach particular audiences and to contribute towards a unique identity for the particular publisher as a key figure in



The cultural and economic work of the series

the cycle of the ways in which a manuscript becomes a book. Series have both categorised and differentiated specific books for sale to intended readers. This has been an economic and cultural issue, one in part of ‘educating the gaze’ so as to produce the ideal consumer. As Andrew King has put this: The first problem any commodity faces when it comes on the market is to initiate the communicative event it is economically dependent upon. It must create its addressee by identifying potential purchasers. It must make potential purchasers give it an identity and persuade them that it relates to themselves. In order to do this it has to get the public to differentiate it from competing products while at the same time it must give the appearance of being already well-known to them. The commodity thus suffers the dilemma of having to be new-and-not-new. (King 2000: 81–2) The publisher combined the inputs of production and mobilised these to promote necessary profit (or social evaluation) and momentum, risk-avoidance and survival. Here, the relationship of the series to the ‘consumer’ may be seen as one of a host of strategies by which publishers sought to respond to the pressures of impending and then actual mass culture as well as to its opportunities. The series sought both sales and security. It was a device by which marketing and production could hopefully be integrated. It was competitive, publisher to publisher, but it was also one method by which to try to predict knowable and continuing markets in which to manage capital, labour and materials. Markets were shaped directly both by publishers – and by social forces – and by potentials discovered, often as surprises. The series and its ‘brand’ has been an important element in helping to address the publishing problem that every book is different.17 Differences in format, design, price, illustration, advertising and content were and are consciously interlinked presentational strategies to entice and stimulate initial sales and then to fulfil repeat demand and to redesign in response to failures. Repetition was also a marketing strategy. These elements have all been used to differentiate ‘branded’ goods, seeking to suggest uniqueness even when there was no copyright protection and often little diversity between competing editions. Timing has been important, too. And the productions themselves have had to be shaped to fit the expectations and understandings of those audiences selected or intended by the publisher in both diverse and controlled (sometimes, cartelised) markets. The ways in which publishers have



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sought leverage – while achieving the appropriate margin with careful controls of costs, print runs, prices, return on capital for their own survival and augmenting and preserving capital for re-investment – are one of the chief subjects of the studies presented here. Series were one way to try to reduce the risks of unpredictability – an attempt to buy shares in the future. Many aspects of series presentation necessarily sought to harmonise a uniform identity with which to enfold the reader in dependable and regular future purchasing. The series presentation, the design, the publisher’s imprint or ‘brand name’, the blurb and series title, series numbering and regularity of production each sought to project a stamp of authority, reliability and habit. Brand names, and imprints, were short-cuts or compressed verifications for the trade and for consumers. However, the proof of the purchase of subsequent series volumes was conditional on the satisfaction of the individual. Given satisfaction, the series was its own recommendation. Series have reflected, too, the economic fact that markets ensure that as consumer demand rises, fixed costs fall, as they become a smaller part of the price of each individual product sold. As technologies lowered fixed costs, more diverse markets evolved to meet minority tastes. There is, too, another key lesson of economics: the challenge for publisher and reader coping with several kinds of scarcity – including the potential book buyer’s personal time, attention and money. Willingness to meet the price tells us much. Lower fixed costs enable publishers to serve niches. Success by publishers with a series – and by readers, responding to and using these in their lives – again reflects the successful, dynamist trial and error system of nineteenth-century capitalism. The series was one technique by which to seek to gain a more sophisticated understanding of readers new and old. This was an adaptive process of discovery in a real economy – the market experimentation, testing and feedback of taste, production and sales. Series thus always seek to reinforce responses by repetition, design and advertisement. They remain a strategy by which to discover a sufficient audience at an adequate margin, and one solution to getting price, format, content, marketing and distribution right. Readers respond with and by their experiences of a book as itself, and to a series with other volumes offered as ‘companions’. In an adaptive market good ideas are copied by others. Series thus create their own competitors. This iterative process sums up which incentives, ideas, designs, titles, prices and formats ‘work’, which fail and which encapsulate successfully a mix of incentives, rewards and penalties. The process mobilises resources effectively, in fruitful exchanges. Consumers



38

thus ‘maximise utility’ and producers ‘maximise profit’. No effective alternative has been invented. Series help us to consider and understand the changing forces constituting this position. The series evolved in modern times, too, alongside many book-trade endeavours to make markets less risky, and to smooth capital accumulation. These processes of control and risk-avoidance in the UK and the USA sought to restrict competition or to control the competitive conditions, to share markets with acceptable players who recognised the rules, and to sustain prices and margins (St Clair 2004; Raven 2007). Cheap (or, often more accurately, cheaper) reprints introduced older works to newer audiences, and sought to meet shifting expectations. Series help us to understand this context of literary, economic and social cultures in which assumptions (and thus series) control or seek to achieve a specific market and a particular production of meaning or reader response. They concern actual, anterior and projected realities. In their overt, directing and inviting blurbs they often offer guidance, models, interpretative strategies and rules or directions. They are a map of maps. They offer us ways to think about individual readers, and communities of readers. Many series, too, show us how original readers first saw and experienced particular titles, as they were published or republished. Here, in Wolfgang Iser’s terms, usually the series deliberately implied a reader. The series thus focused questions about ‘the interactive space of reading’. It involved negotiations between the reader, texts, responses and meanings. It was part of a process of learning and communication, through continual adaptive variation, mutual learning and the encouragement of innovation, both created and creative. Many series seem often to have expected the active participation of the reader concerning meanings, and ways to live (Iser 1978) They have also materially embodied the discursive claims of different sectors of society. And so series invite us to study the material and philosophical moorings of statements about morality, domesticity and the family, the march of progress and other central concerns in different societies.18 Series are thus a system or instrument of classification which present categories of perception to the reader – of both specific and symbolic exchange. Many series have consciously declared themselves as landmarks, and they have themselves classified or designated their audience. They thus have a significant place in the cultural role of the reproduction of social structures, and of underlying systems of power. They offer specific (but differing and competing) ways of perceiving reality. As Bourdieu says, ‘taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier’ (Bourdieu 1993, editor’s introduction: 2).



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As we will see in the second part of this Introduction in Volume 2, series have also contributed to the modern shaping of national identity – and to the idea of a national culture. They have both met and shaped recognisable wants and satisfactions, for which people were prepared to pay individually and willingly. They have provided a site of personal and cultural identifications, including class, religion, race, gender and family. They have both legitimised and excluded texts. The series has thus been one valuable reflective glass by which we may improve the questions we ask and enhance the answers we might find. Then there is modern, targeted marketing to consider. As a preliminary approach to modern targeted marketing, the series was itself a strategy which coexisted for decades with the more traditional idea that publishing held a special status in the culture. That is, it was for the publisher to set his own values and it was his editorial judgement which mattered and which guided him. The series in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries helped to smooth commercial processes, and by marketing titles together helped the publisher to reduce risks and curb over-production. But it was not itself yet a systematic approach to consumer research.19 In terms of methodologies, our contributors illustrate the necessity of employing a structural mode of thought to consider the social space of these producers, their relations of power, and the struggles of publishers, manufacturers and distributors to resist, endorse or invoke change, on which the strategy of any publisher’s series is necessarily based. They examine, too, the external events which transformed these structures, in different regions and at different times. They thus encourage us to focus on empirical historical analysis – on what actually happened to real human beings in the past, their realities and constraints, their challenges and risks, their innocence of simplicities and their independent existence outside any of our own preferred Edens. In William Sherman’s terms, contributors seek to ground reading theories in ‘histories of the reading practices of actual readers’ (Sherman 1995: 59). These essays link essential theoretical frameworks with empirical knowledge, yielding new conceptual insights and much new information concerning the social, economic and cultural realities of books. They give ‘definition’ to definition. By offering ‘meaning’ to different audiences in different formats and at different prices, publishers made a living. By responding to change in markets the publisher showed us the wishes of the implied, intended and actual reader – with the books which were published and especially with those that stayed in print over time. Consumer wishes were not expressed in opinion polls, nor in surveys, nor in Webbian judgements made by public service officials, but



40

in actual cash terms: who was prepared to pay, how much, and for what and when? Who exercised which choices, and with which consequences? The series, at any particular time, is one summation of such a whole. It gives us more than a trace of a whisper from lost voices. Money talks, and preference walks. Cash flow and cash ebb both speak to us. And cash on the counter is a key ‘encounter’. There was a daily referendum of personal preference, price and opportunity cost. Books were in part about private and personal bargains and perceived personal benefits, as each side in every transaction viewed them. Here, too, the transaction was not about domination or control but about a mutual

Figure I.3 Madame Charles Reybaud, The Old Convents of Paris and George Sand, The Haunted Marsh (London and Belfast, Simms & M’Intyre, 1847), The Parlour Library, Vol. VIII



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recognition of mutual autonomy. As Paul Delany puts this, ‘In the market, our innate disposition to persuade is harnessed to the cause of individual and collective prosperity’ (Delany 2002: 3).20 Series are, then, essentially signals which reflect a mosaic of personal as well as social purposes. They show us, too, the competing messages and diversity of a free society. Within the structure of an individual series, a publisher implies uniformity and order. But there are many competing versions of order and these themselves multiply forms, audiences and meanings in differing publisher’s series. Series, too, reflect the specific ‘economy’ of the individual firm – itself, historically, a key driver of change (Coleman 1992: 210). The series pictures the choices (or ‘positions’) on which the publisher based operations, and their relative situation (or ‘performative space’) within their chosen field. These choices directly mirrored the different economic and cultural assumptions and structures of different publishing houses, and their alternative strategies. Factors that such houses had to consider included attitudes towards cultural/economic/political power, legitimacy, self-images and perspectives concerning the roles of authors and other agents. Series imply, too, the scale of operations and the size of the firm, the volume of production, the view taken of risk-taking, the kinds of editorial judgement and investment which guided the firm, the required rates of turnover and financial return, perspectives on time-scale and attitudes towards ‘art’ and ‘culture’ (as ‘art’; as ‘commodity’). The whole is summed up as commercial and intellectual authority, institutional recognition and the reputation of the house with contemporaries and with posterity. Here, ‘brand’, again. Markets are oriented towards development, recognition and identity. Pierre Bourdieu might, indeed, have been writing specifically about the culture of the publisher’s series – and the competition between series – when he said that: The science of the literary field is a form of analysis situs which establishes that each position – e.g. the one which corresponds to a genre such as the novel or, within this, to a sub-category such as the ‘society novel’ [roman mondain] or the ‘popular’ novel – is subjectively defined by the system of distinctive properties by which it can be situated relative to other positions; that every position, even the dominant one, depends for its very existence, and for the determinations it imposes on its occupants, on the other positions constituting the field; and that the structure of the distribution of the capital of specific properties which governs success in the field and the winning of the external or specific properties (such as literary prestige)



42

which are at stake in the field. The literary or artistic field is a field of forces, but it is also a field of struggles tending to transform or conserve this field of forces. The network of objective relations between positions subtends and orients the strategies which the occupants of the different positions implement in their struggles to defend or improve their positions (i.e. their position-takings), strategies which depend for their force and form on the position each agent occupies in the power relations [rapports de force]. (Bourdieu 1993: 30) A key messenger is price. When we make this a key part of our focus there follows some reconsideration of assumptions. Otherwise, most notably, an emphasis on production itself and on labour theories of value – and on ideas of ‘domination’ and ‘commodification’ – tends to marginalise or conceal individual choices and the historical reader, even when we gain much else of value from some studies of the ambivalence of commodity culture (and of implicit and explicit attitudes towards it) such as Andrew H. Miller’s Novels Behind Glass: Commodity Culture and Victorian Narrative (1995). The study of publishing realities uncovers the cultural and economic truths that it is prices which form incomes, and that it is willing revenues which determine sales. Free choices earn producers rewards. Miller argues that ‘the commodification of domestic material culture has become a banal fact of daily life’ (Miller 1995: 91). But for the reader with free choice (as for the working woman released from drudgery by white-goods) what is banal may indeed have greatly improved individual lives. The production of commodities, such as cheaper books, is not to be despised, nor are the motives and actions of producers – including the publishers of series. What happened to their offers in the market can be recovered, and interrogated. Only with these particular observations can we make the move to theoretical or general statements. Wallace Kirsop and Simon Eliot have stressed the historical information we can gain by being very aware of opportunity cost, price and the tales these tell (Kirsop 1998; Eliot, in Eliot and Rose 2007). Similar is St Clair’s stress on access: ‘To help to understand and trace the possible effects of reading on mentalities, we need to trace historic reading. To trace readerships, we need to trace access. To trace access, we need to trace price. To trace price we need to trace intellectual property, and to trace intellectual property, we need to trace the changing relationship between the book industry and the state’ (St Clair 2004: 42). Prices – and their impact on sales and on series – offer us the crucial power and insights of the information which consumers alone can deliver to producers by the individual but cumulative decisions they



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make about goods and prices. This information is otherwise unavailable and uncollectable – either historically, or in contemporary social affairs – nor is it able to be known in advance. This opportunity cost is highly personal, and necessarily opportunistic. This fact is an essential link in the chain which enables us to enquire into the culture of the publisher’s series, and to probe what we can learn about this and about consumer responses to it. The market is the unique source of this otherwise unknowable and widely distributed information about individual and often unpredictable wishes which holds together the structures of direct relationships between producers and buyers, as well as of the more indirect relationships – mediated, for example, by circulating libraries – typical of publishing in Britain (but not in America) until very late in the nineteenth century. And so a very important emphasis here is on the consumer, on how consumers behaved, how they responded to market signals – notably, to price and format (and in our context to series design and other paratextual factors) – and how producers then reacted to this information in an ever-changing situation. Price is always a key indicator of likely and expected audiences and markets, a signal of a main pattern of expectations – although the relationship between price and audience is not straightforward. For example, Alison Fyfe has noted that ‘Price tells us who could afford to purchase a work, but not who actually did, let alone who actually read it’ (Fyfe 2004: 87). We are, of course, keen to know much more of which books were both bought and actually read, as St Clair has stressed (St Clair 2004: 3). Here, Lynne Tatlock’s recent anthology of essays concerned with Germany and reading in the nineteenth-century pays special attention to the books that seem to have been read ‘in the belief that investigation of their story provides a more complete and nuanced picture of book history, literary production, and reading cultures in the shadow of nation-building and class formation in the nineteenth century’ (Tatlock 2010: 3). This is, too, a significant part of the rationale for my own efforts over more than twenty years to collect some 25,000 popular reprints of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Englishlanguage fiction, and examples of more than 1,250 series. As to access, books priced at three or four shillings could not have been routinely bought by artisans, but they might have been picked up second-hand, read in a library or bought by a group of friends or associates (Fyfe 2004: 87). The degree and intensity of interest of a reader, availability and access, and existing individual knowledge necessarily influenced purchases too. And, as St Clair has noted, ‘Since every act of reading is unique, we cannot assume a consistency between the changes in



44

states of mind which occur, say, when a reader is young or when he or she is older’ (St Clair 2004: 401). Here, circularity is a bad habit if the book historian focuses on inputs to indicate outputs. And so study of the series as an input will not necessarily tell us about influences on particular readers, but only about a publisher’s intentions and the generality of demand levels. Success in sales over time may indicate a steady targeting of a market but it will not detail the individual reading experience.21 Paul Delany has noted other opportunities. Notably, The paradox of marketing books is that each one has value by virtue of being unique, and yet, as a consumer production, it can be measured on a common monetary scale. Money reduces even the most complex artefacts to the crude question: ‘how much is it worth?’; but this power of abstraction does not simplify the critic’s task. A monetary theory of literature must consider how books are priced, in the sense of providing income to authors and articles of consumption to readers. The literary marketplace, as mediated by publishers and reviewers, probably has more influence on the evolution of culture than writers and critics are willing to credit. But we have to look beyond the production and sale of literature as a market commodity. Literature is the most complete and complex record of a society’s system of values: not just the money prices of articles of commerce, but also the subtle social valuations that shape market supply and demand. (Delany 2002: 13–14)22 Progress here, then, depends on scholarly devotion to the historical specificity of data (where it exists and can be located) and historical analysis which focuses on the situations of the past, not the politics of the future. A priori is a poor guide, too. That is, if we are to understand and situate such a continuously successful publishing device as the series, and those who bought (and read?) the books.23 This work, of course, concerns studying culture, cultural economics, processes, positions, subjectivity and personal decision-making by authors, publishers, book distributors and book buyers. The cultural and economic work of the series is thus very considerable. It is, however, extremely productive because it shows us realities. The series documents and acts upon individual choices backed up by the individual reader’s spending money, by their deliberate choices and use of scarce personal time in selecting purchases. These decisions highlight the ‘positional properties’ or distinctiveness of different series. History may be full of



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‘movements’, but it is peopled by people. This is a crucial aspect of the process of cultural and economic discovery – through respecting market discovery – and the artistic evaluation and emulation of books and the arts by consumers and producers. It tells us much of the reader in various guizes, including Wolfgang Iser’s ‘implied reader’ (Iser 1978). Economic analysis is essential as series publishing has always reflected investment possibilities. It has been a significant factor in the structure of many publishing houses. It has reflected their estimates of the likelihood of success in conjectural situations (or, in Marxist terms, the objective social conditions determined by the mode of production, class consciousness and class practice). The series was from its beginnings basic to the economy of cultural goods. It has persisted through many epochs and in many different historical and national traditions. Series, and artistic consumption, are processes of communication. They reflect and require differing cultural competences and familiarities with ‘cultural codes’. Series have been fundamental, too, to the segmentation of the market place itself, in what has most recently been predominantly a possessive individualist society where the individual is the proprietor of their own person and capacities (save for some large but failed twentieth-century experiments). This understanding emphasises the importance of the particular: studying individual series and their specific social context, in order to understand particular cultural productions and their contexts. We need to include in our analysis the many complexities and contradictions, the variables and vanities, the oddities as well as the obvious which individual publishers confronted within the particular historical conjuncture that made an individual series possible, and to see what happened next and why. Four crucial corollaries follow: that we need to study publishing as a business, that we need to focus on the consumer and the consequences of willing choices, that we need to take the creative entrepreneur very seriously, and that we should write history without a preference for an imagined future. Entrepreneurship, too, is often to be distinguished from actual ownership, but it is a fundamental in building up a nation’s capital. We always need, too, to establish the conditions in which the consumers of cultural goods and their taste for them was effective, was produced and reproduced, how they appropriated what they wanted and discarded what they did not want (or no longer wanted). Then we have to bring together diverse monographic and empirical studies and set them in a broader cultural perspective: the historical challenge of what was typique. Neither a narrower focus and a shorter time-frame nor a wider time-frame and



46

a broader theory are mutually exclusive. But the focus needs to be on actual experience, and on things as they were, rather than on preferred policy and things as they might be or ought to have been. We need to consider the past in terms of itself, when it was in fact the present, and not in terms of a politically projected future. The priority of the consumer, too, displaces an emphasis on production itself, on labour theories of value – and on ideas of ‘domination’ and ‘commodification’. The ‘consumer’ focus especially avoids marginalising or concealing what we want to reveal about these questions. Indeed, in the words of Claire Squires, we can then hope to discover ‘the negotiations readers make with texts, textual producers, and critical authority figures, that is largely missing from the evidence-base of recent book history’ (Squires, in Eliot and Rose 2007: 412). Here, as we struggle to formulate questions and answers – and, perhaps, helpfully sidestep enshrined political categories – we may still only be able to achieve a more sophisticated set of questions, but with no sufficient answers. Without the first, however, we will not recognise the second when we stub our feet on those floorboards in the night.

Notes 1. Lightman (2007: 30) lists the important nineteenth-century British science series. My introductory analysis embraces both the arts and the sciences. There are, however, some specific sidesteps. I do not seek to tangle here with the thorny thickets and diverse directions of cultural studies in its many aspects. Those who wish to indulge that heavy-breathing hobby-horse can readily saddle up elsewhere, notably with Thomas Carlyle and T. S. Eliot, Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University, and others since the 1980s. There the required stirrups are a Marxist conception of culture which has been summarised as ‘a modality of consciousness, a structure of beliefs and perceptions, a socially constructed subjectivity’ (Harold Love, n.d.: 45–64). A valuable analysis of the emergence of the concept of culture is given by Christopher Herbert (1991). See also Connell (2001). 2. Much necessary research has not been undertaken. We urgently need studies of the work of many cheaper reprint publishers and their relationships concerning audiences and reading practices in many countries. I hope to offer material on the UK in my study By Book or By Crook. The Secret History of a Victorian Publisher, in preparation. My chief focus is on the firm of R. E. King (1886–1922), and publishers associated with or directly competing with this firm. See my paper, Spiers (2010). Wallace Kirsop drew urgent attention as long ago as 1966 to the intellectual opportunities here, and to the necessities of gathering and bibliographically describing this material. He also stressed the grave risks of continued neglect of popular literature and cheap reprints (Kirsop 1969). This material is essential to any examination of the



Introduction 47

3.

4.

5.

6.

7. 8.

9. 10.

John Spiers total dimensions and nuances of literature, society, production, readership, response, social imagery and literary output. St Clair offers a detailed summary of the key events in Britain and the USA (St Clair 2004: Appendix 2. Intellectual property and textual controls. Custom, law and practice, 480–9). On publisher archives which were then known to have survived see Weedon and Bott (1996), St Clair (2004: Appendix 13) and Donaldson (1998). St Clair has suggested that even though much archival material is lost, the recovery of sales figures for a few of dozens of firms competing in the late nineteenthcentury free market for canonical fiction and poetry shows enough similarity for them to be taken as representative of the whole (St Clair 2004: 421). One important archive which contains much unexploited material on printers, binders, publishers and the book-trade in general is the original material – which greatly differs from the final seventeen published volumes of Life and Labour and the People in London (1902–3), and also from the earlier versions. The original notebooks and other archival material preserved in the enormous Charles Booth archive at the British Library of Political and Economic Science in the London School of Economics, and in the University of London Library, await close scrutiny by book historians. See O’Day and Englander (1993). Theodor Adorno said that ‘empiricism and theory cannot be accommodated in a single continuum’ (Adorno 1976: 239). However, economic understandings close this circle. The most essential and most thoughtful I have seen is that of Birkerts (2006). See also the insightful commentary in Colclough (2007). Topham (2000) surveys scientific publishing and reading in nineteenth-century Britain. The classic enquiry is Altick (1957), although he says little of popular science publishing. Stefan Collini, ‘General introduction’ in Collini et al. (2000: 15). One cultural critic who has studied ‘brand’ names, Richard Ohmann, believes that ‘name recognition does not necessarily carry over to the next book, advertising cannot insistently accrete meaning around the bookas-commodity’. And in the USA, ‘For reasons mainly beyond their control, dependable sales eluded the publishers. Four out of five new books lost money’ (Ohmann 1996, 2009). Nevertheless, the persistence of series hints at answers, and publishers evidently believed in the form, both for new and for back-list titles. Readers may not have noticed a publisher’s imprint, but many surely became familiar with a series and its likely contents. In ‘the trade’ everyone knew (and knows) imprints and what they implied, as did gate-keeping critics and academic consumers. Ellen Gruber Garvey has written that ‘The cultivation of reputations did not create a brand name, except for those readers who occupied significant gate-keeping roles as critics, academic, and librarians. A strong reputation among academics, however, did benefit other, often more profitable parts of the firm’s business’ (Garvey 2009). On the discovery process see Hayek (1978: 179–90), Seldon (1990) and Postrel (1998, 2004, passim). The nineteenth- and twentieth-century British ‘reward’ book publisher J. F. Shaw, for example, followed this format. Series, too, have often been taken over by another imprint and repackaged (including sometimes being renumbered). Sheets, stereo plates, binding cases and copyrights of series



48

11.

12.

13. 14.

titles have frequently been transferred between publishers, who have then re-issued the series. We differentiate books in series – generally published in uniform bindings – from the ‘number trade’, the practice of publishing sections of both fiction and non-fiction works in parts and also in periodicals at recurring intervals. On serials see Altick (1967), Hughes and Lund (1991), Patten (1978, 1995), Myers and Harris (1993), Hayward (1997), Haywood (1998), Law (2000), Brake et al. (2000) and Law and Patten (2009). Pierre Bourdieu’s editor, Randal Johnson, says that ‘The literary canon has explicitly become both the site and the stake in the contention as different groups have argued for its rearrangement along lines more favourable to their divergent interests and agendas’ ( Johnson 1979: 19). See Bourdieu’s essay ‘The Market of Symbolic Goods’, in The Field of Cultural Production (1993). See also Tompkins (1985), Guillory (1987, 1993), Klancher (1987), Hohendahl (1989), Viswanathan (1989), Kramnick (1997), Price (2000) and St Clair (2004). On the scientific ‘canon’ Fyfe (2002) has offered an interesting discussion of the differences between a bestseller and a classic. Coleridge, cited in Klancher (1987: 4); Railton (1991: 20). Tyler Cowen (2007: 68). See also his commentary on incentives, on the personal wish for control and on what he calls ‘the Me factor at work’ (ch. 4, ‘Possess All the Great Art Ever Made’). Cowen also says that ‘In reality, how people perceive the world is one of the most important factors for understanding the operation of incentives. Whether we like it or not, people really do think it is all about them’ (ibid.: 117). Anthony Trollope, too, left behind him the insight that literary men did not write without thought of money, and that the consumer, economics and the laws of contract were always crucial. Trollope, the great psychologist of human character, was unconvinced, too, by the holistic and anti-commercial radicalism of Shelley, Carlyle and Ruskin concerning the long-term effects of the Industrial Revolution, which has so greatly influenced the literary and economic imagination, and the writing of book history. Instead, Trollope saw rising living standards all around him. Trollope had his own (neo-classical) views of human motives and the driving force of these changes: ‘All material progress has come from man’s desire to do the best he can for himself and those about him, and civilisation and Christianity itself have been made possible by such progress. Though we do not all of us argue this out within our breasts we do all feel it; and we know that the more a man earns the more useful he is to his fellow-men. … And it has in truth been so too in art and authorship’ (Anthony Trollope 1883: 96–7). Here, the critic Andrew Miller has commented: ‘Trollope’s representation of his own authorial identity, his concern with the issues of copyright, with his reputation, with the use of his name, all are understood as issues of ownership’ (Miller 1995: 12). And ‘Words “represent” money: authorship and the process of writing are completely and unambiguously implicated in the exchange of commodities’ (ibid.: 49). There are also the issues of generational shifts, what Tyler Cowen has called ‘artistic secession’, or generational differentiation, and of ‘acceptable status’, which, for example, affects the changing reputation, sales and readership of novelists (as well as of other artists including musicians). Equally, the effort for a reader in the early twentieth century tackling the



Introduction 49

15. 16.

17.

18.

19.

John Spiers new modernist writers bore a real cost, as did the reading of the self-educating artisan. See also Wexler (1998) and Delany (2002). See the bibliography following these notes for fuller Wallace Kirsop references. On the necessary rediscovery of ‘the human element’ in print, on ‘the individual’s power to affect, to act, to choose’ and on ‘the significant role of the prominent individual as an agent of change’, see the important paper by (McCleery 2002). The position with regard to employees in Scotland is a little better than for most countries, it seems. Holmes and Finkelstein (2001) show what might be done, if archives survive. See also Ross Alloway (2007). Patrick Leary and Andrew Nash noted that the numbers of staff employed as editors, journalists, publicists – as well as authors, and, surely, too, publishing staffs in other specialist work – rose significantly, as the production of books increased fourfold between 1846 and 1916 (Leary and Nash 2009). Who were all these publishers, editors, paper and cloth-makers, type-founders, printers, binders, manufacturers of presses and other essential equipment, stereo-plate makers, illustrators and engravers, proof-readers and office boys, warehousers and distributors, sales people, office clerks, booksellers and their staffs? D. F. McKenzie listed Stationers’ Company Apprentices and registered guild personnel employed in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century printing industry, but we have nothing of the kind for later years. See Richard Ohmann, ‘Diverging Paths. Books and Magazines in the Transition to Corporate Capitalism’, and Ellen Gruber Garvey, ‘Ambivalent Advertising. Books, Prestige, and the Circulation of Publicity’, both in Kaestle and Radway (2009), and Ohmann (1996). Alison (2009) cites a number of Australian memoirs of people who worked for Angus & Robertson in Australia from 1888. Unusually, the survival of detailed archives for the Religious Tract Society (founded in London in 1799) has enabled the consideration of such topics in the management of one very important series, the Monthly Series (comprising 100 sixpenny volumes, 1845–55) issued by the RTS in London (Fyfe 2004: 78; Lightman 2007: 25). One necessary, huge but as yet untaken task, is a detailed bibliography of the RTS, and also of the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge (1698), The British and Foreign Bible Society (1804), The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (1701), The Sunday School Union (1803), the Wesleyan Methodist Association (1835),and other such entrepreneurial religious organisations in the UK and the equivalent ‘pushing’ organisations in the USA. These include the American Bible Society (1816), the American Tract Society (1825), the American Sunday School Union (1824), and the New England Tract Society (1814). Each sought to lead the market by combining a business-like approach with anti-commercial evangelical ends, on which David Nord has done the pioneering work. (Nord 2004, 2010). Until very recently, too, with the advent of the internet, publishers did not adopt direct approaches to individual consumers, nor base their decisions on close market research. It is difficult to demur from Linda M. Scott’s view that until the past few years ‘publishers had failed to invest in the marketing capabilities that help other consumer goods companies “pull” products through the distribution system by stimulating demand’. And so chain retailers rather than publishers now dominate the high-volume general



50

20. 21.

22

23

book business, with computers taking much of the guesswork out of many book-stock and publishing decisions and still without most publishers as yet investing in broad consumer studies as a basis of their marketing strategies (Scott 2002; Abrahamson and Polsgrove 2002: esp. 83–5; see also Miller 2002). Miller examines how magazine owners used demographics and psychographics to shape publications for identifiable audiences. Modern ‘popular’ and ‘trade’ publishers also market test possible jackets and prices. See also Lewis (2000), cited by Delany (2002: 4). Price is the hinge for the fringe, too, enabling minority works to be supported or ignored, deriving from among those living within society in niches of different sizes or breadth. Stephen Colclough offers us the excellent phrase ‘the censorship of price’ (Colclough 2007: 51). Caution is nevertheless necessary in equating levels of reading with either class or price. Every individual makes a personal assessment of opportunity cost, often making surprising choices. Delany’s is a crucial work. For his analysis of how cultural theory has developed see his ‘Introduction: The Peculiarities of the English’ (Delany 2002). See also Shep (2008) and Willison (2007). Delany stressed that works hostile to any kind of economic system including open markets still prevail in markets where consumers will pay the prices (Delany 2002: esp. ch. 9, ‘Paying for Modernism’). On the apparent paradox that great works of art have been produced in what has been seen by some critics as an age of commodification see Vernon (1984: 24–5). Much of ‘the canon’ derives from that age. A dynamist explanation is offered by Postrel (1998, 2004). A particular example: Eric Rolls, the Australian historian, speaks of his discovery in one of the great libraries, the Mitchell Library in Sydney, concerning Charles Darwin’s first work, his Journal of Researches into the Geology and Natural History of the Various Countries Visited by H.M.S. Beagle (1839): ‘I always ask for the oldest edition of a work in a library. The excitement of handling rare books sharpens the imagination. This book was particularly rare. It had been David Scott Mitchell’s own – his signature was in it. It was one of the books that founded the great Mitchell Library. Yet nobody had ever read it. The pages were uncut’ (Rolls 2000: 120).

Bibliography The relevant literature on the topics of these two volumes on the culture of the publisher’s series is enormous. Individual contributors have provided guidance to reading in their specific fields, including non-English-language sources with which I am unfamiliar. There is a detailed general bibliography concerning series and the publishing and historical backgrounds in my Serious About Series. Much essential background reading, such as work by Jonathan Rose and David Vincent, is listed there as are specific studies of series. These individual studies include: Anonymous (1846) ‘Bohn’s Standard Library’, British Quarterly Review, 3. Altick, Richard D. (1958) ‘From Aldine to Everyman: Cheap Reprint Series of the English Classics, 1830–1906’, Studies in Bibliography, 11: 7–8. Bassett, T. J. (2004), ‘T. Fisher Unwin’s Pseudonym Library: Literary Marketing and Authorial Identity’, English Literature in Transition, 47(2): 143–60.



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Bessett, Scott (1976) ‘John Murray’s Family Library and the Cheapening of Books in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain’, Studies in Bibliography, 29: 139–66. Bonnell, Thomas F. (1987) ‘John Bell’s “Poets of Great Britain”: The ‘Little Trifling Edition’ Revisited’, Modern Philology, 85: 128–52. Bonnell, Thomas F. (1989) ‘Bookselling and Canon-Making: The Trade Rivalry over the English Poets, 1776–1783’, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, 19: 53–89. Bonnell, Thomas F. (2008) The Most Disreputable Trade: Publishing the Classics of English Poetry 1785–1810. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bowden, Ann, and Todd, W. B. (2003), Tauchnitz International Editions, 1841–1855. A Bibliographical History. New Castle, Del: Oak Knoll Press; London: British Library. Ezell, Margaret J. M. (1994) ‘Making a Classic: The Advent of the Literary Series’, South Central Review, 11(2). Hench, J. B. (2010) Books as Weapons: Propaganda, Publishing and the Battle for Global Markets in the Era of World War II. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Howsam, Leslie (1992) ‘Sustained Literary Ventures: The Series in Victorian Book Publishing’, Publishing History, 31: 5–26. Howsam, Leslie (2000) ‘An Experiment with Science for the Nineteenth-Century Book Trade: The International Scientific Series’, British Journal for the History of Science, 33: 187–207. James, Elizabeth (1999) ‘George Routledge’s Publishing Enterprise, 1837–1888, with Special Reference to the Railway Library’, University of London PhD thesis, November. McCleery, Alistair (2006), ‘Tauchnitz and Albatross: A “Community of Interests” in English-language Paperback Publishing, 1934–1951’, The Library, 7(3): 297–316. Neavill, Gordon B. (1979) ‘The Modern Library Series: Format and Design, 1917– 1977’, Printing History 1: 26–37. Neavill, Gordon B. (1981) ‘The Modern Library Series and American Cultural Life’, Journal of Library History, 16 (Spring): 241–52. Neavill, Gordon B. (2007) ‘Publishing in Wartime: The Modern Library Series during the Second World War’, Library Trends, 55(3): 583–96. Rectanus, Mark (1984) Literary Series in the Federal Republic of Germany from 1960 to 1980. Wiesbaden: O. Harrassowitz. Reynolds, Sian (2005) ‘Nelson’s French Collection 1910–60s’, in David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery (eds), An Introduction to Book History. London and New York: Routledge (2006 edn). Sadleir, Michael (1951) XIX Century Fiction, Vol. II. London: Constable; Los Angeles: University of California Press. This magisterial work contains much significant detail, bibliographical information and the histories of the major series for its period. Satterfield, Jay (2002), ‘The World’s Best Books’: Taste, Culture and the Modern Library. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Turner, John R. (1992) ‘The Camelot Series, Everyman’s Library, and Ernest Rhys’, Publishing History, 31: 27–46.



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Introduction 53

Aaronovitch, David (2009) Voodoo Histories: How Conspiracy Theory Has Shaped Modern History. London:, Vintage Books (2010 edn). Abrahamson, David and Polsgrove, Carol (2002) ‘The Right Niche. Consumers Magazines and Advertisers’, in David Paul Nord, Joan Shelley Rubin and Michael Schudson (eds), Scorned Literature: Essays on the History and Criticism of Popular Mass-Produced Fiction in America. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Adorno, Theodor W. (1976) ‘Sociology and Empirical Research’, in Connerton (ed.). Alison, Jennifer (2009) Doing Something for Australia. George Robertson and the early years of Angus and Robertson, Publishers, 1888–1900. Melbourne, Victoria: Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand. Alloway, Ross (2007) ‘Personnel in the Print and Allied Trades’, in Bill Bell (ed.), The Edinburgh History of The Book in Scotland. Volume 3, Ambition and Industry 1800–1880. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Altick, Richard D. (1957) The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800–1900. Columbus: Ohio University Press (2nd edn 1998). Anderson, Benedict (1983) Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso (rev. edn 1991). Arnold, Matthew (1869) Culture and Anarchy. London: John Murray. Bell, Bill (ed.) (2007) The Edinburgh History of the Book in Scotland. Volume 3: Ambition and Industry 1800–1880. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Bennett, Arnold (1925) Riceyman Steps. London: Cassell. Birkerts, Sven (1994) The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux (rev. edn 2006). Blainey, Geoffrey (1968) The Tyranny of Distance. How Distance Shaped Australia’s History. London: Macmillan. Bloch, Marc (1928) ‘Pour une histoire comparee des societies europeennes’, Revue de synthese historique, 46: 15–50. Bourdieu, Pierre (1993) The Field of Cultural Production. Essays on Art and Literature, ed. and intro. Randal Johnson. New York: Columbia University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre (2008) Distinction. A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, translated by Richard Nice. New York and London: Routledge. Brake, Laurel, Bell, Bill and Finkelstein, David (eds) (2000) Nineteenth-Century Media and the Construction of Identities. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Briggs, Asa (1985) The Collected Essays of Asa Briggs. Volume II: Images, Problems, Standpoints, Forecasts. Brighton: The Harvester Press. Casper, Scott. E (2010) ‘Case Study: Harper & Brothers’, in Gross and Kelley eds (2010). Colclough, Stephen (2007) Consuming Texts: Readers and Reading Communities, 1695–1870. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Colclough, Stephen (2009) ‘Readers: Books and Biography’, in Simon Eliot and Jonathan Rose (eds) A Companion to the History of the Book. Chichester: WileyBlackwell. Coleman, D. C. (1992) Myth, History and The Industrial Revolution. London The Hambledon Press.



The bibliography given below only lists specific titles cited in the Introduction and the notes to this first volume of the two-volume set.

John Spiers

Colinvaux, Paul (1980) The Fates of Nations: A Biological Theory of History. Harmondsworth, Penguin Books. Colley, Linda (1992) Britons, Forging the Nation 1707–1837. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press (Vintage edn 1996). Collini, Stefan, Whatmore, Richard and Young, Brian (eds) (2000) Economy, Polity, and Society. British Intellectual History 1750–1950. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Connell, Philip (2001) Romanticism, Economics and the Question of ‘Culture’. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Connerton, Paul (1976) ed, Critical Sociology. Selected Readings. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Cowen, Tyler (2000a) In Praise of Commercial Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cowen, Tyler (2000b) What Price Fame? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cowen, Tyler (2002) Creative Destruction. How Globalization Is Changing the World’s Cultures. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Cowen, Tyler (2007) Discover Your Inner Economist. New York: Dutton. David, Deidre (ed.) (2001) The Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Delany, Paul (2002) Literature, Money and the Market. From Trollope to Amis. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Donaldson, Ian (1998) ‘The Destruction of the Book’, in Book History, Volume 1. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Drabble, Margaret (1974), Arnold Bennett. A Biography. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Eliot, Simon (1985) ‘The Three-Decker Novel and Its First Cheap Reprint 1862–94’, The Library, 6th series, 7: 37–53. Eliot, Simon (1994) Some Patterns and Trends in British Publishing: 1800–1919, Occasional Papers, Number 8. London: The Bibliographical Society. Eliot, Simon (1999) SHARP-L Archives, 24 December. Eliot, Simon (2001) ‘The Business of Victorian Publishing’, in Deidre David (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Eliot, Simon (2002) ‘Very Necessary but not Quite Sufficient. A Personal View of Quantitative Analysis in Book History’, Book History, 5: 283–93. Eliot, Simon, Nash, Andrew, and Willison Ian (eds) (2007), Literary Cultures and the Material Book. London: British Library. Eliot, Simon and Rose, Jonathan (eds) (2007) A Companion to the History of the Book. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell (2009 edn). Englander, David and O’Day, Rosemary (n.d.) Retrieved Riches. Social Investigation in Britain 1840–1914. Aldershot: Scolar Press. Erickson, Lee (1996) The Economy of Literary Form. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Finkelstein, David (2002) The House of Blackwood. Author–Publisher Relations in the Victorian Era. University Park: University of Pennsylvania Press. Finkelstein, David and McCleery, Alistair (eds) (2005) An Introduction to Book History. London and New York: Routledge (2006 edn).



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Fischer, David Hackett (1970) Historians’ Fallacies. Towards a Logic of Historical Thought. New York: Harper & Row. Fish, Stanley (1976) ‘Is There a Text in This Class?’, Critical Inquiry, 2(3): 465–86; reprinted in Finkelstein and McCleery (eds), An Introduction to Book History. London and New York: Routledge (2006 edn). Fraser, Robert (2008) Book History Through Postcolonial Eyes. Rewriting the Script. London: Routledge. Fraser, W. Hamish (1981) The Coming of the Mass Market 1850–1914. London: Macmillan. Furet, François (1984) In the Workshop of History, trans. Jonathan Mandelbaum. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Fyfe, Aileen (2002) ‘Publishing and the Classics: Paley’s Natural Theology and the Nineteenth-Century Scientific Canon’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 33: 729–51. Fyfe, Aileen (2004) Science and Salvation. Evangelical Popular Publishing in Victorian Britain. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gagnier, Regenia (2000) The Instability of Human Wants: Economics and Aesthetics in Market Society. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Gallagher, Catherine (1985) The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction: Social Discourse and Narrative Form, 1832–1867. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Gallagher, Catherine (2006) The Body Economic: Life, Death and Sensation in Political Economy and the Victorian Novel. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Garvey, Ellen Gruber (2009) ‘Ambivalent Advertising. Books, Prestige, and the Circulation of Publicity’, in Kaestle and Radway (eds), A History of the Book in America. Volume 4: Print in Motion. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Gettmann, Royal A. (1960), A Victorian Publisher. A Study of the Bentley Papers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Green, James N. (2010) ‘The Rise of Book Publishing’, in Gross and Kelley eds 2010. Griest, Guinevere L. (1970) Mudie’s Circulating Library and the Victorian Novel. Newton Abbot: David & Charles. Gross, Robert A., and Kelley, Mary eds (2010) A History of the Book in America. Volume 2, An Extensive Republic. Print, Culture, and Society in the New Nation, 1790–1840. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press in association with the American Antiquarian Society. Guillory, John (1987) ‘Canonical and Non-canonical: A Critique of the Current Debate’, ELH, 54(3): 483–527. Guillory, John (1990) ‘Canon’, in Lentricchia and McLaughlin (eds). Guillory, John (1993) Cultural Capital. The Problem of Cultural Formation. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Hammond, Mary (2006) Reading, Publishing, and the Formation of Literary Taste in England, 1880–1914. Aldershot: Ashgate. Hayek, Friedrich A. (1978) ‘Competition as a Discovery Procedure’, in F. A. Hayek, New Studies in Philosophy, Politics, Economics and the History of Ideas. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.



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Hayward, Jennifer (1997) Consuming Pleasures: Active Audiences and Serial Fictions from Dickens to Soap Opera. Lexington, University Press of Kentucky. Haywood, Ian (1998) ‘George W. M. Reynolds and the Radicalisation of Victorian Serial Fiction’, Media History, 4(2): 121–38. Herbert, Christopher (1991) Culture and Anomie: Ethnographic Imagination in the Nineteenth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Holmes, Heather and Finkelstein, David (eds) (2001) Thomas Nelson and Sons, with an introduction by Alistair McCleery. East Linton: Tuckwell. Holroyd, Michael (1999) Basil Street Blues. London: Little Brown. Hohendahl, Peter Uwe (1989) Building a National Literature: The Case of Germany, 1830–1870. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Hughes, Linda and Lund, Michael (1991) The Victorian Serial (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Hunt, Lynn (ed.) (1989) Introduction: History, Culture, and Text’, in The New Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press). Iser, Wolfgang (1978) The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press). Iser, Wolfgang (1980) ‘Interaction Between Text and Reader’, in Suleiman and Crossman (eds). Jackson, Mary V. (1989) Engines of Instruction, Mischief, and Magic. Children’s Literature in England from its Beginnings to 1839. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. James, Elizabeth (1997) ‘George Routledge’s Publishing Enterprise, 1837–1888, with special reference to the Railway Library’, University of London D.Phil thesis. Jevons, William Stanley (1879) The Theory of Political Economy. London: Penguin Books, edited and with an introduction by R.D.Collison Black. Johnson, Lesley (1979) The Cultural Critics: From Matthew Arnold to Raymond Williams. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Kaestle, Karl F. and Radway, Janice A. (eds) (2009) A History of the Book in America. Volume 4: Print in Motion. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. King, Andrew (2000) ‘A Paradigm of Reading the Victorian Penny Weekly: Education of the Gaze and The London Journal’, in L. Brake, B. Bell and D. Finkelstein (eds), Nineteenth-Century Media and the Construction of Identities. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Kirsop, Wallace (1969) Towards a History of the Australian Book Trade. Prospects for a History. Sydney: Wentworth Books (lecture delivered in 1966). Kirsop, Wallace (1977) ‘Consignment Sales and Britain’s Nineteenth-century Colonial Book Trade’, in Library Association of Australia, Libraries in Society: Proceedings of the 12th Biennial Conference Held in Tasmania, August, Hobart. Kirsop, Wallace (1979) ‘Literary History and Book Trade History: The Lessons of L’Apparition du livre’, Australian Journal of French Studies, 16: 488–535. Kirsop, Wallace (1991) ‘The Literature on the History of Books in Australia: A Survey’, Reference Australia, 7 ( July): 35–73. Kirsop, Wallace (1992a) ‘Following the Money Trails: Selling Books Before, During and After the Revolution’, Australian Journal of French Studies, 29: 266–87. Kirsop, Wallace (1992b) ‘The Book in Australia Seen from 2001’, BSANZ Bulletin, 18: 215–22. Kirsop, Wallace (1995) Books for Colonial Readers – The Nineteenth Century Australian Experience. Melbourne: The Bibliographical Societies of Australia and New



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Zealand in association with The Centre for Bibliographical and Textual Studies, Monash University. Kirsop, Wallace (1998) ‘Booksellers and Their Customers: Some Reflections on Recent Research’, Book History, 1: 283–303. Kirsop, Wallace (2001) ‘From Colonialism to the Multinationals: The Fragile Growth of Australian Publishing and Its Contribution to the Global Anglophone Reading Community’, in Jacques Michon and Jean-Yves Mollier (eds), Les Mutations du Livre et de L’edition dans le Monde du XVIIIe Siecle a L’an 2000. L’Harmattan: Les Presses de l’Universite Laval. Kirsop, Wallace (ed.) (2007a) The Commonwealth of Books: Essays and Studies in Honour of Ian Willison. Melbourne: Centre for the Book, Monash University. Kirsop, Wallace (2007b) ‘Scholarship, Collecting and Libraries in the Old and New Worlds: A Personal Journey’, in W. Kirsop (ed.), The Commonwealth of Books: Essays and Studies in Honour of Ian Willison. Melbourne: Centre for the Book, Monash University. Kirsop, Wallace (2007c) ‘The Pacific’, in B. Bell (ed.), The Edinburgh History of the Book in Scotland. Volume 3: Ambition and Industry 1800–1880. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Klancher, Jon P. (1987) The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790–1832. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Kramnick, Jonathan Brody (1997) ‘The Making of the English Canon’, PMLA, 112: 1087–98. Kramnick, Jonathan Brody (1999) Making the English Canon. Print-capitalism and the Cultural Past, 1700–1770. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (corrected edn 2008). Larkin, Jack (2010), ‘“Printing is something every village has in it”: Rural Print and Publishing’, in Gross and Kelley eds 2010. Law, Graham (2000) Serializing Fiction in The Victorian Press. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Law, Graham and Patten, Robert L. (2009) ‘The serial revolution’, in D. McKitterick (ed.), The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain. Volume VI: 1830–1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Leary, Patrick and Nash, Andrew (2009) ‘Authorship’, in D. McKitterick (ed.), The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain. Volume VI: 1830–1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 172–3. Lentricchia, Frank and McLaughlin, Thomas (1990) eds, Critical Terms for Literary Study. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Lewis, Thomas (2000) ‘Persuasion, Domination and Exchange: Adam Smith on the Political Consequences of Markets’, Canadian Journal of Political Science, 33 (2 June): 154–76. Lightman, Bernard (2007) Victorian Popularizers of Science. Designing Nature for New Audiences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Loughran, Trish (2007), The Republic in Print. Print Culture in the Age of U.S. Nation Building, 1770–1870. New York: Columbia University Press. Love, Harold (n.d.) ‘Early Modern Print Culture: Assessing the Models’, Parergon 20(12): 45–64. McCleery, Alistair (2002) ‘The Return of the Publisher to Book History: The Case of Allen Lane’, Book History, 5: 161–85.



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McKenzie, Don (1969) ‘Printers of the Mind: Some Notes on Bibliographical Theories and Printing-House Practices’, Studies in Bibliography, 22: 1–75. McKenzie, Don (1984) ‘The Sociology of a Text: Orality, Literacy and Print in Early New Zealand’, The Library, 6(4): 333–65. McKenzie, Don (1985) The Pannizi Lectures 1985: Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts. London: British Library. McKitterick, David (ed) (2009) The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain. Volume VI: 1830–1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mann, Peter (1982) From Author to Reader. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Miller, Andrew H. (1995) Novels Behind Glass: Commodity Culture and Victorian Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Miller, Laura J. (2002) ‘Selling the Product’, in David Paul Nord, Joan Shelley Rubin and Michael Schudson (eds), Scorned Literature: Essays on the History and Criticism of Popular Mass-Produced Fiction in America. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Myers, Robin and Harris, Michael (eds) (1993) Serials and Their Readers, 1620–1914. New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press. Nord, David Paul (2004), Faith in Reading: Religious Publishing and the Birth of Mass Media in America. New York: Oxford University Press. Nord, David Paul (2010) ‘Benevolent Books: Printing, Religion, and Reform’, in Gross and Kelley eds 2010 O’Day, Rosemary and Englander, David (1993) Mr Charles Booth’s Inquiry. Life and Labour of the People in London Reconsidered. London: The Hambledon Press. Ohmann, Richard (1996) Selling Culture: Magazines, Markets, and Class at the Turn of the Century. London: Verso. Ohmann, Richard (2009) ‘Diverging Paths. Books and Magazines in the Transition to Corporate Capitalism’, in K. F. Kaestle and J. A. Radway (eds), A History of the Book in America. Volume 4: Print in Motion. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Olivero, Isabelle (1999) L’Invention de la Collection. De la diffusion de la litte´rature et des savoir a` la formation du citoyen au XIXe siècle. Paris: Editions de l’Imec. Orwell, George (2008) Books v. Cigarettes. London: Penguin Books. Patten, Robert L. (1978) Charles Dickens and His Publishers. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Patten, Robert L. (1995), Literature in the Marketplace: Nineteenth-Century British Publishing and Reading Practices. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Petroski, Henry (1985) To Engineer is Human. The Role of Failure in Successful Design. New York: Vintage Books, 1992 edn. Pinney, Thomas (ed.) (1963) Essays of George Eliot. New York: Columbia University Press (includes ‘Leaves from a Notebook’). Plumb, J.H. (1966) Men and Places. London, The Cresset Press, 1963; Hamondsworth: Penguin Books, 1966 edn. Plumb, J. H. (1969) The Death of the Past. London: Macmillan. Postrel, Virginia (1998) The Future and Its Enemies: The Growing Conflict over Creativity, Enterprise, and Progress. New York: The Free Press. Postrel, Virginia (2003) The Substance of Style: How the Rise of Aesthetic Value Is Remaking Commerce, Culture, and Consciousness. New York: HarperCollins (Harper Perennial edn 2004).



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Price, Leah (2000) The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel: From Richardson to George Eliot. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Railton, Stephen (1991) Authorship and Audience: Literary Performance in the American Renaissance. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Raven, James (1992) Judging New Wealth. Popular Publishing and Responses to Commerce in England, 1750–1800. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Raven, James (2007) The Business of Books: Booksellers and the English Book Trade. New Haven CT: Yale University Press. Raven, James, Small, Helen and Tadmor, Naomi (eds) (1996) The Practice and Representation of Reading in England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rolls, Eric (2000) Australia: A Biography. St Lucia, Queensland: University of Queensland Press. Rose, Jonathan (2001) The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press (2nd edn 2003). Rowbotham, Sheila (2001) Promise of a Dream. Remembering the Sixties. London: Verso. Rowland, William G. Jr (1996) Literature in the Marketplace. Romantic Writers and Their Audiences in Great Britain and the United States. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Sadleir, Michael (1951) XIX Century Fiction, Volume II. London: Constable; Los Angeles: University of California Press. Said, Edward W. (1983) The World, The Text, and the Critic. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. St Clair, William (2004) The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. St Clair, William (2009) ‘Afterwords’, Times Literary Supplement, 10 April: 7–8. Schivelbusch, Wolfgang (1988) The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press. Scott, Joan W. (1988) Gender and the Politics of History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Scott, Linda M. (2002) ‘Markets and Audiences’, in David Paul Nord, Joan Shelley Rubin and Michael Schudson (eds), Scorned Literature: Essays on the History and Criticism of Popular Mass-Produced Fiction in America. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Scott-Warren, Jason (2000) ‘News, Sociability, and Bookbuying in Early Modern England. The Letters of Sir Thomas Cornwallis’, The Library, n.s. 1(4): 381–402. Secord, James A. (2000) Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Seldon, Arthur (1990) Capitalism. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Shell, Mark (1978) The Economy of Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1839), The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley. London: Edward Moxon. Shep, Sydney, J. (2008) ‘Books without Borders: The Transnational Turn in Book History’, in Robert Fraser and Mary Hammond eds., Books Without Borders. The Cross-National Dimension in Print Culture. Houndmills: Palgrave. Sherman, William (1995) John Dee. The Politics of Reading and Writing in the English Renaissance. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.



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Sidgwick, Eleanor Mildred (1906) Henry Sidgwick: A Memoir. London: Macmillan. Smith, Adam (1759) The Theory of Moral Sentiments, reprinted in The Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith, Volume IV. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976–87, 6 vols. Smith, Adam (1776) An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Oxford: Clarendon Press (1976). Snell, Harry (1936) Men, Movements and Myself. London: J. M. Dent. Spiers John (ed.) (2006) Gissing and the City: Cultural Crisis and the Making of Books in Late Victorian England. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Spiers, John (2007) Serious About Series. American ‘Cheap’ Libraries, British ‘Railway Libraries’, and Some Literary Series of the 1890’s. London: Institute of English Studies, University of London. Spiers, John (2010) ‘Letters to the Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain by John Ruskin, LL.D. But Who Reached Them, and How? John Ruskin, Richard Edward King, and Popular Late-Victorian and Edwardian Publishing’, Newsletter of The Friends of Ruskin’s Brantwood, Spring: 19–30. Spiers, John (in preparation) By Book or by Crook: The Secret History of a Victorian Publisher. Stewart-Murphy, Charlotte A. (1992) A History of British Circulating Libraries. Newtown, PA: Bird & Bull. Suleiman, Susan and Crossman, Inge (eds) (1980), The Reader in the Text: Essays in Audience and Interpretation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Sutherland, John (1976) Victorian Novelists and Publishers. London: Athlone Press. Tatlock, Lynne ed. (2010) Publishing, Culture and the “Reading Nation”. German Book History in the Long Nineteenth Century. Rochester, NY: Camden House. Thoreau, Henry David (1854) Walden, edited by Stephen Fender. Oxford: Oxford University Press (1997). Tompkins, Jane (1985) Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction 1790–1860. New York: Oxford University Press. Topham, Jonathan (2000) ‘Scientific Publishing and the Reading of Science in Nineteenth-Century Britain: A Historiographical Survey and Guide to Sources’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 31: 559–612. Trollope, Anthony (1883) An Autobiography, intro Michael Sadleir. Oxford: World’s Classics (n.d.). Vernon, James (1993) Politics and the People: A Study in English Political Culture, c.1815–1867. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Vernon, John (1984) Money and Fiction. Literary Realism in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Vincent, J. R. (1967) Pollbooks: How Victorians Voted. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Viswanathan, Gauri (1989) Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India. New York: Columbia University Press. Wadsworth, Sarah (2006) In The Company of Books. Literature and Its ‘Classes’ in Nineteenth Century America. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Webb, Beatrice (n.d.) Diary, typescript version in British Library of Political and Economic Science, London School of Economics. Weedon, Alexis (2003) Victorian Publishing. The Economics of Book Publishing for a Mass Market. Aldershot: Ashgate.



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Weedon, Alexis and Eliot, Simon (1996) British Book Trade Archives 1830–1939. A Location Register. Bristol: History of the Book on Demand Series, 5. A revised list by Alexis Weedon was published on the web in 2001. See http//:madwiki. beds.ac.uk/british book West, James L.W. III (1988) American Authors and the Literary Marketplace since 1900. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Wexler, Joyce Piell (1998) Who Paid for Modernism? Art, Money and the Fiction of Conrad, Joyce and Lawrence. Fayetteville, Ark: University of Arkansas Press. Williams, Raymond (1958) Culture and Society, 1780–1950. London: Chatto & Windus. Williams, Raymond (1961) The Long Revolution: An Analysis of the Democratic, Industrial and Cultural Changes Transforming Our Society. London: Chatto & Windus. Williams, Raymond (1973) The Country and the City. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Williams, Raymond (1976) Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. London: Flamingo (rev. and exp. edn 1983). Williams, Raymond (1980) Problems of Material Culture. London: Verso. Williams, Raymond (1981) Culture. London: Fontana Press (3rd imp. 1986). Williams, Raymond (1989) ‘Culture is Ordinary’, in Resources of Hope. New York: Verso. Willison, I. R. (1991) ‘Remarks on the History of the Book in Britain as a Field of Study within the Humanities, with a Synopsis and Select List of Current Literature’, The Library Chronicle of the University of Texas at Austin 21(3/4). Willison, Ian (2007) Literary Cultures and the Material Book. London: British Library. Winch, Donald (1996) Riches and Poverty. An Intellectual History of Political Economy in Britain, 1750–1834. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Winch, Donald (2009) Wealth and Life. Essays on the Intellectual History of Political Economy in Britain, 1848–1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Winship, Michael (1995) American Literary Publishing in the Mid-nineteenth century: The Business of Ticknor & Fields. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Woodmansee, Martha (1994) The Author, Art, and the Market: Rereading the History of Aesthetics. New York: Columbia University Press. Wosh, Peter J. (1994), Spreading the Word: The Bible Business in Nineteenth-Century America. Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press.



Introduction 61

Market Forces and Modernisation in the French Book Trade in the Last Century of the ‘Ancien Régime’ and in the Early Nineteenth Century: Some Reflections on the Emergence of the Publisher’s Series Wallace Kirsop

A resolutely ambitious title needs to be explained, if only in a summary fashion. It must be conceded that it is difficult to do justice in a brief chapter to a cluster of questions about the way in which the book trade in France, and in Western Europe generally, made the transition from a tightly controlled guild structure to more open systems and even to laissez-faire capitalism by the end of the nineteenth century. As specialists are now aware, debate about aspects of a transitional period around 1770–1830, to use a rough-and-ready chronology, has been lively in the past few years. Differing approaches to the topic can be found, for example, in William St Clair’s The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (2004), in Jan Fergus’s Provincial Readers in Eighteenth-Century England (2006), in Richard B. Sher’s The Enlightenment and the Book: Scottish Authors and Their Publishers in Eighteenth-Century Britain, Ireland, and America (2006), in James Raven’s The Business of Books: Booksellers and the English Book Trade 1450–1850 (2007) and in Thierry Rigogne’s Between State and Market: Printing and Bookselling in Eighteenth-Century France (2007). If one adds to this a substantial literature in French – for instance, Jean-Dominique Mellot (1998) on Rouen and the biographical dictionaries of the trade being compiled by Frédéric Barbier, Sabine Juratic and their collaborators (Barbier 2002; Barbier et al. 2007), not to mention the growing production of serious monographs and articles in other languages – it is obvious that a perfunctory account of recent contributions would exhaust the space available. As a result it is necessary to proceed almost by hints and suggestions, to sketch an argument rather than lay it out in a systematic way. 62



1

Let us take as a given Isabelle Olivero’s L’Invention de la collection (1999) of a decade ago. Although she excludes certain categories, notably the series designed for a Catholic and religious market – in other words one whose boundaries extended well beyond French-speaking countries and even into remote Australia and New Zealand – her basic points are not to be challenged. The series as we commonly understand it is a creation of the nineteenth century technologically and ideologically. The economies of scale achieved by mechanised production, the move eventually to wood-based paper, the use of decorative printed wrappers and of colourful case bindings, these are some of the features and determinants of new departures in popular publishing alongside the push for improvement, education, political propaganda and pure entertainment. Henceforth the series – easily recognisable – will have a central position in a trade where colportage gradually gives way (but not completely!) to fixed points of sale of various kinds. Mme Olivero allows, of course, that there is a long pre-history of the phenomenon, but to cover this she relies for the most part on the work of Roger Chartier, in particular in Culture écrite et société. L’ordre des livres (XIV–XVIIIe siècle) (1996). However, it is precisely what comes before that is interesting if one wants to grasp the ways in which the publishing industry was seeking to renew itself in the eighteenth century and to exploit the forces and techniques leading towards a modern consumer society. I have written enough – in the Australian Journal of French Studies, in the Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand Bulletin and in Book History among other places – to indicate my belief that for a long time we were not doing enough to study distribution as opposed to production and reception.1 Things are evolving, but there is no need to apologise for an emphasis that any practising publisher ignores at his or her peril. Although the necessary research is perhaps not so difficult as that required by the history of reading, the surviving records are extremely patchy, and not least for Paris, where there is a dearth of material emanating directly from bookselling businesses. The consequent stress on administrative archives and on the authorities’ efforts at policing the trade distorts our view of what was happening and of what was being consumed. It is therefore important to understand the limitations of studies that may be valid and illuminating on their own terms but that unavoidably present a partial picture of a very complex situation. Looking at what is now being done in book history in the Northern Hemisphere from the Antipodean periphery, I am struck by the fact that many people seem content to work within purely national frameworks. Is this because they are not confident about getting access to monographs



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and articles written in foreign languages and, as is usually the case, not translated quickly or ever? Yet the whole history of the book trade, from the late Middle Ages on, tells us that national borders, and not just those separating one part of a linguistic area from others, are there to be crossed. The networks set up from Paris, Lyons, Venice, the Rhineland, the Low Countries, the Frankfurt Fairs, the quite marginal situation of Britain before the middle of the seventeenth century, these are all manifestations of a pervasive international context one cannot properly ignore. Needless to say, this dimension of a book world caught between the local and the transnational did not disappear in the century of the Enlightenment and of French cultural hegemony. The historian needs, therefore, to be no less attentive to practices that are copied and spread from one place to others. British North America before 1776 has its role in the English-speaking domain, and the development of trading links, which are sometimes familial as well, has been tracked. However, there are similar phenomena to be observed between France and Italy, not to mention all the ramifications of a post-1685 Huguenot diaspora. Comparisons and analogies prudently established have a function in the researcher’s arsenal. When documents are very scarce, as for example on the day-to-day operations of a commercial lending library, it is permissible to ask whether Hobart Town in the 1840s has any lessons for Warwickshire in the latter part of the eighteenth century.2 How well informed are we about other colonial contacts – book exports, say, from Bordeaux to French overseas colonies? Are we too obsessed with hunting down the clandestine and the illicit publications that certainly crossed frontiers like the Jura from towns like Neuchâtel where business records have been well preserved? A global approach is not just a matter of space but also one of grasping the trade in its totality, including the mundane and unexciting bits that kept shops going. It is one thing to suggest that we can do better, another to point the way to new sources and problems. The challenge has to be taken up, so I shall first take a hurried look at some of the manifestations of tension, disturbance and experimentation in the final third of the eighteenth century and on into the Revolutionary decade and the Empire as a background to the increased interest in series and then consider the specific case of a firm – Ménard and Desenne – that was one of the pioneers of renewal of a formula that had been known (in some guises) for centuries. *** It is always sensible to follow the money trails when one is investigating the publishing industry. France on the eve of and during the



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Revolution is no exception. Carla Hesse’s Publishing and Cultural Politics in Revolutionary Paris, 1789–1810 (1991) provides much useful information, essentially from official sources, on such topics as the capitation taxes paid by members of the Paris book guild and on bankruptcies, which were predictably frequent and spectacular after the Revolution. What is lacking is documentation from the notarial archives and analysis of trends reaching back to the 1770s, which also saw several failures of leading figures in the trade. The point is that there were stresses at least as early as the decade in which, as in England, the regime of copyright or literary property was liberalised in favour of booksellers and printers in the provinces. Why? The explanations are by no means always clear. Competition from piracies, which, strictly speaking, were only illegally imported reprints, is perhaps part of the story. In the end it is easier to designate symptoms of the malaise. One of these signs is the prevalence of discount catalogues, earlier, it should be noted, than the celebrated remainder ventures of James Lackington in London. Reasons for discounting – often for stated limited periods – can be diverse: a genuine desire to get rid of unsold (and unsaleable) stock, the artificial creation of ‘loss leaders’, the need to raise ready cash quickly. The phenomenon has been studied by Lorraine David in a Monash Master of Librarianship thesis and in an article by her in the collection The Culture of the Book (David 1996, 1999). The relevant catalogues held by the Bibliothèque nationale de France are now listed in the recent checklist of its collection of such publications by booksellers (Lesage et al. 2006). At the same time it should be noted that discounts or rabais were notoriously subject to abuses denounced by opponents such as the bookseller Louis Ravier in the 1790s.3 Fraudulent practices were, it would seem, quite common a quarter of a century after the introduction of this selling technique. An earlier ploy, borrowed from the English via the Dutch, was subscription publishing. Patricia Gray and I have written enough on the subject – in French and in English – for it to be unnecessary to give further details here.4 Suffice it to say that the pace of such proposals quickens in the last two decades of the ancien régime. Given that the offer reaches down into what Cissie Fairchilds (1993) has called the ‘populuxe’ market – that is little books of Cazin style – it is possible to surmise that capital was in short supply. Coming after the 1777 decrees, which effectively released many texts from quasi-perpetual copyright and created openings for the provincial trade, the reforms initiated after 1789 and culminating in the 1793 move of the national literary heritage into the public domain plunged an expanded body of booksellers and printers into crisis. Virtually




Wallace Kirsop

anything could be reprinted, so that money poured into re-editions of classic writers and ultimately into the launching of series to bring such texts before a wider public. There were many failed speculations as a consequence, and technologically the industry was not yet ready for the physical transformation of cheaper eighteenth-century printings into mass-produced popular books. The series in itself was not out of sight. François-Ignace Fournier’s Nouveau dictionnaire portatif de bibliographie (1809) provided appendices with lists of works recognised as belonging to this category: Aldines, Elzevirs, Barbou, Baskerville and above all Didot, including his stereotypes and those of Nicolle/Herhan. The modern examples, coming after loosely characterised series like those of Cazin, pointed to conscious efforts to seek out new markets in the place of those – notably theological and juridical – lost in the upheavals of the 1790s. Was there already a literary canon, especially for fiction? Late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century manuals for bibliophiles give incomplete or inconclusive answers, but a trend can be discerned.5 Reticence was to continue in some quarters for a long time, but rarely to the extent encountered in J. F. Rolland’s Conseils pour former une bibliothèque, ou catalogue raisonné de tous les bons ouvrages qui peuvent entrer dans une bibliothèque chrétienne (1841–3), where novels are replaced by a section – of more than 2,000 items – headed ‘Education’. The eighteenth century had already given readers a huge digest, the Bibliothèque universelle des romans, as well as large assemblages of fairy stories and imaginary voyages, alongside many theatrical collections. Much of this publishing happened, once again, in the reign of Louis XVI, and one can wonder what relation it bore to the shift in the copyright situation in those decades. Ravier’s dislike of what was introduced or emphasised after 1789 was pungently expressed, but he hit his target more often than not. Some of the trade’s disarray is evident in desperate and swindling efforts to sell by recourse to all sorts of gimmicks. He makes fun of the ‘vélinomanes’ – wove-paper maniacs – who prop up extravagances in book production. This was, in his traditionalist view, a world gone mad, abandoning substance for showy form, in other words something like our present-day passion for consumption. Perforce booksellers had to hone their skills in advertising and in commercial sharp practice. Both the Cazin eighteenmo formula before the Revolution and the stereotype model embraced contemporary texts as well as classics. To this extent too there was a prefiguration of the series of the later nineteenth century. There was a ‘modern’ touch in line with the gradual



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movement of the trade from traditional locations on the quais to the Palais Royal, the headquarters of the new arcade culture. This shift was clearly under way before 1789, so it would be dangerous to attach absolute importance to the Revolution alone, with its abolition of the guilds, in the process of aligning French publishing and bookselling on foreign and, in particular, English patterns. *** The Ménard and Desenne dossier is one that I have looked at before in the context of the continuation of discount sales and catalogues into the early nineteenth century. A text was contributed to the volume Le Commerce de la Librairie en France au XIXe siècle 1789–1914 edited by Jean-Yves Mollier (1997),6 situating these figures in the larger movement that crosses the divide between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. However, what is interesting in the present connection is that the firm was engaged at the same time in the business of publishing and marketing series. Monash University Library holds a catalogue, issued in July 1822 from the Ménard and Desenne address, 8, rue Gît-le-Cœur, of works offered at discounts of 50, 60 and 75 per cent as well as – at the normal price – of the ‘Bibliothèque française’ published by the firm. The last-named comprises 125 volumes priced between 260 and 624 francs according to the format – eighteenmo or duodecimo – paper – fine or wove – and illustrations – with a premium for avant la lettre accompanying the wove paper. The titles are essentially French classics – Voltaire, La Rochefoucauld, Fontenelle, La Bruyère, Bossuet, Fénelon, Pascal and so forth – but a few more recent publications like Dupaty’s Lettres sur l’Italie and Barthélemy’s Voyage d’Anacharsis (in eight volumes and an atlas) are included. Mme Olivero (1999: 91, 108) dates the series – via a Voltaire title – from 1821, but Marmontel’s Bélisaire is from 1818, thus suggesting that this is part of a fashion launched in the early years of the Bourbon Restoration. Indeed, a prospectus listed in the Bibliographie de la France on 10 May 18177 makes the starting date perfectly clear. Eventually the ‘Bibliothèque française’ was to include 174 volumes and to linger on into 1828.8 Further archival research is needed to establish the edition sizes. Were they appreciably greater than the 1,250 copies octavo and 1,250 copies duodecimo recorded in the Bibliographie de la France of 1811–12 and 1813 for Didot’s ‘Collection des meilleurs ouvrages de la langue française’?9 In other words, are we still some distance away from the mass reading public of the later nineteenth century?




Wallace Kirsop

The results of my researches on Émile-Eustache-Louis-René Ménard and Grégoire-Joseph Desenne (‘Desenne fils’) were published more than a decade ago. Here it is enough to note that the former was a newcomer to the trade, that he started in association with Pierre-Henri Raymond in shops on the Left Bank between 1811 and 1813 and that after the dissolution of his partnership with Desenne at the end of the 1820s he moved to the Place de la Sorbonne to premises where his son, the writer Louis Ménard, claims to have entertained his friend Baudelaire, and where the bookseller’s great-grandson Jean Galtier-Boissière was still selling his satirical journal Le Crapouillot well into the second half of the twentieth century. Émile Ménard ended up owning several houses, sold paper wholesale and had an interest in banking, all of them activities closer to the heart of the French book trade than people often recognise. Desenne came from a bookselling family based essentially in the new Paris of the Palais Royal on the Right Bank. An important family property, still sold by the partnership, was the Code général français, compiled by Joseph Desenne. The artist Alexandre Desenne was a major illustrator of the Bibliothèque française volumes.

Figure 1.1 One of the most popular titles from the Ménard et Desenne Bibliothèque Française



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One of the Ménard–Desenne catalogues appears – out of its strict chronological place – in the recent BNF checklist (Lesage et al. 2006: 385a, no. 2089).10 The others held in the Paris institution are listed summarily in the guide to booksellers’ and publishers’ catalogues between 1811 and 1924 (Adon et al. 2003: 168). These represent the major source of our knowledge about the firm’s bookselling and publishing activities. The main series with which Ménard and Desenne were involved were the ‘Bibliothèque française’ and a ‘Bibliothèque de l’Enfance’ in twenty eighteenmo volumes, as far as their own initiatives were concerned. In addition they – or rather Ménard and Raymond before them – had a part in the Répertoire général du Théâtre Français, producing fifty-one duodecimo volumes. The Bibliothèque universelle des dames, whose 154 eighteenmo volumes were offered for discount sale at 125 francs instead of 230 francs, was an inheritance from an earlier generation, a remainder preserved by publishers perhaps conscious that they were facilitating a transition from the ancien régime to some of the new century’s preoccupations. *** Things rarely fit into neat slots in historical research, and the book trade in France is no exception in spite of the Revolutionary upheaval. The continuity of private property, and hence of the notarial archives, should remind us that we have to look on both sides of the 1789–1815 divide. Almost a generation after the Histoire de l’édition française several gaps in documentation and investigation have been filled. Yet some of the questions raised by the creation and evolution of series need to be pursued. The work is hard and far from always rewarding, but we must understand more about financing and money flows. Sales of copyrights before 1789 and the role of bankers and backers like paper merchants have to be examined. It is perhaps the crucial question alongside others like the place of the secondhand trade and the relationship between script and print – illuminated by François Moureau (2006) – that have certainly not been exhausted. In this perspective a glimpse of one of the firms linking the old and the new can have its modest uses.

Notes 1. See, for example, Kirsop (1992a, b, 1998). 2. In advance of a forthcoming review of Jan Fergus’s Provincial Readers in Eighteenth-Century England see Kirsop (2003). 3. Journal de la librairie et des arts, an V–an VI, passim. See Wallace Kirsop, ‘WovePaper Maniacs and Swindlers: Selling Luxury Books in Eighteenth-Century




4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

Wallace Kirsop France’, a lecture given at Charlottesville in July 1994 and to be published – in a revised version – as a pamphlet in 2010. See Kirsop 1987, 2000), Gray (1991, 1992), Gray and Kirsop (2001). See Kirsop (2001: 166–76). See ‘Les Ventes au rabais de 1800 à 1830’, pp. 187–94. No. 1486, p. 263. Each ‘livraison’, to be issued monthly from 1 June 1817, was to consist of two volumes. See Bibliographie de la France, 1828, nos 1164, 3660 and 3688. 1811–1812: no. 4951; 1813: nos 149, 2274, 2600. Lesage et al. (2006: 385a, no. 2089, stock catalogue of 1817).

References Adon, J. P., Faure, C., Soulié, M. and Tournerie, S. (2003) Catalogues de libraires et d’éditeurs 1811–1924. Paris: Bibliothèque nationale de France. Barbier, F. (2002) Lumières du Nord: imprimeurs, libraires et ‘gens du livre’ dans le Nord au XVIIIe siècle (1701–1789). Dictionnaire prosopographique. Geneva: Librairie Droz. Barbier, F., Juratic, S. and Mellerio, A. (2007) Dictionnaire des imprimeurs, libraires et gens du livre à Paris 1701–1789 A–C. Geneva: Librairie Droz. Chartier, R. (1996) Culture écrite et société. L’ordre des livres (XIV–XVIIIe siècle). Paris: Albin Michel. David, L. (1996) ‘Les Rabaisseurs: Discount and Remainder Bookselling in EighteenthCentury Paris’, MLib thesis, Monash University. David, L. (1999) ‘Some Early Discounting and Remaindering Initiatives in the Paris Book Trade’, in D. Garrioch et al. (eds), The Culture of the Book: Essays from Two Hemispheres in Honour of Wallace Kirsop. Melbourne: BSANZ, pp. 340–55. Fairchilds, C. (1993) ‘The Production and Marketing of Populuxe Goods in Eighteenth-Century Paris’, in J. Brewer and R. Porter (eds), Consumption and the World of Goods. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 228–48. Fergus, J. (2006) Provincial Readers in Eighteenth-Century England. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fournier, François-Ignace (1809) Nouveau dictionnaire portatif de bibliographie. Paris: Fournier frères, second numbered sequence, pp. 1–48. Gray, P. (1991) ‘From prospectus to belle édition: Investigations in the Luxury Booktrade in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-century France’, PhD thesis, Monash University. Gray, P. (1992) ‘Subscribing to Plutarch in the Eighteenth Century’, Australian Journal of French Studies, 29: 30–40. Gray, P. and Kirsop, W. (2001) ‘L’Art du prospectus: l’écrivain éditeur et son public’, Travaux de littérature, 14: 361–74. Hesse, C. (1991) Publishing and Cultural Politics in Revolutionary Paris, 1789–1810. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kirsop, W. (1987) ‘Pour une histoire bibliographique de la souscription en France au XVIIIe siècle’, in G. Crapulli (ed.), Trasmissione dei testi a stampa nel periodo moderno. Volume II: II Seminario internazionale Roma–Viterbo, 27–29 giugno 1985. Rome: Edizioni dell’Ateneo, pp. 255–82. Kirsop, W. (1992a) ‘The Book in Australia Seen from 2001’, BSANZ Bulletin, 18: 215–22.



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Kirsop, W. (1992b) ‘Following the Money Trails: Selling Books Before, During and After the Revolution’, Australian Journal of French Studies, 29: 266–87. Kirsop, W. (1997) ‘Les Ventes au rabais de 1800 à 1830’, in J.-Y. Mollier (ed.), Le Commerce et la Librairie en France au XIXe siècle 1789–1914. Paris: IMEC Éditions/Éditions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, pp. 187–94. Kirsop, W. (1998) ‘Booksellers and Their Customers: Some Reflections on Recent Research’, Book History, 1: 283–303. Kirsop, W. (2000) ‘Patronage across Frontiers: Subscription Publishing in French in Enlightenment Europe’, in B. Bell, P. Bennett and J. Bevan (eds), Across Boundaries: The Book in Culture and Commerce. Winchester: St Paul’s Bibliographies; Newcastle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, pp. 57–72. Also in E. F. Shevlin (ed.) (2010) The History of the Book in the West: 1700–1800, Volume III. Farnham: Ashgate, pp. 207–22. Kirsop, W. (2001) ‘Canonical Novels for Gentlemen’s Libraries’, Australian Journal of French Studies, 38: 166–76. Kirsop, W. (2003) ‘Writing a History of Nineteenth-century Commercial Circulating Libraries: Problems and Possibilities’, BSANZ Bulletin, 27: 71–82. Lesage, C., Netchine, E. and Sarazin, V. (2006) Catalogues de libraires 1473–1810. Paris: Bibliothèque nationale de France. Mellot, J.-D. (1998) L’Édition rouennaise et ses marchés (vers 1600–vers 1730): dynamisme provincial et centralisme parisien. Paris: École des Chartes. Mollier, Jean-Yves (ed.) (1997) Le Commerce de la Librairie en France au XIXe siècle 1789–1914. Paris: IMEC Éditions / Éditions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme. Moureau, F. (2006) La plume et le plomb: espaces de l’imprimé et du manuscrit au siècle des Lumières. Paris: Presses de l’Université Paris-Sorbonne. Olivero, I. (1999) L’Invention de la collection. Paris: Éditions de l’IMEC/Éditions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme. Raven, J. (2007) The Business of Books: Booksellers and the English Book Trade 1450–1850. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Rigogne, T. (2007) Between State and Market: Printing and Bookselling in Eighteenthcentury France. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation. Rolland, J. F. (1841–3) Conseils pour former une bibliothèque, ou catalogue raisonné de tous les bons ouvrages qui peuvent entrer dans une bibliothèque chrétienne. Lyon: J. F. Rolland, 3 vols, II, pp. 368–569. St Clair, W. (2004) The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sher, R. B. (2006) The Enlightenment and the Book: Scottish Authors and Their Publishers in Eighteenth-century Britain, Ireland, and America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.




The Paperback Revolution in France, 1850–1950 Isabelle Olivero

The French term bibliothèque (in this context, the closest equivalent in English is ‘series’) evolved greatly in the nineteenth century. During the ancien régime – from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries – three types of bibliothèques were distinguished by Roger Chartier.1 First, a bibliothèque was a catalogue of titles, like a publisher’s catalogue, made to guide the ‘learned scholar’ and the ‘bibliophile’ in the construction of his or her private book collection (essentially, two ‘Bibliothèques’ published in 1584 by François de La Croix du Maine and in 1585 by Antoine du Verdier). Second, a bibliothèque was a compilation of books in the same field or on the same subject, such as the ‘Bibliothèque universelle des romans’ (224 volumes, 1775–1789) or the ‘Bibliothèque universelle des dames’ (156 volumes, 1785–1797). These were not technically a series of complete works but, rather, extracts of an editor’s selection among the finest works in the field. Third, and finally, a bibliothèque was a classic bibliography of books published on different subjects. This chapter demonstrates that the meaning of bibliothèque was profoundly redefined during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It principally became what we call a ‘collection’, transformed into a compiled package, using consumer-oriented marketing methods to present literary material not as individual works of art but rather as commodities. Such a package forms a part of a multipiece series to be collected, consumed and displayed as a unit. A nineteenth and twentieth century ‘collection’ is therefore a collectable series of uniform volumes, which brought the same high quality of production of ‘high-end’ or ‘well produced’ books to the inexpensive and popular book. Here, publishers’ practices in the context of ‘literary collections’, encompassing both contemporary and classic authors, are examined. I interpret these practices as the essential dynamic to institutionalise, canonise and 72



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commodify the practice of authorship, the act of producing texts, and of readership, as well as the act of acquiring and consuming books. In sum, this chapter presents the three principal steps of the ‘paperback revolution’ in France, in the creation, commercialisation and reading of popular books from 1850 to 1950.

The nineteenth-century foundations of the book series French historians of the book have generally ignored later developments in order to focus on the much more well known ‘Bibliothèque bleue’ (the equivalent of the ‘chapbooks’) published from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, a series sold via the colportage by itinerant peddlers. This ‘Bibliothèque Bleue’ was studied by Robert Chartier, of course, but also by other early modern historians such as Lucien Febvre and Robert Mandrou.2 Another tendency in the field of the history of books, launched in the 1980s, was the development of studies on important publishers of the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, including Michel and Calmann Lévy, Louis Hachette and later Ernest Flammarion and Arthème Fayard.3 The starting-point of this chapter, however, is the origin of the most important publisher’s series in the nineteenth century, which was founded and directed by Gervais Charpentier, starting in 1838, and known as the ‘Bibliothèque Charpentier’. The first concern of a nineteenth-century history of the book series is a valid historical typology that comprises the specific publishing strategies of the contemporary period. The French paperback series may be classified by format, by subject and by genre, as well as by their ‘intended public’, which is not always the same as the real public, buyer or reader. The origin of an inexpensive paperback book needs to be reflected upon, first of all, in terms of ‘editorial formula’, because its very ‘cheapness’ stems from its inexpensive commercialisation and the fact that it is ‘differently packaged’. Thus, the first classification is that of an ‘editorial formula’: the choice of format, price and the presentation of the volumes. Remaking the format, and consequently reducing the price, was the basic answer to the crucial question for publishers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: how to reach new and popular reading publics. This fundamental challenge was the context for the birth of many book series. It was the fruit as well of a sustained crisis in book production, authorship and bookselling. The choice of texts also revealed broader literary concerns. In fact, the most important strategy after the ‘editorial formula’ is the literary selection of works and the way the publishers constructed their catalogues. This typology helps to shed



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light on the material culture of collections and their historical context. It is also an essential base for a comparative study of these bibliothèques (in the sense of ‘series’) in different countries all over Europe, but also elsewhere in the world (the United States, Canada, India, Australia and other nations). The fifty-five most important French series – that is to say, the most successful and durable series – may be divided into three categories. These were dedicated to literature, both classic and contemporary literature, to scientific and encyclopaedic studies and, finally, to propaganda, both religious and political.4 To this day, however, no French historian has examined these series using quantitative methods, in stark contrast to the path-breaking studies of Richard Altick, Leslie Howsam and others for Britain.5 In general, the numbers of popular book series in Britain and the USA were much greater than those in France. The French specificity, however, was greater diversity in the types of subjects and titles within each series.

The emergence of the ‘modern series’ (1830–1860) The search for a new editorial formula was pursued across Europe and the United States from the end of the eighteenth century. Margaret J. M. Ezell demonstrates that a multivolume series of standardised editions composed of literary works appeared at the end of the eighteenth century with John Bell’s series: the British Poets (109 volumes produced between 1777 and 1793), the Bell’s British Theatre and the Bell’s edition of Shakespeare. Bell made possible ‘the process of creating a classic in the sense of forming a canon. This was intimately connected to the dynamics of developing a commercial market for literature as a commodity.’ Later, the Poets of Great Britain became a complete set of ‘all the British classics, from Chaucer to Churchill’.6 In France, the demand for portable formats re-emerged after the decline of chapbooks. But despite the claim of the eighteenth-century Parisian author Louis-Sébastien Mercier, their fabrication was generally of inferior quality, with one exception: the ‘Collection d’ouvrages français’ in the format in-18 (in English, the small or post-octavo format), printed in 1783 by François Ambroise Didot, one of the Didot printer’s dynasty, and chosen exclusively for the Comte d’Artois, the future Charles X. This type of personalised collection, however, was extremely rare and commercially unsuccessful.7 An innovative experiment in Italy was launched in 1817 by the Milanese publisher Silvestri, who created his new ‘Biblioteca scelta’ with a new format, in-16, and with a price reduced to 35 per cent below the



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average price of Italian-language books. He sought to publish texts ‘destined to increase and correct the choices that make up the literary tradition’.8 Unfortunately, his ‘Biblioteca scelta’ as well as French book series such as the ‘Bibliothèque d’une maison de campagne’ published by the bookseller Lebègue in 1820, the ‘Bibliothèque Française’ by Ménard and Desenne in 1821, the ‘Collection des meilleurs ouvrages français’ by Gosselin in 1822, the ‘Collection des meilleurs romans français’ by Werdet in 1823 or the ‘Bibliothèque des amis des lettres’ of Hiard in 1828, quickly went bankrupt. Even if the format and the price were reduced, the mode of publication was the same as during the eighteenth century: these series were based on a system of subscription. One was thus obliged to subscribe in order to acquire the entire collection. The result was a series of limited volumes – rarely more than 100 volumes – bought for the most part by the bourgeoisie and more often by the aristocracy, who overtly sought them out to fill their ‘country libraries’. These series were ephemeral because they consisted of a restricted number of works addressed to the needs of a very small audience.9 A crisis of the book professions in the 1830s compelled publishers to become more inventive. A symptom of this crisis was a phenomenon common to France and England: Mudie’s Lending and Select Library and the three-decker novel, which were largely the fruit of economic necessity.10 In Britain, this opening of reading rooms took place between 1842 and 1894. In France, the cabinets de lecture, begun earlier, dominated the orientation of the book market and particularly that of the novel which comprised from 50 to 80 per cent of stocks of the reading-rooms. An observer of that time, Emile de Girardin, estimated that only two thousand people regularly bought books in Paris and one thousand others systematically borrowed books. In both Britain and France, many books were simply too expensive for their reading public. Otherwise put, the market was too narrowly defined and the price of the book was far too expensive. So the French reading public began to prefer borrowing books to buying them. To give an idea of this situation, in seven years, from 1826 to 1833, in Paris alone, the number of cabinets de lecture increased from sixty-two to one hundred and fifty. The future publisher Gervais Charpentier worked for two years in a cabinet de lecture, as did John Bell, the proprietor of ‘Bell’s Circulating Library’ on the other side of the Channel. This experience gave the two men a clear advantage over their colleagues. Charpentier was deeply aware of the problem of the publishing market in France. He decided, in 1837, after the failure of a project to publish the complete works of Alfred de Vigny, that a publisher had to respond to what he called




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‘la loi du bon marché’ – roughly, the ‘law of the cheap market’. Charpentier recognised two problems in the production of popular books. Above all was the price. As with the British three-decker novel, the books sold in French reading rooms were systematically divided into two or three volumes, with the price, as a consequence, rising from an already expensive 7.50 francs to 15 francs and 22.50 francs for a complete novel. The other problem was the competition of the periodical press as the new generation of authors, romantics such as Honoré Balzac and Eugène Sue, sought to be paid twice for the same publications. First they would publish their novels in serial magazines (in the section called ‘le roman-feuilleton’), and later in book form destined only for the cabinets de lecture. So, Gervais Charpentier asked for his printer, Eugéne Roulhac, to help produce a new format called in-18 jésus-velin (small or post-octavo). These were the dimensions of today’s paperback ‘folio’ volume from Gallimard (18.3 11.5 cm). Furthermore, Charpentier sought to seduce the public with decorative covers, always in yellow. With this new format, he was able to reduce the price from an average of 15 francs to 3.50 francs. By point of comparison, the average wage of a Parisian worker for one working day in the 1840s was between 1.50 and 2 francs – the price had been reduced from approximately ten working days to slightly over two working days for those earning the most meagre salaries. Clearly, Gervais Charpentier aimed at cultivating the middle-class reading public, in particular those who attended the cabinets de lecture, rather than reaching out to the working class. In his own terms, Charpentier’s intentions and objectives were to create a new ‘bibliothèque de l’honnête homme’ (‘gentleman’s library’) – the definition of a bourgeois reading public. At first, the printing and typographical profession did not know what to call this format because it was completely new to them. It was first known as the format anglais; considering that such a technical innovation could not be French, they thought that it certainly must have been English. They called it the format compact because thanks to this format Charpentier was able to publish works of up to 500 pages, and finally they decided to call it the format Charpentier. Instead of publishing the most successful authors of his time, Charpentier claimed to have a real ‘programme’: ‘to have modern classics enter literary history’. He explained this goal in noting that ‘for twenty years, a few very good works have simply been lost among a thousand bad works’ (this still seems familiar to us today). So, he decided to focus on republishing these good works – Charpentier used the words æuvres durables, what today we call ‘steady sellers’, also a play on æuvres



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complètes, the complete works. The catalogue of the ‘Bibliothèque Charpentier’ featured a heavy dose of the literary romantic movement (the works of Honoré de Balzac, George Sand, Victor Hugo), and later the most representative of the naturalist movement, Émile Zola. The second important characteristic emphasised in Charpentier’s programme was that a series should ‘synthesise every type of production of the human mind’. Here, we clearly see the makings of an encyclopaedic project and the real sense of the denomination bibliothèque. To reach this positivist goal, in 1845, Charpentier created no fewer than fourteen different distinctive series. The largest number of titles was in the series of ‘Contemporary Writers’, followed by a second important ‘Bibliothèque anglaise’ (a library

Figure 2.1 Émile Zola, L’argent, Paris, 1891. The book cover of one of the most successful titles in the series Bibliothèque Charpentier




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of English authors), then the ‘Bibliothèque philosophique’, the ‘Bibliothèque chrétienne’ and the series of ‘Classiques des 16e, 17e et 18e siècles’. From this moment on, a number of Parisian publishers would follow the injunction, ‘You shall launch a book series’, and they created their own series, such as Alexandre Paulin and his ‘Bibliothèque de poche’, Charles Gosselin and his ‘Bibliothèque d’élite’, Jacottet and Bourdilliat and the ‘Bibliothèque nouvelle’ in 1846. Because of the potential of this new book format, other publishers in the nineteenth century decided to use the same layout. Michel Lévy, for example, considered the Charpentier format as the best for any new series and used it for his well known series, costing 1 franc, and called ‘Collection Michel Lévy’, published in 1855. Louis Hachette launched his railway libraries in 1853, the ‘Bibliothèque des chemins de fer’, upon his return from London. Hachette was inspired by the English railway series and copied the railway bookstalls founded in England by William Henry Smith. In turn, the model of the ‘Bibliothèque Charpentier’ was used in England, first by David Bogue in 1846 for his ‘European Library’ and above all by Henry George Bohn, whom we might call the exact alter ego of Gervais Charpentier, when he created his very famous ‘Standard Library’ in 1846.11 It is interesting to note that the Londoner Henry George Bohn created similar series and libraries: the ‘Scientific Library’, the ‘Classical Library’ (1847), the ‘Ecclesiastical Library’, the ‘Philological Library’ and the ‘Philosophical Library’ (1851). The collection thus spread to all publishing domains, and many publishers included at least one and occasionally several series in their catalogues.

The first golden age of the series, 1850–1870 When Michel Lévy created the ‘Collection Michel Lévy’, his introductory advertisement was clear and simple: ‘the principal interest of the public is henceforth the price … so this is why we have decided to publish only successful works in order to sell more and to reduce the price’. The main objective was ‘to republish contemporary and successful works at the best possible price’. Among the authors included in this collection were Lamartine, Sand, Stendhal, Mérimée, Gautier, Dumas, Sue, Souvestre, Féval, Soulié and Karr. A century later, we find the same advertisement, word for word, to introduce the famous pocketbook collection, ‘Le Livre de poche’, launched in 1953 by the Hachette publishing house. By reducing the price of the volumes to 1 franc (equivalent to 4 euros 50 centimes today), mostly because of a lower quality of production, the number of copies in series was doubled from 3,000 in Charpentier’s series to



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6,000 copies in Michel Levy’s series and in the ‘Bibliothèque des chemins de fer’ (the Railways Library) launched by Louis Hachette. Different publishers responded to the commercial crises by launching several kinds of bibliothèques, this time addressed to the working class. A deficit of affordable books for the reading public was at the origin of two other general models of reprint series, sold at an even cheaper price. The first type was launched by what French historiography called the ‘popular publishers’ (versus ‘standard publishers’) and consists of different series of a volume sold at ‘4 sous’, or 20 centimes, part-volumes under the denomination of ‘Romans à 4 sous’ or ‘Romans populaires illustrés à 20 centimes’ – the equivalent of two or three hours of work for an average Parisian artisan. These several series of cheap reprints of popular fiction were published between 1848 and 1860 in ‘quarto’ format, sold by ‘livraisons’ (a regular schedule: every day, week or month) and printed at a minimum of 10,000 copies.12 Here, we can cite the series by Gustave Havard (the ‘Romans illustrés’ and the ‘Bibliothèque omnibus’), by Joseph Bry, ‘Les Veillées littéraires illustrées’, and by Gustave Barba, the ‘Panthéon illustré’.13 The second type, is represented in France by a collection called the ‘Bibliothèque nationale’ – which had nothing to do with the national library of the same name and which constituted one of the most significant collections.14 Here again, it was not a regular publisher who launched the enterprise but, instead, a small group of typographers who, in 1863, worked in one of the biggest printing houses of the Parisian press. They preferred the very small format, in-32 (10 15 cm), sold at 25 centimes a volume, that proved to be a very popular series. The typographers adopted a similar characteristic to that of the ‘Bibliothèque bleue’, also covered with a very poor quality blue paper. The ‘Bibliothèque nationale’ advertised on all its volumes its intention ‘to introduce the most remarkable books of all the literature of the world into the heart of the most modest homes’ and ‘to give to the most humble the finest works of the ancient and modern authors’. For the typographers of the ‘Bibliothèque nationale’, the first goal was to create ‘an instructive and delightful library exclusively aimed at workers in workshops’. This model of the ‘Bibliothèque nationale’ was developed in other countries: in 1867 in Germany with Anton Philipp Reclam’s ‘Universal Bibliothek’; in 1873 in Spain with the series published by Edicion Perlado of Madrid, the ‘Biblioteca Universal’; and in England in 1885 with Henry Morley and John Cassell’s ‘National and World Library’.15 During these years series of popular science also appeared, including the ‘Bibliothèque des




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merveilles’, founded in 1864 by Edouard Charton, and the ‘Bibliothèque scientifique internationale’, created in 1873 by the publisher Germer Baillière. The new editorial formula spread to political and social subjects, giving birth to numerous series of propaganda that were generally Republican and Social Catholic in inspiration. In general, non-profit associations were formed in order to provide the financial means necessary to publish these series. Their particular publishers bore the name of the collections they published: the Librairie de la Bibliothèque démocratique (1869); the ‘Bibliothèque Franklin’ (1872), edited by la Librairie Franklin; and the ‘Bibliothèque du suffrage universel’, by the Librairie du suffrage universel, in favour of extending the franchise to all men and women.16

Series of popular novels (1880–1920) The emergence of series of popular novels in multiple volumes is the great novelty in the literary field during the first years of the twentieth century. The production of these novels was largely divorced from periodicals – in the form of the serial novel – and they were instead published as series of cheap volumes. In this latest manifestation, the serial novel was qualified by an observer as the true coming of the livre populo.17 The movement was launched by Edouard Dentu in 1883 with a collection of novels of contemporary famous authors entitled ‘Les Maîtres du roman’, sold at only 60 centimes a volume. This was followed by publishers Marpon and Flammarion with the series entitled ‘Auteurs célèbres’ (‘Famous authors’), also sold at 60 centimes a volume. But these were widely deplored owing to the poor and fragile quality of paper and printing; they were replaced by more expensive series, with elegant covers printed on quality paper. The formula was inaugurated in 1904 by Fayard as the ‘Modern Bibliothèque’ at 95 centimes a volume. The low prices of this edition were obtained through massive printings of between 50,000 and 100,000 copies. It is therefore this type of publication that marked a decisive step towards the dissemination en masse of literature. A threshold, in effect, was crossed, symbolised by what was called ‘the era of one hundred thousand’ (after the number of copies printed per edition) and reflecting a popularisation of these collections. Finally, a third wave of series emerged, at 65 centimes per volume (currently, the equivalent of 2 euros), launched in 1905 by Fayard with ‘Le Livre populaire’. The covers were again rather catchy, with many illustrations,



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but were also sloppily reproduced on paper of poor quality. One of the series’ triumphant best sellers was to sell 80,000 copies of the sentimental novel Chaste et flétrie by Charles Mérouvel. This model was followed in 1907 by the publisher Jules Tallandier with a series entitled ‘Le Livre national’, and by yet another called ‘Le Livre universel’, sold at 50 centimes a volume by L’Edition Nouvelle – the first volume, Cruel amour by Michel Morphy and Hector France, sold 90,000 copies. These multiple series of novels of adventures and action, and of sentimental novels, including crime fiction – in 1916, Ferenczi launched the series entitled ‘Le Roman policier’ (‘The detective novel’), whose series of characters became famous: Zigomar, Fantômas, Joseph Rouletabille etc. – prefigure the collections that are popular today, i.e. the ‘Harlequin’ series or the famous ‘Série noire’ created in 1945 by Gallimard.

The arrival of the pocketbook in France After the First World War, disastrous economic and social conditions compelled publishers to increase the price of their books from 3.50 francs on average to almost 5 francs; they continued to rise in price, from 7.50 francs in 1923 to 9 francs in 1926, and 12 francs in 1927, only to finish at 15 francs on average in 1930. In these circumstances the novel was simply not selling; to survive the publishers of literature turned to the best market for books in the same format as the normal edition. In 1931, Horace de Carbuccia launched, in Editions de France, ‘Le Livre d’aujourd’hui’, a collection that included the works of several contemporary writers in bound volumes and in the format of previously inexpensive books, but at lower price of 6 francs. It was quickly imitated by Stock, which launched ‘Le Roman cosmopolite à 6 francs’, and then Calmann-Lévy launched ‘Lisez’, this time at the price of 5 francs, as did Gallimard with the collection, ‘Succès’. But the formula did not last.18 As for the series of classic reprints, those appearing after the First World War had the same objective: to publish the masterpieces of literature celebrated in the school curriculum. Thus, ‘Les Classiques pour tous’ of Hatier (1921), and the series by Larousse and Hachette, were textbook extracts of conventional works with nothing to do with the model of the ‘Bibliothèque nationale’. Beyond works aimed at the national educational curriculum, the little series that the publisher Tallandier purchased in 1926 focused on the classics of the nineteenth century. This series was even revived during the Second World War, in 1943, under the name of the ‘Petite Bibliothèque nationale’




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Furthermore, the didactic imperative was personified by the two major encyclopaedic series of the time, the ‘Collection Armand Colin’ initiated in 1921, which sought to ‘popularise without lowering standards’ (‘vulgariser sans abaisser’), and the ‘Collection Payot’, which announced itself as the ‘French encyclopaedia of high culture’ (‘Encyclopédie française de haute culture’). On the eve of the Second World War, a new attempt to sell pocketbook collections of the works of contemporary writers at a cheap price was attempted by Calmann-Lévy, which, in collaboration with Hachette, launched the ‘Collection Pourpre’ in 1939, a collection of bound volumes, sold at 10 francs each, which enjoyed a wide success. At this time modern pocketbook series appeared all over Europe and in the United States. Most successful and well known were the English ‘Penguin’, launched in 1935, and the ‘Pocket’ American, launched in 1939. But we can also mention a very modern collection distributed in France (though printed in Belgium) and published by the English publishers Nicholson and Watson, entitled ‘Le Livre plastic’. It was also in Belgium that the pocketbook series called ‘Marabout’ appeared in 1949. Pocketbook editions were also created in Milan in 1949 as the ‘Bur’ or ‘Bibliotheca Universale Rizzoli’, and in Germany in 1950 when the publisher Rowohlt created the collection ‘RoRoRo’. Why, though, was there a long delay in the publication of pocketbooks made in France? The economic situation of the immediate post-war – as throughout Europe – only partially explains the lack of French pocketbooks. More persuasive as an explanation, perhaps, is the French model par excellence of the ‘Bibliothèque de la Pléiade’, founded by Jacques Schiffrin in 1931 as a kind of secular missal composed of carefully edited texts in expensive and lavishly produced editions. After the Second World War, when the sales of the ‘Collection pourpre’ collapsed, Robert Mounier, who directed Hachette, decided to change the structure of his collection. While he maintained reprints of successful texts, the form of the editions changed dramatically. He thus created the collection entitled ‘Le Livre de poche’ in 1953, which would be followed in the 1960s and 1970s by many other French pocketbooks: ‘J’ai Lu’ created in 1958; the collection ‘GF’ (Garnier-Flammarion) launched in 1964; and, most famously, ‘10/18’ or ‘Folio’ published by Gallimard in 1970. Pocketbooks devoted to the social sciences were published in the successful collection ‘Idées’, launched by Gallimard in 1962. Following the success of Gervais Charpentier’s and other book series in the nineteenth century, twentieth-century pocketbooks would be considered as a second golden age of collections in France, the age of the ‘collections de poche’ (pocket collections).



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The principal problem for nineteenth-century authors was to be paid sufficiently to live off their craft. They also had to fight against the illegal copying of their published material – that is, pirating – which deprived them of any earnings at all. Gervais Charpentier would find a solution to their problem. The system was based upon a long-term contract between the author and the publisher which guaranteed an author’s compensation: a certain sum upon the delivery of the manuscript. In exchange, the author promised the publisher his future works as well. But Charpentier introduced another innovation to this classic contractual system. He considered it unnecessary to keep a copyright on one work for the author’s lifetime or for years beyond. Charpentier’s exclusive rights to an edition were to last a maximum of three years. Consequently, he proposed to the authors a choice between two- or four-year contracts. But he refused to pay in advance or a specific sum upon delivery. Advances or payment upon completion of a work were primitive practices to him, and he proposed payment based on a percentage of the sales of the works: on average, 55 centimes per volume sold. The reaction was ferocious: the publisher was accused of threatening the total ruin of all authors. But in the light of the increase in the quantity of books published, due to the lowering of the cost of the books themselves, many authors quickly accepted that this new system was to their advantage. Alfred de Vigny, for example, earned so much more with this method than previously that he eventually accepted a percentage decrease from 55 to 40 centimes in 1852. We would see the same reaction a century later with the series ‘Le Livre de poche’. As Jean Giono said about whether to accept the simultaneous publication in the luxurious La Pléiade edition as well as a cheap pocketbook edition in a 1956 letter to Gaston Gallimard, ‘not in 20 years, when I shall be dead! No! Right away!’ The pocketbook edition sought to perpetuate the success of such works as those of Mme de Staël in the ‘Bibliothèque Charpentier’, one of the best sellers of the collection. It also sought to create a success with some of the most important romantic writers, such as Alfred de Musset, Théophile Gautier and Alfred de Vigny. Before Charpentier’s edition their works sold at a maximum number of between 600 and 1,000 copies by ‘standard publishers’. In Charpentier’s edition they reached between 3,000 and 6,000 copies for the first edition and a total of between 15,000 and 35,000 copies in less than ten years. And the ‘Bibliothèque Charpentier’ created great success (often publishing and selling 70,000 copies) for the first editions of many works of political and social thinkers. One successful



On the advantages of the book series, 1850–1950

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author was Edouard Laboulaye, a lawyer and one of the founders of the Third Republic; another was the American Unitarian theologian and preacher William Ellery Channing.19 For Nicolas David, the director of the ‘Bibliothèque nationale’, the catalogue also had to focus upon canonical classical works. These were glorified for two reasons: first, because of their literate quality; second, as contributions to the necessary culture ‘to form citizens’. These intentions reveal a didactic objective, a will to further popular education. The catalogue of the ‘Bibliothèque nationale’, for example, devotes a large space to the classics of the Enlightenment. What literary scholars call the ‘paratext’ is also an essential editorial strategy in the publishing book series. Different forms, contents and authors meant a lot in terms of trying to link specific texts with a specific public. The introduction, preface, notice and notes have different functions. Some are simply meant to invite the reader to read a book and others are intended to complete ‘critical contributions’. Charpentier assigned precise tasks in the making of the edition to specialists. The particular works chosen were the same as those selected in 1933 by Jacques Schiffrin for the prestigious ‘Bibliothèque de la Pléiade’.20 The book series also privileged the circulation of texts by constructing new methods of selling and promoting literary texts. Of course, new literary products needed new modes of distribution and selling. Charpentier surprised all his colleagues when he imposed a series of conditions upon the booksellers of his editions. First, they were obliged to place his editions in the most visible part of the shop, meaning in the windows themselves. Second, they were always to have in stock a complete set of his Bibliothèque. Finally, Charpentier demanded that all his works be kept together in the bookstore as an integral collection within sight of all customers. Although some booksellers originally resisted, they accepted these rules when sales increased. Here again, Charpentier anticipated modern methods of selling in the book trade. Moreover, thanks to their small sizes and light weight, the stocks were simultaneously sold by mail order. With the postal network widening with the expansion of the railway system, mail order books were the publishers’ most lucrative market.21 In turn, of course, the virtuous cycle of books and railways was further stimulated by the Bibliothèques de gare (Railway bookstalls). Margaret Ezell writes about ‘the desirability of the small size in terms of books as collectable objects’. Indeed, there existed a desire for a complete collection, as well as the creation of a space for acculturation: a means of granting greater access to reading material to workers, peasants and women. In this respect, the ‘Bibliothèque nationale’ was a



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veritable success. It attracted three types of publics. When it appeared in 1863, bourgeois readers would snatch up the collection, quite happy to be able to carry and read classic authors anywhere. Then, women were interested in this small and discreet format (which was easier to hide). It was light and congenial (of course, women were challenged not only in the act of reading but also in their choices of what they read in the nineteenth century and in the twentieth century). Finally, , the volumes were occasionally bought by peasants and workers, who were often autodidacts. Here, we have witness accounts that give a similar narrative of popular readership in both France and Britain. The speed and ease with which the working classes could build their own libraries by purchasing the book series made them compelling to many. In the autobiographies of the working class, we can see that the book series represented not only an offer but also an adequate response to a broader demand from ‘humble readers’. In conclusion, we may draw two different ‘professional trajectories’ according to the model of the collection in France and Great Britain. On the one hand, new publishers like Gervais Charpentier, Michel Lévy and Louis Hachette were no longer a part of family publishing dynasties, but arose from the petite and average ‘bourgeoisie’. They shrewdly understood how to fuse ancestral traditions in the French bookstore with modernity. They were also men who were engaged by social and political causes: Republicanism and Social Catholicism. Others were publishers in name only (for this was not their real profession of origin), belonging to milieus such as the artisanate. These individuals were often tied to their publishing activities through involvement in the world of the press. They were most often selfmade men: examples include Nicolas David, John Cassell and, later, John Dent (the publisher of ‘Everyman’s Library’, founded in 1904).22 We may also define the meaning of the French term bibliothèque or ‘library’ in the nineteenth-century context: an aggregate of works using marketing methods to present literary material not as individualised art but as commodities. This package comprised a multipiece series to be collected, consumed and displayed as a unit. A ‘library’ is thus a collectable series of uniform volumes. The result of the bibliothèque movement in France in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was the birth and the development of three differents models of literary series. One model was that of ‘the great collection of classical and contemporary authors’, as proposed by the ‘Bibliothèque Charpentier’, the ‘Bibliothèque de la Pléiade’ (1933) and Gallimard’s ‘Folio’ collection (1972). Another is the model of ‘the cheap classics series’ of the ‘Bibliothèque nationale’, the German




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Reclam’s ‘Universal Bibliothek’ (1867) and Dent’s ‘Everyman’s Library’. In fact, with the model of the ‘Bibliothèque nationale’, Cassell and many others in England, enjoyed greater success in England than in France. This is amply demonstrated in the numbers: about 400 titles for the ‘Bibliothèque nationale’ in 1914, several thousand titles for the ‘National and World Library’ and the German ‘Universal Bibliothek’ (3,470 volumes in 1896). A third model, which began with the ‘Collection Michel Lévy’ and with the formula of the ‘Romans à quatre sous’ and the bibliothèques in fascicules (issued in part-volumes), the predecessors of ‘dime-novels’, and continued with the collections of popular novels in volumes at the beginning of the twentieth century – from the ‘Livre populaire’ (Fayard, 1905), the ‘Livre national’ (Tallandier, 1909) and the ‘Roman policier’ (Ferenczi, 1916) to the ‘Le Livre de poche’ – finally embodied on a permanent basis the cheap series of popular fiction. The first two of these models sought the ‘canonisation’ of great texts; the third model sought ‘standardisation’ in which remaining ‘cheap’ was more important than being ‘great’. They truly marked the advent of a mass culture of the book in Europe.

Notes 1. Roger Chartier, ‘Bibliothèques sans murs’ (‘Libraries without walls’), in L’Ordre des livres. Lecteurs, auteurs, bibliothèques en Europe entre XIV et XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Alinea, 1992), pp. 69–94. 2. Roger Chartier, in Lectures et lecteurs dans la France d’Ancien Régime (Paris: Seuil, 1987), and Robert Mandrou, ‘La “Bibliothèque bleue” de Troyes’, in De la culture populaire aux 17e et 18e siècles (Paris: Imago, 1985). 3. Jean-Yves Mollier, Michel et Calmann Lévy ou la Naissance de l’édition moderne, 1836–1891 (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1984), Mollier, Louis Hachette (1800–1864). Le fondateur d’un empire (Paris: Fayard, 1999), Elisabeth Parinet, La Librairie Flammarion, 1875–1914 (Paris, IMEC, 1992), Sophie Grandjean-Hoog, L’évolution de la librairie Arthème Fayard de 1857 à 1936, doctoral thesis in history, under the direction of J.-Y. Mollier, Université de Versailles-SaintQuentin-en-Yvelines, 1996. 4. Fifty-five series divided in three categories: the ‘collections d’auteurs classiques et contemporains’, the ‘collections encyclopédiques’ and the ‘collections de propagande’; see appendix I of my book, L’Invention de la collection. De la diffusion de la littérature et des savoirs à la formation du citoyen au XIXe siècle (Paris: Éditions de l’IMEC/Éditions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 1999), pp. 277–9. 5. Richard D. Altick has recorded one hundred series in his article, ‘From Aldine to Everyman: Cheap Reprint Series of the English Classics 1830– 1906’, Studies in Bibliography, 11 (1958), and Leslie Howsam listed many British series from 1835 to 1900 in her article, ‘Sustained Literary Ventures: The Series in Victorian Book Publishing’, Publishing History, 31 (1992): 1–26.



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6. Margaret J. M. Ezell, ‘Making a Classic: The Advent of the Literary Series’, South Central Review, 11.2 (1994): 2–16. 7. See Louis-Sébastien Mercier, Tableau de Paris, J.-C. Bonnet, editor, (Paris: Mercure de France, 1994), Volume 4, chapter 313: ‘Petits formats’. 8. See Marino Berengo, Intelletuali e librai nella Milano della Restaurazione (Turin: Einaudi), 1980. 9. Olivero, L’Invention de la collection, Chapter 3: ‘Les petites collections de classiques’, pp. 89–92. 10. As described in an unpublished paper by Simon Eliot given at Sharp’s 2006 conference called ‘The Three-Volume Novel Myth and Mudie’s Circulating Library’. See also Guinevere L. Griest, ‘A Victorian Leviathan: Mudie’s Select Library’, Nineteenth-century Fiction, 20.2 (1965): 103–26. 11. Francesco Cordasco, The Bohn Libraries. A History and a Checklist (New York: Long Island University, 1951), p. 14. 12. These series are the equivalent of American cheap series – ‘Lovell’s Library’, ‘The Lakeside Library’ or the ‘Seaside Library’ – published between 1870 and 1900; see John Spiers, Serious about Series: American Cheap Series, British Railway Libraries, and Some Literary Series of the 1890’s (London: Institute of English Studies, University of London, 2007). 13. See Georges-André Vuaroqueaux, Edition populaire et stratégies éditoriales en France de 1830 à 1870, doctoral thesis in history, under the direction of Roger Chartier, EHESS, 2006. 14. In 1863, The Bibliothèque nationale took the name of ‘Bibliothèque impériale’. The choice of ‘nationale’ meant for the typographers ‘the best works in France and elsewhere’. 15. Simon Nowell-Smith, The House of Cassell 1848–1958 (London: Cassell & Co., 1958), pp. 107–13. 16. See Isabelle Olivero, ‘Les propagandes catholiques et républicaines dans la librairie au début de la IIIe République, 1860–1880’, in Jean-Yves Mollier (ed.), Le commerce de la librairie en France au XIXe siècle, 1789–1914 (Paris: Editions de l’IMEC/Maison des sciences de l’homme, 1997), pp. 243–53. 17. Gabriel Hanotaux, L’Exposition de 1900: le livre. 18. Pascal Fouché, ‘L’Edition littéraire, 1914–1950’, in Histoire de l’Edition française, Volume 3: Le temps des éditeurs (Paris: Editions Promodis, 1986), p. 209. 19. Essentially Channing’s Oeuvres sociales and the two best-sellers of Laboulaye, Paris en Amérique (1863) and Le Prince caniche (1868)’ a strong critic of Napoléon III’s regime; see Olivero, L’Invention de la collection, pp. 120–1 and 148–51. 20. Alice Kaplan and Philippe Roussin, ‘A Changing Idea of Literature: The Bibliothèque de la Pléiade’, Yale French Studies, 89 (1996): 237–62. 21. I developed these points in my chapter entitled ‘Circulation et diffusion des collections: la librairie française et étrangère, les nouveaux réseaux de distribution, le don et l’échange’, L’Invention de la collection, pp. 197–-222. 22. See Jonathan Rose, ‘Everyman’s Library’, in The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (New Haven and London: Yale University Press) pp. 131–6.




Canonicity, Reprint Publishing, and Copyright Gordon B. Neavill

The history of reprint series begins with the octavo editions of Latin and Italian classics that Aldus Manutius printed and published in Venice beginning in 1501, less than fifty years after the invention of printing. The first volume was a compact edition of Virgil. The series lacked a formal name, but the volumes were distinguished by their uniform format and typography. The books were about an inch shorter and narrower than modern-day Penguins, and the texts were printed, except for capital letters, in italic type that was specially designed for the series. Like many reprint series that followed, the volumes were designed for personal use and easy portability. Later series included the Aldine British Poets published by William Pickering between 1830 and 1853 and the cluster of British reprint series established between 1900 and 1906 – Nelson’s Classics, the World’s Classics, Collins’s Pocket Library, and Everyman’s Library. These are discussed by Kate Macdonald and Terry Seymour in the two present volumes. The most important American reprint series of the twentieth century was the Modern Library of the World’s Best Books, which began in New York in 1917. The paperback revolution in the English-speaking world brought many new series, including Penguin Classics. Pre-eminent among series created with the formal intention of publishing the literary canon are the Bibliotèque de la Pléide, which began in Paris in 1931 and includes literature and philosophy by French and foreign authors, and the Library of America, which was founded in 1979 and published its first titles in 1982. The background and culture of French series is examined by Wallace Kirsop and Isabelle Olivero in the present volume. Many of these series have been published over long periods of time, and their lists can provide a sense of evolving perceptions of the literary canon. This is especially true if 88



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titles are discontinued as well as added on a regular basis, as has been the case with the Modern Library.

The concept of canonicity derives from the ecclesiastical realm. The Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘canon’ as ‘the collection or list of books of the Bible accepted by the Christian Church as genuine and inspired’.1 Catholic and Protestant branches of Christianity disagree about the canonical status of certain books that are either omitted from Protestant Bibles or printed separately as the Apocrypha. Apart from these differences, the Christian canon of sacred texts has been fixed for a very long time. The use of the word ‘canon’ in connection with secular works is fairly recent. I am not sure when the word began to be applied to secular literary works. There are isolated examples as early as the 1920s, but its use in this context appears to have become widespread only within the past twenty-five years. ‘Canon’ does not appear in Raymond Williams’s Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, which was published in 1976 and revised in 1983.2 A cluster of influential articles focusing on the literary canon appeared in the journal Critical Inquiry in 1983 and 1984 and were reprinted with additional papers as a book, Canons, edited by Robert van Hallberg.3 Since then the use of the word in this context has become ubiquitous, but it was only in June 2002 that ‘canon’ appeared as a draft addition in the electronic version of The Oxford English Dictionary, where it is defined in the context of literary criticism as ‘a body of literary works traditionally regarded as the most important, significant, and worthy of study’.4 The words ‘traditionally regarded’ are key to the concept of canonicity. Canonicity is a social construct. There is no such thing as ‘the canon’ in the secular realm; we can only speak of multiple canons. Secular canons reflect the values of a given time and place and therefore tend to be unstable. Writers, artists and composers who are regarded as canonical at one period may be regarded differently at another. There are different levels or degrees of canonicity. A few figures such as Chaucer and Shakespeare, Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, Mozart and Beethoven – once their stature was recognised – have maintained a position as central figures in the western canon. Other figures, even entire genres, rise and fall in status. Works cease to be canonical when the communities that recognise their status no longer exist. At any given period there are multiple canons that exist side by side. We can speak of the ‘western canon’ and of the canon of any given



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national literature.5 There are regional canons, such as Scottish literature or the literature of the American South. Regional canons include figures like Robert Burns or William Faulkner who occupy a place in national canons, as well as lesser figures whose canonical claims at the national level are less compelling. Other canons are formed around the writings of particular groups such as women, African Americans or African American women. There are endless permutations. It is useful to think about canons in terms of centre and periphery, with some works securely established at the centre and others occupying more tenuous positions at the periphery. The phrase ‘centre and periphery’ comes from the sociologist Edward Shils, who was writing about society as a whole. Shils wrote that the centre or central zone of society ‘is a phenomenon of the realm of values and beliefs. It is the center of the order of symbols, of values and beliefs, which govern the society’.6 In terms of the canon, works at the periphery are subject to the greatest volatility, but there are also works that occupy a fairly stable position at the periphery. Canons are continually evolving, with new works entering the canon and some (but not all) older works fading from view. Today it is common to define the canon in terms of works that are studied at schools and universities. This is just one of many canons, but it has become increasingly influential since the Second World War as university enrolments have expanded dramatically and large numbers of creative writers, composers and artists have been absorbed into the academy as teachers. The academic canon of a given period can be analysed in terms of works appearing on syllabi, the contents of successive editions of standard textbook anthologies and clusters of academic articles devoted to particular authors and works. The academic canon evolves partly in response to prevailing approaches to criticism. Certain works lent themselves better than others to the analytical techniques of the New Criticism of the 1950s; others lend themselves better to the contemporary critical emphasis on gender, race and class. It is safe to say that canons can’t be cut in stone. As proof of this assertion we have only to look at the libraries, concert halls and museums of a certain age where canonical names are literally chiselled in stone. Despite a tendency to play it safe – it is common to find buildings where the names cut into the facade derive entirely from classical antiquity – it is their datedness and the omissions, including the absence of women, that are most likely to strike contemporary observers. This architectural tradition appears to have originated with the Bibliotèque Sainte-Geneviève in Paris, which was designed by Henri Labrouste in 1838–9 and built between 1843 and 1850. As Neil Levine has



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shown, Labrouste was strongly influenced by Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris and especially the chapter ‘Ceci teura cela’ (‘This Will Kill That’), which Hugo added to the novel when it was reprinted in December 1832, more than a year and a half after its initial publication.7 Hugo believed that the printing press had supplanted architecture as the primary medium for the public expression of human thought. Before printing, Hugo argued, ‘architecture was the great script of the human race. And so true is this, that not only every religious symbol but also every human thought has its own page and its own monument in this immense book.’8 The message of ‘Ceci teura cela’, Levine writes, was that ‘the proliferation of printed matter would alter the form of buildings as radically as their significance. … If buildings were to express anything, they would have to cease being ‘architectural’ and become ‘literary’ in character.’9 This is what Labrouste was determined to do when he received the commission to design the Bibliotèque Sainte-Geneviève. He inscribed the names of 810 authors on the façade of the building, and equipped the vestibule with busts of prominent French writers, scientists, philosophers and artists. ‘The meaning of Labrouste’s library’, Levine notes, ‘unfolds progressively. One sign or image crops up after another as in turning over the pages of a book.’10 This architectural tradition of inscribing canons in stone appears to have faded around the time of the Second World War.11 Butler Library at Columbia University, which opened in 1934, may be a late example. The practice remained sufficiently alive in the late 1930s for George R. Stewart to begin his academic novel Doctor’s Oral with a comic account of the problems that ensued when the president of a fictional state university in the American heartland asked professors from each department to select the name of a major figure in their field to be carved into the pediment of a new university library. Nominations such as Michelangelo had to be overruled as too long for the space available, but it was the biology department’s nomination of Darwin, a name that was anathema to the state legislature, that caused the greatest turmoil.12 Evidence of outmoded canons can be found everywhere. One example is the old card game ‘Authors’, which was created during the latter part of the nineteenth century by the American game company Milton Bradley. I played it as a boy in the 1950s. The cards depicted famous authors, mostly from the nineteenth century. The object of the game was to accumulate sets of cards for a given author, each of which listed one of the author’s better known works. The game gave young people a nodding acquaintance with the names of canonical authors like Hawthorne, Dickens and Carlyle. In my recollection all of the authors




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were men; as a boy I was particularly struck by the number of authors who boasted impressive beards. At home I have a set of ‘Authors’ that appears to date from the late nineteenth century. I have a reasonably good general knowledge of literature, but there is one author in the set, George William Curtis, whose name was new to me. When I looked him up in The Oxford Companion to American Literature I learned that he was an editor of Harper’s Weekly, published books of essays and travel writings, and lectured on behalf of the anti-slavery movement and in support of women’s rights, civil service reform and industrial harmony – possibly someone worth looking into. It is safe to say, however, that his position in the canon is no longer what it was over a hundred years ago, when he was included alongside Dickens and Thackeray in a popular card game. My final example of a dated canon is the Library of Congress classification for American literature (the PS’s), which was drawn up after the turn of the twentieth century and published in 1915. This is the classification system used for shelving books in most American academic libraries. Nineteenth-century American authors perceived as first rank are each assigned a range of forty-nine numbers that are used to organise books by and about the author. Authors with ranges of fortynine numbers include Emerson and Hawthorne, along with authors like Whittier whose lustre is not as bright today as it was one hundred years ago. Melville is allotted a mere nine numbers, which reflects his diminished reputation at the time the classification was created. His first two books, the South Sea romances Typee and Omoo, were his most successful. Moby-Dick puzzled and disappointed many readers when it appeared in 1851, and it was out of print by 1887.13 The critical re-evaluation of Melville that began in the 1920s with a biography by Raymond Weaver, followed by the first publication of Billy Budd, which had remained unknown during Melville’s lifetime, came too late to influence the compilers of the Library of Congress classification. As a practical matter it makes little difference to the organisation of an author’s works whether the author is allotted nine numbers or forty-nine; but the range of numbers, based on so-called ‘literary warrant’, survives as a reflection of the author’s standing at the time the classification was created. I will conclude my discussion of canonicity by introducing another sociological concept that is relevant to our understanding of the subject. This is Max Weber’s concept of charisma. Charisma is the quality that attaches to persons, roles, institutions, symbols and cultural objects because of their presumed connection with the most fundamental and important areas of human existence.14 One influential recent work that uses the concept is William Clark’s Academic Charisma and the Origins



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of the Research University.15 Canonical works can be distinguished from semi-canonical or non-canonical works by the charisma that attaches to them; it is perhaps the quality that makes them canonical. The aura of charisma exerts a powerful attraction. People want to get as close as possible to whatever it is they recognise as charismatic. In the realm of literature intellectual possession – understanding a work as fully as possible – may not be enough. There are people who seek a more tangible association with the charismatic. Possessing a work as a physical object may be preferred to borrowing it from a library. A first printing retains its charismatic appeal, bringing us closer to the source than a later printing or a reprint edition. Even if errors and misprints in the first printing are corrected in later printings, the first printing may be preferred. Better yet is a first printing signed by the author, or proof sheets corrected in the author’s hand, or – the ultimate prize – the original manuscript itself. Of course, not everyone can aspire to owning the original manuscript of a canonical work. But the artefact remains charismatic. Countless Joyceans make pilgrimages each year to view the autograph manuscript of Ulysses at the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia.16 The charisma that surrounds canonical works can also provoke attacks against classical works by those who identify with the avant-garde and others who may be in rebellion against an inherited tradition. I will illustrate this with two examples of bad behaviour on the part of youthful modernists in the 1920s. The first involves Donald Friede, a wealthy young man who went into publishing after a three-year university career during which he earned the rare distinction of being expelled by Harvard, Yale and Princeton. He subsequently purchased a vice-presidency at Boni and Liveright, which was perhaps the most important American publishing house of the 1920s, and later established a new but short-lived publishing firm in partnership with Pascal Covici. Friede’s autobiography shows him to have been a clever but shallow young man. He writes: before we went to a concert, we would always call Carnegie Hall to find out at what time the Stravinsky Sacre du Printemps would go on. We would stand out in the lobby smoking until the orchestra had finished playing that old fuddy-duddy Haydn. Then we would troop in, swoon orgiastically over the atonal music we had come to hear, and troop out again, careful to be safely in the lobby before our ears were assaulted by the horribly melodic music of Johannes Brahms.17 My other example comes from Samuel Putnam, who is best remembered today for his translation of Don Quixote. His splendid memoir, Paris Was




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‘One night … we were all at a house somewhere down in the country. [Malcolm] Cowley … [Matthew] Josephson and [E. E.] Cummings, I remember, were there. Our host had an elaborately bound set of the works of Racine, and by way of showing our contempt for this kind of ‘literature,’ we took the volumes and tossed them into the fireplace. Then, as they went up in smoke, we all stood around and urinated upon the embers.’18

Reprint series and copyright Reprint series like the World’s Classics, Everyman’s Library, the Modern Library, Bibliotèque de la Pléide, Penguin Classics and the Library of America offer tangible expressions of the canon. But no series that includes works that are protected by copyright can fully represent the canon. Copyrighted works can only be included by arrangement with the original publisher or copyright holder, and inevitably there are works that are withheld. The Library of America offers a dramatic example. Inspired by the example of the Bibliotèque de la Pléide, founded with seed money from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Ford Foundation, published by a non-profit corporation, guided by a board of distinguished academics and literary figures, and with a publishing programme that includes authoritative texts of major works of American fiction, drama, poetry and essays together with other genres including history, nature writing, journalism, literary criticism, sermons and crime novels, the Library of America comes closer than any other publishing venture to establishing an official canon of American literature. Living authors like Philip Roth and John Ashbery are included, as were Saul Bellow and Eudora Welty when they were still alive. Its imprimatur has been bestowed on outstanding but lesser-known writers such as Dawn Powell and William Maxwell. Two volumes devoted to the science fiction novels of Philip K. Dick are indicative of its openness to all genres of American literature. Several authors are conspicuously absent from the Library of America, mostly because copyright holders have refused to grant reprint rights. The complete novels of William Faulkner are collected in the Library of America in five uniform volumes, but no volumes are devoted to Ernest Hemingway. F. Scott Fitzgerald is represented by a volume that reprints



Our Mistress, offers one of the best accounts of Paris in the 1920s. Here Putnam is relating a story told to him by the Surrealist Louis Aragon:

his first two novels and first two volumes of short stories, but his most important works, including The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night, are missing. Fitzgerald’s early works, published between 1920 and 1922, are in the public domain. The later works are still protected by copyright. Charles Scribner’s Sons, the publisher of both authors, decided in the early 1950s to retain exclusive rights in all American markets to its most valuable literary properties. It withdrew The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms and The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway from the Modern Library in 1953 and 1954. The Great Gatsby would have been withdrawn at the same time if it had still been in the series.19 It is understandable that Scribner’s has chosen to retain exclusive rights to authors like Fitzgerald and Hemingway. Charles Scribner, Jr, has reported that The Great Gatsby ‘year after year … has had the biggest sales of any Scribner’s book; in fact it is the best-selling book in the history of our company’.20 Thomas Wolfe is another Scribner author who has been withheld from the Library of America. Hemingway’s works and the later works of Fitzgerald are likely to be included in the Library of America after they enter the public domain, but that won’t be soon. The term of copyright protection in the United States has increased dramatically over the past thirty-five years or so. Under the 1909 Copyright Act the term of copyright was twenty-eight years from the date of publication with the option of a renewal term of another twenty-eight years. The Copyright Act of 1976 extended the term to the life of the author plus fifty years. Under the Copyright Extension Act of 1998 the term is the life of the author plus seventy years. As the law stands now the major works of Hemingway published during his lifetime will enter the public domain between 2020 and 2047.21 It is not inconceivable that there could be further extensions of copyright protection before Hemingway’s works are available to the Library of America. If US copyright law had not been revised after their deaths, all of the major works of Fitzgerald and Hemingway would be in the public domain today. Copyright is not the only reason for the absence of canonical works from the Library of America. The series tries to publish authoritative texts, and textual scholarship is an ongoing process. The poetry of Emily Dickinson is the most obvious gap in the Library of America’s coverage of nineteenth-century literature. The series hopes to use the definitive versions of the poems edited by R. W. Franklin and published about ten years ago by Harvard University Press.22 Harvard University Press has agreed in principle but wants to wait a little longer before making its edition available to the Library of America. Another nineteenth-century omission is




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the poetry of Herman Melville. Melville’s prose works in the Library of America use the texts originally edited by a team of Melville specialists for joint publication by Northwestern University Press and the Newberry Library. Editorial work on the poems has not been completed.23 The major British reprint series that came into existence between 1900 and 1906 confined themselves in large part to works in the public domain and thus avoided problems related to copyright. S. H. Steinberg has written that the Copyright Act of 1842 ‘stipulated that copyright should cease seven years after an author’s death or forty-two years from the publication of a book. The result was that, round about the year 1900, all or most of the writings of Dickens, Thackeray, Disraeli, Lytton, George Eliot, the Brontës, Carlyle, Ruskin – in brief, all the great Victorians – would become available. It is therefore no accident that all the famous series of cheap reprints which have survived to this day originated within a few years.’24 The Modern Library series, which I have been studying for many years, was also profoundly affected by copyright. Established in 1917 in conjunction with the modernist assault against Victorian culture, it was published initially by Boni and Liveright. Albert Boni, who conceived the series, was a twenty-five-year-old Greenwich Village bookseller and occasional publisher. To raise capital he entered into partnership with Horace Liveright, a former bond salesman who was searching for a new career with financial backing from his father-in-law. The first title in the new series was Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray. Most of the titles that followed were by post-Victorian British and Continental writers. Five additional titles by Wilde found their way into the series by 1925, along with four by Anatole France and three each by Gabriele D’Annunzio, Henrik Ibsen, Guy de Maupassant and Friedrich Nietzsche. Authors with two titles each in the new series were Lord Dunsany, Gustave Flaubert, Walter Pater, Arthur Schnitzler, August Strindberg, Leo Tolstoy, Ivan Turgenev and H. G. Wells. There were few Americans in the early years. The only pre-nineteenth-century works were by authors like François Villon and Voltaire, whom modernists claimed as spiritual forebears. Nearly all of these authors were in the US public domain. The United States did not extend copyright protection to the works of foreign authors until 1891. Works by foreign authors published in the United States before 1 July 1891 fell automatically and irretrievably into the US public domain on the day they were published, although they continued to be protected by copyright in other countries. But 1 July 1891 cannot be established as a clear line of demarcation after which works by foreign authors received US copyright protection. The manufacturing



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Figure 3.1 August Strindberg, Married. One of the first twelve Modern Library titles published in May 1917

clause of the 1891 law specified that in order to be eligible for copyright books had to be printed from type set in the United States or from plates made from such type. Books that were published in the United States using imported sheets of a British edition were ineligible for US copyright protection. It was common practice to publish books by foreign authors using imported sheets, especially for authors without an established American audience. A significant number of books by foreign authors fell into the public domain after 1891 because of the manufacturing clause. Examples include W. H. Hudson’s Green Mansions, published in 1904 by G. P. Putnam’s Sons using imported sheets of the Duckworth edition, and Norman Douglas’s South Wind, published in 1918 by Dodd,




Gordon B. Neavill

Mead & Co. using sheets of the third Martin Secker printing.25 The manufacturing clause compounded confusion over the copyright status of works by foreign authors since US copyright was determined by neither the author’s nationality nor the date of publication but by the place where the type had been set. It was common for some of an author’s works to be protected by copyright while others were not. A book could be in the public domain in Detroit and protected by copyright a mile away in Windsor, Ontario. The 1909 Copyright Act softened the manufacturing clause to some extent by creating a new category known as ad interim copyright. This was a sort of copyright purgatory. A publisher who issued a book using imported sheets could register it for an ad interim copyright that provided temporary protection. Full copyright could be secured by the speedy registration of a domestically manufactured edition. The window allowed by the 1909 act was two months (one month to register the imported edition, another to register the domestically manufactured edition). This was extended to a more realistic six months in 1919. US copyright law allowed Boni to put together the Modern Library’s early lists of post-Victorian works almost as freely as the editors of World’s Classics and Everyman’s Library had put together their lists of Victorian and pre-Victorian classics. Most of the British and Continental European titles that Boni considered for the Modern Library were in the US public domain. Only one of the first twelve titles published in May 1917 was copyrighted in the United States. The United States had entered the First World War in April, and Boni wanted to include a war book. He selected The War in the Air by H. G. Wells, negotiated a reprint contract with the American publisher and paid an advance that he recalled many years later as probably having been $1,000. The Modern Library advertised the book in New York with posters depicting battling airplanes.26 The second batch of Modern Library titles included George Bernard Shaw’s early novel, An Unsocial Socialist, originally published in 1887. Shaw was a natural addition to a series devoted to the emerging modernist canon, but his plays, which began to appear in the 1890s, were copyrighted in the United States. Shaw retained tight control over his copyrights and refused to allow inexpensive reprints of his plays. It was not until the mid-1950s, following Shaw’s death, that the Modern Library was able to publish two volumes of his plays. An Unsocial Socialist was not an ideal Shaw title for the Modern Library, but it was what the Modern Library could get.27 Copyright was not the only factor that affected the selection of books for the series. The first shift in editorial direction took place after Boni



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left the firm in the summer of 1918. Liveright was more interested in publishing new American writers than in the relatively unglamorous business of reprint publishing, and he never shared Boni’s commitment to the cause of European modernism. He became one of the most significant literary publishers of the 1920s, with a list that included Sherwood Anderson, Hart Crane, Theodore Dreiser, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Robinson Jeffers and Eugene O’Neill, but he tended to neglect the Modern Library. Only eight titles were added to the Modern Library in 1919 and nine in 1920. Most of these appear to be ones that Boni had slated for inclusion. The years 1917–20, when eighty-one titles were published, can be regarded as the Modern Library’s Boni period. The years 1921–5, when thirty-four titles were added, can be regarded unambiguously as the Liveright period. There are striking differences between the titles published during the two periods. Half the titles published before 1921 were translations; only 27 per cent of the titles published during 1921–5 were translations. There was also a shift in the kinds of translations included. Boni showed a special interest in central and eastern European authors. Fourteen volumes by Russian and Scandinavian authors were published between 1917 and 1920; no Russian or Scandinavian authors were added in the Liveright period. French authors accounted for 35 per cent of the translations published in the Boni period and 70 per cent of the translations in the Liveright period. Only 9 per cent of the titles published before 1921 were by American authors; 30 per cent of the titles added in the Liveright period were by Americans. Many of these were by Boni and Liveright authors such as Theodore Dreiser and Eugene O’Neill or authors like Sherwood Anderson whom Liveright was courting. In the summer of 1925 Liveright sold the Modern Library to Bennett Cerf, a young man who had joined Boni and Liveright as a vicepresident two years before. Cerf established a new firm, the Modern Library, Inc., in partnership with Donald S. Klopfer. Cerf and Klopfer added more American authors to the series, and they gradually broadened the scope of the series to include canonical and semi-canonical works from all periods. They also published occasional trade books and limited editions under the imprint Random House. Following the 1932 bankruptcy of Liveright, Inc., they signed Eugene O’Neill and Robinson Jeffers and began publishing trade books more systematically. Early the following year they published the first American edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses, and in 1936 they acquired the firm Harrison Smith and Robert Haas, whose list included Isak Dinesen, William Faulkner, Robert Graves, André Malraux, and Jean de Brunhoff’s Babar books. At this point they




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reorganised the business. Random House became the name of the firm as a whole, and the Modern Library became a subsidiary of its offspring. On several occasions Cerf and Klopfer added works to the Modern Library shortly before their copyrights expired. Examples include Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and the poetry of Emily Dickinson. By committing to long-term royalty payments the Modern Library was able to get a jump on the competition and establish its editions in the market place ahead of its rivals. In 1940 the Modern Library published a one-volume edition of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in its Giants series. Tom Sawyer had been in the public domain since 1932, and Huckleberry Finn would enter the public domain within a few months. A large number of inexpensive editions of Tom Sawyer had appeared after its copyright expired, and Cerf expected the same thing to happen with Huckleberry Finn. He offered Harper & Brothers an advance of $1,000 against royalties of five cents a copy for the right to reprint Huckleberry Finn before the copyright expired. Income from reprint editions of copyrighted works was normally divided between the original publisher and the author or the author’s estate; after sales of the Modern Library edition reached 20,000 copies, Harper’s and the Twain estate would each receive an additional two-and-a-half cents for each copy sold. Cerf told the president of Harper’s that the Modern Library edition would bring additional income to the Twain estate for years to come.28 Selected Poems of Emily Dickinson, published in the Modern Library in 1948, included a number of poems that were in the final years of their copyright. Its contents were drawn from three volumes of Dickinson’s poetry that had been published by Roberts Brothers in Boston following the poet’s death in 1886: Poems (1890), Poems: Second Series (1891), and Poems: Third Series (1896). Little, Brown & Co. became Dickinson’s publisher when it acquired Roberts Brothers in 1898, and it was with Little, Brown that the Modern Library negotiated reprint rights. The first two volumes of Dickinson’s poems entered the public domain in 1946 and 1947, fifty-six years after their original publication. The Modern Library collection included all the poems from these two volumes. Rights to the other poems in the collection had to be negotiated with Little, Brown & Co. The Modern Library naturally wanted the best collection it could get, but part of its motivation was to give its volume a competitive edge over a collection of Dickinson’s poems that World Publishing Co. in Cleveland was bringing out in its Living Library series. That volume, also published in 1948, was limited to the poems that had recently entered the public domain.29



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The fact that the third volume of Dickinson’s poems would enter the public domain in 1952 gave the Modern Library some bargaining power. With only a few years to go before the copyright expired, it was to Little, Brown’s advantage to lock in royalty payments while it could. Yet the Modern Library was unable to get everything it wanted. The Modern Library had hoped to base its selection on the Centenary Edition of Dickinson’s poems published by Little, Brown in 1930, the one-hundredth anniversary of Dickinson’s birth. The Centenary Edition included the first three volumes of Dickinson’s poetry as well as poems from two subsequently published volumes. Little, Brown flatly refused to allow the Modern Library to base its selection on the Centenary Edition.30 Little, Brown finally gave the Modern Library permission to include poems from the first three volumes of Dickinson’s poems on the condition that not more than a third of the total came from Poems: Third Series.31 Only twenty poems from the Third Series had to be omitted, but that was enough to safeguard Little, Brown’s interest in the volume for the remaining years of its copyright. The Modern Library paid Little, Brown royalties of six cents a copy. Sales up to and including spring 1958 totalled 36,631 copies, which meant that Little, Brown earned royalties for that period of nearly $2,200.32 Selected Poems of Emily Dickinson has remained one of the most readily available editions of Dickinson’s poetry for most of the period since its publication. It survived the 1970s, when Random House slashed hundreds of titles from the Modern Library, and remained in print into the 1980s. The contents, based on the copyright status of Dickinson’s poetry in 1948, remained unchanged throughout this period. It was only in 1996, after Random House revived the Modern Library, that the twenty poems omitted from the original edition were added. By this time they had been in the public domain for forty-four years. The only other differences between the content of the original Modern Library edition and the reset 1996 version are the replacement of Conrad Aiken’s introduction with a biographical note by Billy Collins and the welcome addition of an index of first lines. Selected Poems of Emily Dickinson remains in print today as a Modern Library paperback. Copyright considerations affect the contents of anthologies in two ways: first in terms of works that can be included, and second in terms of how extensively anthologies can be revised. My example here is an anthology of modern American poetry edited by Conrad Aiken that originally appeared in the Modern Library in 1927 and was revised in 1945 and 1963. The volume was successively titled Modern American




Gordon B. Neavill

Poets, Modern American Poetry and Twentieth-Century American Poetry. The 1927 Modern Library edition was itself a revised version of an anthology that Aiken had published in London in 1922.33 Changes in the contents of successive editions document new poets entering the canon and the evolving reputations of poets included in earlier editions. The number of works by a given poet may increase or decrease, new poets may be added and poets included in earlier editions may be dropped. The 1927 Modern Library edition presents the poets chronologically by date of birth instead of alphabetically as in the London edition. Other changes include an increase in the number of poems by Amy Lowell and T. S. Eliot by one each, and a reduction in the number of poems by William Carlos Williams from seven to one. Cerf had told Aiken he wouldn’t care if Williams was omitted altogether.34 The 1945 edition adds thirty-nine poets, including Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, Robinson Jeffers, John Crowe Ransom, Archibald Macleish, E. E. Cummings, Horace Gregory, R. P. Blackmur, Hart Crane, Robert Penn Warren and Delmore Schwartz. It is possible that Pound had been omitted from earlier editions because copyright permissions could not be secured. Only one poet included in the first Modern Library edition – the Greenwich Village poet Maxwell Bodenheim – is omitted. The 1963 revision adds thirty-six poets and omits twelve poets who were in the 1945 edition. Among those dropped were George Santayana, Witter Bynner, Elinor Wylie, Edmund Wilson and Kenneth Patchen. But it is the copyright implications of the 1963 edition that are especially relevant to the present discussion. When Random House authorised the revised edition, Aiken was told that the permissions budget for new poems would be at least $4,000 and that he had to make certain that the length of the revised anthology did not exceed that of the previous edition by more than a third. If it exceeded that limit the revision would have been regarded as a new anthology, and it would have required new permission fees for all the poems.35 Copyright guidelines together with economic constraints affected the changes that could be made in revising the anthology.

Acknowledgements Work on this chapter was supported in part by a grant from the Wayne State University Humanities Center, and the chapter has been revised during the 2008–9 academic year when I have been a resident scholar at the Humanities Center. The support of the Humanities Center and that of its director, Dr Walter Edwards, are gratefully acknowledged. I also



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Notes 1. OED Online (electronic version of Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edn, New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), def. 4. 2. Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, rev. edn (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983). 3. Canons, ed. Robert van Hallberg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). 4. OED Online, draft additions, June 2002. 5. See Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1994). 6. Edward Shils, ‘Center and Periphery’, in Center and Periphery: Essays in Macrosociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), p. 3. Also in Shils, The Constitution of Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 93–109; originally published as ‘Centre and Periphery’, in The Logic of Personal Knowledge: Essays Presented to Michael Polanyi (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961), pp. 117–30. 7. Neil Levine, ‘The Book and the Building: Hugo’s Theory of Architecture and Labrouste’s Bibliothèque Ste-Geneviève’, in Robin Middleton (ed.), The Beaux-Arts and Nineteenth-century French Architecture (London: Thames and Hudson, 1982), pp. 138–73; notes 262–8. 8. Victor Hugo, Notre-Dame of Paris, trans. and ed. John Sturrock (London: Penguin Books, 2004), p. 191. 9. Levine, ‘The Book and the Building’, p. 154. 10. Ibid., p. 166. 11. I wish to express my deep appreciation to the numerous colleagues, including many unknown to me personally, who responded with generosity and erudition to my ‘Canons Cut in Stone’ query on the SHARP-L listserv in late January 2009. I especially wish to thank Edward Levin, who drew my attention to Neil Levine’s chapter, ‘The Book and the Building’, cited above. The postings are archived and can be accessed through the SHARP website (http://www.sharpweb.org/). 12. George R. Stewart, Doctor’s Oral (New York: Random House, 1939). 13. G. Thomas Tanselle, A Checklist of Editions of Moby-Dick, 1851–1976 (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and The Newberry Library, 1976), p. 2. 14. Edward Shils, ‘Charisma’, in Center and Periphery: Essays in Macrosociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), p. 127. 15. William Clark, Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). 16. Legacies of Genius: A Celebration of Philadelphia Libraries, ed. Edwin Wolf 2nd (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Area Consortium of Special Collections Libraries, 1988), pp. 88–9.



wish to express my gratitude to the staff of the Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University, for their helpful and informed assistance over the course of three decades, especially in connection with my use of the Random House Papers.

Gordon B. Neavill

17. Donald Friede, The Mechanical Angel: His Adventures and Enterprises in the Glittering 1920s (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1948), p. 225. 18. Samuel Putnam, Paris Was Our Mistress: Memoirs of a Lost & Found Generation (New York: Viking Press, 1947), p. 184; quotation marks in original. 19. Fitzgerald’s reputation was at a low point when the Modern Library published The Great Gatsby in 1934. The book turned out to be one of the worst-selling titles in the series and was discontinued after four and a half years. A sizeable portion of the Modern Library printing of 5,000 copies was remaindered. Fitzgerald’s reputation revived in the 1950s. 20. Charles Scribner, Jr, In the Company of Writers: A Life in Publishing (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1990), p. 161. 21. Lolly Gasaway, When U.S. Works Pass into the Public Domain (http://www.unc. edu/~unclng/public-d.htm), last updated 4 November 2003. 22. Harvard University Press published the three-volume variorum edition of The Poems of Emily Dickinson in 1998. The one-volume reading edition appeared in 1999. 23. My discussion of the Library of America has benefited from personal communications from Cheryl Hurley, president of the Library of America, and G. Thomas Tanselle, a member of the Library of America’s board of directors. 24. S. H. Steinberg, Five Hundred Years of Printing, 2nd ed. (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1961), pp. 356–8. The statement appears on p. 255 of the first edition (Penguin Books, 1955) and on p. 263 of the hardbound edition (London: Faber and Faber, 1959). Only the first two sentences appear in John Trevitt’s revision of Steinberg’s book (London: British Library; New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 1996), p. 169. 25. John R. Payne, W. H. Hudson: A Bibliography (London: Wm Dawson & Sons; Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1977), p. 81–2; Cecil Woolf, A Bibliography of Norman Douglas (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1954), pp. 57–8. 26. Boni, interview with J. C. Furnas, 24 February 1971; notes of interview provided by Furnas. 27. In 1946, towards the end of his life, Shaw relaxed his opposition to cheap reprints and allowed Penguin Books to publish a million copies of his plays – ten volumes in printings of 100,000 copies each – on the occasion of his ninetieth birthday. 28. Bennett Cerf to Henry Hoyns, Harper & Brothers, 31 July 1939. Random House Papers, Columbia University. 29. Emily Dickinson, Poems: First & Second Series (Cleveland, OH: World Publishing Co., 1948). 30. Robert Linscott to Conrad Aiken, 5 April 1948. Random House Papers, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. 31. Robert Linscott to Conrad Aiken, 31 March 1948. Random House Papers, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. 32. The Modern Library would have paid an advance against royalties when the reprint contract was signed, but I don’t know what the advance was. Income from the Modern Library edition was presumably divided between Little, Brown and the Dickinson estate, but I have no information about the details. 33. Modern American Poets, ed. Conrad Aiken (London: Martin Secker, 1922). 34. Bennett Cerf to Conrad Aiken, 12 March 1926. Random House Papers, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University.



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Canonicity, Reprint Publishing, and Copyright 105 35. Jason Epstein to Conrad Aiken, 12 September 1960. Random House Papers, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University.

Bowker, Richard Rogers (1912) Copyright: Its History and Its Law. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co. Cerf, Bennett (1977) At Random: The Reminiscences of Bennett Cerf. New York: Random House. Dardis, Tom (1995) Firebrand: The Life of Horace Liveright: The Man Who Changed American Publishing. New York: Random House. Egleston, Charles (ed.) (2004) The House of Boni & Liveright, 1917–1933: A Documentary Volume. Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 288. Detroit: Thomson Gale. Genette, Gérard (1997) Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. Jane E. Lewin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gilmer, Walker (1970) Horace Liveright: Publisher of the Twenties. New York: David Lewis. Johns, Adrian (2009) Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lauter, Paul (1991) Canons and Contexts. New York: Oxford University Press. Neavill, Gordon B. (1975) ‘Role of the Publisher in the Dissemination of Knowledge’, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 421 (September): 23–33. Neavill, Gordon B. (1979) ‘The Modern Library Series: Format and Design, 1917–1977’, Printing History, 1: 26–37. Neavill, Gordon B. (1981) ‘The Modern Library Series and American Cultural Life’, Journal of Library History, 16 (Spring): 241–52. Neavill, Gordon B. (2007) ‘Publishing in Wartime: The Modern Library Series during the Second World War’, Library Trends, 55(3): 583–96. Satterfield, Jay (2002) ‘The World’s Best Books’: Taste, Culture, and the Modern Library. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Shils, Edward (1975) Center and Periphery: Essays in Macrosociology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Von Hallberg, Robert (ed.) (1984) Canons. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.



Selected bibliography

‘To Undertake Such Works as They Find to Be Wanted’: The Early Years of the Clarendon Press Series Simon Eliot When considering any printing or publishing firm, however august, one should never forget to ask the embarrassing questions: how does it make its money, and how then is its money spent? For Oxford University Press in the seventeenth, eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the engine that made the profits was the printing of Bibles, for which it had gained a number of privileges in the 1580s and 1630s. However, for all sorts of technical and political reasons, the Press wasn’t inclined to exercise its profitable privilege immediately or directly. Instead it frequently sold its rights to the Stationers’ Company in London. From 1637 the university commonly received £200 per annum from the Stationers for its ‘forebearance’ from publishing Bibles, Lily’s Grammar and other profitable lines. However, in 1671 Dr John Fell, one of the first creators of the OUP as we know it today, formed a partnership to take over Bible printing, and in 1678 he took on as partners a number of London printers. This profitable arrangement lasted for over 100 years. However, by 1780 no London partners could be found to share in the Bible business, and the Press was forced to create a joint stock company with forty-eight shares, twentyfour of which were held by the university, the others being distributed among Oxford and London booksellers. This new arrangement was to prove efficient, robust and profitable, and would last until 1884, when the last non-university owned shares were bought back by the Press. The restructuring of the 1780s brought the OUP into the emerging world of publishing as the majority shareholder in what could only be described as a venture in the mass production and mass marketing of texts. The Learned side of OUP might commonly be ordering print runs in hundreds of copies, but the Bible side printed in tens of thousands. It also printed in a host of formats and typesizes, and sold these carefully 106



4

targeted items to precise niche markets. It also mass produced for other organisations, such as the British and Foreign Bible Society. Even by the end of the eighteenth century this production had a peculiarly modern air about it, for in part it was based upon modules. Whole Bibles were printed in large numbers, of course, but so also were New Testaments, Psalms and Books of Common Prayer. Each of these modules could be marketed and sold separately, or bound in different combinations according to the fluctuating demands of the market. How successful this process was can be illustrated by the following: in the early 1830s, the Bible side of OUP was selling between 700,000 and 900,000 copies per annum and making between £45,000 and £66,000 a year. This should be contrasted to the learned side under the Clarendon imprint, which made at most between £6,000 and £13,000 a year.1 All we need to take away from this preamble is the awareness that OUP had the ability to produce large quantities of cheap texts for a mass market. With the growth and then reform of both the private and public school systems in the UK in the second half of the nineteenth century, a new educational mass market was in the process of emerging. It is in the early 1860s that evidence of OUP’s interest in this new market begins to be reflected in the Delegates’ Minute books for the period. First, I should say that the factors that precipitated these changes were many and varied. In 1860 Henry Liddell (1811–98) of Liddell and Scott’s Lexicon and the father of Lewis Carroll’s Alice, and Bartholomew Price (1818–98) – the subject of Lewis Carroll’s ‘Twinkle, twinkle little bat’ – had both become Delegates. Price, in particular, was already beginning to show evidence of the energy and determination that was to make him a predominant force in OUP until the 1890s. In 1862 the Delegates began to express concern about the activities, or rather the inactivities, of their agent, the Oxford-based bookseller James Parker.2 An investigation led to a sudden, and suddenly instituted, decision to sever links with Parker both as agent and as distributor of Clarendon books, and to search for a London-based agent instead. First Murray was approached and, when he refused, Alexander Macmillan was appointed. However, even before Macmillan’s name had been mentioned, the Delegates were for the first time beginning to articulate their concerns in a new language. By 30 January 1863 the Delegates were thinking of issuing Clarendon books bound rather than in sheets,3 and a week later: The same Committee were authorized to make such arrangements for advertising books before publication, and for advertising all



The Early Years of the Clarendon Press Series 107

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In other words, for the first time the Delegates were beginning to view books as materials that needed not simply to be printed, but to be properly warehoused, bound, distributed, advertised and sold. In other words, they were beginning to think, not as learned printers, but as modern publishers. This brief summary masks an extraordinary story of radical rethinking and reform that took place in the autumn of 1862 and the spring of 1863. This is a story that will be told elsewhere;5 suffice to say that, though Alexander Macmillan was a vital part of the changes that I shall map in this chapter, the changes were well under way before he arrived. Indeed, on the day that the Delegates resolved to appoint Macmillan from October 1863, they also declared that: ‘The Committee generally approves of the proposal to issue Educational works from the Press, but would desire to undertake such works as they may find to be wanted rather than a systematic series.’6 Of course, the Press had produced standard textbooks from time to time, and what we might recognise as set texts. But this was the first time the broad-scale issue of an identifiable genre was planned and agreed upon. Perhaps unsurprisingly for a publisher that was formally a department of the University of Oxford, the initiative was to be pragmatic rather than systematic. Nevertheless it became, to all intents and purposes, a series, albeit a rather loose one. This was made clear in a later part of the same minute where, despite the first disclaimer, a systematic delineation of the areas for publication was laid out: The Committee thinks that a Committee should be appointed with authority to take all necessary measures for the speedy publication for [sic] works of the following kind. (␣) Elementary Classical works, such as a Greek and a Latin delectus; Exercises in Greek and Latin composition in Prose and Verse; new editions of Cornelius Nepos, Caesar &c with notes. (␤) Elementary French books. (␥) Treatises on Heat, Light, Electricity and Magnetism; Applied Mechanics &c.7 By the time this plan came to fruition in the mid-1860s, there was a formal sub-committee of the Delegates; the School Book Committee,



books generally, as they may think best on each occasion; and were directed to report their proceedings always to the next meeting of the Board.4

overseeing the initiative.8 There was also in place a generous and, for the UK at this time, a novel royalty payment system for contributors, and the books were being issued under a series title, one that gave the full weight and dignity of the Learned side of the Press to this new venture: for the titles were to be brought together under the banner of ‘The Clarendon Press Series’ (CPS). This process of bringing the series into focus was almost certainly in part the result of Alexander Macmillan’s influence. From the beginning he had expressed a great interest in the idea of the series. Indeed, he was keen to be as closely involved as possible both intellectually and financially with what became the CPS. Financially his commitment was clear very early on. On 12 June 1863 the Delegates’ minutes recorded that: ‘Mr Macmillan proposes to take a share in such works, and the Committee sees no objection to his being allowed to do so.’9 However, such a financial commitment left the commercial publisher Macmillan, already well experienced in the publication of educational and textbooks but with a firm only some twenty years old, feeling rather vulnerable. He found himself intimately involved in the business of a long-established printer-publisher whose founding statutes and cultural inclinations did not put a great stress on financial success. As Macmillan put it in a letter to Price on the subject of OUP’s and Macmillan’s mutual financial interest, written on 18 November 1865: I need not say I think there are many advantages in our having common interest – you have always expressed that. But you will see it is easy for the wealthy University to lose – it has got into a habit of losing, perhaps rather likes it than not. But it is a game I could not afford to play at. So I would need to have a voice in the selection and choice of books.10 But this was not just a matter of making sure that the Press understood the need to make the books pay. It was also necessary to make sure that the books paid well, and this was a matter of marketing. The Delegates may have accepted the general principle of the need for marketing, but they had little practical experience of it. The Oxford inclination to publish books as and when the need arose was not likely to result in a coherent series, and coherent series were a means of establishing and expanding a presence in a growingly competitive market. G. W. Kitchin11 had been appointed as Secretary to the School Books Committee, and it was to Kitchin that Macmillan wrote a letter that best articulated the London publisher’s concern to ensure that the various




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A series of works such as you name: editions of English authors, or a series of Extracts from them, was among the earliest suggestions I made to the School Book Committee. But my feeling is very strong that these books should be done in a systematic manner, and should be connected with your Grammars and works on the language. I think your scheme should be drawn up carefully, submitted to a variety of persons engaged in tuition, and besides to men devoted to philological studies. The idea is that the English language should be taught as Scientifically and carefully as Greek or Latin. The idea is new. The field quite open, and if occupied, should be occupied promptly … and thoroughly as can be done. I would deprecate piecemeal haphazard publication.12 This is a remarkably early expression of the idea of English literature, if not replacing the Classics, at least being on a par with them, and being treated – in terms of a publishing programme – in exactly the same way. The Delegates must have taken at least part of the point because, as early as 1868, CPS English texts were carrying the collective title ‘English classics’.13 It is noticeable that Macmillan was keen to claim precedence in proposing the idea of an English series, partly because he recognised its novelty: ‘the idea is new’. His urging promptitude and thoroughness points to his fears about how OUP might operate left to its own devices, characterising this as ‘piecemeal haphazard publication’. The Delegates had been the first to articulate the general idea of the CPS, but it was Macmillan who shaped it intellectually and powered it by the urgency of the market. Extracting information about title production from the OUP archives is not as simple a procedure as one might expect. The records, though copious, are not comprehensive and, though occasionally detailed, are not consistent. We are still in the early stages of assembling the data on which The History of Oxford University Press will be written, but it is already clear that it will consist of a combination of internal evidence from the archive and related manuscript sources, and external bibliographical information. Now, the early bibliographical history of OUP has been well if not exhaustively covered by Falconer Madan working in the early twentieth century and Harry Carter in the 1970s.14 However, these surveys only cover the period 1478–1780, and do not venture into



lines within the CPS were coherent and integrated, and thus most marketable. On this occasion he was describing the proposed development of a series of English language and literature books:

the nineteenth century. After two years work on the post-1780 period, I now fully understand why. Creating even a tentative annual list of titles (or ALT) for OUP’s production from 1781 to 1900 is daunting task. For the time being I have been using COPAC, augmenting this as and when possible with ESTC, NSTC and the World Catalogue. The task of filtering out duplicates and bibliographical ghosts alone is huge, and continuing. However, when further advanced, this process will provide us with a reasonably accurate account of OUP’s title production yearby-year to 1900. This present study of the Clarendon Press Series is based on the current ALT listing for 1865–1900 with one additional feature. Having created a subset of CPS books (some 865 impressions so far), I have then crudely classified each title using the ten Dewey classes. It is on this material that the following description is based. Between the late 1860s and the 1890s the CPS represented a significant part of the title output of the Learned side of OUP. Numbers of new titles and reprints fluctuated from year to year but there was no mistaking the ever-present nature of the series in the Press’s output. Figure 4.1 is a histogram illustrating the number of new titles and reprints in CPS between 1865 and 1900. This clearly indicates substantial production from 1867 onwards with a few spikes in 1869, 1874 and a massive surge in title production in 1884–93, with a tail-off after that. But how does this profile fit into the

60

Number of impressions

50 40 30 20 10

1865 1866 1867 1868 1869 1870 1871 1872 1873 1874 1875 1876 1877 1878 1879 1880 1881 1882 1883 1884 1885 1886 1887 1888 1889 1890 1891 1892 1893 1894 1895 1896 1897 1898 1899 1900

0

Figure 4.1 Clarendon Press series, 1865–1900




Simon Eliot

overall production of titles and reprints by the Learned side? How significant was the Clarendon Press Series in relation to the Learned Press’s output of other new and reprinted titles? Figure 4.2 illustrates this. What is most striking is the considerable significance the series had between 1867 and the early 1890s. In 1867, for instance, CPS accounted for 48 per cent of total OUP titles recorded. Between 1871 and 1873 it varied from 52 to 60 per cent of total titles. Between 1867 and 1890 it only dropped below 30 per cent in one year (in 1881 to 27 per cent). Between these dates its average percentage share was 41 per cent. What had been invented by a small group of Delegates in a few months in 1863 came, to a significant extent, to characterise the nature of OUP’s secular publishing in the second half of the nineteenth century. Between 1865 and 1880 CPS books were commonly produced under a joint imprint: London [black letter] / MACMILLAN AND CO. / PUBLISHER TO THE UNIVERSITY OF / Oxford [black letter] As we have already seen, this was not an honorary title. Quite apart from Alexander Macmillan’s strategic role in steering the Press towards a clearer view of what series publication should be, he had additionally performed many tactical roles. From very early on, certainly before any Clarendon Press Series books had emerged, Macmillan had been called 180 Other titles

CPS titles

160 Number of impressions

140 120 100 80 60 40 20 1865 1866 1867 1868 1869 1870 1871 1872 1873 1874 1875 1876 1877 1878 1879 1880 1881 1882 1883 1884 1885 1886 1887 1888 1889 1890 1891 1892 1893 1894 1895 1896 1897 1898 1899 1900

0

Year

Figure 4.2 Clarendon Press series and other titles, 1865–1900



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upon frequently to attend meetings of the Delegates, and even more frequently to advise on possible authors, on print-runs and on the pricing of various CPS titles. The indispensability of the London publisher, particularly in the early years of planning and first publication, was made clear by Price in a letter dated 4 June 1864: ‘The Delegates of the Press will hold the last meeting for the term on Friday next at two o clock. The amount of business is considerable: and cannot be done without you.’15 Although there had been a variety of relationships between various Oxford and London printers throughout much of the Press’s history, this was of a different sort, and one that was characteristic of its period. Indeed, such a relationship could not have been conducted twenty years previously. In 1843 Oxford was joined to the rapidly expanding railway network, and from then on it was possible to travel at speed between the two cities, and to do so frequently and commonly with great promptness. By 1863 there were thirteen services per weekday to Oxford from Paddington, and eleven return services, each taking around 2 hours, though two express services a day cut the journey down to about 1 hour 40 minutes.16 In his correspondence with Bartholomew Price during the 1860s, Alexander Macmillan frequently promises to be up by the early train, or specifies the hour by which he will be in Oxford.17 For his part, Price names a time in the early afternoon at which he will call on Macmillan, adding that he will return to Oxford that evening as he has lectures to give on the following morning.18 But it was not just the technology of the railway system and its printed timetables that shaped and guided the OUP–Macmillan relationship. Telegrams were also sent buzzing up and down the wires between the two publishers to confirm decisions or alter plans, and both publishers relied on regular and frequent postal deliveries.19 Modern technology, in the form of the railways, the telegraph and the penny post, introduced in the 1830s and 1840s, made this relationship a closer and a more exacting one than would have been possible even in the days of the crack mail coach running on the newly constructed turnpike roads of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Alexander Macmillan would have had a vivid reason to appreciate this change. In 1844, just after the Macmillan brothers had published their first book, Alexander was summoned to Cambridge to tend his brother Daniel, who had suffered a haemorrhage. Travelling in the depths of winter on the outside of a stage coach, Alexander arrived too ill to give Daniel any immediate support.20 The CPS was in part the expression, not only of the powers of mid-Victorian printing technology,




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but also of the speed and high-volume nature of the communication systems that had been established only a couple of decades before. The first CPS titles were true to the Delegates’ declared aims of producing books not covering the most predictable areas but satisfying gaps in the educational market. The first was Chemistry for Students by A. W. Williamson published between 1 and 16 December 1865.21 This was followed in October 1866 by An Elementary Treatise on Heat by Balfour Stewart. However, it was 1867 that witnessed a substantial increase of CPS titles, thirteen titles in all in a recorded overall output of twentyeight OUP titles in that year. Science was again well represented with some strikingly adventurous subjects such as A Handbook of Descriptive and Practical Astronomy, a Treatise on Natural Philosophy by Sir William Thomson and P. G. Tait and An Elementary Treatise on Quaternions (a mathematical concept now mostly superseded by the use of vectors). In fact, science, without ever being the predominant subject, held its own in the CPS right through to 1900, as illustrated by Figure 4.3. In total, of the 865 impressions so far recorded in the Clarendon Press Series between 1865 and 1900, sixty were on scientific subjects. Some were considerable works by distinguished authors, such as A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism (1873) by James Clerk Maxwell in two volumes. Others were highly specialised and did not seem quite to answer the description of school books, such as Uniplanar Kinematics of Solids and 18


16 14 12 10 8 6 4 2 1865 1866 1867 1868 1869 1870 1871 1872 1873 1874 1875 1876 1877 1878 1879 1880 1881 1882 1883 1884 1885 1886 1887 1888 1889 1890 1891 1892 1893 1894 1895 1896 1897 1898 1899 1900

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Figure 4.3 Clarendon Press series, 1865–1900: Dewey 5 (pure science)



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Figure 4.4 Title page of the first volume of Maxwell’s Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism (with kind permission of the Senate House Library)

Fluids: with Applications to the Distribution and Flow of Electricity (1882). Indeed, it was a characteristic of CPS that, in whatever genre one looks at, there is a spread from the most basic introductions and readers to the most recondite of works. It was as if one series were expected to cover the work undertaken by, on the one hand, an eleven year old and, on the other, a research student and his supervisor. It appears that, despite Macmillan, CPS was regarded by OUP as a container into which virtually anything might be poured. Science maintained an impressively consistent presence in the CPS, though not a predominant one. Which, then, were the subjects that were most frequently printed and reprinted in the CPS? Figure 4.5 provides the answer. As you will see from this histogram, publishing in the 800 class (literature) was so prolific that it needed further articulation by being broken down into Dewey divisions, hence 82 English, 83 German and other Teutonic, 84 French, 85 Italian, 86 Spanish, 87 Latin and 88 Greek.




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Figure 4.5 Clarendon Press series, 1865–1900: Dewey classes

Outside Class 8 the most important subject was, perhaps unsurprisingly, Class 4, covering philology, under which were classified grammars, language exercises, histories of language etc. Overwhelmingly these were associated with support for the publications in the 82, 87 and 88 divisions, and could be thought of as justified by one of the Delegates’ first-announced priorities: ‘Exercises in Greek and Latin composition in Prose and Verse’. One hundred and thirty-seven editions and impressions were published in the general area of philology. Almost exactly equalling this proportion was Latin Literature (87) at 138 impressions and Greek literature (88) at 128 impressions. Thinking back to the Delegates’ original intentions, one might consider that French literature was rather poorly served at just thirty-four impressions. However, all three 1863 priorities were featured in the output of CPS, overwhelmingly, as one might have expected, in those traditional areas of scholarly publishing in which the Press had already distinguished itself: Greek, Latin and their grammars and histories. What had not been anticipated by the Delegates in 1863, yet what proved to be the dominant genre in the CPS right the way through to 1900 and beyond, was English literature. Indeed, 22 per cent of all CPS titles so far recorded between 1865 and 1900 were in the broad area of English literature. The production of English literature titles was not consistent over this period, as can be seen in Figure 4.6. But it did begin early. In the first major year of production, 1867, English featured strongly with




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The Early Years of the Clarendon Press Series 117 18

14 12 10 8 6 4 2 1865 1866 1867 1868 1869 1870 1871 1872 1873 1874 1875 1876 1877 1878 1879 1880 1881 1882 1883 1884 1885 1886 1887 1888 1889 1890 1891 1892 1893 1894 1895 1896 1897 1898 1899 1900

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Figure 4.6 Clarendon Press series, 1865–1900: Dewey 82 (English literature)

Book I–II of the Faery Queene (two volumes), two selections of texts from the Canterbury Tales and Specimens of Early English Selected from the Chief English Authors A.D. 1250–A.D. 1400. The range of topics covered and degrees of sophistication achieved varied as much as they did in science. There was, for instance everything from Scott, Lady of the Lake; with a Map of Scott’s Lake District (1891) to The Tale of Gamelyn, from the Harleian MS. No. 7334, collated with six other MSS, edited, with notes and a glossarial index by the Rev. Walter W. Skeat, 1884. There was, as one might expect, a significant emphasis on middle and, to a lesser extent, Old English, with such publications as An Anglo-Saxon Reader in Prose and Verse by Henry Sweet in 1876. This obviously provided the intellectual stiffening that English as a subject was regarded as needing in order to validate it as a legitimate addition to, or partial replacement for, the classics; in other words, following the pattern that had been proposed by Macmillan in 1863. For this reason the CPS saw many reprints of selections from the Canterbury Tales (‘the Prologue’ was printed at least nine times22 and ‘Man of Lawe’s tale’ etc. six times)23 and Piers Plowman (reprinted six times).24 However, Shakespeare was also much favoured (Hamlet five times,25 Merchant of Venice four times).26 Various combinations of Books I and II of Spencer’s Faery Queen were issued at least ten times.27 Milton’s English Poems was printed five times.28 But it was not just medieval and early modern: various works by Dryden, Pope (Essay on Man), Addison and Cowper were also featured.29 Burke was published and, more remarkably, the poetry of Burns and Byron.30




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Figure 4.7 Shakespeare Select Plays Hamlet, Clarendon Press series, Oxford, 1876

CPS books may have carried a consistent imprint but could vary in format and appearance from the magisterial two large octavo volumes of Maxwell’s A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism (1873) at 31s. 6d.31 to the limp bound small octavo of just eighty pages of Hamilton and Ball’s Book-keeping, published first in 1868 at 1s. 6d.32 Flexibility of format, presentation and price seems to have been as much a keynote of the design of the series as was the diversity in its subject coverage. It is time to draw back and see the CPS in its full context. From 1867 until at least 1900 the Clarendon Press Series made a substantial contribution to the total secular output of OUP. Indeed, it was almost as though the CPS provided the initial booster rocket that launched



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OUP title production in the later nineteenth century. On average in the 1850s the Press was producing about twenty titles a year. By the 1890s that average was around 110 a year. For most of this period CPS titles were providing between 30 and 50 per cent of that increase. Yet the decline of the series, when it came, was dramatic and steep. Between 1901 and 1905 the average annual number of Clarendon Press Series titles listed was eleven. In 1906 and 1907 it was just four. No CPS titles at all were listed between 1908 and 1910; there was just one in both 1911 and 1912, none in 1913. A ‘New Clarendon Press Series of Classical Authors for the use of schools’, announced in 1914, effectively marked the end of the original, eclectic series. The CPS, given its huge baggy monster nature, was never, despite Macmillan’s heroic efforts in the 1860s, really a series in any cogent sense of the word. However, it provided an experimenter’s bench on which the OUP constructed a multitude of genuine publishers’ series: Max Muller’s ‘The Sacred Books of the East’ from 1885, ‘Series of Old Welsh Texts’ from 1887, ‘Rulers of India Series’ from 1890, ‘Oxford Classical Texts’ from 1900, the ‘Tudor and Stuart Library’ from 1906, the ‘World’s Classics’ from 190633 and many others from the early twentieth century onwards. The two years that marked the beginning of the collapse of the CPS, 1906 and 1907, were significant. When Alexander Macmillan resigned from the role of OUP’s publisher in 1880, Henry Frowde was appointed in his stead. Under Frowde’s direction the Press’s base in London, which had begun as a Bible warehouse, grew into a major secular publishing business. Despite this, London’s status had remained uncertain. In 1906 Humphrey Milford was sent from Oxford to London to establish a quasi-independent branch of OUP – the London Business – which was hugely to expand the size and range of the Press’s book production. It was to target new markets such as children’s books and medical publications. It was to issue the ‘World’s Classics’ series. In this new world, the CPS was no longer needed, for now there was a separate business office devoted to doing in great ways what CPS had done in little. This did not mean that the series or its titles completely vanished overnight. The Oxford University Press General Catalogue dated November 1916, but issued with a supplement dated July 1917, illustrates both the remarkable consequence of the CPS and the fate of its component titles.34 At a conservative calculation this catalogue listed over 100 named series ranging from ‘World’s Classics’ through ‘Anecdota Oxoniensia’ to ‘Herbert Strang’s Romance of Modern Invention’. The list can be found in Figure 4.9.




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Figure 4.8 Front cover of OUP’s first general catalogue 1916–17 (private collection)

In terms of the component titles, many of the classic texts from CPS found their way into the ‘New Clarendon Press Series of Classical Authors’, while some of the CPS’s English literature texts had a home in ‘Clarendon Press Library Editions’. Many, however, were dispersed throughout the catalogue into other series or into none. Very occasionally, as on p. 255 where the Oxford Reading Book of 1867 is listed, the Clarendon Press Series is mentioned, probably by accident, but, apart from that, the 1916/17 catalogue is silent on the subject of the one series that started it all. The CPS did live on in a small number of individual records within some COPAC libraries, certainly into the late 1920s and probably



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Figure 4.9 A list of series mentioned in OUP’s first general catalogue 1916–17

beyond. This later period has still to be investigated, but it may well be that this is a vivid example of a cultural lag engendered by stereotype plates. The plates of still-in-demand textbooks would not have been donated to the war effort by being sent as scrap because they would have had considerable commercial value. They would then have been used, when paper supplies were back to normal, to produce new impressions containing the, by now, fossil imprint of the CPS. The CPS was a considerable success in its forty and more years of vigorous life: a large number of its titles went into many impressions and sold in their tens of thousands of copies. It had an impact on OUP’s income and on the educational system that it served, and




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through its royalty system generated substantial incomes for some of its most successful authors and editors, such as William Aldis Wright. Ultimately, however, the series was almost more important internally than externally. The Clarendon Press Series allowed, almost ‘gave permission’ to, certainly encouraged, OUP to experiment, and to do so in a separate place which was marked off from Learned publishing on the one side and from Bible publishing on the other. Its loose, ill-defined nature was both a reflection of the Delegates’ original intentions and a result of it being a product of trial and error – it was an area, in other words, for the Press to experiment in publishing. Once OUP had acquired a better sense of what it might do, and had started to do it through a host of specialised series, and by the creation of the London Business, the CPS had done its job. The modern Press that emerged in the late nineteenth century was, as Alexander Macmillan had encouraged it to be, a business and, as such, had to be unsentimental if it were to thrive. In such conditions when something is no longer productive, it is despatched. So it was with the Clarendon Press Series. In the whirligig of time this was also to happen to the London Business in 1976, the printing works in 1989 and the Poetry List in 1999. But these are other stories for other times.

Notes 1. The Oxford University Press’s private archive is used by kind permission of the Press. Clarendon Press Account 1811–1853; Bible stock notebooks, Box File 1831–1845, Old Store Row E2, Stack 1, Shelf 3. Delegates’ Orders 1853–1881, 28 December 1870, p. 108. 2. This process was chronicled in a separate ledger associated with the Delegates’ Orders sequence; see ‘Letters and Orders relating to termination of agency of Messrs J. H. & J. Parker in 1861’. 3. Delegates’ Orders 1853–1881, Friday 30 January 1863, p. 74. 4. Delegates’ Orders 1853–1881, Thursday 5 February 1863, p. 74. 5. The History of Oxford University Press is to be published in four volumes: 1478–1780 edited by Ian Gadd, 1780–1896 edited by Simon Eliot, 1896–1970 edited by Roger Louis, 1970–2004 edited by Keith Robbins. The first three volumes are due for publication in 2012, the final volume in 2013. 6. Delegates’ Orders 1853–1881, Friday 12 June 1863, pp. 79–81. 7. Delegates’ Orders 1853–1881, Friday 12 June 1863, pp. 79–81. 8. The School Book Committee was established in 1865 and was wound up in 1884 when its functions were taken over by a ‘Publications Committee’. See School Book Committee 1865–1884 (OUP/m/1/3) and Peter Sutcliffe (1978: 88). 9. Delegates’ Orders 1853–1881, Friday 12 June 1863, pp. 79–81. 10. Macmillan letters to OUP 1865–9, Add. Mss. 55326, 2.



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11. G. W. Kitchin (1827–1912) of Christ Church lectured in a number of Oxford colleges and was responsible for promoting the study of modern history and modern languages in the university. At various times he was university examiner in mathematics, classics and modern history. He performed the role of Secretary to the Delegates in 1866–8, after which he was replaced by Bartholomew Price; he was also the Secretary of the School Books Committee in 1865–74. He was author or editor of a number of CPS titles. 12. Macmillan letters to OUP 1865–9, Add. Mss. 55326, 19 (22 February 1866). 13. See, for instance, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, Book I, ed. R. W. Church (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1868). 14. Falconer Madan, Oxford Books, a Bibliography of Printed Works relating to the University and City of Oxford or Printed or Published There (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, Volume I 1895, Volume II 1912, Volume III 1931). Harry Carter, A History of the Oxford University Press, Volume I (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), pp. 414–612. 15. Add. Mss. 55326, fo. 5. 16. See Bradshaw’s London Railway Guide (London: W. J. Adams, March 1863). Return fares for London to Oxford in 1863 were: first class, 11s.; second class, 8s. 4d.; third class, 5s. 3d. 17. ‘I have a note from Mr Kitchin saying he calls the meeting for Tuesday at 2, and have written today to say I will be with him.’ Macmillan to Price, 18 November 1865; ‘But Wednesday at 10.30 will suit me very well. I will look for you at that hour.’ Macmillan to Price, 1 January 1866; Add. Mss. 55326, fos 2B, 5. 18. Price to Macmillan, 22 January 1869, Price letter book 1, fo. 322. 19. See, for instance, Add. Mss. 55326, fo. 1. 20. Charles Morgan, The House of Macmillan 1843–1943 (London: Macmillan & Co., 1943), p. 25. 21. After Macmillan’s withdrawal from the role of Publisher the imprint changed: London [black letter] / HENRY FROWDE / [OUP shield] / OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS WAREHOUSE / AMEN CORNER, E.C. / 22. Imprint dates so far found (to 1900): 1867, 1872, 1874, 1877, 1883, 1885 (‘Fifty-sixth thousand’), 1886, 1889, 1897. 23. Imprint dates so far found (to 1900): 1867, 1877, 1879, 1889, 1891, 1897. 24. Imprint dates so far found (to 1900): 1869, 1874, 1881, 1888, 1893, 1900. 25. Imprint dates so far found (to 1900): 1873, 1874, 1876, 1884, 1896. 26. Imprint dates so far found (to 1900): 1868, 1874, 1883, 1891. 27. Imprint dates so far found (to 1900): 1867 (Books I–II), 1869 (Book I ‘4th ed.’), 1872 (Book II, ‘2nd ed.’), 1873 (Book I, ‘5th ed.’), 1874 (Book II, ‘3rd ed.), 1877 (Book I, ‘9th ed.’), 1883 (Book I ‘10th ed.’), 1886 (Book I), 1895 (Book II ‘9th ed.’), 1897 (Book I). 28. Imprint dates so far found (to 1900): 1872, 1875, 1876 (‘4th ed.’), 1880, 1891. 29. Imprint dates so far found (to 1900): Dryden, 1871, 1889, 1893, 1896; Pope, 1869, 1878 (‘6th ed.’), 1884; Addison, 1875; Cowper, 1874, 1896. 30. Imprint dates so far found (to 1900): Burke, 1876–8, 1886–92, 1897; Burns, 1889; Byron, 1885. 31. Imprint dates so far found (to 1900): 1873, 1881. 32. Imprint dates so far found (to 1900): 1868, 1888, 1896, 1899. 33. This series was created by the inventive publisher Grant Richards in 1901 but was taken over by Henry Frowde of OUP’s London Business in 1906




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and extensively developed by Frowde’s successor, Humphrey Milford. In a letter dated 18 June 1942 to Churchill’s secretary in support of a pension for Richards, Milford wrote ‘the WORLD’S CLASSICS series which he did invent, did float, did carry to a position of triumph, and long before EVERYMAN’S LIBRARY was thought of’. Milford Letter Books – 167M, 18 May 1942–23 February 1943, 119–20. 34. Oxford University Press General Catalogue, November 1916 (Oxford, London, New York: Humphrey Milford, 1916).

Selected bibliography Briggs, Asa (2008) A History of Longmans. London: British Library. Carter, Harry (1975) A History of the Oxford University Press. Volume I: To the Year 1780. Oxford: Clarendon Press. James, Elizabeth (ed.) (2002) Macmillan: A Publishing Tradition. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Madan, Falconer (1895, 1912, 1931) Oxford Books: A Bibliography of Printed Works Relating to the University and City of Oxford or Printed or Published There, Volumes I–III. Oxford: The Clarendon Press. Morgan, Charles, The House of Macmillan 1843–1943. London: Macmillan & Co. Some Account of the Oxford University Press 1468–1926 (1926) Oxford: Clarendon Press. Sutcliffe, Peter (1978) The Oxford University Press: An Informal History. Oxford: Clarendon Press.



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Personality, Appreciation and Literary Education: Harrap’s Poetry and Life Series, 1911–1930 Patrick Buckridge

A minor but arresting fact about Harrap’s ‘Poetry and Life’ series is that it quotes non-English-language poetry entirely in the original, with no accompanying translation. This is hardly the most obvious feature of the series, since it comprises over thirty-five critical biographies of canonical poets, only four of whom – Horace, Schiller, Victor Hugo and Dante – are neither British nor American.1 It is nonetheless a puzzling editorial decision to have made – perhaps even (in Sir Humphrey Appleby’s sense) a ‘courageous’ one – but clearly quite deliberate, and with no half-measures: not only are there no translations provided on the page, or in footnotes or appendices, but there are also no recommended translations as such (though some of the critical works recommended in the bibliographies to the volumes were more open to compromise in this regard, and do contain translations). The quantity of quoted verse in these volumes, furthermore, is quite large: quoting whole poems wherever possible was a stated policy for the series, and a quarter or more of the 150-odd pages in most volumes was standard. And as if to make things yet more challenging to the Anglophone reader, Schiller’s poetry is quoted throughout in black-letter German (though extracts from his letters, by contrast, are given in translation). Whatever the thinking behind Harrap’s policy on foreign quotation when it was first implemented in 1913 (a question to be addressed in due course), it still seemed right in 1927, when the annual sales catalogue says of the ongoing Poetry and Life series, presumably as a point of pride, that ‘the poems are quoted in the language of the originals’.2 Just how unusual was it? What were the other publishers doing? The short answer is: they were providing translations. The Great Writers series, published by the firm of Walter Scott, most of them twenty years before, quote their foreign writers (Schiller, Heine, Goethe, Lessing, 125



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Balzac, Voltaire and Cervantes) entirely in English translation, as do the seventeen volumes of Foreign Classics for English Readers edited by Mrs Oliphant and published by Blackwood from the late 1870s. The one volume on a foreign writer (Anatole France) in William Heinemann’s Contemporary Men of Letters series (1908) also quotes him in English. We can reasonably conclude, then, that the Harrap policy resulted from a deliberate decision to be different – and different in a way that seems, at this distance, almost perversely designed to alienate a general readership that in others of its series the company had seemed eager to meet more than halfway – for example, with their contemporaneous ‘Bilingual Series’ of modern-language readers for students, in French, Spanish, Italian, German and Russian, with selected stories and translations on facing pages. The Bilingual Series was even advertised on the dust jackets of the Poetry and Life volumes! I have described this unusual feature of Harrap’s Poetry and Life series because it highlights, in parvo, some of the distinctive aims, assumptions and methods of the series, including a strong commitment to a particular conception of literary ‘authenticity’, and an educationally proactive approach to readers. I propose to explore these aspects of the series as a whole, considered partly in its own terms and according to its explicit editorial rationale; but also, to some extent, in terms of the larger cultural project to which the publishing house of Harrap devoted its energies in the first four decades of the twentieth century. My task is hampered somewhat, and my conclusions made somewhat more tentative than they might otherwise be, by the lack of a correspondence archive for the firm, but there are various other sources – memoirs, catalogues and the books themselves – from which inferences can fairly be drawn.3 Poetry and Life started out in 1910 as a proposal put to George G. Harrap, the founder of the firm, by William Henry Hudson (not the naturalist of that name), who was at this time a staff lecturer in literature, of eight years’ standing, with the University Extension Board of the University of London. Hudson had had an interesting career: with, as far as I can determine, no academic degree, he seems to have cultivated a broad and deep knowledge, not just of English, French and German literature, but of the philosophy of literary study, almost entirely independently and from an early age.4 Having refused the offer of legal articles in Bristol in 1882, he spent a year in New York, then – after returning to England and working as private secretary first to Herbert Spencer, and then to Sir Frederic Leighton, the painter – he returned to America in 1890, where he worked for two years at Cornell University as an assistant librarian,



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and was then recruited to the English Department of the newly founded Leland Stanford Jr College in California, where he was employed as a Professor for nine years (1892–1901).5 He resigned in January 1901,6 and returned to England to take up a lectureship with the University of London Extension Board, where he took over the responsibilities of the departing John Churton Collins. During the last twenty years of his life he published some forty books of history, biography, literary history and criticism – even finding time to publish a novel and a book of poems – while at the same time maintaining a killing (perhaps literally!) schedule of Extension lectures. He died of heart disease at the age of fifty-six.7 The first volume in the series, Keats and his Poetry, written by Hudson himself, appeared in 1911; and all but the last half-dozen titles had appeared by 1918, the year in which Hudson died. (See Appendix for dates of first publication.) As the Appendix shows, the list of poets in the series is very canonical even in today’s terms, with just a couple of surprising absences – Shakespeare and Goethe – and no really surprising

Figure 5.1 William Henry Hudson (1862–1918)



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inclusions: Chatterton and Francis Thompson might not appear in such a list today, but both were held in generally higher regard in the early decades of the twentieth century than they are now. Clearly, then, no concerted attempt was being made here to extend most readers’ literary horizons, to pique their curiosity or to challenge their canonical assumptions in the way that, for example, Heinemann, Blackwood and Swan & Sonnenschein (with its eccentric, crocodile-clad Dilettante Library) had all done in the preceding decade or so. If, as John Spiers suggests, series are ‘a distinct, carefully crafted, particularized and instrumental means of publishing’,8 what was this series, qua publishing instrument, attempting to do? A sensible initial approach to that question might be to consider what the series editor actually said he was trying to do; the more so when we notice the large number of volumes written by the editor, W. H. Hudson himself. Using the same author for several volumes in such a series was not especially unusual: the Great Writers series, for example, had used William Sharp, Richard Garnett and the series editor Frank Marzials for three or four volumes each; and the fifty-odd volumes of Macmillan’s two English Men of Letters series included four by Sir Leslie Stephen. But to have the general editor write nine books in a list of thirty-five suggests either an unusually regulated and micro-managed series, or a degree of difficulty in recruiting authors. Attracting authors quite as eminent as those in the Scott and Macmillan series may well have been an uphill battle: Harrap in 1911 had only been in business at all for ten years, and committed to a general literature list for less than half that time.9 Not surprisingly then, there are not many established scholars or critics in the series; and of those few some, like the prolific eighteenth-century scholar Reginald Brimley Johnson (Tennyson), seem to have taken on assignments outside their specialisation, perhaps suggesting a spirit of adventurous altruism. There were also several fairly recent university graduates, like Allardyce Nicoll (Blake) and Ifor Evans (Morris), who later became eminent literary scholars, and another, Kathleen Royds (Coleridge, Mrs Browning), who later gained fame in a different field (under her married surname Innes) as Chair of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. Still others were recruited from the ranks of private school teachers (Winbolt and Chapman) and teacher-educators (Edmunds, Smeaton and Amy Cruse). The established literary biographer, Thomas Seccombe, Assistant Editor of the DNB, was originally commissioned for the second volume in the series, a one-off double on Johnson and Goldsmith, but his name was withdrawn from the published lists after 1914 and replaced by



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Hudson’s (who did then write the book himself, which appeared under his name in 1918). But Hudson was not there simply as a trouble-shooter. He was a general editor with a vision, determined that the series he was responsible for should incorporate his own well defined and closely argued views about the study of literature in general, and of poetry in particular. Every volume was published with a standard two-page ‘General Preface’ which summarises, or at least alludes to, these views. It starts from the undeniable fact that with the vast majority of young students of literature a living interest in the work of any poet can best be aroused, and an intelligent appreciation of it secured, when it is immediately associated with the character and career of the poet himself.10 Fresh light, Hudson continues, will always be thrown upon a poem by ‘some knowledge of the personality of the writer’ and by ‘a consideration of the circumstances in which [the poem] had its birth’. He anticipates the counter-claim from ‘the purely aesthetic critic’ – he probably has Walter Pater in mind here – that the poem ‘should be regarded as a self-contained and detached piece of art, having no personal affiliations or bearing’. And while not rejecting that view out of hand, he restates his belief ‘that in the earlier stages of study at any rate, poetry is most valued and loved when it is most human and vital’, and that what he calls the ‘biographical method of interpretation’ is the best way of bringing this home to the reader. The ‘chief purpose of the present series’, he says, is to consider ‘biography and production … together and in intimate association. In other words … to interest the reader in the lives and personalities of the poets dealt with, and at the same time to use biography as an introduction and key to their writings.’ This notion of a tight reciprocity between life and work – or biography and production, as he puts it – turns on the concept of ‘personality’, a term Hudson uses but does not define in the short Preface to the series volumes. In the book he published in 1910, however, An Introduction to the Study of Literature, he expatiates on the concept at several different points, conceiving it to be, among other things, that quality of distinctive individuality which it is the chief business of criticism to articulate: A great book is born of the brain and heart of its author; he has put himself into its pages; they partake of his life, and are instinct with his individuality. … A great book owes its greatness in the first instance to the greatness of the personality which gave it life.11




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In a three-page Appendix, ‘On Personality in Literature’, he insists – pace the comparativist H. M. Posnett – that a ‘personality-based’ approach to literary study as a whole can accommodate the supra-personal character of much ancient literature, on the grounds that his notion of personality is fundamentally expressive rather than psychological; and he is prepared (if pressed) to collectivise, nationalise or racialise it – to speak, for example, of the ‘personality’ of a nation and its people. What he cleaves to, however, is the conviction that personality in his sense is the main guarantee of authenticity in literature. He uses that term several times in the Introduction, and also – more or less synonymously with it – the words genuineness, sincerity, freshness and originality, all of them denoting the valued quality in a work of literature, which it behoves both reader and critic to strive to appreciate (pp. 14–18). Finding and articulating the ‘personalities’ of a series of great poets, as he seeks to do in this series, therefore draws as much upon literary criticism as it does on biographical research. ‘The biographical study’, he says, will be used as a setting for a selection, as large as space will permit, of [the poet’s] representative poems. Such poems, where possible, will be reproduced in full, and care will be taken to bring out their connection with his character, his circumstances, and the movement of his mind. This together with ‘so much more general literary criticism as may seem to be needed to supplement the biographic material, and to exhibit both the essential qualities and the historical importance of his work’. The resulting proportion of critical commentary to straight biography in these volumes is certainly somewhat greater than in earlier comparable series, but more striking than that is the large amount of quoted verse in the volume, highlighted by a full listing of the poems quoted in each volume. In this latter respect at least, Hudson’s claim that ‘the plan thus pursued is substantially in the nature of a new departure’ was probably justified; so too his claim to be appealing to a combined readership – ‘to teachers and students of literature, and no less to the general lover of English poetry’ – though not infrequently made by textbook authors and publishers at the time, was also perhaps more credible than most. This is an appropriate point at which to note, if only in passing, the possibility of a previously unnoticed intersection between Hudson and T. S. Eliot during the poet’s earliest years in London. During the war Eliot worked as a tutor for the University Extension Boards of both Oxford and



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London. For the latter institution, he designed and delivered a three-year course of lectures on modern English literature to a small class in Southall, Middlesex, beginning in October 1916.12 Eliot’s syllabus notes survive, and there is a fairly close match between the scope (though not the individual lectures) of Eliot’s course and those that Hudson had been teaching since 1902 – enough to suggest the possibility that Eliot may have been picking up the slack for Hudson, whose ‘several serious illnesses interfered with [his] lecturing and general literary work’ in the few years prior to his death in the summer of 1918.13 There is no evidence that Eliot and Hudson ever met – he is not mentioned by name in Eliot’s letters – but Eliot did make a number of comments about Extension lecturing in essays and letters, most of them disparaging, and he may well have had Hudson, or someone very like him, in mind when he observed that: A popular theme of Extension lectures and the like is the Relation of Poetry to Life. Poetry has been interrogated a good many times by these conscientious educators, who have exerted considerable ventriloquial ingenuity in the replies they have pretended to extract from them.14 One of the defining postulates of Eliot’s early criticism, first formulated in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919), was his rejection of the expressive nexus between the artist’s life and art, and insistence on the proper impersonality of the great artist. It is tempting to think that Eliot may have formulated it in a spirit of resistance to its direct opposite, the doctrine of art as personality, which he regarded – probably correctly – as an orthodoxy in Extension English at this time, and which is certainly central to Hudson’s Poetry and Life series.15 For Hudson, then, the three elements of a typical volume in this remarkably consistent and uniform series were biography, criticism and poetry, and these elements all worked together, ideally, to produce for the reader, as part of the experience of reading the book, an appreciative response to the poetry. That response is shaped, on the one hand, by a sympathetic apprehension of the poet’s personality, a process triggered by ‘authentic’ details like the poet’s signature in facsimile on the front cover16 and the photograph or engraving of the poet used as a frontispiece, and carried through the volume by a strictly writing-centred life-narrative. At the same time, a properly appreciative response to the poetry is being modelled and influenced at every point by interpretative literary criticism. The point and purpose of it all is to enable readers to read the poetry better than they would otherwise do – and to do it then and there. This, it seems




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clear, is how Hudson hoped every book in the series might operate: as a scaffold for aesthetic experience rather than a source of information. And the self-contained nature of the scaffolding – its ‘DIY’ dimension – made it suitable for the school and self-education markets alike. In a booklet published a few years earlier by Thomas Crowell, The Meaning and Value of Poetry (1901), Hudson described his conception of poetic response at greater length: The poet appeals to the poet within ourselves – to our own poetic faculty … the true secret of a poem can be seized and appropriated only by the exercise [by the reader] of an imaginative power similar in kind to that which originally gave the poem birth, however much it may fall short of such power in strength and vitality.17 This insistence on the necessity for readers to ‘respond to [the poet’s] genius and identify themselves with his passion, [so] that their own reading of his written words becomes, as it were, a re-creation … of the poem, which they thus absorb into their lives’ (p. 23), entails a corresponding emphasis on the importance of a kind of documentary authenticity as the empirical basis and imaginative stimulus for that act of re-creation. Reproducing at least some part of the poet’s own textual environment, on this theory, helps readers to place themselves by his side. This was not the first time Hudson and his publisher had invoked ‘authenticity’ in the form of documentary verisimilitude. Immediately prior to the Poetry and Life venture, in 1908–9, Hudson had completed the first five – as it turned out they were the only five – of a series of single editions of Shakespeare’s plays that was called The Elizabethan Shakespeare. These are quite elaborate, scholarly, ‘Arden-like’ editions, running to about 200 pages, each with a General Preface, thirty to forty page Introduction and full apparatus, including variorum textual readings, extensive critical and historical notes, a glossary and an index. The explicitly distinguishing feature of the series was that it presented the First Folio text of each play, almost untouched. In his Preface Hudson expressed the view that ‘there is practically nothing in the form of … the First Folio which should cause the present-day reader any difficulty in reading it’.18 Accordingly, aside from modernising some printing conventions, he let the Folio text stand, ‘with all its imperfections on its head … but in easily readable form’. The individual editions were praised by serious and eminent Shakespeare scholars such as Edward Dowden, but the short life of the series suggests it may not have found a public audience for whom the ‘authenticity effect’ gained by ‘fidelity to



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the early text and the preservation of the Elizabethan atmosphere of the First Folio’ outweighed its difficulties as a reading text, and the superfluity of its professional scholarship. (Twenty years later, Harrap issued another, more long-lived and presumably more successful series of Shakespeare plays for students, the New Readers’ Shakespeare, also called the Kingsway Shakespeare, edited by F. H. Pritchard and G. B. Harrison, which used the Globe text, dropped most of the critical apparatus and interpolated lengthy stage directions in the manner of Shaw.) I have dwelt a little on Hudson’s earlier foray into the popular dissemination of classic literature and scholarship for two reasons. The first is that it shows how the Poetry and Life series maintained a commitment to the kind of documentary authenticity that drove the Shakespeare series, while attempting also to strike a new, more popular balance between historical and textual scholarship on the one hand, and direct literary appreciation on the other. Hudson’s stubborn adherence to that notion of documentary authenticity may account, at least in part, for the untranslated German, French and Latin poetry to which I referred at the beginning (notably, the volume on Dante, the only one to use English translations, is the only volume on a foreign poet to have been published after Hudson’s death in 1918). The second reason for dwelling on the Elizabethan Shakespeare series is that it highlights certain of Hudson’s institutional affiliations more clearly and hence, by extension, the institutional genealogy of the Poetry and Life series. I said a moment ago that the Elizabethan Shakepeare editions are somewhat ‘Arden-like’, and since Methuen’s Arden editions had been appearing since 1899, the similarities, such as they were, could hardly have escaped Hudson or for that matter George Harrap, who took an active interest in such matters. In fact, though, the Elizabethan Shakespeare editions bear a somewhat stronger resemblance in both pitch and format to Heath’s English Classics, a series of about twenty American College editions of selections and single whole works by classic British authors, initially published since the early 1890s by the Boston educational firm of D. C. Heath & Co. These featured lengthy introductions, full descriptive and explanatory notes at the back, a bibliography of recommended biography and criticism, and in some cases discussion questions, suggested comparisons and critical extracts for students. The elaborate apparatus was designed, in the words of Vida Scudder of Wellesley, editor of the series edition of Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, to facilitate ‘the study of the drama as a work of art and as a historic product’, and to ‘make the poem more widely known to the general reader, and more available for purposes of the classroom’.19




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Hudson himself edited a volume in the series, the one on Addison’s Sir Roger De Coverley Papers. Furthermore, George Harrap had been acting for several years as the British agent for Heath, first as an employee of the failing English publisher Isbisters, and then, after 1901, through his own newly formed company (soon to become George G. Harrap & Co.), which traded in Britain under the name of D. C. Heath & Co. for its first two years of operations.20 Most of the Heath’s English Classics series were published in London under the Heath imprint from Harrap’s early premises in York Street and Portsmouth Street, and a slightly later series of ten plays, Heath’s Shakespeare, was also published in London and advertised in Harrap’s sales catalogues. The relay of institutions and individuals from the American English Classics series to the British Poetry and Life series has interesting implications for tracing the flow of ideas and practices concerning the study of literature between Britain and America at about the turn of the twentieth century. A factor that seems to have been largely overlooked, even in the midst of the surge in ‘transatlantic studies’ in recent years, is the interchange of British and American ideas about literary education in the early decades of the century. The very idea of literary appreciation as a systematic practice of detailed attention to the aesthetic dimensions of classic works of world literature had much stronger roots in the American colleges than in English universities where, despite the best efforts of John Churton Collins and others, university study of English remained in the grip of classics, philology and critical dilettantism until well into the twentieth century.21 Thus, in William Morton Payne’s book English in American Universities,22 the descriptive rationales given by English department professors from ‘twenty representative institutions’ nearly all ‘show the existence of a well-marked differentiation … of literature from linguistics’, and express a conscious commitment ‘to impart the spirit of literary appreciation no less than the methods of exact scholarship in literary investigation’ (pp. 25, 21). Payne himself proudly proclaims that Churton Collins’s long-cherished goal of a School of English devoted to the aesthetic study of literature as literature in English and English translations had been largely realised in the American colleges (pp. 18–19). The widespread use of a textbook like Benjamin Heydrick’s How to Study Literature: A Guide to the Intensive Study of Literary Masterpieces testifies to an American interest in ‘close reading’ of a kind, long before the advent of the New Critics.23 These are very much also the ideas and attitudes that Hudson was elaborating and implementing just a few years later, in his critical writing and literary editing; and this is hardly surprising, as he was employed as a



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Professor of English at the Leland Stanford Jr University in California for nine years, 1892–1901, and is one of the lecturers named in the Stanford chapter of the Payne collection just referred to. Also mentioned, in more than one chapter, is another expatriate Englishman, Richard Green Moulton (1849–1925), Professor of Comparative Literature and Lawrence Chair in the School of General Literature at the University of Chicago, a scholar who was widely respected in the USA in the early twentieth century for his work on defining and theorising literary appreciation as the science of ‘inductive criticism’, and for his tireless advocacy of the value of studying the masterpieces of world literature by that method. Like Hudson, Moulton had migrated to the USA in 1891, in his case after twenty years of lecturing in literature with Cambridge University Extension. Given Hudson’s own later attachment to the London University Extension Board, it seems clear that the British extramural system also played a significant role in developing what might be called the systematic appreciation of the classics.24 Hudson, like Moulton, worked for years in the two institutions which, at that moment in history, offered real scope for the teaching of great literature as literature, namely the American university system and British University Extension. But Hudson’s last and most ambitious attempt to convince large numbers of people of the pleasure and value of studying classic literature for its own sake – and to show them how to do it – involved a third institution, that of book publishing. The Poetry and Life series is that attempt. No doubt well aware that no one book could make a real and lasting difference – not even one as brilliant in its way as Arnold Bennett’s Literary Taste (1909), and certainly not his own well written, but somewhat less sparkling, singletons on the subject – Hudson probably saw the series as a training regimen, a sequence of carefully orchestrated experiences of appreciation – cumulative, but in terms not so much of an orderly acquisition of literary-historical knowledge as of a gradual, unabashedly normative process of taste-modification by means of repeated exposure to selected poetry, illuminated and enlivened by biography and criticism. In his Introduction to the Study of Literature, published just a year before the first book in the Poetry and Life series appeared in 1911, he described at some length the process by which the ordinary reader’s initial likes and dislikes may be ‘transcended’: we may recognize the existence of great qualities in a given piece of literature even when we are unable to enjoy it; indeed, it may frequently happen … that it is by reason of its great qualities that a piece of literature may fail to amuse, please, touch us – may even baffle and




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To remedy that situation, he continues, what is needed is ‘training in enjoyment’, a concept that the liberal-idealist philosopher Bernard Bosanquet had developed some years earlier, in an essay of that name to which Hudson refers, as a response to the destructive separation of pleasure and moral virtue that was characteristic, in Bosanquet’s view, of English popular culture.25 Arnold Bennett, early in his single-volume ‘training programme’ Literary Taste and How to Form It, tells his targeted taste-trainee to go away and read Charles Lamb’s essay ‘Dream Children’ before continuing to read his book.26 Whether Hudson, in a similar spirit, thought that the readers of his book on Schiller, for example, should go off and learn German when they encountered the first poem we may doubt – though it is true that Harrap could also have sold them books to teach themselves the language, and that some of these books were advertised on the Poetry and Life dust jackets. Whether, in the end, many sensibilities were formed and trained by this series, who can say? The reviewer of the series for the Athenaeum in 1927 found the books admirable for the purpose of introducing young readers to the work of good poets. There can be no doubt in the minds of those who are concerned with teaching English in the middle and higher forms of secondary schools that the biographical method of interpretation rouses an interest which disconnected selections of poetry can never attain. The series is well designed, the books are of about the right length, well printed, and contain roughly about [sic] 55% of biography and 45% of selected poems or passages from poems.27 We can be sure that Harrap marketed the series to schools as effectively as they could have been: the price – 1s. 3d. or 1s. 6d. for the limp-cover school editions in 1927 – was attractive, and the firm’s dual organisation as both general and educational publishers was by this time acknowledged and admired by other firms.28 The actual rate of school adoptions in Britain and other countries is material for further research (and even this, of course, would tell us little about reading outcomes). Evidence of the books’ general readership is even more elusive. Harrap appear not to have reissued them beyond the 1930s, but since the 1960s they have been reprinted many times by other publishers, including Folcroft, Kennikat, AMS and Kessinger. Ownership inscriptions I have sighted in



repel us; for the enjoyment of greatness in art needs strenuous effort which, through indolence or apathy or want of preparation, we may be unwilling or unable to put forth. (p. 303)

thirty or so of the Harrap imprints suggest that the only slightly more expensive hardback editions may have been a popular purchase by schoolteachers and junior lecturers. The opportunistic uses to which such readers probably put them may not have been exactly what Hudson envisaged for them, but he would no doubt have been happy enough for them to have remained part of the larger project of literary education in the mid-twentieth century. Their frequent reprintings suggest that this may not be too much to claim for them.

Appendix: The Poetry and Life Series, ed. W.H. Hudson. George G. Harrap & Co., 1911–1932 1. 2.

Keats and his Poetry Johnson and Goldsmith and their Poetry 3. Gray and his Poetry 4. Shelley and his Poetry 5. Coleridge and his Poetry 6. Matthew Arnold and his Poetry 7. Lowell and his Poetry 8. Burns and his Poetry 9. Spenser and his Poetry 10. Mrs Browning and her Poetry 11 Milton and his Poetry 12. Scott and his Poetry 13. Elizabethan Lyrists and their Poetry 14. Tennyson and his Poetry 15. Byron and his Poetry 16. Longfellow and his Poetry 17. Poe and his Poetry 18. Horace and his Poetry 19. Pope and his Poetry 20. Browning and his Poetry 21. Wordsworth and his Poetry 22. Schiller and his Poetry 23. Rossetti and his Poetry 24. Cowper and his Poetry 25. Marlowe and his Poetry 26. Chaucer and his Poetry 27. Walt Whitman and his Poetry 28. Chatterton and his Poetry 29. Whittier and his Poetry 30. Victor Hugo and his Poetry 31. William Blake and his Poetry 31b Herrick and his Poetry 32. Dryden and his Poetry 33. William Morris and his Poetry

W. H. Hudson W. H. Hudson

1911 1918*

W. H. Hudson E. W. Edmunds Kathleen E. Royds Francis Bickley W. H. Hudson H. A. Kellow S. E. Winbolt Kathleen E. Royds W. H. Hudson A. E. Morgan Amy Cruse R. Brimley Johnson William Dick Oliphant Smeaton Lewis M. Chase J. B. Chapman E. W. Edmunds Ernest Rhys W. H. Hudson W. H. Hudson Mrs F. S. Boas James A. Roy John H. Ingram E. W.Edmunds H. B. Binns John H. Ingram W. H. Hudson W. H. Hudson Allardyce Nicoll T. Bruce Dilks Allardyce Nicoll Ifor Evans

1911 1911 1911 1911 1911 1911 1912 1912 1912 1912 1913 1913 1913 1913 1913 1913 1913 1914 1914 1914 1914 1914 1914 1914 1915 1916 1917 1918 1922 [?1922] 1923 1925




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34. 35. 36. 37.

John Donne and his Poetry Francis Thompson and his Poetry Christina Rossetti and her Poetry Dante and his Poetry

F. W. Payne T. H. Wright E. Birkhead Mary B. Whiting

1926 1927 1930 1932

*Author given as Thomas Seccombe in 1914 and earlier.

Notes 1. For reasons that will emerge, the volume on Dante is the exception: its quotations are all in English (and English alone), using translations by Rossetti, Shelley, Cary and Dean Plumptre. 2. Harrap’s Reference List of Educational and General Books (1927). 3. Harrap’s London archives and book-stock were destroyed when their premises at 182 High Holborn were firebombed in early 1941. A small quantity of files – mainly authors’ contracts – survived, and are currently held in the office of Chambers-Harrap in Edinburgh; but no correspondence and no readers’ reports have been located. 4. Hudson provides a brief account of his early reading in a preface to his biography of Sir Walter Scott (Hudson 1901a: ix–x). An extract from this account is accessible on the Reading Experience Database, 1450–1945 (http:// www.open.ac.uk/Arts/reading/), 14715, 14716. 5. Information from staff files at Cornell University Archives, Ithaca, NY, and Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA. 6. A full account of the resignation (in protest, with others, at a perceived violation of academic freedom by the President) is given on the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle, 73(1), Wednesday 16 January 1901. 7. A. A. Jack, ‘William Henry Hudson: A Memoir’, in Hudson (1919: v–xiv). 8. John Spiers (2007: 4). 9. George G. Harrap (1935: 65–6). 10. The General Preface appears in all volumes in the series, on pp. 5–7. An approximate page reference is to be understood for this and all subsequent quotations from it. 11. W. H. Hudson (1910: 15). 12. Ronald Schuchard (1999: 25–51). 13. Jack, ‘William Henry Hudson: A Memoir’, p. xii. 14. T. S. Eliot, ‘Modern Tendencies in Poetry’, October 1919, quoted in Schuchard (1999: 50). 15. I would like to thank Elizabeth James of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, for making this suggestion to me. 16. The ‘autographic effect’ of the signature is sometimes just that. The signature ‘Horace’ [sic] does not bear much thinking about. Perhaps to counterbalance that audacity, a genuine image of Augustus was used as frontispiece in preference to a doubtful image of Horace. 17. W. H. Hudson (1901b: 21). 18. ‘General Preface,’ in The Tragedie of Julius Caesar, with Introduction and Notes by William Henry Hudson. The Elizabethan Shakespeare (London: George G. Harrap & Co., 1909), p. v. (Hudson’s seven-page General Preface



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19. 20. 21.

22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

is printed in the four other plays in the series: The Merchant of Venice, Loves Labour’s Lost, A Midsommer Night’s Dreame and The Winters Tale). Percy Bysshe Shelley (1892: ii). George G. Harrap, ‘The Twenty-Fifth Anniversary of the House’, Harrap Mercury, Christmas 1926, p. 75. An exception must be made for Scotland, where a tradition of systematic formal ‘appreciation’ of literature was established in the second half of the eighteenth century, first by Adam Smith at the University of Glasgow, and later by Hugh Blair at the University of Edinburgh. See Franklin E. Court (1992: 17–377). William Morton Payne (1895). Benjamin A. Heydrick (1901). See Patrick Buckridge (2009). Hudson (1910: 204, n.1). The essay ‘Training in Enjoyment’ appears in Bernard Bosanquet (1893: 237–67). Arnold Bennett, Literary Taste (London: Jonathan Cape, 1909), ch. 5, ‘How to Read a Classic’, pp. 53ff. Quoted in Harrap’s Reference List (1927). Harold Raymond, Managing Director of Chatto & Windus, acknowledged the superiority of Harrap’s access to the educational market in letters to the authors of the Simple Guide Series, explaining the reasons for the transfer of their contracts to Harraps in 1928 (Chambers-Harrap Archive, Edinburgh, uncatalogued).

Selected bibliography Bennett, Arnold (1909) Literary Taste. London: Jonathan Cape. Bosanquet, Bernard (1893) The Civilisation of Christendom and Other Essays. London: Sonnenschein. Buckridge, Patrick (2009) ‘Taste, Appreciation and the Study of Literature: F. D. Maurice, R. G. Moulton and the Extramural Effect,’ Australasian Journal of Victorian Studies, 13(1): 21–34. Court, Franklin E. (1992) Institutionalising English Literature: The Culture and Politics of Literary Study, 1750–1900. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Harrap (1927) Harrap’s Reference List of Educational and General Books, Including the Publications of D. C. Heath and Co., with Revised Prices from May 1, 1927. London: Harrap. Harrap, George G. (1935) Some Memories: A Publisher’s Contribution to the History of Publishing. London: Harrap. Harrap Mercury, The (1926) London: Harrap. Heydrick, Benjamin A. (1901) How to Study Literature: A Guide to the Intensive Study of Literary Masterpieces. New York: Hinds & Noble. Hudson, William Henry (1901a) Sir Walter Scott. London: Sands & Co. Hudson, William Henry (1901b) The Meaning and Value of Poetry. New York: Thomas Crowell. Hudson, William Henry (ed.) (1909) The Tragedie of Julius Caesar. The Elizabethan Shakespeare. London: George G. Harrap & Co.




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Hudson, William Henry (1910) An Introduction to the Study of Literature. London: Harrap. Hudson, William Henry (1919) A Short History of French Literature. London: G. Bell and Sons, Ltd. Payne, William Morton (ed.) (1895) English in American Universities. Boston: D. C. Heath & Co. (repr. 1910). Schuchard, Ronald (1999) Eliot’s Dark Angel: Intersections of Life and Art. New York: Oxford University Press. Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1892) Prometheus Unbound, ed. V. D. Scudder. Heath’s English Classics. Boston: D. C. Heath & Co. Spiers, John (2007) Serious About Series: American Cheap ‘Libraries’, British ‘Railway’ Libraries, and Some Literary Series of the 1890’s. London: Institute of English Studies, with the Senate House Library, University of London.



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Excavating Original African American ‘Pulp Fiction’: W.W. Norton’s Old School Books Cécile Cottenet

In 1996 the mainstream American publisher W.W. Norton launched Old School Books, a series of African American pulp novels, all authored by African American men, that had formerly been published individually between the 1950s and the early 1970s. Judging from Norton’s reputation and catalogue, the endeavour may have seemed bold; in effect the series must be considered alongside other contemporary ‘re-visionary’ series of the times that aimed at recovering writings – often by women or by ethnic minorities – that had previously been excluded from the classics reprint series. I propose to show that Norton’s series was not purely the outcome of the editors’ nostalgia for a forgotten literature, but that it was both ‘re-visionary’ and visionary, in the ways it tried to define a new segment of the American readership.1 In this sense it can be seen as a product for a particular niche market, at the confluence of the US market for popular fiction and the market for Afro-American popular fiction. After showing in what ways the series was both the result and the reflection of ‘specific historical circumstances, of possibilities’ (Spiers 2007: 6), i.e. the 1990s, I will look for the ‘intended reader’ – that is, intended by the editors – based on observations of the materiality of the book taken as a highly signifying system, and in particular examining the series’ editorial paratext as pointing to the horizon of expectations that the series editors attempted to summon.2 Yet this analysis will be coupled with sociological elements that tend to show that the editors had at least some prescience of the audience for their books. The Old School Books series was created during the African Americans’ ‘fourth cultural renaissance’ in literature and the arts in the twentieth century, as outlined and analysed by the African American scholar Henry Louis Gates. Gates traces the origins of this literary movement 141



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back to the early 1980s and the upsurge of black women’s literature, when authors such as Toni Morrison, Alice Walker and Terry McMillan burst onto the literary scene. While others have qualified the extent and the notion of ‘renaissance’ for the 1990s, the boom in the number of African American books published during the decade is nevertheless not to be denied (Bass 2005). The mounting interest in the black experience in books throughout the 1990s has resulted in the multiplication of black imprints in mainstream publishing houses in the early twenty-first century. The publishing of anthologies and the growth of bestsellers are also indicative of the healthy market for Afro-American books; and according to a report issued by the Hunter-Miller group in 2003, the demand for African American books doubled between 1992 and 2000, with sales following accordingly. The revivalist movement of the 1990s must be seen in the wake of the ‘culture wars’ of the 1980s that resulted in a revision of the literary canon, thus enabling the inclusion of voices of ethnic minorities that had been formerly neglected. In addition, the 1990s also experienced a publishers’ ‘craze’ for ‘revamping or initiating new classics’ (Barry 2003: 258). Similarly to the works of the Harlem Renaissance published in the 1920s and 1930s, most of these texts were mainly aimed at a high culture, academic and intellectual readership. Yet, besides this already well known public, publishers in the 1990s found a new outlet among the empowered black upper and lower-middle classes, who were intent on maintaining their culture, past and present. A mass market for black books developed, with the success of books by, about and for black women, a previously neglected readership. Perhaps the best example of this trend are the bestselling books by Terry McMillan, whose Waiting to Exhale in 1992 contributed to opening this mass market. Parallel to this phenomenon, the decade also witnessed a wave of new black noir and crime literature, exemplified by Walter Mosley and his Easy Rawlins novels. Like McMillan, but with a greater crossover readership, Mosley certainly opened the door to mainstream publishing for himself and his followers. Still, marketing these works remained experimental, for as Susanne B. Dietzel wrote, ‘Fiction by black authors is one example of the complex relationship between a particular reader constituency and the publishing industry’ (Dietzel 2004: 156). By the mid-1990s W.W. Norton had largely established its reputation as a solid publisher of ‘serious books’. Surprisingly in an age of conglomerates, it had remained independent since its creation in 1923, and its balanced catalogue of textbooks and trade books accounted for its stability. In 1996, with an output of approximately



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40,000 books a year, its annual revenues averaged $1 million (Feldman 1998; Lamm 1998). Gerald Howard, acquiring editor for the series, has emphasised Norton’s ‘open culture’ and in particular its role in promoting African American literature (Howard 2007). Its contribution to the revision of the literary canon is unmistakable, judging by the acclaim received by its Norton’s Anthology of African American Literature (1996), and by the publication of other works of distinction and of interest to scholars of African American studies – such as a bibliography of African American writers, Spirited Minds: African American Books for Our Sons and Our Brothers (1997), or the critical editions of Frederick Douglass’s Narrative (1996) and of Jean Toomer’s Cane (1988). But the connection to the Old School Books series was made through another author, Walter Mosley, as Marc Gerald, one of the two editors of the series, acknowledged: I approached W.W. Norton about creating an imprint devoted to rediscovering the best – and toughest – crime fiction of the 1950s through the 1970s. As the house responsible for launching Walter Mosley, they seemed like the perfect match. Walter’s editor, Gerry Howard, agreed. (Gerald 1997) Mosley had been a Norton author since his first Easy Rawlins book in 1990, Devil in a Blue Dress, and had been getting excellent critical acclaim, featuring on the bestseller lists of several national newspapers. Moreover, the release of the Hollywood adaptation of Devil in 1995 had increased his popular success. Gerald, then a literary agent, had been an editor of true-crime fiction for True Detective Magazine. He launched the series with a French editor and journalist, Samuel Blumenfeld, who coincidentally would create a French version of the series with the Editions de l’Olivier. In their accounts of the project, both men emphasise how their knowledge of 1970s Black culture triggered their haphazard search for other neglected African American crime writers to resurrect and sent them rummaging through second-hand paperback bookstores and perusing the catalogues of the Library of Congress. They also acknowledged that one of their motives was to demonstrate that Richard Wright, James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison had not been the only ones to produce a valuable body of literature for African Americans (Gerald 1997). Perhaps Gerald also had a mind to challenge the contemporary success of Afro-American women writers by reprinting exclusively male authors.



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The project was therefore not a mere matter of delving into the house’s back-list and repackaging available texts, since none of the works in the series had previously been published by Norton. The overarching motive was thus, in Marc Gerald’s own terms, to ‘bring … lost writers of a particular brilliance back into the light’ (Gerald, interview). The editorial paratext bears evidence of this ‘mission’: the first two editors’ notes – one for each set – welcomed the reader in a familiar way, and presented the texts as unfairly forgotten ‘landmark works’ (take 2) deserving ‘a second chance’ (take 1). Enticing the reader to uncover ‘a fiction few today remember or have read’, ‘an era whose time has come and gone’, was an efficient teaser. In passing, the editors suggested that they were doing a service to literature by unearthing these treasures whose authors had lapsed into ‘Obscurity. Poverty. Rejection’. They were proud to announce, that, ‘Lost since their original publication, they’ve been dead and buried – impenetrable as a tomb and inaccessible as a dream. Here in the Old School they are born again’ (‘A Brief Message from Your Sponsors’). There also transpired in the biographical notes the hope that the time would ‘finally come’ for these authors, and their ‘renegade fiction’ would ‘finally be seen for the masterpieces they always were’.3 These crusading editors thus planned to ‘right the wrongs’ suffered by these authors, and they highlighted the inevitable ‘brick wall’ that black authors had been pushing against for generations, as they ‘struggl[ed] against a publishing world that doesn’t give a damn, that is unless it’s got an affirming message, a likable protagonist, and screams “commercial” in capital letters’ (in Jefferson 1976). To stave off any criticism of the perhaps lesser literary value of the works, which might have accounted for their ensuing disappearance, the biographies often feature excerpts from contemporary reviews intended to establish the original acclaim these texts had received. Hence in the paratext to The Scene, Cooper was compared to Nelson Algren in the New York Tribune of the time, and Charles Perry was acknowledged in a contemporary review by Kay Boyle in The Times Literary Supplement. ‘Excavating’ landmarks in African American fiction was thus the principal function of this series. Yet the effects of reprinting can vary, depending on the past of the books: from the revelation of genuine authors and the launching of failed careers, to the updating, and canonising, of the texts.4 The editorial paratext of the Old School Books bears traces of such intended effects, and also reveals that the books were designed to appeal to a specific readership.



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Published between July 1996 and July 1998, the series encompasses sixteen volumes, eighteen novels initially published between 1958 and 1975. Norton issued the books twice a year, generally in lists of three or four volumes in January and July. Two of their unifying elements are the gender and racial origins of its authors, who were all male and AfroAmerican. A third criterion for the selection of the texts, according to Gerald Howard, was the genre – crime novels – and the relative or total oblivion into which they had slipped (Howard 2007). The specific ‘package psychology’ (Altick 1958) can be seen in the uniform book design and systematic critical apparatus. The titles, artfully crafted in a graphic Staccato 555, were reminiscent of the 1950s pulp-fiction magazine covers. The layout of the critical apparatus – the succession of the editors’ note, the list of titles in the series, the title page, the author’s biography with a photographic portrait – remained unchanged between 1996 and 1998. However, the transformations of the cover design over such a short period of time suggest the difficulty in adequately marketing the books, and Howard has hinted at the possible connection between the first design and the rather low sales. The first two sets displayed black and white photographs, coloured over in bright colours that changed with each volume. The characters portrayed, most of whom were recognisably African or African American, served to emphasise the genre that was clearly labelled on the back cover ‘FICTION / AFRICAN AMERICAN’. However gaudy, this initial cover design both evoked the bright colours of the pulp magazines, and the flashy shades often found on the covers of many books of African American fiction in the mid-1990s. The second cover design, adopted for the third set published in July 1997, somewhat shifted the perspective from ‘African American pulp’ to ‘African American noir’, possibly prefiguring a change in target audience. Although the photographs remained, gone were the bright colours, and the cover was now dressed in dark shades of burgundy and black that gave it fitting sophistication. As for the selection of texts, carried out according to ‘chance and happenstance’ (Gerald, interview), it derives as much from the editors’ enthusiasm as from the availability of the texts, many of which were no longer in print. Yet the series does not merely juxtapose, but rather strives to create both a dialogue between, and an aura for, its objects. The selection of titles and authors did enhance a particular ‘intertextual grid’ (Rabinowitz 1985: 424), partly constitutive of the essence of any series. Along with the graphic elements of the paratext, it helped to project a set of generic expectations onto the reader, who




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was clearly intended to read each book against the other volumes in the series. The first set published in July 1996 included authors who were almost completely unknown, such as Charles Perry and Clarence Cooper. Perhaps not so unknown were Alfred A. Williams, author of The Man Who Cried I Am (1967) and previously acknowledged in a bio-bibliography of AfroAmerican writers in 1984, and Herbert Simmons, laureate of a Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship in 1957. Yet as most had gone without proper promotion, they were all but forgotten in 1996. Under the imprint of the series, they might have found an opportunity to re-emerge onto the book scene;5 so far, none has subsequently made a successful comeback. The famous noir author Chester Himes was also found in the series. When compared with other Old School authors, Himes appears as a crossover figure, who had been late in receiving critical attention in the USA, having achieved his fame in France with the publication of his novels in Gallimard’s prestigious Série Noire. As a pioneer of Black detective fiction, Himes was being rightfully reinstated in the pantheon of Black crime writers, and his insertion in the series also served to establish a historical connection for books initially published over a period of eighteen years (Soitos 2005). Furthermore, he stands out as the most literary figure in the series, closer to Richard Wright than to Goines, which presumably accounts for the special treatment of his books in the series. Indeed, Yesterday Will Make You Cry (1998) was the first hardback volume in the series, and featured an introduction by a cult black figure of the 1970s, Melvin Van Peebles.6 In addition The End of a Primitive (1997) had been carefully edited and restored to its initial version with a Black protagonist.7 The publication of the two texts was definitely intended, to quote Van Peebles, to give ‘Chester’ ‘his due’ in the United States. Alongside these reputed ‘classics’, Old School Books included the work of a highly popular yet less literary author, Donald Goines, who had also been included in the Série Noire. Known as one of the ‘godfathers’ of ‘black experience literature’, he had become an icon for the post-soul generation of the 1990s.8 The fifteen novels of this former pimp and heroin addict had originally been published between 1971 and 1974. His mass-market paperback publisher Holloway House had always marketed Goines specifically to black audiences. Raising him from low culture to lower-middle and upper-middle taste culture9 by diversifying his readership and establishing his literary pedigree, and taking him out of his ‘niche’, was what Gerald and Blumenfeld set out to do. Instead



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of downplaying his criminal record, which constituted his credentials for his ‘unbridled ghetto realism’, they ironically highlighted it, describing his writing schedule as a combination of ‘writing in the morning, shooting up the rest of the day’, and Hemingway’s ‘methodical schedule’ (‘Biography’, Daddy Cool ). The hip-hop and rap generation of the mid-1980s and early 1990s fuelled new interest in Goines and the likes. The iconography of ‘gangsta rap’ – namely drugs, guns, the ghetto and black pride – permeated the ‘black’ movies of the period, such as Spike Lee’s Clockers (1995).10 In the meantime, the media, catering to a now very important youth taste culture, were happily ‘going backwards in time for material’, as Herbert Gans (1999: 156) has pointed out, and as illustrated by the revival of the 1970s ‘blaxploitation’ in Quentin Tarantino’s tribute movies Pulp Fiction (1994) and Jackie Brown (1997), or in the works of black directors

Figure 6.1 Donald Goines, Daddy Cool (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997)




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John Singleton and Spike Lee. The counterculture of the 1950s and 1970s was clearly being re-appropriated and commercialised. Many novels in the Old School Books series were part of this original subculture, and well before the ‘hood’ movies of the 1990s and the violence of rap lyrics, Goines had depicted the gritty urban world of the inner city, peopled with ‘outsiders’ and anti-heroes. The editors prescribed the connection, emphasising how the stories of the series ‘join Stax Records, 70s gangsta chic, and the blaxploitation flick as cultural artefacts to be embraced by a new generation’ (first editors’ note). Thus, beyond literary generic assumptions, these were other preconceptions with which the reader of the 1990s was to approach the texts. Who was this ‘new generation’? The all-encompassing character of the answer given by Gerald Howard suggests the challenge that lay ahead: the intended readership ‘included whomever might be interested’, the audience for Afro-American literature in general, and Norton ‘were hoping to reach the “hip hop audience”’ (Howard 2007); in other words, quite a widely diversified audience, as is the audience of popular literature. In spite of a common urban residence, this readership seems quite different from the readers of pulp magazines in the 1920s and 1950s, as ‘widely held to be socially and economically marginal’ by the critics (Smith 2000: 12). In any case the dominant low taste culture of the 1950s had by the 1990s been largely replaced by the lower-middle taste culture (Gans 1999: 115). If, as Gwendolyn Osborne (2001) states, the ‘hip-hop’ audience was composed of a racially mixed group of urban males aged sixteen to twenty-five, targeting it was decidedly a challenge for the publishers. First, this age group was not exactly known for its voracious reading, and, as signalled in a 2002 survey conducted for the National Endowment for the Arts agency, in the early 1990s men in America tended to read less literature than women, with a ratio of 47 per cent versus 60 per cent of the adult population. Moreover, marketing to African Americans was still experimental, and their reading interests difficult to assess, since this population had rarely been solicited in the past. Again the NEA survey merely indicated that in 1992 less than half of the adult Afro-American population read literature.11 Publishers’ Weekly and Black Issues Book Review have repeatedly pointed to the complexity of the black market in the 1990s and 2000s. Many corporate mainstream publishers were then struggling to find new ways of selling black fiction to Afro-Americans (Pride 2006), while unusual methods were still in use. Barbershops and liquor stores remained popular venues for the ‘hardboiled’ masculine fiction, while ‘decent’ fiction could be found at hair salons, churches and sorority groups (Taylor 1999;



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Holt 2000). In 2001 a senior editor at Random House’s African American imprint, Ballantine Books, summed up the situation thus: ‘the black community values recommendations from friends, family and community organizations much more than media hype’ (in Smith-Passariello 2001). Gerald Howard himself admitted that ‘sales positioning’ of the series was problematic, and he seems to have relied on ‘setting up a tribal drum’. Leaving aside the economic and sociological aspects for the present, I shall now attempt to decipher the horizon of expectations that the editors designed in the paratext, which gives clues as to the intended readers of the series, before examining some of the marketing strategies reflected in the peritext. Richard Altick (1958: 17) has warned us that ‘the problem of how far the reprint publisher was responsible to public taste, and how far he influenced it, must remain a matter for speculation’; still the series is revelatory of the particular taste to which the editors wished to cater. Leslie Howsam has shown how for Victorian publishers the names of the series were never carelessly chosen, but always referred either to an intended market, the place where the books were intended to be placed or read, or again to their price (Howsam 1992: 14). Norton’s name for the series, which should be broken down into ‘Old School’⫹‘Books’, unmistakably connotes a Black musical environment that predated rap. Indeed, the term ‘old school’ is often used to refer to the R&B of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, and the reference could not be missed by the ‘hip-hop audience’ of the mid-1990s. The emphasis on authenticity – of writing, style, point of view and experience – is another revealing characteristic of the peritext. Fast-paced, graphic, the editors’ notes are straight to the point, advising the readers in the second note to ‘pull up a stool, have a round on the house, and read [their] way into oblivion’. The rather colloquial language, tallying with the genre of the texts, was bound to appeal to young readers. As it is, authenticity of experience is an intrinsic component of hip-hop and rap culture (George 1998; Spiegler 1996). For one, the jail or criminal motif in several stories presumably struck a familiar note with many Black readers; according to a 1990 report almost one in four AfricanAmerican males aged between twenty and twenty-nine were either behind bars or on probation, a proportion exceeding that of the total number of Black young men enrolled in higher education (Mauer 1990).12 Furthermore, the proportion of Blacks among the drug offenders in American prisons was very high. If we consider that readers of popular literature are more prone to read works against ‘the background of everyday experience of life’ than against ‘other art forms’ ( Jauss 1970: 34),




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and that African American readers, perhaps ‘as a historically excluded population’, want ‘to see themselves represented in the texts that they read’ (Dietzel 2004: 156), then the authenticity-centred strategy seemed certainly judicious.13 The gist of this strategy is obvious in the second editors’ note, presenting the texts as ‘a slice of real life that will keep you up at nights, and chill you to the bone’, and ‘landmark works told with terrible honesty and explosive brilliance’. The writers themselves were ‘black authors with street credentials born of hard times and tough luck’ (first editors’ note), several had been to prison, and/or been drug addicts, others yet were reformed pimps, all of which certified their right to transcribe their lives for the readers. These wrong turns, alluded to in the biographies, certainly made efficient teasers; they contributed to framing the texts as ‘black experience’ fiction, a term fitted for Goines’s works, but that did not prove quite as adequate for other texts in the series. In fact this label spelled commercial fiction rather than literature. The dialogue established by the series between the different volumes engenders a form of paradox. The inclusion of Himes, and the choice of a more sophisticated book design, were perhaps meant to appeal to the more literate reader of ‘noir’. A parallel is also suggested between Afro-American underground pulp literature and a more serious literature, which the critics were quick to seize upon. In turn, the reviews, reinserted into the peritext, presented the texts as sociological accounts, ‘unflinching biographies of the streets’,14 all the while placing their authors within American – and not merely African American – literary history, alongside pulp novelists Jim Thompson and Raymond Chandler, and Richard Wright. While these devices aimed at legitimating the publication of the series by a house as distinguished as W.W. Norton, attaching a literary value that had previously been denied to these texts, they also testified to the shadowy nature of the reader of noir and more generally of popular literature. Further evidence of the target audience in sociological terms rather than literary terms can be found in the epitext used as a marketing tool in the first pages of the volumes. In his study of the Modern Library, Jay Satterfield has shown the importance of the variety of magazines in which Bennett Cerf placed advertisements for the famous series, in his attempt to reach the American ‘civilized minority’. In the same manner the variety of magazines cited in the blurbs of the different sets reveals the contours of the target audience and intended readers – namely, young, male, hip and possibly African American. The selection of reviews from Time Out, the tabloid Newsday and the more edgy magazines such as Detour, a Los Angeles based fashion and entertainment magazine,



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the arts-and-culture quarterly Bomb and the major-circulation music magazine Spin unmistakably tell of a young readership. Presumably the advertising of the series in these same magazines emphasised the entertainment value rather than the literary aspect of the texts. On the other hand, reviews in Playboy or Condé-Nast’s magazine Details attest to the male target, while the mention of African American magazines such as Emerge and the hip-hop music magazine The Source was geared more towards the African American public. The only ‘literary’ medium quoted was Kirkus Reviews, a literary review magazine catering to writers and the book trade, as though again the editors wished to re-evaluate the authors of the series. Some of these magazines had just recently been created – Emerge had been launched in 1993, and The Source had only begun to develop in the early 1990s – which attests to their ‘hipness’. The ‘tribal drum’ was set, and the music connection was by no means anecdotal: in 1999 sociologist Herbert Gans emphasised that ‘music … remains the most vital area of public black culture – as it always has been’ (Gans 1999: 156). The global sales positioning illustrates several market and sociological trends of the 1990s, such as the predominance of youth in surveys, as advertisers repeatedly targeted the eighteen to thirtyfour age group (Gans 1999), and the increasing influence of race as a source for diverging taste cultures in the United States. Meanwhile, it also reflected the undeniable ‘straddling’ of taste cultures and specific American processes of cultural borrowing, not only from low cultures by lower-middle cultures, but also from black culture by white culture. These marketing strategies also show that, already by the 1990s, editors and publishers were beginning to sense that a crossover was possible, and that there did exist a ‘new capacity of the broader American reading public to identify with black characters’, with ‘the black experience [being] a metaphor for the larger human experience’, as Henry Louis Gates claimed (Arnold 2001). Old School Books are symptomatic of the characteristic field of cultural production of the 1990s, which witnessed the culture wars and the opening of the canon, a boom in the publication of African American fiction and literature, and the development of a ‘hip-hop’ culture as expressed or illustrated in music and movies. The series was a ‘re-visionary’ one as conceived by Margaret Ezell (1994), but was also very much impregnated by its contemporary culture. The bestowal upon the series and its editors of a special American Book Award by the Before Columbus Foundation in 1997 certainly testified to its literary importance as a contribution to multicultural literature.




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In 2006 Marc Gerald admitted his disappointment on the subject of sales, and attempted to place responsibility with the publisher’s unsuccessful sales positioning: ‘A bit on the stodgy, academic side, Norton brought passion but no particular gift for finding a generation of readers who have subsequently proven they were out there’ (Gerald, interview).15 Viewed from this angle, the Old School Books was a visionary series that contributed to seeking out and defining – if not actually reaching – a new readership. The recent extraordinary popularity of ‘street lit’ or ‘urban fiction’ among young readers in the United States, and the staggering contracts signed by new authors such as Nikki Turner or Vickie Stringer, seem to prove him right. Confident, as he stated in 1997, that it was then ‘up to the industry to find some way to capture’ this readership, Gerald actively participated in the trend, reaching out to this ‘hip-hop’ audience with an imprint of books representing the fiction equivalent of hip-hop, packaged together with a music CD, launched in 2000 (Arnold 2000).

Notes 1. I use the term ‘re-visionary’ as it is used by Margaret Ezell (1994). 2. Michele Moylan and Lane Stiles (1996) highlighted the risk – but took the chance – of such an endeavour in their introduction to Reading Books, Essays on the Material Text and Literature in America. I borrow the notion of ‘horizon of expectations’ from Jauss (1970, 1978). 3. See introductions to Robert Deane Pharr, S.R.O. and Giveadamn Brown. 4. For the multiple functions of reprint series, see Isabelle Olivero (1999). 5. Roland S. Jefferson, whose House on 103rd Street is included in the series, has since followed up with a new novel published in 2007, One Night Stand. Herbert Simmons was at the time working on two novels forming a trilogy with Man Walking on Eggshells, entitled Tough Country and The Land of Nod. 6. Van Peebles was the author of both the book and the ‘blaxploitation’ movie Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971). He had already prefaced a collected edition of three of Himes’s novels for the British Payback Press in 1996: A Rage in Harlem, The Real Cool Killers and The Crazy Kill. 7. The End of a Primitive had originally been published in a heavily edited version as Cast the First Stone (1952), with the protagonist’s skin colour changed to white. 8. According to his publisher, in 2004 sales of Goines’s titles were estimated at ten million copies, a quarter million volumes a year. These figures are to be considered with caution, as they are presumably inflated. 9. I am using Herbert Gans’s categories for American society as defined in Popular Culture and High Culture (1970). 10. Other ‘black’ movies of the period include John Singleton’s Boyz ’n’ the Hood (1991) and New Jack City (1991) directed by Mario Van Peebles, son of the aforementioned Melvin Van Peebles.



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11. For 1992, the table for ‘Literary Reading Rates by Ethnicity and Race’ gives a figure of 45.6 per cent of Afro-American adults reading literature, and 58 per cent of the white adult population. Literature was defined in the survey as ‘any novel, short story, play or other’. 12. This report was written for the Sentencing Project in Washington, DC. 13. See also Hunter-Miller report, 2003. 14. Quoted from USA Today in ‘Take Three’. 15. As for the sales, as I have not yet been able to examine Norton’s records, I can only report estimations: according to Gerald (interview), individual editions sold between 5,000 and 10,000, while Howard claims that the sales were ‘small’, between 3,000 and 5,000 (interview).

Selected bibliography Altick, Richard (1958) ‘From Aldine to Everyman: Cheap Reprint Series of the English Classics, 1830–1906’, Studies in Bibliography: 3–24. Anonymous (2003) ‘Black Gold, Part I: Travel, Financial Services, Technology and Books Are Untapped Mines in the African-American Market’, Issue 21, November (http://www.huntermillergroup.com/MarketSnapshots/Issue-21Black-Gold-Part-I.pdf), accessed 2 December 2008. Arnold, Martin (2000) ‘Coming Soon: Paperbacks that Sound Like Hip-Hop’, New York Times on the Web, 21 September (http://www.nytimes.com), accessed 16 November 2006. Arnold, Martin (2001) ‘MAKING BOOKS; Books by Blacks in Top 5 Sellers’, New York Times on the Web, 26 July (http://www.nytimes.com), accessed 2 December 2008. Barry, Rebecca Rego (2003) ‘The Neo-Classics: (Re)Publishing the “Great Books” in the United States in the 1990s’, Book History, 6: 251–75. Bass, Patrick Henry (2005) ‘The Bloom Is off the Boom’, Publishers Weekly Online, 7 November (http://www.publishersweekly.com), accessed 22 March 2007. Bourdieu, Pierre (1979) La distinction, Critique sociale du jugement. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit. Cooper, Clarence L. (1960) The Scene. New York and London: W.W. Norton (1996). Cooper, Clarence L. (1967a) Black! Three Short Novels. New York and London: W.W. Norton (1997). Cooper, Clarence L. (1967b) The Farm. New York and London: W.W. Norton (1998). Davis, Thadious M. and Harris, Trudier (eds) (1984) Afro-American Fiction Writers after 1955. Detroit: Gale Press. Dietzel, Susanne B. (2004) ‘The African American Novel and Popular Culture’, in Maryemma Graham et al. (eds), The Cambridge Companion to the African American Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 156–-68. Ezell, Margaret (1994) ‘Making a Classic: The Advent of the Literary Series’, South Central Review, 11(2): 2–16. Feldman, Gary (1998) ‘Seventy-Five Years of Norton’s “Books that Live”’, Publishers Weekly Online, 29 June (http://www.publishersweekly.com), accessed 22 March 2007. Fleming, Robert (2001) ‘Black Book Bounty’, Publishers Weekly Online, 10 December (http://www.publishersweekly.com), accessed 18 March 2007.




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Gans, Herbert (1970) Popular Culture and High Culture, an Analysis and Evaluation of Taste, rev. edn. New York: Basic Books (1999). Gates, Henry Louis, Jr (1997) ‘Harlem on Our Minds’, Critical Inquiry, 24 (Autumn): 1–12. George, Nelson (1998) Hip Hop America. New York: Viking. Gerald, Marc (1997) ‘Old School Noir: My Search for African-American Noir’s Lost Legacy’, 7 March (http://www.salon.com/march97/noir2970307.html), accessed 14 April 2007. Gerald, Marc (2006) Interview by the author (e-mail), 24 October. Goines, Donald (1974) Daddy Cool. New York and London: W.W. Norton (1997). Himes, Chester B. (1952) Yesterday Will Make You Cry. New York and London: W.W. Norton (1998). Himes, Chester B. (1955) The End of a Primitive. New York and London: W.W. Norton (1997). Holt, Karen (2000) ‘Shades of Black Fiction’, Publishers Weekly Online, 12 December (http://www.publishersweekly.com), accessed 22 March 2007. Howard, Gerald (2007) Interview by the author (telephone), 16 January. Howsam, Leslie (1992) ‘Sustained Literary Ventures, the Series in Victorian Book Publishing’, Publishing History, 31: 5–26. Jauss, Hans Robert (1970) ‘Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory’, New Literary History, 2(1): 7–37. Jauss, Hans Robert (1978) Pour une esthétique de la réception, trans. Claude Maillard. Paris: Gallimard. Jefferson, Roland S. (1976) The School on 103rd Street. New York and London: W.W. Norton (1997). Labbe, Theola (2000) ‘Black Books in the House’, Publishers Weekly Online, 11 December (http://www.publishersweekly.com), accessed 1 December 2008. Lamm, Donald (1998) Chairman of W.W. Norton, interviewed for the ‘Conversations with History’ series at the University of California at Berkeley (http:// globetrotter.berkeley.edu/conversations), accessed 21 March 2007. Mauer, Marc (1990) ‘Young Black Men and the Criminal Justice System: A Growing National Problem’, February (http://www.eric.ed.gov), accessed 14 August 2007. Moylan, Michele and Stiles, Lane (eds) (1996) Reading Books. Essays on the Material Text and Literature in America. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. National Endowment for the Arts (2004) ‘Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America’, June (http://www.arts.gov), accessed November 2008. Olivero, Isabelle (1999) L’invention de la collection. De la diffusion de la littérature et des savoirs à la formation du citoyen au XIX siècle. Paris: Editions de l’Imec. Osborne, Gwendolyn (2001) ‘The Legacy of Ghetto Pulp Fiction’, Black Issues Book Review, September (http://findarticles.com), accessed 21 November 2006. Perry, Charles (1962) Portrait of a Young Man Drowning. New York and London: W.W. Norton (1996). Pharr, Robert Deane (1971) S.R.O. New York and London: W.W. Norton (1998). Pharr, Robert Deane (1978) Giveadamn Brown. New York and London: W.W. Norton (1997). Phillip, Mary-Christine (1996) ‘Black Literature in the 90s’, Black Issues in Higher Education, 16 May.



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Pride, Felicia (2006) ‘Count the Ways’, Publishers Weekly Online, 11 December (http://www.publishersweekly.com), accessed 21 March 2007. Rabinowitz, Peter J. (1985) ‘The Turn of the Glass Key: Popular Fiction as Reading Strategy’, Critical Inquiry, 11(3): 418–31. Satterfield, Jay (2002) ‘The World’s Best Books’: Taste, Culture and the Modern Library. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Simmons, Herbert (1957) Corner Boy. New York and London: W.W. Norton (1996). Simmons, Herbert (1962) Man Walking on Eggshells. New York and London: W.W. Norton (1997). Slim, Iceberg (1969) Mama Black Widow. New York and London: W.W. Norton (1998). Smith, Erin (2000) ‘Dressed to Kill: Hard-Boiled Detective Fiction, Working-Class Consumers, and Pulp Magazines’, Colby Quarterly, 36(1): 11–28. Smith-Passeriello, Carol (2001) ‘New York Publishing’s Black Pack – African American Network’, Black Issues Book Review, May (http://findarticles.com), accessed 21 November 2006. Soitos, Stephen (2005) ‘African-American Detective Fiction: Surveying the Genre’, in ‘Polar Noir’: Reading African-American Detective Fiction, Cahiers de Recherches Afro-Américaines Transversalité. Tours: PU François Rabelais, 11–17. Spiegler, Marc (1996) ‘Marketing Street Culture: Bringing Hip-Hop Style to the Mainstream’, American Demographics, November. Spiers, John (2007) Serious about Series: America Cheap ‘Libraries’, British ‘Railway’ Libraries, and Some Literary Series of the 1890’s. London: Institute of English Studies, University of London. Taylor, Carol (1999) ‘A Diverse Market for African-American Books Keeps Growing’, Publishers Weekly Online, 13 December (http://www.publishersweekly. com), accessed 14 May 2007. Van Dyke, Henry (1971) Dead Piano. New York and London: W.W. Norton (1997).




The Symbiotic Relationship of Thomas Nelson & Sons and John Buchan within the Publisher’s Series Kate Macdonald

In the first half of the twentieth century the Scottish publishing firm Thomas Nelson & Sons moved away from its traditional ground of educational and religious publishing to sell fiction.1 Up to 1950 it published huge numbers of novels and essays in over fifty accumulating series and sub-series.2 These series began with the New Century Library in 1900, and then the Sixpenny Classics. These were reprints of fiction long out of copyright, which were thus cheap to repackage. The firm had begun introducing innovations to the trade from 1907 by printing a cheap series of novels still in copyright. These were the Nelson’s Sevenpennies, followed by the Shilling Library, which offered better quality copyright fiction, and the Two-Shilling Library of New Novels in 1910. These series were regarded as commercially hostile by the trade,3 although Macmillan, for one, rapidly followed suit with its own sevenpenny series.4 John Buchan’s involvement with the development of these series, and his relationship with Nelson’s, is a business story set before, during and after the First World War. It is complicated by Buchan’s growing success as a novelist and war historian, journalist and pundit. His conflicting loyalties can be illustrated by examining how and why Buchan allocated his own works to the Nelson’s lists. How much of an asset was Buchan to Nelson’s? Was he good for the firm, or was it better for him?5 John Buchan was brought into Nelson’s in 1907 as their London-based literary adviser. He had been at Oxford with the senior director, Thomas Arthur Nelson, and in 1906 he was still looking for a fixed career. He was a published writer, with twelve books to his name, but none of these had been successful enough to allow him to make writing his career. He had read for the bar, had worked in the post-Boer War imperial civil service in South Africa under Lord Milner, had been deputy 156



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editor of the Spectator, and a literary and political journalist. He had also worked in publishing before: in his first year as an undergraduate at Oxford he was a publisher’s reader for John Lane at The Bodley Head. In 1906 Buchan had just turned thirty, and he was courting his future wife, Susan Grosvenor, a cousin of the Duke of Westminster. Tommy Nelson’s offer of a job was opportune: the prospect of a steady income and a fixed profession would have been important at this stage in Buchan’s life. He signed the contract with Nelson’s at the end of 1906, to work for them at a salary of £1,500 a year.6 At the beginning of the twentieth century the British publishing industry was experiencing unnerving cultural change from the demise of the Victorian triple-decker novel and the increasing power of libraries and booksellers. After 1900 there was still ‘overwhelming evidence that good-quality British fiction was suffering a severe commercial crisis’.7 New novels were not selling enough. ‘To many commentators the solution to the problem was obvious – authors and publishers should … drastically reduce the price of new fiction, by-pass the libraries, and compete in the mass market.’ 8 Publishers increasingly began to offer their own ‘libraries’, ‘named and numbered series as a “collection” of new books and reprints’, or ‘a remarketing exercise using backlists and selling titles in sets or series that had previously had no connection’. These were marketed as more culturally valuable than the sum of their parts.9 The form was not new, having proved to have been successful in the reprint market since at least the 1860s, and in the 1880s, by, for example, Chatto & Windus and Routledge.10 Repackaging reprinted texts became a staple of many publishers’ lists after 1900. The market for new fiction was not as busy, because novels in copyright were far less profitable than reprints of older works for publishers to include in their series. However, new novels were issued in cheap editions, for example by J. W. Arrowsmith, T. Fisher Unwin and Cassell.11 Opponents of these cheap editions of new fiction objected to a potential degradation of the status of the novelist.12 Writers also found that they had to change their habits. ‘With the introduction of cheap formats, the author faced the prospect of having to write more (and find a publisher to buy it) for a cheaper return … the solution was becoming clear: shorter, cheaper fiction of a style that appealed to the largest readership.’13 Nelson was following the industry’s trend, where ‘traditional publishers competed energetically with each other to produce similar … reprints’.14 Their acquisition of the magazine Practical Teacher – an up-todate periodical for the teaching profession – also became a useful marketing



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investment for Nelson’s, since they used it extensively to advertise and ‘review’ their new series. In 1907 the Sevenpenny series was launched as the Nelson Library of Copyright Fiction.15 Buchan selected potential new titles for this series, and for the Nelson’s Sixpenny Classics, with the aim of bringing ‘good modern fiction’ to a newly literate public.16 As the Sevenpenny series grew by two new titles a month and the Shilling novels by one each month, Nelson’s had committed themselves to a rapid, sustained print production schedule: It was a carefully planned operation, made possible by a large capital investment in new machinery which had reduced labour costs and enabled the publishers to negotiate terms with living authors. … They included works by some of the most popular and the most respected novelists of the day. It was the nearest any British publisher came to entering the mass market with cheap new fiction, and it was a commercial success.17 Nelson’s were not in publishing to promote a radical philosophy, but their background (and indeed future) in educational and nonconformist religious publishing, and Buchan’s own views about publishing the best quality fiction for working people,18 were reflected in their commercial impetus. They did much to make mass market publishing of the time more egalitarian, and less segregated, for readers and authors. ‘The cheap classics series was an important manifestation of the lower-middle classes’ drive toward self-education and self-fashioning.’ However, ‘in terms of cultural capital, the cheap classics series was never going to equal the eighteenth-century gentleman’s library on which it was modelled’.19 Nelson’s also avoided segregation between texts by not attempting to follow genre divisions in its series, being content to categorise reprints and ‘new’ fiction by price and legal status only.20 Their copyright libraries mixed Anthony Hope’s Ruritanian adventures with Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s sensation drama, and H. G. Wells’s science fiction with Una L. Silberrad’s realist romance. There were, however, clear quality divisions for the different Nelson’s series. Charles Garvice, for example, ‘is really not the class for our Sevenpenny Library and would certainly not be the class for our Two Shilling Novels. His real line seems to be 6d in paper, and we do not touch this at present.’21 Social fluidity in the widening book market, in readers and authors, was also reflected in its producers and distributors: ‘1890 to 1910 [was] the time when publishing ceased to be an occupation for gentlemen and became a purely commercial venture’.22 Nelson’s commercial



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success with its series, and its resistance to the commercial norm by pursuing the mass market in cheap fiction rather than the high-priced and consequently exclusive trade of the Establishment, also conformed to ‘attempts to regulate cultural productions and access, to influence socialisation and to exert moral and social control’.23 Its policy for its Two-Shilling New Novels was to publish ‘the work of the most famous authors of the day, but books of exceptional merit by new or less-known writers will occasionally be admitted. A new writer, if he is worthy will find Nelson’s Novels a road to fame.’24 In this manifesto we can see the Nelson’s series as relevant for considering ‘the complicities, opportunities and compromises of the market’.25 Nelson’s were certainly willing to compromise on the literary quality of a title for one of their series (though never its moral standing) if they could ‘get it very cheap’.26 John Buchan took advantage of the opportunities of the market for Nelson’s. By January 1907 he was working in the firm’s different departments and factories to learn his new business. Despite its technical and commercial audacity, the contents of Nelson’s lists still had a staid and provincial output. Its ‘new titles were mainly religious books and children’s books, but the chief output was in miscellaneous reprints. The list was anything but distinguished: the firm was out of touch with contemporary writing.’27 Buchan’s arrival coincided with a new impetus of energising dynamism: by the end of 1907 Nelson’s had brought out five new series.28 Nelson’s also set up reprint series in French, German, Hungarian and Spanish, and began negotiations for publishing in China.29 By the time of the outbreak of the First World War they were planning a Russian series as well,30 and thinking about breaking into the American market to combat the Americans who were making inroads on British authors.31 By 1914, seven years after Buchan had joined the firm, Nelson’s list had been enlarged by twenty-five new series of books. These were aimed at the educational market and at the autodidact, and all their titles were relatively inexpensive to buy, with the most expensive volumes only costing two shillings. While articulating an inherited Presbyterian and Calvinist work ethic, Buchan did not subscribe personally to the rigid church-centric perspective that Nelson’s own history in religious publishing had encouraged as the firm’s ethos. He understood that milieu, for he had been born into it, but his experiences at Oxford, his varied career and his new aristocratic family connections through his marriage had shown him a profitable world beyond a kirk readership. Based in London, Buchan had more of a feel than his Edinburgh colleagues for contemporary literature. Although he reassured Nelson’s that H. G. Wells’ novel Ann Veronica




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was ‘indefensible’,32 he was able to persuade them that E. F. Benson’s Daisy’s Aunt was not as scandalous as had been reported.33 Buchan was certainly behind the Nelson’s ‘Handbooks to Moral Instruction’ series,34 but he was also busy developing a series of French novels, the ‘Collection Nelson’.35 In parallel he edited Nelson’s experimental acquisition, the weekly Scottish Review, from 1907, hoping to recreate the glories of his Spectator days. The venture failed after eighteen months, since the paper’s conventional kirk-going readership did not take to Buchan’s senior common room approach or his focus on literature and politics rather than church affairs.36 Buchan now settled into his most rewarding role, as Nelson’s literary adviser, reading novels, advising on texts for reprint and negotiating copyright agreements.37 By proving the commercial status of literary publishing, and by nurturing and developing Nelson’s literary series, Buchan was also establishing the cultural value of these series to Nelson’s as a brand name. The Nelson’s series became products in their own right: in ten years cheap reprints had acquired market respectability, and the copyright library had also proved culturally acceptable, offering new work by authors from all positions on the literary continuum to a culturally catholic readership.38 During his publishing apprenticeship Buchan began to write fiction again himself. The period 1903–10 had been creatively arid for him.39 His imaginative powers had been diverted to political writing by his South African experiences, but his systematic exposure to current writing from his work for Nelson’s was bringing the fallow period to an end. In 1910 Nelson’s brought out Buchan’s novel Prester John, which had been written especially for them. This novel was the first manifestation of a new aspect of Buchan’s involvement with Nelson’s. Initially he had limited himself to writing introductions to collected stories and essays for Nelson’s series volumes, but by 1910 he was rewriting literature and geography texts.40 Prester John was noted in a review as ‘the latest addition to the Nelson’s two-shilling series’,41 evidence that as a writer Buchan was now associated directly with the series. One year later, Buchan followed Prester John with Sir Walter Raleigh (1911), written for the schools market as a history primer, and, again, written especially for first publication with Nelson’s. In 1913 Nelson’s published Buchan’s biography The Marquis of Montrose – again, written especially for them.42 In July 1914 Buchan sent Tommy Nelson the manuscript of his second novel written specifically for Nelson’s, at that time provisionally called New Lands in the Sunset.43 War broke out at the beginning of August 1914. Buchan’s letters to George Brown in the first weeks of war were concerned with turning the Nelson’s business around to grapple with an unknown wartime



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readership. Their overseas printing contracts were abruptly cut off, and so the Nelson’s plant needed regular work to keep the workforce employed. Buchan pushed through the speedy launch of a weekly news magazine, called The War,44 for which he wrote all its lead articles, at the same time as he was researching and writing another new Nelson’s publication, the colossal Nelson’s History of the War. The War lasted for twenty-nine issues and was stopped due to poor distribution and a lack of sales. Nelson’s History ran to twenty-four volumes, finally concluding in 1919, and it was mainly due to this series and to The War that Buchan became a well known name in war writing. He was appointed as a special war correspondent for The Times in 1915, and was made a director of Nelson’s when it finally became a limited company. In 1916 Buchan was in uniform, working in GHQ in France, writing military communiqués for the War Office under General Haig. In 1917 Buchan became Director of Information, and saw the end of the war as a lieutenantcolonel. He had been bereaved by the deaths in action of many friends, including his youngest brother Alastair and Tommy Nelson. During the war Buchan’s association with Nelson’s became inextricably bound up in his government-salaried propaganda work. He used his Foreign Office notepaper to conduct his business for Nelson’s.45 His text from the Nelson’s History was reused in Nelson’s War Atlas and in other Nelson’s wartime publications. The greater Buchan’s fame grew, the more Nelson’s advertising used that name, and associated Buchan with Nelson’s as a writer and as an employee. From volume XVIII of the Nelson’s History (December 1917) Buchan’s face and name were featured prominently on the dust jackets, to the end of the series. As the Nelson’s History continued, Buchan’s name became a bigger selling point in the Nelson’s marketing. In 1917 the Nelson’s Map Book of the War carried an advertisement for ‘Nelson’s History of the War by John Buchan: A Standard Work. Everywhere recognised as the Authoritative Narrative of the War. Everywhere praised as a Brilliant Military History.’46 Nelson’s 1918 publication A History of the British Navy During the War by H. C. O’Neill displayed the prominent subtitle ‘Adapted from Col. John Buchan’s History of the War’. No longer was it the Nelson’s History, but Buchan’s History. When Buchan moved to the Department of Information in January 1917, and began coordinating propaganda for the British government, he naturally turned to his publishing contacts to disseminate this propaganda. Nelson’s were one of a handful of trusted British publishers whose printing capacity Buchan used for covert government publications aimed at European audiences. In 1916 Buchan wrote from the War Office about a printing deal for ‘a pamphlet by me on the battle of




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Figure 7.1 Advertisement of Thomas Nelson’s from 1907, showing a sample of the authors placed in two of their series

Jutland … you had better estimate for 100,000 … [and] a book which we should sell at some price not more than 1/– on the recent offensive … there will be translations of both in three or four languages, which we should also like you to do, and of these we will order large quantities. … Time is very important. The Jutland thing is ready, and the other should be ready in a fortnight.’47 This was to be The Battle of Jutland, published in October 1916, and ‘the other’, Buchan’s The Battle of the Somme, First Phase, came out a month later, and was quickly translated into four languages. The Second Phase came out in May 1917, with seven translations.48 In 1916 and 1917 alone Nelson’s thus printed large quantities of ten separate publications under a government contract brokered by



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Buchan. However, it is unlikely that he or Nelson’s profited to excess, if at all, by these muddily demarcated commercial transactions.49 Buchan was quite open about his overlapping personal interests. ‘I don’t want the second part of the Battle of the Somme to interfere with Volume XVI of my History, which will be out next month, so I propose to use it only for foreign countries and in a small degree in America’.50 A single book by Buchan on the Somme was printed for the American market by George Doran in 1917, based, ‘for propagandist purposes’, on volume XVI of the Nelson’s History and on his two-volume set on the battle for the British market, published by Nelson’s, The Battle of the Somme: First Phase (1916) and Second Phase (1917), thus acquiring extra permissions fees for Nelson’s.51 There was no longer any division between Buchan’s commercial interests, as a director of Nelson’s, and his personal interests as an author. Even if he did not receive royalties, his name was attached to his war propaganda, published by his own firm. He was a government official in contracting and paying Nelson’s for the nation’s propaganda work. Wartime conditions are the obvious justification for this apparent collapse in objective business conduct. But, in fairness, Buchan was never accused of dishonesty or of graft. While excess profits were not expected, Nelson’s stayed solvent during the war and had jobs ready for returning soldiers. Buchan continued to write fiction all through the war. It had become a mental release from the requirements of his day-job of telling selected truths for government purposes. He had access to all the information that journalists were allowed, and had become a very well informed war pundit. He was a natural storyteller, and had an impressive capacity, from his legal training, his journalism and his civil service work, for assimilating the facts and extracting, with great efficiency, the pertinent information for his purposes. Once Buchan had put on uniform in 1916, he was then given even more access to confidential military and political documentation. Although he found his official writing wearing (‘wretched stuff – simply dull military history’52), Buchan could not resist reusing incidents that stimulated his imagination in his wildly entertaining stories.53 He developed the capacity to use in fiction what he could not use in the official propaganda. Buchan was in a position to be able to indulge his imagination because of the massive success of The Thirty-Nine Steps in 1915. This novel was not a Nelson’s book. Buchan had just given Nelson’s New Lands in the Sunset, which they would publish as Salute to Adventurers in 1915, and he had decided to go back to his old publisher, William Blackwood & Sons, with this new story. The two novels are quite different. Salute




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to Adventurers is a stirring historical romp, set in seventeenth-century Scotland and colonial Virginia. The Thirty-Nine Steps is a modern thriller, where the hero is pursued by aeroplane, blows himself out of captivity with explosives and is engaged in a race against time to retrieve the secret plans from the enemy spies on the eve of war. Presumably Buchan felt that Blackwood’s and Blackwood’s Magazine would be receptive to this novel whereas Nelson’s might not. Perhaps he felt embarrassed at having produced a second novel in twelve months, while being a fulltime employee supposedly engaged in reading other people’s novels, and while editing a magazine and preparing a war history. The Thirty-Nine Steps set a pattern for Buchan’s future publishing that was highly disadvantageous to Nelson’s. Once Buchan became a bestselling novelist he negotiated a new contract with a new publisher, the go-getting Hodder & Stoughton. From then onwards, Nelson’s could not get at Buchan’s annual high-selling novel until Hodder & Stoughton had creamed off the first profits. However, Buchan did not neglect them. Buchan negotiated with Nelson’s personally for them to publish the sequel to The Thirty-Nine Steps, his first Hodder novel Greenmantle, in the Nelson’s Continental Library.54 This Paris-based series was an ingenious wartime development, because it was not distributed in Britain or the United States. It thus had cachet for the foreign English-reading population, and tapped a new foreign market at the same time. Its obvious strength in wartime was that the British Army and all the Anglophones attending the Western Front could buy volumes from the Nelson’s Continental Library in France, which they could not do in Britain, thus increasing that series’ potential sales immensely. The Thirty-Nine Steps itself appeared in the Continental Library in 1917, again negotiated by Buchan with his then co-director George Brown at Nelson’s.55 Buchan willingly gave Nelson’s his essays, biographies and non-fiction work, which were harder to sell, but in giving them to Nelson’s Buchan was also ensuring that he had a tame publisher who would do the selling for him. The 1919 reprint of Buchan’s last novel for Nelson’s, Salute to Adventurers, carries a prominent list of twenty Buchan titles, opposite the title page, ‘By the Same Author’. The list is an ostentatious display of Buchan’s polymathic talents as a valuable Nelson’s property: as its director, its literary adviser and, by then, as a bestselling author. The twist is, over half the titles in this list were not at that date published in any Nelson edition. Nelson was here advertising titles owned by its rivals in order to present its own ownership of Buchan as a more impressive statement. The book was not a prestige edition, only a reprint in



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a cheap cloth binding. However, it was brought out at an important time for the firm. The war had just ended, and publishing faced an uncertain future in a weakened European economy. Tommy Nelson was dead. The remaining three Nelson’s directors, Ian Nelson, George Brown and Buchan, had to work together to ensure the survival of the firm in unknowable post-war conditions. The discontinuing of the Sevenpennies and the resignation of George Brown in 1921 was the first sign of a serious change in the regime, and the second was the argument between Buchan and Ian Nelson over money in 1923. Ian Nelson did not have the same relationship with Buchan that his elder brother had had, and his first grievance with Buchan was over Buchan’s acceptance of a directorship with Reuters in 1919, which in Ian’s eyes would compromise Buchan’s commitment to Nelson’s. In 1919 Buchan was also working with George Brown on a uniform edition of his own titles, which would entail buying permission to use the titles held by other publishers, another investment by Nelson’s on Buchan’s behalf. Buchan was sending a lot of signals that his own interests, as an author, may have been higher on his list than those of Nelson’s. But Buchan’s name was a valuable asset to Nelson’s: Prester John was reprinted again in 1919, and in 1920 Nelson’s published the first of the series ‘John Buchan’s Annual’, with The Long Road to Victory, a collection of non-fiction chapters on the war, written especially for Nelson’s and edited by Buchan. Buchan brought Sir Henry Newbolt into the business, to work on a new Teaching of English series, and, later, the companion series on The History of English Literature, The Nineteenth-Century Poets and The Teaching of History. In 1921 Buchan’s own Great Hours in Sport was the second ‘John Buchan’s Annual’. Nelson’s also published the first volume of the condensed four-volume History of the Great War. In 1922 Buchan’s A Book of Escapes and Hurried Journeys was brought out as part of the Teaching of English series, followed by his Hodder collection of linked short stories The Path of the King (1921), as a reprint in the same series. Meanwhile the Uniform Edition of John Buchan’s Novels burst upon the world in 1922, and from this date that series presented reprints in two special editions of all Buchan’s novels, usually two years after their first publication by Hodder & Stoughton, until his death in 1940. In 1923 Buchan’s The Last Secrets appeared as a John Buchan Annual, but by then he and Ian Nelson had had their argument, and Buchan had agreed to a new contract with Nelson’s, at considerably less money, but with the freedom to pursue private projects. He promptly became Deputy Chairman of Reuters. He was still working on fiction titles,




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since new Nelson’s series were being launched every year.56 He continued to promote his own works, and wrote biographies and other non-fiction works for Nelson’s. After 1923 Buchan’s involvement with Nelson’s settled down to a pattern of annual or biannual non-fiction works written or edited especially for them, reprints of his novels or short story collections in their various series, and his introductions and talent spotting. In 1929 Buchan resigned his directorship of Nelson’s and left the firm. From this date his new non-fiction works were published by Peter Davies, so he had severed his publishing connections with Nelson’s as well as his employment. Nelson’s, however, did not lose sight of him. From 1923 Buchan’s titles were present in nineteen Nelson’s series, four of which were named after Buchan himself. As Buchan the bestselling novelist mutated into a politician and a titled diplomat, Nelson’s began to capitalise on their asset by repackaging sections of the Nelson’s History of the War as Episodes of the Great War in 1936, Naval Episodes of the Great War in 1938 and Unchanging Germany in 1939. These were obvious and astute responses to the build-up towards the Second World War, but the real scraping of the barrel by Nelson’s was their issue of Comments and Characters, a collection of Buchan’s journalism from the disastrous Scottish Review of 1907–8. While it has historical interest as collected journalism by Buchan, its appearance in 1939 capitalised solely on Buchan himself, Lord Tweedsmuir, Governor-General of Canada and one of the most important names Nelson’s had to boast about. The back cover carried heavy advertising for the rest of Buchan’s works that Nelson’s sold in its Collected Edition. Copyright is key to understanding the Nelson’s–Buchan relationship. Their early series were based on copyright fiction and copyright non-fiction libraries, a clear signal that, as well as indulging in the up-to-date publishing jargon of their day in their advertising, for Nelson’s the copyright status of a property was its most important aspect, possibly more so than its literary merit. One of the principal grievances that Buchan had with Ian Nelson, in their dispute over money in 1923, was that Buchan had given the copyright of his works first written for and published by Nelson’s to the firm freely and as part of the terms of his employment. He claimed to have donated £10,000 of royalties to Nelson’s from these titles, implying that he forewent them himself.57 For Ian Nelson to accuse Buchan of having milked Nelson’s for his high salary, and then not having done enough to earn this, was a serious accusation that Buchan felt deeply. Buchan



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must have come to the end of his contract with Nelson’s in 1929 with a sense of relief, as well as the knowledge that he was now able to manage without them, since he had been a bestselling author without them for many years. The firm had been good for him, but he had been, and would continue to be, better for the firm.

Notes 1. Grateful acknowledgement is given to the late Michael Ross of Avonworld Books for bibliographical data. 2. ‘Series’ as used here follows the definition ‘a set of uniformly bound, uniformly priced books issued under a general title’ (Spiers 2007: 7). Nelson’s first reprint series, the New Century Library, published sub-series of the Works of Dickens, Scott, Thackeray, the Brontës and Browning, in addition to single works by Lord Lytton, Alexandre Dumas, George Eliot and Edgar Allen Poe. 3. P. Keating (1991: 435). See also the Thomas Nelson’s Correspondence, Edinburgh University Special Collections, Gen 1728, John Buchan – Nelson’s letters (hereafter abbreviated to TNC/EUSC). 4. John Buchan to George Brown, 24 February 1909, TNC/EUSC, B/1/196. 5. For more information on Nelson’s publishing activities before the First World War, see K. Macdonald (2009: 71–96). 6. J. Adam Smith (1965, 1985 edn: 162). 7. Keating (1991: 431). 8. Ibid. 9. Spiers (2007: 7). 10. Keating (1991: 433–4). Other European publishers bought paperback reprint rights for their own series, including Tauchnitz and Albatross (Rose 2007: 345). 11. Keating (1991: 432). 12. Ibid.: 434. 13. M. Voykovic (1996: 33). 14. Keating (1991: 434). Nelson’s New Century Library relied on perennial classics from 1899 to 1909. Its Sixpenny Classics series, later called the Nelson’s Classics series, was launched in 1903 (McCleery 2007: 71). This also printed out-of-copyright titles at a very competitive rate, since Dent’s Everyman Library and Oxford University Press’s World’s Classics series, taken over from the defunct Grant Richards, were both retailing at a shilling per volume in 1906. By 1909 there were over one hundred cheap reprint series in the market (Keating 1991: 434). ‘John Long was producing 51 titles in 6d paperback form in 1904, the “Daily Mail” series of copyright novels had 137 titles by 1906, Cassell were publishing 102 titles in paperback in 1911, and Pearson’s 179 in 1908–09’ (Birch 1987: 80). 15. Andrew Nash notes that Collins also brought out a 7d. copyright library within days of Nelson’s first 7d. volumes: the idea appears to have been developed simultaneously and in parallel (Nash 2007: 188). 16. Adam Smith (1985: 171).




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17. Keating (1991: 435). By 1909 the Copyright Library had been joined by the Nelson Shilling Library (advertisement, Practical Teacher, 30.3, September 1909: 21), ‘a series of further copyright titles of general literature’ (McCleery 2007: 71). By 1912 the Shilling Copyright Library of New Novels contained well over 100 titles (data from catalogue in Una L. Silberrad’s Ordinary People, 1912 Nelson’s Copyright library edition). 18. Adam Smith (1985: 170). 19. M. Hammond (2006: 86). Richard Altick (1958) also has some good information on this subject. 20. Its schools series had a more genre-specific organisation. 21. John Buchan to George Brown, 15 November 1909, TNC/EUSC, B/1/418. 22. B. Luey (2007: 369). 23. Spiers (2007: 3). 24. Memorandum, 1909, TNC/EUSC, B/1/123. 25. Spiers (2007: 3). 26. See, for example, John Buchan to George Brown, TNC/EUSC, 9 February 1909, B/1/181a; 10 March 1909, B/1/204; 6 April 1909, B/1/226. 27. Adam Smith (1985: 168–9). 28. These were the Sevenpennies, Nelson’s Short Studies in English Literature (advertisement, Practical Teacher, 28.2, August 1907: xv), Nelson’s Highroads of History (advertisement, Practical Teacher, 28.2, August 1907: 113), Nelson’s Cycle of Song (advertisement, Practical Teacher, 28.2, August 1907: xv) and Nelson’s Cameos of Literature (advertisement, Practical Teacher, 28.2, August 1907: xv). Additional series followed rapidly, including Nelson’s Royal Treasury of Story and Song, Nelson’s Alert Arithmetic, Nelson’s Handbooks of Moral Instruction, Nelson’s Highroads of Literature, Nelson’s Highroads of Geography and Nelson’s Young Folks’ Bookshelf. 29. S. Reynolds (2007: 73–5). In 1909 Buchan was in negotiation with the Chinese authorities over publishing new educational series in China ( John Buchan to George Brown, 12 February 1909, TNC/EUSC, B/1/189). 30. J. Buchan (1940: 140). 31. John Buchan to George Brown, 25 March 1914, TNC/EUSC, B/5/47c. 32. John Buchan to George Brown, 25 May 1910, TNC/EUSC, B/2/84a. 33. John Buchan to George Brown, 12 October 1909, TNC/EUSC, B/1/385. 34. A. Candlish (1985: 15–18). Buchan also handled technical specifications, trade reports, serial rights, legal advice to his colleagues, rewriting and editing, advertising development and sales, art direction and translation. 35. In February 1914 this had reached eighty-five volumes, sold alongside a fiftyone volume edition of the Complete Works of Victor Hugo, a Lutetia Classics series of eight volumes and the Complete Works of Molière in six volumes (advertisement, The Bookman, February 1914: iii). 36. Adam Smith (1985: 171–2). 37. Candlish (1985) and Redley (2005). 38. Keating (1991: 437). 39. While Buchan had published thirteen books in eight years, four of them novels, before he was twenty-seven, after his return from South Africa in 1903 he was ‘only’ to publish five books in the next five years. 40. John Buchan to George Brown, 28 December 1910, TNC/EUSC, B/2/256a. 41. Anon (1910: 302).



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42. John Buchan to Thomas Arthur Nelson, 25 October 1911,TNC/EUSC, B/3/274. 43. John Buchan to George Brown, 29 May 1914, TNC/EUSC, B/5/29. 44. K. Macdonald (2007: 14–15). 45. Letters, November 1917, TNC/EUSC, B/7/82-142. 46. Nelson’s Map Book of the World Wide War (1917: 6). 47. John Buchan to George Brown, 9 August 1916, TNC/EUSC, B/6/175. 48. K. Macdonald (2006: 30–5). 49. ‘A large number of pamphlets were produced at 1d, 2d and 3d and a few at 6d. The publisher gave his imprint (an important point this) and the benefit of his organisation in regard to reviewing, holding stock, advertising, sales accounts, etc for a fee of 5 guineas, which in most cases did not cover his expenses. Publishers more did not demand a monopoly of publications’ (War Office Papers n.d.: 2). 50. John Buchan to George Brown, 16 January 1917, TNC/EUSC, B/7/14. 51. John Buchan to George Brown, 16 January 1917, TNC/EUSC, B/7/14. George H. Doran published most of the British government’s propaganda publications aimed at the USA (War Office Papers n.d.: 4). Doran had a connection with Buchan that predated his arrival at the Department of Information, since they had first published him in 1910 with an American edition of Prester John, and also in 1915 and in 1917. 52. Quoted in Harris and Harris (1983: 18). 53. He had a tendency to exaggerate in private meetings too. Basil Liddell Hart recorded a conversation with Buchan in December 1916 where Buchan claimed to have been ‘with Sir John French at the First Battle of Ypres in 1914 and has been on the Headquarters Staff ever since’ (see the Liddell Hart papers in the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives, file 7/1916/36, 1). 54. Correspondence between John Buchan and George Brown, October 1916, TNC/EUSC, in B/6/209-359. 55. John Buchan to George Brown, 21 October 1916, TNC/EUSC, B/6/238. 56. See Redley (2005). 57. Adam Smith (1985).

Selected bibliography Adam Smith, J. (1965) John Buchan. A Biography. London: Rupert Hart-Davis (repr. Oxford University Press, 1985). Altick, R. (1958) ‘From Aldine to Everyman: Cheap Reprint Series of the English Classics 1830–1906’, Studies in Bibliography, 11: 3–24. Anonymous (1910) ‘The Review’s Bookshop’, The Review of Reviews, 42(249): 302. Birch, M. J. (1987) ‘The Popular Fiction Industry: Market, Formula, Ideology’, Journal of Popular Culture, 21(3): 79–102. Buchan, J. (1940) Memory Hold-the-Door. London: Hodder & Stoughton. Candlish, A. (1985) ‘John Buchan – Literary Advisor’, The John Buchan Journal, 5 (Summer): 15–18. Hammond, M. (2006) Reading, Publishing and the Formation of Literary Taste in England, 1880–1914. Aldershot: Ashgate.




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Harris, M. and Harris, S. (1983) The War Artists. London: Michael Joseph. Keating, P. (1991) The Haunted Study: A Social History of the English Novel 1875–1914. London: Fontana Press. Luey, B. (2007) ‘Modernity and Print III: The United States 1890–1970’, in S. Eliot and J. Rose (eds), A Companion to the History of the Book. Oxford, Blackwell, pp. 368–80. McCleery, A. (2007) ‘Selling to the World’, in D. Finkelstein and A. McCleery (eds), The Edinburgh History of the Book in Scotland. Volume 4: Professionalism and Diversity, 1880–2000. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 71–82. Macdonald, K. (2006) ‘The Translations of John Buchan’s Wartime Histories’, The John Buchan Journal, 34 (Spring): 30–5. Macdonald, K. (2007) ‘Writing the War’, The Times Literary Supplement, 11 August: 14–15. Macdonald, K. (2009) ‘The Diversification of Thomas Nelson & Sons: John Buchan and the Nelson Archive, 1909–1911’, Publishing History, 65: 71–96. Nash, A. (2007) ‘The Changing Face of the Publishing House’, in D. Finkelstein and A. McCleery (eds), The Edinburgh History of the Book in Scotland. Volume 4: Professionalism and Diversity, 1880–2000. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 185–202. Nelson’s Map Book of the World Wide War (1917) 50 Pages of New Bold Maps and a Diary of the War, 3rd edn. Edinburgh: Thomas Nelson & Sons. Redley, M. (2005) ‘The “School of Buchan”: Inter-war Fiction in the Buchan Style’, The John Buchan Journal, 33 (Autumn): 28–41. Reynolds, S. (2007) ‘Nelson’s French Collection, 1910–60s’, in D. Finkelstein and A. McCleery (eds), The Edinburgh History of the Book in Scotland. Volume 4: Professionalism and Diversity, 1880–2000. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 73–75. Rose, J. (2007) ‘Modernity and Print I: Britain 1890–1970’, in S. Eliot and J. Rose (eds), A Companion to the History of the Book. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, pp. 341–53. Spiers, J. (2007) Serious about Series. American Cheap ‘Libraries’, British ‘Railway’ Libraries and Some Literary Series of the 1890’s. London: Institute of English Studies. Voykovic, M. (1996) ‘The Culture of Thriller Fiction in Britain, 1898–1945’, PhD thesis, Department of History, University of New South Wales. War Office Papers (n.d.) INF 4/1B, Memorandum: The Activities of Wellington House during the Great War 1914–18, National Archives, Kew.



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The Series as Commodity: Marketing T. Fisher Unwin’s Pseudonym and Autonym Libraries Frederick Nesta

The Pseudonym and Autonym Libraries were distinctively packaged novelettes that caught the attention of late nineteenth-century British and American audiences and attracted imitators on both sides of the Atlantic. Their publisher, T. Fisher Unwin, was noted as a publisher of both fiction and non-fiction series directed at differing audiences. By 1917 the firm had twenty-eight series in its lists, of which several stood out: the Mermaid series of Restoration and Jacobean plays, the Cameo series of poetry and the Story of the Nations series of histories written by some of the outstanding historians and writers of the day. Thomas Fisher Unwin (1848–1935) apprenticed in 1868 with the publishing firm of Jackson, Walford, and Hodder. Unwin started his own house in 1882, at the age of thirty-four, purchasing Marshall, Japp & Co. for £1,000 and setting up shop in Holborn Viaduct. He later moved to Paternoster Square and then to 1 Adelphi Terrace in 1905. Although the Unwin family were strict Congregationalists, Thomas Fisher Unwin hearkened back to his brewer grandfather and namesake, Fisher Unwin (1776–1819), and enjoyed wine with his meals and Continental culture. He had a liberal outlook that made him a champion of free trade, a pro-Boer and an advocate for Africans in the Congo and for Irish Home Rule. A keen mountaineer, he published books on mountaineering and, when his nephew Stanley Unwin came into the firm, became the distributor of Ordnance Survey maps and Baedeker guides. But he was also jealous of his associates, impatient in his dealings with people, and was described by his general manager, A. D. Marks, as a lonely man with little sense of humour who became increasingly unable to make decisions. Unwin was fortunate to have several talented people work with him over the years. Much of the early success of the firm in finding new talent must be attributed to Edward Garnett (1868–1937), who became 171



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one of the most respected readers in England. Although Garnett was reputedly hired to pack books but was given a job as a reader only because he was late for work on his first day and impressed Unwin by arriving in a hansom cab, Jefferson (1982: 12) notes that it was his father, Richard Garnett, Keeper of Printed Books at the British Museum, who arranged the job with T. Fisher Unwin and that Unwin would have been aware that this young man came from a family with very strong literary connections: George Meredith, the Rossettis, Madox Brown and other prominent Victorians were weekly guests at the Garnett house and the writers the young Garnett brought to T. Fisher Unwin included classmates such as Ford Madox Ford and friends such as W. B. Yeats.1 Although he was only twenty-two when he started the Pseudonym and Autonym Libraries, Garnett had a strong marketing sense coupled to his critical skills and could recognise when a story or series would appeal to a particular audience and when an author’s style was no longer fashionable. Garnett and his wife, translator Constance Black Garnett, had close contacts with the Russian émigré communities in England, enabling Garnett to add foreign authors to the Unwin list. One of Garnett’s discoveries was Joseph Conrad, and it was Garnett who encouraged Conrad to continue writing. Garnett remained a reader with T. Fisher Unwin for twelve years before continuing his career with Heinemann and others. The young firm made a name for itself by publishing fiction from young authors, including Somerset Maugham’s Liza of Lambeth (1897), Joseph Conrad’s Almayer’s Folly (1895), John Galsworthy’s From the Four Winds (1897) and poetry and fiction by W. B. Yeats (Unwin 1947: 80). They published a Colonial Library and ‘Unwin’s Library’ to compete on the Continent with the German firm of Tauchnitz. Their First Novel Library published Ethel M. Dell’s The Way of an Eagle (1912) and Dorothy Sayers’s Whose Body? (1923). The British Library Catalogue lists over 1,600 items under the T. Fisher Unwin imprint. The Unwin catalogue of 1909 provides an example of the breadth of the firm: there are fourteen poems and plays by W. B. Yeats; translations of Gorky; Ibsen’s The Lady from the Sea. Ford Madox Ford, then writing as Ford H. Hueffer, wrote children’s books for the firm, illustrated by his grandfather, Madox Brown, while W. B. Yeats’s father Jack B. Yeats also illustrated books for T. Fisher Unwin. Publishing new novelists, even if they were to become recognised as geniuses in later years, brought little income to either the firm or its discoveries. Richard Garnett’s introduction to his Letters from Joseph Conrad tells us that it took nineteen years for Conrad to achieve any popular success, even though his reviews were favourable from the start: Almayer’s Folly took seven years to go to a third impression. Outcast



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of the Islands (1896) and Tales of Unrest (1898) both took eleven years to reach a second impression, and the Nigger of the Narcissus (1897) took sixteen years to reach its third impression (Conrad 1962: 16). In the nineteenth century authors more commonly used their own names, but the use of pseudonyms and anonymity had not completely gone out of fashion. Anonymous or pseudonymous novels appeared in publishers’ lists alongside named authors; thus a book titled The Failure of Lord Curzon: A Study in Imperialism by ‘Twenty-eight Years in India’ and the anonymous Missing Friends: Being the Adventures of a Danish Emigrant in Queensland appeared in T. Fisher Unwin’s catalogue, the titles fitting in among the alphabetical list of named authors without comment or note. So too does the name of John Oliver Hobbes appear among the list of titles in Unwin’s Red Cloth Library, with no indication that John Oliver Hobbes was the pseudonym of Pearl Craigie. Publishing a series that highlighted the use of a pseudonym drew attention to the fact that the author was shielding his or her true identity. Had the first volume in the Pseudonym Library, Mademoiselle Ixe, appeared in T. Fisher Unwin’s First Novel Library under the authorship of Lanoe Falconer, the pseudonym of Mary Elizabeth Hawker, few would have questioned who Lanoe Falconer was, if the author were male or female, an already known author writing under a pseudonym or a new novelist making a first appearance. But by publishing Mademoiselle Ixe specifically in a series that drew the attention of reviewers and readers to exactly those questions, Unwin tantalised readers with the mystery of the authorship and attracted their attention again with the later revelation of the author’s identity. Whether the Pseudonym Library began because T. Fisher Unwin fit the series around the 30,000 words of Mademoiselle Ixe and Mary Elizabeth Hawker’s use of a pseudonym or not, the combination of short, gripping stories, mysterious authors and a distinctive physical format made for a series that was enormously popular in the 1890s and copied by several other publishers.2 The first book in the Pseudonym Library series appeared in October 1890, followed by new titles every month or two (Edwards 1957: 11). The Pseudonym Library continued to publish new titles until 1903, showcasing new authors, foreign authors and translations. Few established authors appeared in the series but several later-famous authors got their start in the Pseudonym Library. The Pseudonym Library published a total of fifty-five titles between the first, Mademoiselle Ixe, and the final volume, Vernon Lee’s Penelope Brandling: A Tale of the Welsh Coast in the Eighteenth Century, in 1903.3 There was a gap in the series after number 52, Anthony Jasper by Ben Bolt,



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was published in 1896 and no further titles appeared until As a Tree Falls by L. Parry Truscott was published as number 53 in 1903. T. Fisher Unwin may have planned to replace the Pseudonym with a new series called ‘Little Novels’ of about the same length but in a slightly larger format. The Pseudonym Library was reissued in one shilling format in 1914 as a ‘new edition of the Pioneer Library of Cheap and Good Fiction’ (Times List of New Books 1914: 6). Forty-one different authors wrote for the series, of whom thirty-seven have been identified, eleven men and twenty-six women (Bassett 2002: 121). Four of the established authors who wrote for the series were already known under their pseudonyms: ‘Ouida’, ‘Rita’, ‘Vernon Lee’ and ‘Ralph Iron’ (Olive Schreiner), whose Story of an African Farm (1883) was published under her pseudonym. W. B. Yeats was a young poet on the T. Fisher Unwin list when he wrote a novel for the series under the pseudonym ‘Gonconagh’, and Walter Raymond had published at least one previous novel (Misterton’s Mistake, 1888) before he made his appearance as ‘Tom Cobbleigh’. Most of the other authors were unknowns and for two, Lanoe Falconer (Mary Elizabeth Hawker, 1848–1908) and John Oliver Hobbes (Pearl Richards Craigie, 1867–1906), the Pseudonym Library was their debut into fame. Lanoe Falconer was the daughter of a Highlands regiment officer who grew up in Europe after her father’s death and mother’s remarriage. Mademoiselle Ixe was her first major success, followed quickly by The Hôtel d’Angleterre and Cecilia de Noël. Falconer suffered from tuberculosis and ill-health that prevented her from continuing her career after 1894. John Oliver Hobbes was the daughter of the American businessman John Morgan Richards, who introduced display advertising and American cigarettes and patent medicines to England (‘England and America’ 1906: 175). He relocated his family to London in 1867 where Hobbes grew up on Tavistock Square. She was charming and precocious, and had an unfortunate early marriage to Reginald Walpole Craigie, whom she left shortly before she published Some Emotions and a Moral (1891) in the Pseudonym Library. The novel became ‘a success for both author and publisher’ and sold 6,000 copies in England within a year (Harding 1996: 56–7). Hobbes may have had an understanding of advertising from her father. At Hobbes’s suggestion, T. Fisher Unwin placed advertisements for her books with complimentary and adverse reviews next to each other in parallel columns. He also advertised her novels as ‘thousandth’ rather than ‘second edition’, giving buyers a better clue to the novel’s popularity (Waller 2006: 151, 673). Hobbes herself became a prominent personality, a playwright as well as a novelist, with her fame coming first 10.1057/9780230299368 - The Culture of the Publisher's Series, Volume 1, Edited by John Spiers


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from her novels, then again from her position as a wealthy American socialite in London and, finally, from her early death at the age of thirty-eight in 1906 and the publication of her biography and letters by her father in 1911. Everyone seemed to know that John Oliver Hobbes was Pearl Richards Craigie, and that Mrs Craigie was John Oliver Hobbes. Her identity was revealed in 1892, only a year after the first of her four Pseudonym Library books had appeared.4 When her collected Tales of John Oliver Hobbes appeared at the end of 1894 outside of the Pseudonym Library it contained her portrait. Her name – or in this case, both of her names – must have helped to sell the Pseudonym Library as much as the Pseudonym Library had brought her to the public’s attention. They advertised each other. From the start, reviews of the Pseudonym Library concentrated as much on the series and its distinctive oblong format and yellow covers as on the individual novels in it. The Saturday Review noted that it ‘surprises and interests by itself before a word of it is read. It is tall, it is slender, it is bright yellow, it is the first volume of the “Pseudonym Library.” It is a most delightful book to hold, being light, and the high narrow column of type recommends itself most agreeably to reading.’ The Athenaeum agreed that even ‘if the text were less interesting than it is, one could always derive a certain comfort and pleasure from the handling of so dainty a little volume’.5 The initial Times review (‘Recent Novels’ 1890: 11) noted that while ‘rival publishers are racking their brains to devise “libraries” with taking names, it was not an unhappy thought of Mr. Fisher Unwin to start a “Pseudonym Library”’, using ‘a narrow, oblong shape and ample margins’ to ‘[eke] out the story to the dimensions of a railway novel’ and atoning for the ‘tenuity of matter’ by the ‘get-up’ of the book and its 1s. 6d. price. That review may have inspired a poem to the series by Ernest Radford (1880–1920) that appeared in the Pall Mall Gazette: Fisher Unwin publishes, Price one-and-six, In the ‘Pseudonym’ Library, M’selle Ixe. Publishers are constantly Up to such tricks; This is their latest, M’selle Ixe. He who sits reading it Hopelessly sticks 10.1057/9780230299368 - The Culture of the Publisher's Series, Volume 1, Edited by John Spiers



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But the ‘get up’ of it Everything licks:– Buy it, ye Bibliacs, M’selle Ixe! He who gets discount Has straw for his tricks; If you want to lose fourpence, Pay one-and-six.6 The second review in The Times in 1891 praised the series, saying the Library ‘deserves the success it has done much to obtain from the very audacity of the conception. It was a bold and original idea to invite a variety of writers, presumed to be exceptionally gifted, to merge their personalities in that of the publishers, and bring any fame they might gain into a common stock. The result, so far as the scheme has been carried out, has been to give us a series of novelettes very decidedly above the average’ (‘Pseudonym Library’ 1891: 6). The review then went on to discuss Mademoiselle Ixe, A Russian Priest, The Story of Eleanor Lambert, The Hôtel d’Angleterre, and A Mystery of the Campagna, all favourably and with a comment that the identity of the author of Mademoiselle Ixe has become a ‘matter of notoriety’. Another Times review in 1894 begins ‘One of the best “Pseudonyms” that have appeared’ in its review of Alice Spinner’s A Study in Colour and John Oliver Hobbes’s A Bundle of Love. Although the reviewer found Hobbes’s novels disappointing, the series was still seen as a whole and favourably (‘One of the Best’ 1894: 9). T. Fisher Unwin quoted some of the reviews in his advertisements for the series: These quaint-shaped booklets always promise originality – Graphic Ces petits volumes, jaunes, au format de carnet, si faciles à mettre dans la poche, d’une prix si modique et d’une lecture si attrayante. – Le Livre Moderne The Pseudonym Library is a veritable academy of new literary reputations. – Queen Not everyone was as positive about the series. Eleanor Marx Aveling wrote that while many of T. Fisher Unwin’s series were charming and



In this pseudonymous M’selle Ixe.

useful, she wondered ‘Why is he issuing this “Series?” Simply because it is pseudonymous?’ Nor was she impressed with the format, finding that ‘It resembles only one thing – a cash-book. Those of us – a very few – who have cash-books don’t need such reminders. Those, most of us, who have no cash-books can hardly enjoy being reminded of what they have not. And, finally, the volumes will fit neither into a travelling-bag, a pocket, nor a book-case’ (Marx Aveling 1891). Over sixty years later The Times was still talking about the Pseudonym Library. Oliver Edwards (the pseudonym of Sir William Haley, 1901–87, then editor of the Times) reviewed the series again in 1957, noting that ‘an odd shape can fix a book in one’s mind as much as anything else, and never was there an odder – or a more convenient – shape for a book than Mr. Fisher Unwin’s Pseudonym Library’ (Edwards 1957: 11). The Pseudonym Library continued Unwin’s promotion of new authors. Ford Madox Ford recounts that not only was Conrad a new discovery, with ‘English that was new, magic, and unsurpassable’, but also among Unwin’s finds were Hobbes and the other authors of the Pseudonym Library, with its sulphur-yellow colour covers that penetrated like a fumigation into every corner of Europe. Mademoiselle Ixe must have found millions of readers. And it was really the talk of the town. Mr. Gladstone, I think, wrote a postcard about it. Then there was Olive Schreiner, who was a prophetess, and who wrote wonderfully well about South Africa, and lectured the Almighty for the benefit of Hampstead. (Ford 1911: 250–1) Mademoiselle Ixe may not have had a million readers but it did sell at least 40,000 copies (Lee 2004). Its sales certainly helped the success of the series. Short, readable, attractively packaged and priced, they must have stood out at the booksellers or at W. H. Smith’s railway counters. Peter Unwin says that they were ‘fashionable upon the occasional tables of the ‘nineties’ and their popularity was such that both Conrad and Maugham submitted their first manuscripts to T. Fisher Unwin for publication in the series (Unwin 1986: 42). According to Unwin, the series was begun ‘with the object of utilising the short novels that from time to time were offered to the publisher’ and by the end of 1894 had required the printing of half a million copies (Good Reading 1894–5: 127). Sales were also helped by the use of a striking poster for the Pseudonym Library, ‘Girl and a Bookshop’, done in 1893 by Aubrey Beardsley. Beardsley did another poster for the Autonym Library that was later and incongruously used to promote Unwin’s children’s books. Aubrey Beardsley created two posters for




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T. Fisher Unwin. The first, ‘Girl and a Bookshop’, created in 1893 (Reade plates 296, 320), was used to advertise both the Pseudonym and Autonym Libraries and for trade cards and magazine and book covers, including the cover of Hobbes’s The Dream and the Business (1906). A second poster (Reade, plate 324), done in late 1894, may have been intended for the Autonym Library, as it is described as the Autonym Library poster on the facing page to the article about the Autonym Library (p. 133) in Good Reading about Many Books, Mostly by their Authors (1894–5). A letter from Beardsley to T. Fisher Unwin in October 1894 mentions a meeting with Unwin to discuss a book, followed by other letters in November about a receipt and proofs, presumably for the Autonym poster, as the Pseudonym poster had already appeared and was attracting attention (Beardsley 1970: 76–8). It later appeared and has become known as the poster for the T. Fisher Unwin Children’s Library, rather inappropriately, as it simply shows a woman with a very low bodice seated in a winged chair reading a book. Both posters carried the Beardsley illustration on the left-hand side, leaving the right available for changing advertising text.7 Pseudonym authors who proved their popularity would later appear in full-length novels under their pseudonym: T. Fisher Unwin published four novels by John Oliver Hobbes in the Pseudonym Library and nine other novels in other editions, one of them, Tales of John Oliver Hobbes, collecting all of the Pseudonym titles into one volume. Lanoe Falconer’s two Pseudonym novels were bound together in the one shilling ‘Popular edition’. Rita’s A Jilt’s Journal and Vanity: The Confessions of a Court Modiste and Ouida’s The Silver Christ were republished in separate, more expensive editions. The much less successful Autonym Library began in 1894 with Francis Marion Crawford’s The Upper Berth and concluded in 1896 with number 18, Cosmo Hamilton’s (Henry Charles Hamilton Gibbs, 1870–1942) first book, Which Is Absurd, which was reviewed by Jerome K. Jerome with a two-word review: ‘Quite so’ (Hamilton 1921: 90). The Autonym Library followed the same physical format but its list of authors included some of the most popular of the time: S. R. Crockett, who had published his popular Stickit Minister with T. Fisher Unwin; Mrs Oliphant, George Gissing and W. E. Norris. In George Gissing’s case and perhaps in the others as well, T. Fisher Unwin solicited contributions to the series, writing to Gissing early in January 1895 to ask for a piece for the Autonym Library. Although Gissing’s reply to Unwin’s initial offer indicates that Unwin had asked for a contribution specifically to the Autonym Library, Unwin must have written back to Gissing after he agreed to do the story asking if Gissing preferred to publish in the Autonym or the



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Figure 8.1 Poster by Aubrey Beardsley for T. Fisher Unwin’s children’s books, including The Children’s Library, 1894

Pseudonym Library. Apparently it did not matter to Unwin if Gissing’s work appeared in either, giving a good example of how fiction had become a commodity, in this case 30,000 words that could sell in the Autonym Library as a Gissing work or 30,000 words that would sell in the Pseudonym Library as a simple piece of well crafted fiction. Gissing sent the completed manuscript of Sleeping Fires to Unwin on 13 March. Garnett thought the work would sell a ‘few thousand copies’ solely because of Gissing’s name, but still he wrote: What is Mr Gissing’s Market Value for a tale of say 30,000 words? On the answer to that question depends what we should say in TFU’s next




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letter to him for of all the half & half potboilers we have come across, this is the finest specimen of them all. … Of course Gissing’s name has a certain marketable value, but we feel that a stronger effort be made to get good work out of him, that he ought not to get rid of work which very likely would be refused by every other publisher. (Gissing 1895; underlining in original) Fortunately for Gissing, T. Fisher Unwin’s other reader, W. H. Cheeson, was more charitable and convinced Unwin to accept the novel as it was ‘a quiet earnest and sincere outcome of Mr. Gissing’s convictions’ and ‘if it would be agreeable to have a Gissing story in the “half crown” series, why this is a fair enough specimen for the purpose’, the ‘half-crown series’ most likely being the ‘Popular Copyright Novels’ of reprints of works by established authors (Gissing 1895). Garnett also used the ‘potboiler’ term in referring to Rita’s submission of A Husband of No Importance, saying that it would not ‘do for the Pseudonym’ as it was too ‘vulgar and cheap’ for the Pseudonym’s requirement of ‘good distinctive art’, but that since it was a ‘New Woman’ potboiler it could be popular enough to ‘pull the Autonym up, and make it talked about. What we want in that series is up to date fiction, fiction essentially of the hour’ that would appeal to the ‘railway bookstall public who like some sensation and cheapness for their money’ ( Jefferson 1982: 49–50). Given the low price of the books, T. Fisher Unwin could not have paid the authors handsomely for writing for the Pseudonym or Autonym libraries. Cosmo Hamilton received only £10 for his Autonym contribution but it was his first book and a reasonable amount for a short novel, considering that T. Fisher Unwin only paid Conrad £25 for the entire copyright of Almayer’s Folly (Unwin 1986: 4). Established authors would have certainly received more and, if Gissing’s fee (£150) is typical, Unwin would have paid £5 for each thousand words for all rights, the same rate that Gissing’s agent, J. B. Pinker, was able to negotiate for Gissing’s short stories that he sold to periodicals. The Autonym Library was imitated by the Pocket Library series published by Cassell under the editorship of Max Pemberton in 1895.The Pocket Library copied the oblong format and size of the Pseudonym and Autonym series almost exactly. It sold for 1s. 4d., just undercutting the 1s. 6d. price for the Autonym Library. Shortly after sending the typescript of Sleeping Fires to Unwin in late March 1895, Gissing was approached by Max Pemberton for a contribution to the competing series. Cassell published only five titles in the series and Gissing’s The Paying Guest (1895) was the last.8 Including the £50 for the British and the



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£25 Gissing was paid for the American rights, Cassell paid £3 per thousand words, less than the three guineas that Gissing had received for short stories earlier in his career. The appearance and demise of the Cassell series in 1895 and the suspension of the Unwin series from 1896 until 1903 reflects the shifting market after the expensive three-decker novel died in 1894. New novels were appearing at 6s., with re-issues at 3s. 6d. and 2s. appearing about a year later. I suspect that Unwin and Cassell found that paying established authors £50 or £150 for a novelette selling at 1s. 4d. or 1s. 6d. was proving unprofitable and faced too much competition from new full-length novels that were now appearing at an affordable price. According to Stanley Unwin, T. Fisher Unwin paid £1,500 for Olive Schreiner’s Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland (1897). At fewer than 25,000 words it could never have recovered the large copyright payment selling at the Pseudonym Library’s 1s. 6d.; instead it was published at 6s., the type spread out to 100 words a page so as to fill 264 pages of an octavo volume. Imitation of the Pseudonym and Autonym format was not confined to Cassell or to Britain: three American imitators appeared, copying the format, the series name or a variation on it, and reprinting several of the titles. T. Fisher Unwin had close relationships with two of the publishers, Putnam and Cassell, and seems to have sold the titles and influenced the format of his American imitators. The three American ‘Pseudonyms’ were the Incognito Library published by Putnam, the Unknown Library published by Cassell in New York and the Pseudonym Library published by J. S. Tait & Sons. The New York Cassell’s Unknown Library was announced in the New York Times on 28 February 1891 thus: A new series which promises to be one of the successes of the year. The stories are written by well-known writers, who prefer for the once to write over a pseudonym. The books are long and narrow, just the right shape to slip readily into the pocket of a man’s or woman’s coat, and they are bound in flexible cloth, and ornamented with a chaste design. The type is large and the margins generous. The first volume in the ‘Unknown Library’ is: MADEMOISELLE IXE By Lanoe Falconer. Cloth, 50 cents. ‘Mademoiselle Ixe’ is the story of a Russian Nihilist, told with such strength and power as to hold the reader spell bound.




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Putnam’s Incognito Library appeared in 1894 and an advertisement appearing in Margaret Green’s The Doctor, His Wife and the Clock (1895), one of the Autonym Library books published by Putnam, announced that their Incognito series was ‘A series of small books by representative writers, whose names will for the present not be given. In this series will be included the authorized American editions of the future issues of Mr. Unwin’s “PSEUDONYM LIBRARY,” which has won for itself a noteworthy prestige.’ Note that element of mystery in ‘names for the present will not be given’: these were not the usual pseudonymous or anonymous books. The Tait Pseudonym Library may have begun as early as 1892 – the early volumes are undated – but ended in 1894 with the publication of A Bundle of Life, number 6 in its series. The company began in 1892 as Tait, Sons and Company and early imprints bear that name. In 1893 the firm began publishing British fiction under the name of the AngloAmerican Publishing Company but in 1894 the name was changed to J. Selwin Tait and Sons, the imprint under which the last Pseudonym title was published in 1894. The firm was purchased by the Eskdale Press in 1897 and seems to have died out shortly thereafter. While the Incognito and the Unknown Libraries had more elaborate decoration on their covers than did the Unwin books, the Tait Pseudonyms were almost exact imitations of the Unwin books, unadorned except for the narrow bands at the head and tail of the spines and covers. All three publishers issued their series at 50 cents. Putnam also published the Autonym Library. They must have negotiated the rights to each title in the Autonym separately, as Gissing’s Autonym title was published in the United States by Appleton in 1896 and not by Putnam. A New York Times review of the first two titles published in Putnam’s Autonym series (‘Recent Fiction’ 1894: 23) reveals that the American series differed in that it featured American writers, in this case Mary Putnam Jacobi, whose book Found and Lost actually consisted of two short stories previously published thirty years earlier.9 Interestingly, the Putnam advertisement for the Jacobi book implies that it was ‘issued in co-operation with Mr. Unwin of London. Copyrighted for the United States’, but as the book was not published in England or in the Autonym Library, the advertisement may only be referring to the series. Two New York Times reviews remarked on the recent appearance of similar ‘little books’, noting that ‘a great deal of ingenuity of the publishing trade seems to be expended on devising tasteful and novel forms for them’ (‘Famous Ghost Stories’ 1894: 23). The New York Times review of Dr Jacobi’s



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book listed the Autonym, the Incognito, the Vest Pocket Series, the Handy Volume Series and Knickerbocker Nuggets as examples of a new ‘swarm’ of volumes ‘built for people who snatch their reading as a certain variety of business man snatches his lunch’, but also noted that their low price was a temptation and that the Autonym was ‘at once self-respecting and attainable’ (‘Recent Fiction’ 1894: 23). Some of the titles in the Unknown Library were by obscure American authors: My Two Wives by One of Their Husbands and Wanted: A Copyist by W. H. Brearley are two examples. Cassell’s Unknown Library published Falconer’s Hôtel d’Angleterre, three of John Oliver Hobbes’s titles and seven other titles from the British series. Putnam’s Incognito Library published four of the Unwin ‘Pseudonyms’. Tait did not publish any American titles in their series, confining their Pseudonym Library to seven T. Fisher Unwin titles. Both Tait and Cassell published Hobbes’s A Bundle of Life in 1894.10 The Tait and Cassell editions of A Bundle of Life are identical, both using the same plates. None of the American series seem to have published any new titles beyond 1896 or 1897. An advertisement for Wanamaker’s department store in New York, appearing in the New York Times on 26 January 1897 (p. 4), lists four titles from the Incognito Library remaindered at 10 cents each. The Pseudonym and Autonym Libraries may not have done as well in the American market because their English or foreign settings may not have been of much interest to the Americans and they were competing in a market in which new, full-length novels were available for only 50 cents more and often for less.11 There was also an economic depression in the United States in 1896–7 that may have affected the market. However, why did both the British and American Pseudonym and Autonym Libraries cease after 1896? Garnett was at T. Fisher Unwin until the end of 1899, and presumably still had an interest in the series, but Unwin stopped acquiring more titles for the series until 1903 ( Jefferson 1982: 72–3). Leslie Howsam’s study of Victorian serials notes the growth of their numbers between 1881 and 1897 and their decline between 1898 and 1900 (Howsam 1992: 7). The top twenty publishers of series produced 211 titles in 1881–9, 478 in the period from 1890 to 1897, but only 250 in the period from 1898 to 1900. The novelty may have worn off, especially with other imitators in the market and competition from the increased number of journals, selling at a shilling or less, that carried new short stories by popular authors, some of whom were appearing in the Pseudonym and Autonym Libraries. Both series would continue to appear in the T. Fisher Unwin catalogue for many years, but that is an indication of stock rather than of sales,




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or at least that there were still sufficient sales that the series was not remaindered en masse. Certainly there was enough interest in the series to see it revived in 1914. Perhaps the Pseudonym and Autonym Libraries best serve as a way to see the series as a commodity, a certain number of words, of a certain quality, ordered and purchased at a price suiting the source, and then sold on to carefully selected markets. The Garnett and Cheeson comments above reflect this concentration on marketing and should not be surprising: commodification is inherent in the nature of print. Printing and publishing require capital for the purchase of the text, for the presses, type, ink, paper, binding, skilled labour and a distribution system. Publishers have to recover their costs for the title in hand and have sufficient return to produce the next. This was as true in Caxton’s time as it was in the nineteenth century.12 What was different in the nineteenth century was the expansion of the middle class and the rise of a literate working class. Publishers now had to find ways to exploit these new markets and discovered that they could align their books to match the tastes and demands of various segments within each group. Unwin’s readers, literary men that they were, still talked and thought in terms of markets. Unwin packaged Hobbes for different markets: the Green Cloth Library at 6s. and the 3s. 6d. edition for those who wanted what today could be the trade paper edition. Hobbes’s Pseudonym titles were collected and marketed in new formats, perhaps taking Eleanor Marx’s advice and making the volume more something suitable for the bookcase in the Adelphi Library series at 3s. 6d. or for a gift in the Green Cloth Library at 6s. For those who preferred Hobbes’s Flute of Pan and more romantic novels there was the Red Cloth series. Readers could choose titles from the Popular Copyright Novels or from Unwin’s Shilling Reprints of Standard Novels, with titles from the Pseudonym Library appearing in both. There was the First Novel Library for the curious, Unwin’s Shilling Novels for those on a budget and, for the almost impecunious, Unwin’s Sixpenny Editions, mostly novels, including some by Hobbes, but also including Unwin’s longtime bestseller, How to be Happy Though Married, by E. J. Hardy.13 The audience that the Pseudonym and Autonym Libraries were aimed at seem to have been railway bookstall buyers, young City clerks and fashionable young women, people who would be entertained by a good, quick mystery, who were sophisticated enough to want to read a story that not only had a foreign setting but may also have even been written by a foreigner: five Pseudonyms had Russian authors. In the Pseudonym Library, ‘John Smith’ and ‘Ben Bolt’ kept company with authors named



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‘Juhani Aho’ and ‘Holger Drachmann’. This was a time of nationalistic ferment abroad, and at home, an imperial, adventuring, travelling and missionary England that was intrigued by all things foreign. Lanoe Falconer was inspired to write Mademoiselle Ixe when she heard the ‘torment’ of a Russian tune and would later donate some of her earnings to assist Russian exiles, the sorts of exiles that Edward and Constance Garnett were intimate with in London. For half an hour, a commuter from Bromley to Blackfriars could escape a crowded carriage and be with mysterious people in Russia, France or even China. Mysterious people, strange settings, an author who was not what he (or she) seemed, all set in a book of unusual format: the formula worked for T. Fisher Unwin in the 1890s and carried the firm into the new century.

Notes 1. Although the story of the cab is from Constance Black Garnett’s memory, it may be apocryphal, as Autonym author Cosmo Hamilton also planned to make his initial appearance at Pasternoster Row a dramatic entrance behind a prancing horse. He discovered that the Row was too narrow to admit the hansom cab and had to walk from the end of the street (Hamilton 1921: 90). 2. Bassett (2004) cites Evelyn March Phillipps, ‘Lanoe Falconer’, Cornhill Magazine, 32, November 1912: 233 as the source for the Pseudonym Library tailored to Falconer’s novel. 3. Bassett and others count fifty-four to fifty-six titles in the series but the 1909 Unwin list shows that there were in fact fifty-five. 4. Lanoe Falconer, much more reticent, kept her real name hidden until her death, but she too had an interview in 1892 that disclosed the woman behind the masculine name (Bassett 2004: 153). 5. ‘Novels’, Saturday Review, 70, 8 November 1890: 622; ‘Novels of the Week’, Athenaeum, 3289, 8 November 1890, quoted in Bassett (2002: 123–4). 6. Unwin used a modified version of the poem in Good Reading (p. 129), published as a New Year’s gift for booksellers. The poem was revised to read ‘Publishers are constantly Up to new tricks’ and closed with ‘the Trade will knock fourpence Off one-and-six’. 7. The poster used for the children’s series appears in Good Reading (p. 133), and is described as a detail from a poster for the Autonym Library (Beardsley 1970). 8. The titles were A King’s Diary, by Percy White; The Little Huguenot, by Max Pemberton; A White Baby, by James Welsh; Lady Bonnie’s Experiment, by Tighe Hopkins; A Whirl Asunder, by Gertrude Atherton; and The Paying Guest, by George Gissing (Catalogue From Ia By Q, Cassell, 1896). The British Library records two Cassell’s Pocket Library series, this one, edited by Max Pemberton, and a later and different series that started in 1928. 9. It was her first publication, at age seventeen. Mary Putnam Jacobi, daughter of the publisher G. P. Putnam, was a physician and pioneer in advancing the careers of women in medicine.




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10. It was number 34 in the Cassell Unknown Library and number 6 in the Tait Pseudonym Library. It was number 31 in the Unwin Pseudonym Library. The Unwin edition has 195 pages and the two American editions 159. 11. Gissing’s Denzil Quarrier was available from Macmillan for $1 and his Eve’s Ransom from Appleton for the same price. The Unclassed was sold by Fenno for $1.25. A slim novel from Grant Allen, The Bride from the Desert, was also on sale from Fenno for only fifty cents. 12. For Caxton and the commodification of texts, see William Kuskin (2008). 13. Originally published in 1885 under the pseudonym ‘A Graduate in the University of Matrimony’, it would continue selling in numerous editions for many years, from the 6d. edition above to a deluxe white vellum, giltedged edition suitable for a wedding present and selling for 7s. 6d. The 1910 Unwin catalogue lists six different editions.

Selected bibliography Bassett, T. J. (2002) De-Monopolizing Literary Space: Authors, Publishers, and the OneVolume Novel in Late-Victorian Britain. Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas. Bassett, T. J. (2004) ‘T. Fisher Unwin’s Pseudonym Library: Literary Marketing and Authorial Identity’, English Literature in Transition, 47(2): 143–60. Beardsley, Aubrey (1970) The Letters of Aubrey Beardsley, ed. Henry Maas, J. L. Duncan and W. G. Good. London: Cassell. Conrad, J. (1962) Letters from Joseph Conrad, edited and with an introduction by Edward Garnett. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill. Edwards, O. (1957) ‘To Kill the Count’, The Times, 28 February. ‘England and America’ (1906) New York Times, 24 March 1906: BR175. ‘Famous Ghost Stories’ (1894) New York Times, 27 May. Ford, M. F. (1911) Memories and Impressions: A Study in Atmospheres. New York: Harper, pp. 250–1. Gissing, George (1895) 7 ALS to T. Fisher Unwin, Jan.–Dec. 1895 with reader’s report by W. H. Cheeson. Berg Collection, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations. Good Reading about Many Books Mostly by Their Authors (1894–5) London: T. Fisher Unwin. Green, M. (1895) The Doctor, His Wife and the Clock. New York: Putnam. Hamilton, C. (1921) ‘Cosmo Hamilton’, My Maiden Effort: Being the Personal Confessions of Well-known American Authors as to their Literary Beginnings. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Harding, M. D. (1996) Air-bird in the Water: the life and Works of Pearl Craigie (John Oliver Hobbes). London: Associated University Presses. Howsam, L (1992) ‘Sustained Literary Ventures: The Series in Victorian Book Publishing’, Publishing History, 31: 5–26. Jefferson, G. (1982) Edward Garnett: A Life in Literature. London: Jonathan Cape. Kuskin, W. (2008) Symbolic Caxton: Literary Culture and Print Capitalism. Notre Dame, IN, University of Notre Dame Press. Lee, E. (2004) ‘Hawker, Mary Elizabeth (1848–1908)’, rev. Megan A. Stephan, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press (http:// www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/33768), accessed 17 Nov 2007.



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Marx Aveling, E. (1891) Time, January 1891: 95–6 (http://www.marxists.org/ archive/eleanor-marx/1890/literature.htm). ‘One of the Best’ (1894) The Times, 27 March. ‘Pseudonym Library’ (1891) The Times, 1 September. ‘Recent Fiction’ (1894) New York Times, 2 September. ‘Recent Novels’ (1890) The Times, 26 December. Spiers, J. (2007) Serious about Series. London: Institute of English Studies. ‘Times List Of New Books And New Editions’ (1914) The Times, 31 March. Unwin, P. (1986) The Printing Unwins. London, Routledge. Unwin, S. (1947) The Truth about Publishing. London, Allen & Unwin. Waller, P. (2006) Writers, Readers, and Reputations: Literary Life in Britain 1870–1918. Oxford: Oxford University Press.




Sifting out ‘Rubbish’ in the Literature of the Twenties and Thirties: Chatto & Windus and the Phoenix Library Andrew Nash

Launched in 1928, the Phoenix Library was perhaps the most distinctive of a number of series of cheap reprints of contemporary literature that began to appear from the mid-1920s. Like its main competitors, the New Adelphi Library, begun by Martin Secker in 1925, and the Travellers Library launched by Jonathan Cape in 1926, the Phoenix Library was not a series of out of copyright classics like Dent’s Everyman’s Library but consisted mainly of reprints of works by contemporary authors which had not before been available in a smaller format and at a cheaper price. Publishers historically have always exploited the price elasticity of British books by issuing works at a variety of prices over a carefully spaced duration of time. In the inter-war period the main market for books – especially for literary fiction, biography and related genres – was still the libraries and books would in the first instance appear at a high price, usually 7s. 6d. for fiction. Once a work had been on the market for around two or three years and initial sales had slackened the price would be cut, usually to 3s. 6d. or 5s. What began to happen around the mid-1920s, however, was that publishers came to market these price cuts more aggressively, using uniform bindings and dust jackets and branded names to market cheap reprints as a series. Chatto & Windus boasted one of the most prestigious publishing lists of the inter-war period.1 The launch of the Phoenix Library in January 1928 meant that the works of Lytton Strachey, Aldous Huxley, Richard Aldington, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Rosamond Lehmann, T. F. Powys and numerous others were made available at a cheap price within easy reach of the book-buying public. When he announced the plans for the library to Lytton Strachey in October 1927, Charles Prentice, the senior partner, wrote: ‘Fresh publishers are bringing out cheap libraries 188



9

of reprints every season, and there is no doubt that the bookbuyer’s pocket money goes more and more into this form of book. We are accordingly launching a 3/6d library in the spring before the market gets too full.’2 The first twelve volumes consisted of three Strachey titles, three Huxley and books by David Garnett, Clive Bell, Hilaire Belloc, Arnold Bennett, C. E. Montague and A. A. Milne. By 1937 the library had over 100 titles. The range was considerable. The backbone consisted of reprints of the firm’s major authors of fiction and belle lettres but also included were plays by Milne and Richard Hughes; poetry volumes by Coventry Patmore and Wilfred Owen as well as a series of anthologies including Harold Monro’s influential Twentieth Century Poetry; Constance Garnett’s translations of Chekhov and C. K. Scott Moncrieff’s translations of Proust and other French writers; books on art by Clive Bell and Roger Fry; popular science works by Julian Huxley and J. B. S. Haldane; travel books such as J. R. Ackerley’s Hindoo Holiday; and miscellaneous titles such as G. K. Chesterton’s Short History of England, Jane Austen’s Love and Friendship and The Gentle Art of Cookery by C. F. Leyel and Olga Hartley. An essential part of the rationale of series publishing is uniformity in physical appearance. When the firm announced its plans to Clive Bell, it argued that cheap editions sold better in a series because they ‘attract attention on the shelves of a bookseller by presenting one bright uniform mass of colour’.3 The uniform design of the Phoenix Library made it possible to market a diverse range of books, some of which appealed only to a niche audience. As Geoffrey Whitworth, the firm’s art editor, told Roger Fry, the Phoenix Library was ‘a somewhat less elastic method of publishing’ but it meant that books such as Vision and Design ‘would reach a wider public than that definitely concerned with the study of aesthetics’.4 The Phoenix Library had a uniform dust jacket designed by Thomas Derrick but, in contrast to its competitors, the works of individual authors were bound in different colours – dark green for Strachey, dark blue for Huxley, light blue for Aldington, red for Garnett, black for Powys etc. The firm told Bell that ‘in this way … the works of each author will preserve an individuality of their own’.5 This policy entails an interesting assumption that some readers would discard the dust jacket once the book was purchased. Libraries would probably have circulated the books without wrappers as well. The innovations of the series were widely paraded in catalogues and announcements, which were inserted in national newspapers as well as literary magazines and trade journals. Early advertisements emphasised



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The advent of The Phoenix Library is not only a landmark in the history of the firm of Chatto & Windus, but in a larger world. In a day of attractive reprint series The Phoenix Library is prominent, first by reason of the books it includes, and again owing to its novelties and attractive appearance … each author has a distinctive colour, though the tawny, pleasing dust-cover is uniform. … It is pre-eminently a series to collect, and to go on collecting.6 The Observer picked up on this final point by declaring in a review that was recorded on early advertisements: ‘The very latest of the reprint libraries the Phoenix … has so many reasons why it should be bought forthwith and in its entirety, that one may expect to see its vivid red wrapper (Phoenix covered) in every home.’ The name of the library turned out to be one of its most effective marketing assets. In contrast to Cape’s Traveller’s Library and Secker’s New Adelphi Library, the use of a common noun – the Phoenix – allowed Chatto & Windus to market the books more aggressively as branded goods. The ornithological image anticipates the success of the Penguin paperbacks, which would hatch less than a decade later. The dust jacket was covered with a profusion of the distinctive Phoenix image, which was also blind-stamped on the front binding and used as a header on advertisements for the library. Early announcements used literary quotations to help push the series name. These included: ‘one Phoenix / At this hour reigning’ from The Tempest and three lines from a poem by Thomas Carew: Ask me no more if east or west The Phoenix builds her spicy nest, For unto you at last she flies … One advantage of series publishing is that it allows for books to be advertised collectively rather than individually, thus saving costs. Early announcements for the Phoenix Library advertised the series rather than the individual titles, which were listed at the bottom of the advertisement. Lists and catalogues were also included in each volume. The style of these changed over time. Initially they appeared opposite the title page but later a full catalogue was included at the end of the book, initially in order of appearance of each title but later, once the series



the cultural distinction of the library and made an appeal to the collecting instinct encouraged by the uniform appearance:

was fully established, alphabetically by author, sometimes with short commentaries or blurbs. The dust jackets also carried a list of selected titles on both the inside flaps and the back. Uniformity of appearance was carried further in the size of the volumes. Different weights of paper were used to help make each volume roughly the same thickness. Stendhal’s The Charterhouse of Parma consisted of over 650 pages, while Richard Hughes’s Plays ran to less than 200; the two books nevertheless look much the same size. David Garnett’s two novellas, Lady into Fox and A Man in the Zoo, were published in a single volume of just 190 pages. Not all disparities could be disguised, however. Proust’s Within a Budding Grove appeared in two volumes of 396 and 354 pages, and his other works were also spread over two volumes. Aldous Huxley’s Point Counter Point, which was twice the length of the average novel, did not appear in the library at all. Volumes were issued in batches in instalments every autumn and spring season. Each batch included titles by different writers so that the works of an individual author were added not all at once but gradually over a period of a year or eighteen months. This was designed to spread the earning potential of the books and to keep up demand for the series. The early volumes were also published in a leather binding priced at 5 shillings but this made little impact and was soon abandoned. Some new books were published in the library but mostly it consisted of reprints or new editions of previously published works, such as Wyndham Lewis’s Tarr. In some cases the Phoenix edition constituted the first cheap publication of the works of an established author. Lytton Strachey’s biographical volumes had never before been issued at a price lower than 7s. 6d. Eminent Victorians (1918), the second volume in the Phoenix, had been on the market for over ten years in its original edition priced at 10s. 6d. and in a reset smaller format 7s. 6d. edition. The Phoenix Library edition was thus the first in which this famous work was available at an affordable purchase price. Cheap reprints were an important means by which publishers could consolidate their association with an author’s work. As Harold Raymond, the firm’s other senior partner, told Richard Aldington: Almost every day we have to decide whether to reprint a ‘cheap’ or to let it die. Then come the questions, What did it sell last year? What royalty do we pay? How many years will it take us to recover our outlay? These questions can’t be ignored if one is to avoid bankruptcy, but unless they are preponderating, the factors which usually decide the issue are more personal ones. How do we stand with the author?




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The books were printed where possible from existing stereotype plates. This saved substantially on production. The firm estimated that to set them up afresh would cost about £80 and make a retail price of 3s. 6d. impossible. In the case of art books, such as Bell’s Art and Fry’s Vision and Design, the half-tone illustrations were omitted partly on grounds of cost but also because the firm wanted to preserve the distinctiveness, and therefore the sales, of the more expensive editions. There was also the issue of uniformity. Geoffrey Whitworth told Fry that the ‘appearance of one illustrated volume would scarcely be consistent with the general plan of the series, and would make it difficult for us to regain consistency in the future’.8 The Library was not conceived as a big money-spinner. Raymond told Aldington: ‘Broadly speaking, a publisher regards the “cheaps” market more as a help towards overheads than as a profitable line in itself. They help to ease him of the costs of the 7s. 6d. edition.’9 The profit margins were small. Authors generally received a royalty of 10 per cent, with 10 per cent of the net proceeds from colonial sales. Books were sold in the colonies at a cheaper price, thus narrowing the royalty margin. Demand for thin-paper editions in the colonies was in any case small, no doubt because the crown octavo editions were already being offered at a cheaper price. Some authors, such as David Garnett, received 12.5 per cent royalties after the sale of 5,000 copies, while Strachey and Huxley were given the luxury of 12.5 per cent from the outset. Raymond told Aldington that by factoring in overheads of 6½d. and a royalty of just over 4d. per copy, this left a little over 1s. 3d. out of which the firm had to manufacture the book and take any profit. If an edition of 2,000 copies was sold out the net profit would be about 3d. per copy.10 For most titles in the library the first print run was 5,000 copies. The initial printing of the first volume, however, Strachey’s Queen Victoria, was 10,000. The firm’s production ledgers record that the first binding order was for 5,000 cloth and 250 leather. The cost of paper and printing of the edition was £157 16s. 8d. and the total manufacturing cost was roughly 3¾d. per copy in quires and 5¾d. for a cloth-bound copy. Within the first ten months 7,000 copies had been sold and after two years Chatto & Windus had printed 25,000 copies and sold over 17,000. The profit recorded in the ledger was over £680, with Strachey having been paid some £380 in royalties. These figures make for interesting comparison with earlier sales of the book in more expensive editions.



Is his reputation advancing and is he likely to stick by us? If so, let’s keep as much of him in print as we possibly can.7

Queen Victoria had first been published in 1921 at the very high price of 15s. This was dropped after three years to 7s. 6d. – still a price that was aimed more at the library market than at book-buyers. In the seven years before the work was transferred to the Phoenix Library a total of 28,000 copies had been printed. The Phoenix edition was thus well on the way to matching this figure within the space of two years. An important aspect of the rationale of cheap reprints is to spread the demand for books by tapping into a new market. As Raymond told Aldington, cheap reprints allow an author ‘to keep his titles alive and to earn him a little extra royalties, whereas in America his books often cease to earn anything at all once their first gay months of life are over’.11 This was one advantage of the British culture of book consumption: because there was a range of markets that emerged over time – library-borrowers, expensive purchasers, cheap purchasers – the demand for books could be sustained rather than dissipating quickly after publication. The Phoenix Library was conceived under the conviction that there was an expanding book-buying market and a different type of audience that might be reached. An early promotional advert laid emphasis on this point: ‘Without question Messrs Chatto & Windus, in issuing reprints of some of the most important authors of the day at a uniform price of 3s. 6d. … have rendered a real service to those who wish to buy books, and to buy the best.’12 The main consumers of the Phoenix Library were the wholesalers and the new tuppeny libraries, which generally catered for a more downmarket audience.13 Circulating libraries, which drew their subscribers mainly from the middle classes, generally preferred to stock crown octavo editions, as did public libraries. This made it necessary to continue to hold a stock of these editions. Prentice told Aldington that the usual subscription number for Phoenix titles ‘before the Announcement list has had time to get into everybody’s hands’ was 1,000, which generally included 250 on sale or return to W. H. Smith.14 Ordinary booksellers bought copies at a one-third discount – 2s. 4d. – but wholesalers and tuppeny libraries purchased at 2s. 1d. or 2s. 2d. The profit-and-loss ledgers reveal that of the 17,000-plus copies of Queen Victoria disposed of within the first two years, over 13,000 were sold at the lower discount. This meant that only about a quarter of the sales were direct to booksellers. An additional purchaser of the library was a subscription firm entitled the Phoenix Book Company, which was run by J. M. Dent. The name was coincidental. In a throwback to Victorian traditions, the company sold direct to the general public partly by house-to-house visiting and




Andrew Nash

partly by mail order through advertisements placed in papers such as Everyman and John o’ London’s Weekly. It bought books in the publisher’s binding and took a 50 per cent discount. Charles Prentice advised Rosamond Lehmann that ‘in our opinion such sales are additional sales, and do not encroach on sales through ordinary bookshops’.15 Like the sales to tuppeny libraries, the take-up of the Phoenix Library by a subscription firm, drawing its market in part from the readers of lowbrow magazines such as John o’ London’s Weekly, indicates how the venture was taking contemporary literature to a new market of readers, distinct from those who would have borrowed the books from subscription libraries or bought them at the higher published prices. Another area where Chatto & Windus pushed the Phoenix Library was the continental market. Historically, authors usually sold English-language rights on the continent to European publishers, notably the Leipzig firm of Tauchnitz. Throughout the inter-war period, however, Chatto & Windus tried to get authors to resist the small sums that Tauchnitz and others offered for a separate continental edition and allow the British edition to circulate unimpeded. ‘Tauchnitz we hope will sometime be as dead as the Dodo’, Prentice told Richard Hughes in 1931: Europe is a smaller place nowadays, most English publishers have their regular travellers there and the sale of English books is increasing; it is becoming a more important market, and Tauchnitz’s 2s editions are certainly causing English authors to lose money.16 One reason for the expansion of sales was that the downward trend in retail prices brought home-produced books more in line with the cost of Tauchnitz editions. Nevertheless, fighting the continental publishers proved difficult. Hughes sold the rights in A High Wind in Jamaica to Tauchnitz for £30 but as Prentice complained, ‘The Phoenix edition of The High Wind won’t have very much chance now. It will come out about the same time as Tauchnitz – which is a pity as the Phoenix Library is stocked abroad.’ In a similar vein, Harold Raymond told R. H. Mottram that a Tauchnitz edition of The Spanish Farm would: ‘entirely throttle the 3/6d edition in a number of continental towns. … Very few continental booksellers will stock an English cheap edition of a book which is also done in the Tauchnitz.’ He explained that the Phoenix edition of David Garnett’s Lady Into Fox, ‘a book which was very popular in France, has been almost entirely killed over there by the Tauchnitz edition’.17 A further problem was that European booksellers tended to hold back on orders for the more expensive editions, anticipating



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Figure 9.1 Some volumes from The Phoenix Library (London, Chatto & Windus)

publication in Tauchnitz. When the first volumes of the Albatross Continental Library appeared in 1932 the competition became even more severe. In an effort to trump the Albatross edition of Huxley’s Brave New World, Chatto allowed a 3s. 6d. edition to circulate on the continent nine months before they published the work at that price at home. Back in Britain, the success of the Phoenix Library led to the firm deciding against issuing separate collected editions of some of their more high profile writers. When this issue was discussed in relation to Richard Aldington’s works, Chatto were advised by their travellers that the books would stand a better chance published in the Phoenix rather than as a group by themselves. A letter from Prentice to the author illustrates the philosophy behind issuing books by individual authors in a larger series: The Phoenix is well stocked, it has proved itself a bread-and-butter line to the bookseller; as he knows what he can do with it, the travellers always find it possible to get orders for separate books and separate authors than they would get otherwise. Besides, the Phoenix owing to its size and variety will always get a more prominent show on a bookseller’s shelves. … The public will go on seeing it, and they’ll see it more extensively and more frequently,




Andrew Nash

whereas a range of books by one author, though gaining from its homogeneity, will not be given the same display … and may get dropped by the bookseller. I rather wonder whether Secker would have made a separate edition of Lawrence’s books, if his Adelphi Library had been a better scorer. Furthermore, by using different coloured bindings for individual authors the series already acted in some way as a uniform edition of an author’s works, but one that was also part of a larger, multi-author series. Most of the volumes that appeared in the Phoenix Library were recent publications, but some titles were already available in cheap editions, in some cases as low as 2s. 6d. R. H. Mottram’s famous war novel A Spanish Farm had been available at this price for two years but the firm were nevertheless eager to transfer it to the slightly more expensive Phoenix Library, not solely for reasons of size and uniformity but, as Raymond explained, because ‘to a certain extent we think that we should find an extra market for the book. … The series has been going very well indeed, and we find that one book in it helps to sell another, especially as a list of the series is bound in at the end of each volume.’18 Still older titles were transferred from the St Martin’s Library, a cheap reprint series that Chatto & Windus had launched in the Edwardian period. Volumes in this series were originally priced at 2s. 6d. but rose to 3s. after the war. Two of Bennett’s books were transferred from the St Martin’s Library, as were Constance Garnett’s translations of Chekhov. As Prentice told Mrs Garnett, ‘we have a preference for the Phoenix, as it is now the stronger’.19 Two years after the Phoenix Library was established, Chatto launched a further cheap reprint series, the Centaur Library. This was distinct from the Phoenix in that the books were a full-size crown octavo. The library was used to work off excess sheets of the original print run. The Centaur had a particularly striking uniform dust jacket designed by Edward Bawdon. The commercial principle was the same as the Phoenix: ‘that any series of books in a uniform bright-coloured jacket attracts the customer’s eye in a bookshop’.20 Rather than continuing with the existing binding and simply dropping the price, Chatto replaced the existing wrapper with a Centaur wrapper and marketed the individual title collectively with others in the library. As Prentice told Huxley: We are not, of course, anticipating that this series will revolutionise the book trade. As you will see, it is really only an alternative to



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the usual 3/6d edition; but published at 3/6d in the ordinary way, a novel naturally gets stuck on a shelf amid a mixed crowd of other 3/6’s. When put into a series, it will, we hope, attract more attention in a bookshop, and enable one to gain better publicity for it in the way of circulars and lists. The decision whether to put a title into the Phoenix or the Centaur was often prompted by the number of crown octavo sheets on hand. A text might be put into the Centaur Library in the first instance to work off the surplus stock of existing quires before being reprinted (from the same plates) and bound up as a Phoenix Library title. Nevertheless, a good number of the titles that appeared in the Centaur Library were never transferred to the Phoenix. The reason for this was the publisher’s determination to include only the best books. Right from the outset Chatto & Windus emphasised the cultural distinction of the Phoenix Library. The first announcement declared the firm’s intention to exclude ‘all rubbish from the list’.21 This emphatic statement was maintained in subsequent advertisements. One for April 1929 confirmed that the library ‘has avoided, and will continue to avoid, the inclusion of any rubbish’.22 With writers like Strachey, Huxley, Wyndham Lewis and William Faulkner on the list, following this policy was easy. Not all authors were allowed to grace the library, however. Chatto had published Beverley Nichols’s first three novels to considerable financial success but the firm was always rather embarrassed by their association with a writer who had developed a reputation as a kind of literary dilettante with an oeuvre which, by the early 1930s, included a book on celebrities, an impudent autobiography and the first of many gardening books. Chatto continued to issue his three novels in cheap editions but not in the Phoenix Library. The firm were also selective when it came to including titles from their long back-list of Victorian and Edwardian literature. The only authors from this period who appeared in the Phoenix were Frederick Rolfe, Arnold Bennett and Ambrose Bierce, whose volume of stories In the Midst of Life had been published in 1891. In the case of Bennett the choice of texts was significant. Chatto had published most of the author’s sensation novels, such as The Ghost and The Grand Babylon Hotel, but it was only the more serious works, Tales of the Five Towns and The Grim Smile of the Five Towns, that were included. The other Bennett titles continued to be available in cheap editions but they were kept out of the new canon, as were even older works such as the still well selling




Andrew Nash

novels of Wilkie Collins and Charles Reade, although some books by these two authors were available at very cheap prices in other series, such as the Reader’s Library circulated by Woolworth’s. The selectivity of the series was always uppermost in the firm’s concerns. In 1933 Prentice told Aldington that the reason why they were adding only three books that autumn season was because they didn’t want to flood the series with too many titles: We’re thousands of miles off the point at which the Travellers Library stands; Cape spoilt a good thing there by over-haste. The Phoenix has got no padding in it – or very, very little. You may be interested to hear that we got a repeat of 868 Phoenix assorted from Smith’s yesterday, and that our Town traveller was told again by Simpkin’s that the Phoenix is still out and away the best of the 3/6d series, the Travellers Library being pianissimo.23 As a consequence of this policy, it is significant that this library of cheap editions included the work of several highbrow authors, or writers whose books had previously been available only in small or limited editions. Chatto & Windus were the first British publishers of William Faulkner, for example, and the inclusion of three further authors, Norman Douglas, T. F. Powys and Wyndham Lewis, illustrates the special contribution made by Charles Prentice to the formation of literary culture in the late 1920s and early 1930s.24 Prentice’s editorial brilliance was personally responsible for facilitating the publication of works by these authors who, for different reasons, had become disillusioned with the commercial publishing market. Douglas, who was exiled in Italy, had issued most of his works privately in expensive editions through the publisher-bookseller Pino Orioli. Through Prentice, however, Chatto & Windus took on the publication of several titles, including the novel In the Beginning. The subsequent inclusion of this title in the Phoenix Library indicates the moment when Douglas returned to a mass market from which he had largely retreated. The sales of In the Beginning illustrate a recurrent trend in the firm’s fiction publishing in this period. One year after being published at 7s. 6d., Douglas’s novel had sold 2,926 copies but was still showing a deficit of £100 in the profit and loss account, excluding overheads. Prentice told the author, however, that ‘we fully expect to wipe this amount out with the Phoenix edition’.25 Ironically, it was the commercial possibilities of the 3s. 6d. library that allowed Chatto & Windus to recover costs on works that made a loss in the 7s. 6d. edition. By appealing to a



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book-buying public, the Phoenix Library enabled Chatto & Windus to reach a different set of readers from the circulating libraries, which constituted the main market for fiction at the higher price. These libraries conducted a form of moral censorship that often led to the rejection of certain books, which severely compromised sales. The Phoenix Library became an important weapon in the war against the libraries because it enabled the publisher to bypass the threat of censorship. The publication of T. F. Powys’s Mr Weston’s Good Wine is a case in point. Fearing that the libraries might ban the book, Chatto & Windus published the novel in a strictly limited edition of 600 copies and then allowed it to go out of print for a year to stimulate demand. Rather than issuing the first unlimited ‘trade’ edition at the normal price of 7s. 6d., however, the firm bypassed that market altogether and placed the work immediately into the Phoenix Library. Within two years it had sold over 5,000 copies and Powys had become established as an author after more than a decade of failure.26 These trends are indicative of how, by the late 1920s, modernist or highbrow authors were being absorbed back into a mainstream publishing culture that earlier in the decade ‘had become ‘openly hostile’ to them’.27 Cape included Joyce’s Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in the Travellers Library and Secker produced a cheap edition of Lawrence’s works. The inclusion of Wyndham Lewis’s Tarr in the Phoenix Library is a further illustration of this trend. Having been turned down by a number of mainstream literary publishers, this novel was published in 1918 in a small edition of 1,000 copies by the Egoist Press. It had remained out of print until it was issued in a revised edition in the Phoenix Library in 1928, an event that marks the transition of a text from a small restricted cultural market to a larger, mainstream channel. The Phoenix Library, then, was both a reflection of, and a contribution to, the shifting dynamics of the literary market in the late 1920s; a dynamic that saw the emergence of a particular style of literary publishing that would become more evident in 1935 when the first Penguin paperbacks arrived. The advent of Penguin inevitably sparked debate about the likely impact on the Phoenix Library. Although Chatto & Windus informed Milne that ‘Penguinisation will probably slow up sales in the Phoenix [but] won’t altogether kill them’, the advent of 6d. paperbacks certainly did curtail public demand for the 3s. 6d. libraries.28 Michael S. Howard records that additions to Cape’s Travellers Library ‘dwindled and then ceased’.29 The impact of Penguin and the outbreak of war in 1939 put an end to the growth of the Phoenix Library as well.




Andrew Nash

Consistent with the legend, however, the Phoenix rose again. After the war Chatto & Windus began the New Phoenix Library in association with the Hogarth Press, which had fallen under Chatto’s management in 1946. Successful titles from the old library, including ones by Huxley, Powys, Faulkner and Sylvia Townsend Warner, were made available alongside books by Virginia Woolf, Christopher Isherwood, William Plomer and others from the Hogarth list, at retail prices ranging from 5s. to 7s. 6d. The original image was retained for the dust jacket, binding and title page. The brand was exploited again in the 1960s in another collaborative venture with the Hogarth imprint – the Phoenix Living Poets. The mythical bird did not have quite the impact on British publishing as the ubiquitous Penguin, but its image lasted, and its contribution to an important phase in British literary publishing was considerable.

Notes 1. For an overview of the firm’s output in this period, see Andrew Nash (2007). 2. Charles Prentice to Lytton Strachey, 11 October 1927, Chatto & Windus Letter Book 118, fo. 761. Chatto & Windus archive, University of Reading Library. 3. 4 November 1927, CW Letter Book 119, fo. 69. 4. 15 December 1927, CW Letter Book 119, fo. 544. 5. 4 November 1927. 6. Chatto & Windus Advertisement Book 2, fo. 120. 7. 26 June 1935, CW Letter Book 167, fo. 198. 8. 15 December 1927, CW Letter Book 119, fo. 544 9. 26 June 1935. 10. 26 June 1935. 11. 26 June 1935. 12. CW Advertisement Book 2, fo. 142, original italics. 13. For a discussion of fiction and the library market in this period, see Q. D. Leavis (1932) and Joseph McAleer (1992). 14. 12 September 1930, CW Letter Book 129, fo. 836. 15. 2 February 1931, CW Letter Book 131, fo. 445. 16. 31 July 1931, CW Letter Book 133, fo. 527. 17. 7 May 1930, CW Letter Book 128, fo. 513. 18. 24 September 1929, CW Letter Book 125, fo. 790. 19. 12 December 1929, CW Letter Book, 126, fo. 830. 20. Harold Raymond to R. H. Mottram, 22 October 1930. CW Letter Book 130, fo. 319. 21. CW Advertisement Book 2, original italics. 22. CW Advertisement Book 2, fo. 129. 23. 1 September 1933, CW Letter Book 150, fo. 373. 24. On Prentice, see Andrew Nash and James Knowlson (2002).



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Chatto & Windus and the Phoenix Library 201 25 September 1929, CW Letter Book, 125, fo. 764. See Nash and Knowlson (2002). Ian Willison (1996: xiv). 18 November 1936, CW Letter Book 179, fo. 109. Howard (1971: 165).

Selected bibliography Chatto & Windus Advertisement Books, University of Reading Library. Chatto & Windus Letter Books, University of Reading Library. Howard, Michael S. (1971) Jonathan Cape, Publisher. London: Jonathan Cape. Leavis, Q. D. (1932) Fiction and the Reading Market. London: Chatto & Windus. McAleer, Joseph (1992) Popular Reading and Publishing in Britain, 1914–1950. Oxford: Clarendon. Nash, Andrew (2007) ‘Literary Culture and Literary Publishing in Inter-war Britain: A View from Chatto & Windus’, in Simon Eliot, Andrew Nash and Ian Willison (eds), Literary Cultures and the Material Book. London: British Library, pp. 323–42. Nash, Andrew and Knowlson, James (2002) ‘Charles Prentice and T.F. Powys: a publisher’s influence’, Powys Journal, 12: 35–66. Willison, Ian (1996) ‘Introduction’, in Ian Willison, Warwick Gould and Warren Chernaik (eds), Modernist Writers and the Marketplace. London: Macmillan, p. xiv.



25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

Behind the Scenes at the Albatross Press: A Modern Press for Modern Times Michele K. Troy

To travellers in 1930s Europe, the colourful, well-made paperbacks of the Albatross Modern Continental Library would have been a familiar sight. With captivating covers in kelly green, acid yellow, sprightly orange, turquoise, red and violet that proclaimed their genre, these books convinced many to pay the 12 francs, 9 lire or 1.8 Reichmarks to read the most recent English and American literature. These were not translations, but works in English for continental buyers, stamped with the warning: ‘Not to be introduced into the British Empire or the USA.’ In its heyday from 1932 to 1939, the Albatross Press made affordable to its readers reprints of seminal texts such as D. H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow, Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India and Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. Albatross’s subsidiary, The Odyssey Press, also reprinted the controversial Ulysses and Lady Chatterley’s Lover, while the Albatross Crime Club and Albatross Giants series kept English and American tales of mystery and biography before European eyes. Historically, the Albatross might have been just one in a parade of ‘bird’ series, sandwiched between Chatto & Windus’s Phoenix Library in the 1920s and Allen Lane’s Penguin Books from 1935. Yet through its savvy mingling of modern authors, high-end design and international titles, the Albatross Press quickly became the major player in English-language books on the continent in the 1930s. Publisher Siegfried Unseld once claimed ‘Show me your series and I’ll show you who you are’ (quoted in Rectanus 1984: 3). Albatross’s identity was modern, cutting-edge, high-quality. Despite their inexpensive prices, Albatross books conveyed a forward-looking elegance, with the spare design of a bird in flight hovering on each cover. They also projected a cosmopolitan ethos when nationalism was dangerously on the rise, 202



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with offices in Hamburg, Paris and Bologna listed on the front covers and commentaries in English, German, French and Italian inserted in the back. Albatross was indeed as multinational as its covers suggested. Funded by English money via Jewish industrialist Sir Edmund Davis, the firm signed contracts from its Paris office and printed its books in Germany. It was driven by ambitious publishers and agents who forged international alliances, including: John Holroyd-Reece, a Germanborn Anglophile fluent in French and Italian, as its ‘visionary’; Max Christian Wegner, nephew of Insel Verlag owner Anton Kippenberg, as its CEO; Hamburg-based publisher Kurt Enoch as head of distribution; Italian publisher Arnoldo Mondadori as President of its board; Scottish publishers Ian and William Collins as board members; and Margareta Scialtiel, of Curtis Brown’s French literary agency, as an early director (Pressler 1985: A4). The Albatross Press’s lightning-like success lends truth to the idea that series are both ‘great borrowers in the book business’ and ‘great introducers of new ideas’. For, in February 1932, the Albatross Modern Continental Library manoeuvred its way into terrain long occupied by the Tauchnitz Collection of British and American Authors. Indeed, Albatross’s modernisation of the lucrative continental editions market makes it an ideal candidate for studying how series operate as ‘creative publishing responses to cultural shifts and new opportunities’ (Spiers 2007: 1–2). In the 1840s, Baron Tauchnitz began paying English publishers a modest fee to reprint their books in continental Europe. In return, Tauchnitz editions secured English authors copyright protection in Europe (Nowell-Smith 1968: 43–4). By the early 1930s, the Tauchnitz series had reached 5,000 volumes, and had ostensibly sold over 40,000,000 copies, ‘envisaged as extending … the total distance from London to New York’ (Todd 1977: 8). Albatross demoted this elder statesman of English-language publishing, so eroding Tauchnitz’s market that it took over the management of its former rival after 1934. It is one thing to say that the Albatross Press succeeded. It is another to ask how its success shaped taste for English and American books on the continent. What works did Albatross make available that did not appear in translation? What canons did it package for readers? How did its prominence and affordability affect the competing sector of the market for translations? More broadly put, what impact did the series have on literacy, on readers and on the book trade? These questions of taste – what counts as good taste, who controls what is produced – are especially tricky in the case of the Albatross because its rise to dominance coincided with the rise of the Third Reich. Above all, we might ask, how



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did a cosmopolitan, English-owned firm that produced English-language books survive – indeed, even flourish – printing its books out of the crucible of 1930s Germany? Albatross entered the continental market for Anglo-American books when it was blossoming and ready for change. German professor Friedrich Wild, for example, observed that ‘More than ever German translations of the titles of English novels glance at us from shop windows’, while Die Literarische Welt concluded that ‘The popularity of English literature is … astonishingly great and still continually growing’ (Wild 1928: n.p.; K.B. 1932: 9). In the 1920s, numerous European firms translated contemporary English and American books. In France, for instance, Plon, Albin Michel, Fayard, Hachette and the Librarie Stock all inaugurated literature series including English and American authors (Fouché 1983: 216). While Tauchnitz’s feast of books sated readers’ appetites for the classics, Sylvia Beach, head of the English bookshop Shakespeare and Company in Paris, noted that Tauchnitz was not keeping pace with modern literature (Beach 1959: 21). Albatross stepped into this gap, designing a series that catered to literary explorers with elite tastes and modest means. For any series to succeed, it needs to ‘faire serie’, to fulfil ‘an obligation for each of its published texts to respond to a coherent program adapted to the expectations and tastes of a particular readership’ (Olivero 1999: 269; Rectanus 1984: 114). With its Modern Continental Library, Albatross adapted the ‘bibliothèque ideale’ model used by many nineteenth-century French publishers, which suggested to readers that the books were sanctioned by an editor whose education might rub off on them (Olivero 1999: 224). Yet Albatross proposed to delight as much as instruct. For its series included both books designed ‘to give the reader a few hours of pleasant relaxation’, and books from the weightier category of the ‘best modern English and American literature’ (Albatross Almanac 1934: 174). Albatross positioned itself as a ‘list’ house of distinction, despite its ‘entrepreneurial’ aims (Feltes 1993: 19). The two ‘talent-spotters’ at its helm, Holroyd-Reece and Wegner, both knew the power of taste or, more precisely, the power of the impression of taste, in selling books: Holroyd-Reece, as an art collector and publisher of high-end art books, and Wegner, as a prior affiliate of Insel. In Pierre Bourdieu’s terms, these editors converted symbolic capital into economic capital, understanding that ‘the only legitimate accumulation … consists in making a name for oneself, a name that is known and recognized, … and of making profits from this operation’ (Bourdieu 1996: 148). Forging a



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quality name allowed the Albatross to balance books that won them cultural capital with those that also promised financial gain – for every Edith Wharton, whose sales slowly crept beyond 2,000, a Sinclair Lewis, quickly exhausting a print run of 6,000. Thus, when Ezra Pound wrote that he wanted to assassinate Holroyd-Reece for pandering to the lowest common denominator of taste in The Albatross Anthology of Living Verse, Holroyd-Reece proudly retorted, ‘However little you would believe it, the ALBATROSS is interested in supplying the best stuff which it can market. The ALBATROSS on the whole is particularly fortunate because, so far, broadly speaking, the best stuff has, contrary to the experience of most publishers, found the best market for us’ (Holroyd-Reece 1934). If successful series must ‘engage in a transformation of the given world to construct another world’ (Olivero 1999: 270), this psychological allure was critical for Albatross, since its ‘best stuff’ did not form one canon. A Frankfurter Zeitung reviewer humorously observed, for instance, that behind the ‘charming play of colours’, Albatross’s offerings varied from the ‘high[brow] stars’, with a ‘tiny reading public’, to the ‘low[brow] stars … that mention a cigarette every third page’ (Imelman 1932: 6). Albatross used its series concept to create the illusion of unity, letting implied readers know that they were getting quality whether they dove into a stream-of-consciousness novel or one littered with cigarettes. For example, the back matter of Lawrence’s The Lovely Lady (1934) claimed distinction for The Crime Club series, calling its books ‘a first-class choice of this type of book’ chosen by ‘the leading experts’. Albatross cleverly named its readers ‘Friends of the Albatross’ and developed ‘Dear Reader Cards’, which they could mail in with suggestions or notes about their favourite Albatross books. To secure the loyalty of this ‘common reader’, Albatross declared ‘what a very uncommon person he is, and … what a high standard of taste this common reader has’ (Albatross Almanac 1934: 174). With its stress on group cohesion and distinction, Albatross incorporated strategies for marketing through ‘package psychology’, ‘brand name psychology’ and ‘snob appeal’ (Altick 1989: 184). The British Publishers Association tried to undermine Albatross’s allure by trying to convince authors and agents that continental editions were ‘not an academic prize’, but ‘merely cheap editions’ (British Publishers Association 1933: 81). That their efforts failed may speak to the powerful ‘cultural work’ series accomplish: ‘to re-assure, to confirm standards, … to encourage the sale of one book by another, … to certify identity and membership (Spiers 2007: 20). Each book sold, each book seen by fellow




Michele K. Troy

Figure 10.1 The Albatross Almanac, 1935

passengers on the train, invited Albatross’s readers into ‘another world’, down the red carpet, past the velvet ropes and into an elite, membersonly club. How Albatross readers responded to this invitation is another question entirely. In the absence of data from Albatross’s historical readers – whose ‘Dear Reader’ cards were probably casualties of war – we can more usefully ask how series shape taste, and perhaps alter reading habits, by changing readers’ access to texts (Olivero 1999: 23). Albatross sought a new readership for continental English editions by reconceptualising its buyers. While Tauchnitz had envisioned English and American travellers on the Grand Tour as its clientele, Albatross also reached out to foreign readers who could sit fireside with their



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books. Publisher Kurt Enoch, charged with Albatross distribution from Hamburg until he fled to France in 1936, explained that the foreignlanguage ‘blurbs’ were intended ‘to help in sales and selection by booksellers and readers who were not too familiar with the English language’ (Enoch 1984: 61). The firm also pursued speakers of French, German and Italian by advertising in foreign-language publications. In the April 1933 Der Querschnitt, for example, an Odyssey Press advertisement for Lady Chatterley’s Lover aroused German readers’ identification with Frieda Lawrence’s German origins, while a promotion in Die Literarische Welt described Albatross books as a ‘delightful addition to the German coffee table’ (Advertisement 1933: 299; Die Literarische Welt 1932: 1). Yet Albatross most enhanced readers’ access to modern English and American books by making them inexpensive. Tauchnitz had provided cheap books, but until the late 1920s, had done little to modernise its offerings. By contrast, British publishers had sold current English titles in hardcover through European booksellers, but only at lofty prices. While Albatross books in France were double the cost of the 6 franc Frenchlanguage series, they were, until Penguin editions, the cheapest English books around and could be had for the price of a dozen oranges or a haircut (Beach 1932: n.p.). And in Germany, Albatross editions were often two to four times cheaper than translations. For Enoch, such prices encouraged sales, but also served a ‘useful social purpose’ (Enoch 1984: 62) Albatross played up this benefit: ‘Many of your friends surely enjoy reading English books. But you think about how expensive the original English editions are and how difficult it is to obtain them and pay in foreign currency. There, the Albatross Modern Continental Library can help you’ (Die Literarische Welt 1932: 1). It is difficult to know how effective Albatross was in forging a new readership. In 1937, Holroyd-Reece claimed that four out of five Tauchnitz readers were foreigners (p. 25). Yet given his penchant for hyperbole, it is unclear whether these figures are accurate or extend to Albatross. Nonetheless, considerable evidence suggests that Albatross expanded an important niche in continental publishing. Several German magazines catering to readers curious about foreign literature had circulations hovering around 20,000 in 1930, a not insubstantial number of possible readers (Schlawe 1973: 20, 59). More telling is an article in Die Literarische Welt that credited both Albatross and Tauchnitz with directly expanding the readership of English-language books. They not only helped ‘scholars of moderate means’ to access the classics for the first time, insisted the author, but also kept critics up to date on English literature in a ‘convenient and inexpensive manner’ (K.B. 1932: 9).




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Another reviewer stated that even though certain Albatross books had been translated, many German readers would welcome the chance to read the original versions (Bieber 1932: 6). Such comments suggest that Albatross may have shaped group identities with a certain cachet, since foreign readers educated enough to brave English editions could confirm their intellectual prowess with purchases of Albatross titles (St Clair 2004: 1; Spiers 2007: 5). Anecdotes from the French market also speak to readers’ enthusiasm for Englishlanguage books, and Beach’s bookshop, in particular, provided a forum in which group identities emerged around readers’ curiosity about English (St Clair 2004: 1). In her memoir, Beach conjures up an André Gide who ‘always carried some English book or other in his pocket’, and a group of French intellectuals who ‘were pinning their hopes on Ulysses to enlarge [their English vocabulary]’ (Beach 1959: 51). The American Library in Paris registered a growing number of French students seeking its books in the mid-1930s, while approximately half of Beach’s customers were French (Trumbull 1936; Riley Fitch 1983: 401–2). Beach herself quickly converted to Albatross titles, which seem to have numbered more than half of her purchases if the letter ‘A’ marching through her accounts is any indication (Beach 1935–41; Riley Fitch 1983: 401–2). Albatross shaped taste, in part, by giving continental readers access to a sizeable canon of modern works in English. In some cases, the firm introduced authors to markets. For example, it published Graham Greene and William Saroyan in 1938 and 1939, respectively, when there were no translations of their works in German and Italian. In many other cases, Albatross extended the range of an author’s works. For example, the List Verlag had published one of Richard Aldington’s novels in 1930. Albatross published five between 1934 and 1938, and featured his introduction to Lawrence’s Apocalypse. Similarly, while Tauchnitz had produced five Lawrence volumes between 1928 and 1932, Albatross tallied twenty between 1932 and 1939, including the Odyssey Press’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. By contrast, Gallimard published ten translations in a similar period, and Insel eleven from 1922 to 1934. Katherine Mansfield is another notable case. Tauchnitz published Bliss and Other Short Stories in 1930 and the Reichner Verlag finally offered the Garden Party in 1938. In the interim, Albatross widened the reach of Mansfield’s work in Germany, publishing her Journals, Letters, one novella and two story collections between 1932 and 1935. Such consolidation was particularly useful to readers in France, where an author’s corpus was often scattered across publishers.



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Through both the range and quality of its books, Albatross can be seen as a critical – but largely overlooked – ‘institution of modernism,’ part of the ‘third wave of modernism’, the ‘more frankly commercial … edition’ that expanded modernism’s audience beyond readers of little reviews and limited editions (Rainey 1998: 99). The medium is the message in modernist works, the style a means of conveying protagonists’ perceptions. To cite the most famous examples, publishers bemoaned how difficult it was to translate Joyce’s word-play in Ulysses, Lawrence’s repetitions in Women in Love and Woolf’s crystal-like refractions of character in The Waves. Translations were often so notoriously inaccurate that one French critic concluded it was ‘impossible for a French person who does not understand English to understand Lawrence’ (Brulé 1934: 549). So while Insel took the risk on Woolf in Germany, translating four of her works in the late 1920s, Albatross also made a contribution to English letters when it offered The Waves in 1933 – a work that only appeared in French in 1937 and was not translated into German or Italian before the war. Albatross’s series are, then, of historical importance because they carried many authors into the heart of the continental mass market, ‘[lengthening] the life of many books, and at lower prices [extending] the reach and reputation of many authors’ (Spiers 2007: 8). Tracking Albatross’s contributions gives us a glimpse into the moment when names such as Joyce, Woolf, Forster, Huxley, Aldington, Graves, Mansfield and Hemingway – which had been mere curiosities to many European readers – took on substance and weight, a life of their own. Whether foreign readers reached eagerly for detective novels or modernist fiction, Albatross became a critical means ‘by which texts reached the hands, and therefore potentially the minds, of different constituencies of readers’ (St Clair 2004: 1). Series that succeed do so, in part, through ‘hidden forces at work, forces that determined not only what was available and to whom, but also influenced the selection of one book or edition over another’ (Hammond 2006: 12). Among the ‘hidden forces’ that helped Albatross to shape taste for English and American books were its networks of agents, booksellers and distributors. Prominent literary agent Curtis Brown framed himself as the ‘godfather’ of the Albatross, for bringing Holroyd-Reece and Wegner together, and the firms even shared office space in Paris (Brown 1935: 178; McCleery 2006: 305). Holroyd-Reece also claimed that the Pinker literary agency was ‘frightfully good to the Albatross’ (HolroydReece 1932). While not all were so well disposed, Albatross generally received ‘excellent cooperation from literary agents and publishers’




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(Enoch 1984: 62). Not only did these networks secure Albatross’s virtual monopoly over English-language books in Europe, they also helped the press to survive the changing political winds. Through Albatross’s relationship to approximately 6,000 booksellers, the firm partly swayed which editions booksellers ordered. Enoch (1984: 62) noted that ‘the book trade, encouraged by good sales and service, made and gave us ample space on their shelves and other display facilities’. Holroyd-Reece (1937) more frankly stated that Albatross gained ‘popularity in the French trade without precedent’ because it offered ‘better terms’ to the booksellers, many of whom were not fluent in English and simply promoted Albatross as ‘the pick of American and English literature’. A British Publishers Association survey confirmed Albatross’s advantage, concluding that continental editions ‘killed the sale’ of expensive English editions, partly because customers waited for the cheaper editions of authors who became identified with the ‘Albatross’ brand (British Publishers Association 1933: 81). In addition, Wegner (1934) noted that Albatross trumped other publishers through its distribution networks in countries like Germany, Austria and Hungary with strict currency and book import regulations. From its inception, Albatross had planned on using this international network to move into the market for translations, yet its influence in this sector seems unrealised. The firm certainly shaped taste over translations into Italian through its affiliation with Mondadori, to whom it funnelled authors and the base texts for translations. Respected translator Herberth Herlitschka also complained of a more tacit influence, remarking that many publishers only risked translations of books that had been deemed worthy of continental editions (Herlitschka1929). Some evidence also suggests that Albatross editions may have hurt translation sales. Within the German context, for instance, both the Albatross edition of Lawrence’s Apocalypse and Insel’s translation appeared in 1932, yet Albatross sales rose to approximately four times that of the translation (Jansohn and Mehl 1990: 59; Holroyd-Reece 1933). Yet Albatross only truly entered the translation market in 1937, when Holroyd-Reece joined forces with the Nouvelle Revue Critique, a firm with a reputation for English-to-French translations of crime novels and military histories. Through this affiliation, Holroyd-Reece not only gained a Parisian-based venture, initially free of German interference – important for him as the son of a German-born Jew – but also diversified Albatross’s stake in English and American books. Most striking in Holroyd-Reece’s plan for the French Albatross series is his assumption that Albatross already controlled taste for English and American books and would simply extend



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its domain. The language of monopoly permeated his plan, as he noted that Albatross could ‘compel’ Hachette ‘to give the terms to the trade we impose’, and as he described Albatross’s proposed ‘one-stop shopping’ approach: ‘it should be possible on frequent occasions to buy the continental rights, the French rights and the German rights of an author. When this happens we can sell almost automatically for the author or agent the Italian translation rights’ (Holroyd-Reece 1937). Had this translation venture succeeded, Albatross might have achieved heightened control over ‘the selection of … the best English and American literature’ (Holroyd-Reece 1937). Yet the German Albatross was not realised before the war, and the French Albatross never lived up to its promise. Editors sought contracts with William Faulkner and Willa Cather, as well as Albatross authors Erskine Caldwell, Evelyn Waugh and William Saroyan. Yet some rights had been snapped up, while Cather’s contract fell through because Albatross did ‘not see the possibility of publishing this volume at this moment given the circumstances’ (Ralli 1940). That this response pre-dates the occupation of Paris by several months suggests that Holroyd-Reece was in over his head before German troops arrived. Perhaps he had committed too many funds to advances ‘for books that could not possibly be fitted into any realistic publishing programme within a reasonable period’, as Alistair McCleery reasons of Albatross’s failure after the war. Certainly, both Albatross and Nouvelle Revue Critique correspondence at this time is littered with demands for overdue royalty payments. And doom was on the horizon, so that Holroyd-Reece fled Paris for London. During the occupation, Albatross limped along. Nazi authorities in France halted the firm’s production of new books and only allowed sales of existing stock (McCleery 2006: 312). As for its French series, the authorities provisionally closed the Nouvelle Revue Critique, ending the French Albatross’s ability to shape taste for English books (Fouché 1987: 64). The strange, final chapter of Albatross’s hold over English and American books unfolded under the Third Reich. Because of its multinational affiliations, Albatross found itself stretched across the fault-lines of international dispute as Europe moved towards war. In one of many ironies, the Albatross English branch could not communicate with its German branch once war began without violating Britain’s Trading with the Enemy Act (Holroyd-Reece 1940b). At the same time, the French government treated Albatross as German rather than English, blocking Albatross sales for the first four months of the war (Holroyd-Reece 1940a). France’s reaction was not exaggerated, since Albatross had a vested interest in the German economy. Its books were printed by




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a German firm, Brandstetter, which was partner to the contract whereby Albatross’s German branch had managed the German-owned Tauchnitz since 1934. Thus, the biggest ‘hidden force’ shaping Albatross’s success by the late 1930s was perhaps the Nazi regime’s interest in preserving Albatross’s economic ties to Germany. Against this backdrop, the question of ‘what it means – socially and ideologically – to buy, borrow, read or display a particular book in a particular context’ is especially intriguing (Hammond 2006: 11). Albatross may, in the end, have shaped taste for English and American books just by being there in a market that no longer truly endorsed their production. Germany was, in a sense, the ideal market for Albatross, as a nation of readers, with six times as many bookshops per capita as the United States in peacetime (Holman 2008: 227). Holroyd-Reece estimated that the German-speaking countries constituted half of Albatross’s market. Yet ‘what it meant’ to read an Albatross book under Hitler’s watch was conditioned by readers’ awareness of cultural tensions. Some reviewers picked up on a selling point from Albatross’s marketing arsenal, plucked from Tauchnitz, depicting the firm as a world citizen who spread the light of cross-cultural awareness much as Santa Claus might scatter toys to needy children. For instance, Die Literarische Welt proclaimed in 1932 that Albatross editions filled a need for German readers to gain exposure to other cultures and languages: ‘Today a mutual intellectual understanding between peoples is a necessity. Since many are denied … personal contact, literature must, through its multifacetedness, step into the position of mediator’ (Bieber 1932: 6). One Jewish bookseller in Berlin observed that the more the government controlled radio, movies and theatre, the more Germans sought to ‘escape in their reading’ to foreign places (Hill 2001: 21). This desire for escape may lie behind the fact that reviewers valued Albatross books for their insight into other worlds. Until the start of war with Britain, and then the United States, Die Literatur offered a regular ‘English Letter’ and ‘American Letter’ discussing new books from these cultures. An article as late as 1937 praised both Albatross and Tauchnitz for allowing readers to ‘penetrate not just into the literary movements of English-speaking peoples, but especially into their spiritual impulses’. While the reviewer noted how some English authors exposed problematic English tendencies, the tone of the article was less judgemental than curious about how the English lived and what they believed (Nagel 1937/8: 273). Albatross was initially more slowed than halted by Nazi regulations. Indeed, 1933, the year Hitler rose to power, became a peak year for English-language reprints in Germany because of Albatross’s attempts



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to overtake Tauchnitz (Schlösser 1934: 33). While the Nazi government ratcheted up its surveillance, it did not ban foreign works until the beginning of the war, perhaps partly to reassure other nations of its tolerance (Evans 2005: 20). Instead, the regime regulated the flow of foreign books in the hope of redressing the trade imbalance whereby Germany imported far more books than it sold abroad (Schäfer 1982: 12–13). Thus, from 1935 on, Albatross, like publishers of translations from English, needed to negotiate a tedious permissions process that slowed production, sales and royalty payments (Barbian 1993: 242). Prominent Albatross authors, D. H. Lawrence and Aldous Huxley appeared on confidential censorship lists, while Sinclair Lewis was suspect enough that one-third of those who purchased the German translation of his novel Work of Art in 1934 returned it to stores (Aigner 1971: 1021; Bradley 1935). In this context, Albatross toed a ‘politically shrewd’ line, often pre-censoring its own authors by omitting references to Germans and the Nazi context to permit such works to be printed at all (McCleery 2006: 306–8). If Albatross activities were, as such, curtailed, the firm was also granted great leeway. In 1935 the regime granted Albatross and Tauchnitz authors a tax break under which they paid 3 per cent instead of 10 per cent tax (Wegner 1935). It often overlooked continental editions, as in the case of Hemingway, whose English editions were advertised even after his translations were barred (Schäfer 1982: 15). After the war began, one might have expected the authorities to shut Albatross down as an English-owned producer of English-language literature. For, as of 1939, booksellers in some regions were ordered to take English and French authors out of their display windows (Barbian 1993: 242–3). Instead, however, the regime encouraged Albatross sales, even giving the firm permission to sell the works of its Jewish authors abroad under special conditions as late as 1940 (Anonymous 1940). Such sales suited Nazi agendas. One official speculated to another that the regime tolerated Albatross because it generated foreign currency and because English-language books proved no threat to a German readership (Anonymous 1939). While Albatross sales could not match pre-war heights, the Nazi-appointed Albatross director proudly noted that figures from January to May 1941 were up by 22 per cent over the same period of the previous year. He also observed that the demand for the firm’s books was ‘so large as to guarantee sales in the near future’ and described 1942 as a financially ‘quite gratifying’ year overall (Gey 1941, 1943a). Even in the first half of 1943, when the government had blocked sales of Albatross books abroad, he reported that Albatross turned around 62,000 Reichmarks in sales within the Reich alone (Gey 1943b).




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German ministries were thus willing to tolerate the ‘enemy’ in their midst if it worked to their advantage. This might not seem unusual for a regime full of inconsistencies, unless one considers the political purpose of books in wartime. As one British official aptly stated, ‘Books are not merchandise. Books are a nation thinking out loud’ (Holman 2008: 3). The Nazi regime was well schooled in this attitude, having spent an estimated £1 million in 1935 on books as propaganda abroad (Holman 2008: 18). At times, the Propaganda Ministry also used English and American books to its own ends, as when it authorised an edition of Sinclair Lewis’s Babbit in 1942 to sell German readers on the stereotype of the ‘ugly American’ (Schäfer 1982: 15). Given the zeal with which the Nazi regime used books as propaganda, it is surprising that it risked sales of Albatross books – commodities that might, after all, lead German readers to build ‘links to understanding’ rather than feeding their scorn for their enemies (Bieber 1932: 6). In fact, the German regime’s tolerance of Albatross seems completely at odds with its wartime aims, if one remembers that while Albatross was selling English books from within Germany, the British government was simultaneously using such books as weapons against Germany, airlifting books into Sweden and other neutral countries partly to combat Nazi propaganda with good, oldfashioned democratic ideals. If governments viewed books in wartime as ‘catalysts’ that ‘could persuade, convert, educate, inform, challenge, entertain, pacify or stimulate’ (Holman 2008: 4), it seems odd, or at least short-sighted, that what Albatross ‘meant’ to the Nazi regime was largely calculated in Reichmarks. That the regime kept Albatross alive as long as it did despite the firm’s English ownership and cuttingedge books underscores how the Reich’s economic motives sometimes trumped its ideological aims. Albatross’s influence on the taste for English books across national boundaries and a decade troubled by disturbing political tensions is difficult to track. Enoch distributed Albatross and Tauchnitz books in France from 1936 until war provoked his further flight to the United States. Holroyd-Reece started the French Albatross in 1937, fleeing to London in 1940, and Wegner took over Enoch’s firm in Hamburg in 1936, distancing himself from Albatross-Tauchnitz until after the war. With new individuals left to manage Albatross’s German base from the late 1930s on into the war, it is hard to speak of Albatross’s attempts to shape taste for English-language books in any unified fashion. If Albatross was kept dormant during the war, allowed to sell its existing books but limited in its capacity to produce new ones, its allegiance to Tauchnitz never fully slept. After the war, Holroyd-Reece and Wegner



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Acknowledgements I would like to thank the following archives for their permission to access and quote materials from their collections, all listed below: Department of Special Collections and University Archives at Stanford University Libraries; Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library; The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University; the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin; the National Archives at College Park, Maryland; and finally, the Bundesarchiv in Berlin.

Selected bibliography Advertisement for Odyssey Press edition of Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1933) Der Querschnitt, 13(4): 299. Aigner, Dietrich (1971) Die Indizierung ‘schädlichen und unerwünschten Schrifttums’ im Dritten Reich. Frankfurt am Main: Buchhändler-Vereinigung. Albatross Almanac for 1935 (1934) Hamburg: Albatross Press. Altick, Richard D. (1989) Writers, Readers, and Occasions: Selected Essays on Victorian Literature and Life. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Anonymous (1939) Letter to Karl Thülke, Z 007.70018, 14 December. Reichskulturkammer Microfilm Publication A3339, Series RKK, 2,466 Rolls. Microfilmed Records Received from the Berlin Document Center. Captured German and Related Records on Microform in the National Archives, College Park, Maryland. Anonymous (1940) Letter from Reichsschriftumskammer to Erich Kupfer. Z007.70018, 17 July. Reichskulturkammer Microfilm Publication A3339, Series RKK, 2,466 Rolls. Microfilmed Records Received from the Berlin Document Center. Captured German and Related Records on Microform in the National Archives, College Park, Maryland. Barbian, Jan-Pieter (1993) Literaturpolitik im Dritten Reich: Institutionen, Kompetenzen, Betätigungsfelder. Frankfurt am Main: Buchhändler-Vereinigung. Beach, Sylvia (1932) Financial Diary from 1932. Sylvia Beach Papers C0108. Box 25. Manuscripts Division. Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library. Beach, Sylvia (1935–41) Account book: ‘Account opened 1st October, 1935’. Sylvia Beach Papers C0108. Box 68. Manuscripts Division. Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library. Beach, Sylvia (1959) Shakespeare and Company. New York: Harcourt Brace. Bieber, Fritz (1932) ‘Albatross’, Die Literarische Welt, 17 (22 April): 6.



joined forces, players once again in the game of taste, as they debated how to recreate a world where, in Holroyd-Reece’s words, ‘today’s Albatross-Tauchnitz author is tomorrow’s classic’ (Holroyd-Reece 1949).

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Bourdieu, Pierre (1996) Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Bradley, William (1935) Royalty Report for 1934 to Sinclair Lewis, 30 August. William A. Bradley Literary Agency Papers. Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin. British Publishers Association (1933) ‘Continental Editions. Views of the Publishers’ Association’, The Author ( Journal of the Society of Authors), 43(3): 80–2. Brown, Curtis (1935) Contacts. New York and London: Harper and Brothers. Brulé, A. (1934) ‘Revue de Lettres Choisies de D.H. Lawrence, L’Homme qui était mort, et La Vierge et le bohémian’, Revue Anglo-Americaine, 547–9. Enoch, Kurt (1984) Memoirs of Kurt Enoch Written for His Family. New York: Privately printed by his wife, Margaret M. Enoch. Evans, Richard (2005) The Third Reich in Power, 1933–1939. New York: Penguin. Feltes, N. N. (1993) Literary Capital and the Late Victorian Novel. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Fitch, Noel Riley (1983) Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation: A History of Literary Paris in the Twenties and Thirties. New York: Norton. Fouché, Pascal (1983) ‘L’édition littéraire: 1914–1950’, in Henri-Jean Martin and Roger Chartier (eds), Histoire de l’Édition Française: Le livre concurrencé. Paris: Promodis, pp. 188–241. Fouché, Pascal (1987) L’Édition Française sous l’Occupation: 1940–1944. Paris: Bibliothèque de Littérature française contemporaine de L’Université Paris 7. Gey, Walter (1941) Letter to the Reichskommisar for the Handling of Enemy Property, 20 June. Bestand R87/1192. Reichskommissar für die Behandlung feindlichen Vermögens, Bundesarchiv-Berlin. Gey, Walter (1943a) Letter to the Reichskommisar for the Handling of Enemy Property, 15 April. Bestand R87/1193. Reichskommissar für die Behandlung feindlichen Vermögens, Bundesarchiv-Berlin. Gey, Walter (1943b) Letter to the Reichskommisar for the Handling of Enemy Property, 7 July. Bestand R87/1193. Reichskommissar für die Behandlung feindlichen Vermögens, Bundesarchiv-Berlin. Hammond, Mary (2006) Reading, Publishing and the Formation of Literary Taste in England, 1880–1914. Aldershot: Ashgate. Herlitschka, Herberth (1929) Letter to J.B. Pinker and Sons, 16 April. Aldous Huxley Papers M0107. Department of Special Collections and University Archives, Stanford University Libraries. Hill, Leonidas (2001) ‘The Nazi Attack on ‘Un-German’ Literature, 1933–1945’, in Jonathan Rose (ed.), The Holocaust and the Book: Destruction and Preservation. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, pp. 9–46. Holman, Valerie (2008) Print for Victory: Book Publishing in England, 1939–1945. London: British Library. Holroyd-Reece, John (2006) The Harvest: Being the Record of One Hundred Years of Publishing: 1838–1937. Leipzig: Bernhard Tauchnitz. Holroyd-Reece, John (1932) Letter to Laurence Pollinger, 11 March. D. H. Lawrence Collection, Series IV: Curtis Brown, Ltd. Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin Holroyd-Reece, John (1933) Letter to Laurence Pollinger, 4 November. D. H. Lawrence Collection, Series IV: Curtis Brown, Ltd. Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin.



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Holroyd-Reece, John (1934) Letter to Ezra Pound, 4 March. Ezra Pound Papers, Series I–IV YCAL MSS 43. American Literature Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Holroyd-Reece, John (1937) Memorandum: ‘Albatross Activities in France’, 14 September. William A. Bradley Literary Agency Papers. Series II: Publisher Correspondence. Subseries C: French Publishers. Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin. Holroyd-Reece, John (1940a) ‘Note for the Information of British Albatross and Tauchnitz Authors’, January. David Lloyd Agency Files of Pearl S. Buck C0060, Series II: Foreign Translations and Publication rights of Pearl S. Buck. Box 28. File 19. Manuscripts Division. Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library. Holroyd-Reece, John (1940b) Letter to Pearl Buck, 30 April. David Lloyd Agency Files of Pearl S. Buck C0060, Series II: Foreign Translations and Publication rights of Pearl S. Buck. Box 28. File 19. Manuscripts Division. Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library. Holroyd-Reece, John (1949) Letter to Max Christian Wegner, 25 April. Albatross Verlag Records, 1931–1954. Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin. Imelman, Rudolf (1932) ‘Albatroß’, Frankfurter Zeitung, 18 September: 6. Jansohn, Christa and Mehl, Dieter (1990) ‘D. H. Lawrence and the Insel Verlag’, Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen, 227: 38–61. K.B. (1932) ‘Das englische Buch auf dem Kontinent’, Die Literarische Welt, 8(36/7): 9. Die Literarische Welt (1932) ‘Nun Hören Sie den Rat von 50 Deutschen Verlegern … !’ (‘Now Listen to the Advice of 50 German Publishers!’), Die Literarische Welt, 8(49): 1. McCleery, Alistair (2006) ‘Tauchnitz and Albatross: A “Community of Interests” in English-Language Paperback Publishing, 1934–1951’, The Library, 7(3): 297–316. Nagel, Muske (1937/8) ‘Ernte aus England: zu neuen Albatroß- und Tauchnitzbüchern’ (‘Harvest from England: On the New Albatross and Tauchnitz Books’), Die Literatur, 40: 273–6. Nowell-Smith, Simon (1968) International Copyright Law and the Publisher in the Reign of Queen Victoria. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Olivero, Isabelle (1999) L’Invention de la Collection. De la diffusion de la littérature et des saviors à la formation du citoyen au XIX siecle. Paris: Éditions de L’Imec. Pressler, Karl (1985) ‘Tauchnitz und Albatross: Zur Geschichte des Taschenbuchs’, Aus dem Antiquariat, 1: A1–A10. Rainey, Lawrence S. (1998) Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Ralli, Alexandre (1940) Letter to Mrs Jean Bradley, 12 March. William Bradley Literary Agency Records. Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin. Rectanus, Mark (1984) Literary Series in the Federal Republic of Germany from 1960 to 1980. Wiesbaden: O. Harrassowitz. St Clair, William (2004) The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schäfer, Hans Dieter (1982) Das gespaltene Bewußtsein: über deutsche Kultur und Lebenswirklichkeit, 1933–1945. Munich: Hanser.




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Schlawe, Fritz (1973) Literarische Zeitschriften, 1910–1933. Stuttgart: Metzler. Schlösser, Anselm (1934) Die englische Literature in Deutschland von 1895 bis 1934. Jena: Walter Biederman. Spiers, John (2007) Serious about Series: American Cheap ‘Libraries’, British ‘Railway’ Libraries, and Some Literary Series of the 1890’s. London: Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London, with the Senate House Library. Todd, William (1977) ‘Firma Tauchnitz: A Further Investigation’, Publishing History, 2: 7–24. Trumbull, Evangeline (1936) Letter to Edith Wharton, 14 May. Edith Wharton Collection YCAL MSS 42, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Wegner, Max Christian (1934) Letter to William A. Bradley, 14 February. William A. Bradley Literary Agency Papers. Series I: Author Correspondence, Sinclair Lewis, folder 37.9. Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin. Wegner, Max Christian (1935) Letter to William A. Bradley, 15 May. William A. Bradley Literary Agency Papers. Series II: Publisher Correspondence. Subseries C: French Publishers. Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin. Wild, Friedrich (1928) Die englische Literature der Gegenwart seit 1870. Vol. 1, Drama und Roman. Wiesbaden: Dioskuren-Verlag.



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‘Sound Information and Innocent Amusement’: John Murray’s Books on the Move1 Barbara Schaff

British tourism in its modern form developed from about the 1830s onwards. Europe had become more accessible again after the Napoleonic Wars, and new commercial infrastructures, faster and interconnected modes of transport, above all the emerging railway network and steamships, as well as extended networks of communication, were forming a frame for the emerging mass tourism that was to have enormous commercial and cultural consequences. A major factor in this process was print culture: in continental reading rooms like Galignani in Paris, in hotels, lending libraries like the Gabinetto Vieusseux in Florence and bookshops like Spithöver’s in Rome, print material in English was becoming widely distributed and available. It not only influenced the ways in which the British performed abroad as tourists or perceived continental culture, but also constituted public spaces for social interaction where they would share their experiences with other itinerant readers. Print material helped to construct collective narratives that confirmed the British self-image of an ‘imagined community’ abroad. An important factor in this process was the development of guide books for English-speaking tourists, the most influential of which was the series of Handbooks for Travellers. It was initiated by John Murray III (1808–92) in 1836 and its titles covered much of the globe by the end of the century, running to around sixty volumes. The series accounted for the new material conditions of travel, and proved crucial in informing the taste, social practices, modes of conduct and cultural identities of its readers. The handbook series, and to some extent its offspring such as the short-lived Knapsack Guides –comprising portable editions of the handbooks to Norway, Switzerland, Italy, Tyrol and Eastern Alps for the hurried traveller – and its satellite series Railway Reading and The Home and Colonial Library were formative forces, defining the ways in 219



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which the British experienced foreign countries, perceived themselves and positioned themselves towards cultural and ethnic alterity. In general, the Murray Hand-books for Travellers negotiated cultural difference with insight, objectivity, fairness, anthropological interest and humorous understanding, but on rare occasions they were xenophobic. The Hand-book for Travellers on the Continent, for instance, might compare German beds unfavourably to British beds, or make gentle digs at German pompousness in the following manner: fondness for titles, orders, and high sounding forms of address, which was ever the characteristics of Germans, though perhaps less intense than formerly, has by no means yet disappeared. The German is scarcely happy until he can hang a little bit of striped ribbon from his button-hole; and every effort of interest and exertion is made to increase the number of them, and of the crosses and stars which dangle from them. (Hand-book for Travellers on the Continent 1874: 184) The remarks about cultural difference are always good-humoured and, at the same time, the Hand-book is equally ready to highlight German habits of social intercourse that compare favourably to British ones. It elaborates, for instance, on the friendly and democratic ways in which Germans meet socially on Sundays, and the way in which they allow for the intermingling between the upper and lower classes: Such recreation, even with the mirthful exercise of dancing superadded, is surely harmless in comparison with the solitary orgies of the pot-house and gin-shop, to which the same class of persons but too often devote their Sundays in our country. (Hand-book for Travellers on the Continent 1874: 185)

Writing and editing With the publication of this first Hand-book for Travellers on the Continent, John Murray introduced a new genre that served to innovate travel writing, not least with regard to the author: the handbooks replaced the traditional perspective of the single author-traveller with a self-avowedly objective view that was the result of a new kind of multiple authorship.2 Murray’s series, unlike previous travel narratives, represented a truly collaborative venture, each title being designed as a continuous work in progress, in some cases not only written by several



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commissioned authors, but also compiled from numerous notes and letters from their respective readers. The various editions were often revised by several subsequent editors. Thus, one could even regard the handbooks as products of an ongoing correspondence between readers and the publisher, a virtual hypertext, never finished but continuously rewritten. Readers and authors were linked in an intertextual network of references – copying, amending and double-checking information. This strategy proved particularly useful as far as the quickly growing and changing tourist infrastructure was concerned: new restaurants and hotels would appear on the scene or a return visit would show a change in standard, new railway lines opened and changed timetables for public transport, new roads were being built – on the whole, the tourist transportation network seems to have been in a constant state of flux. The expanding transport system also had consequences for the representation of tourist sights: owing to increased accessibility through better roads and an expanding rail network, more and more sights were likely to be included in the handbooks. Ongoing extensive archaeological excavations led to the discovery of important new sites in the course of the nineteenth century, which had to be duly credited in guidebooks. But there were also losses of established tourist sights: the devastation caused by the Franco-Prussian War called for an extensive revision of some handbooks in the early 1870s. The Italian handbooks perhaps profited most from the rise in tourism: the handbooks for Italy, for instance, were begun as two volumes: Northern Italy by Francis Palgrave in 1842; Central Italy by Octavian Blewitt in 1843. In 1853, Blewitt’s Handbook to Southern Italy was published; later additions were the handbooks to Rome, Florence and Sicily. However, by giving very strict and detailed guidelines for the shape of his series, Murray made sure that multiple authorship converged into a seemingly homogeneous product, following the same principles he himself had outlined in the introduction to the Hand-book for Travellers on the Continent: The writer of the Hand-book has confined himself to matter-of-fact descriptions of what ought to be seen at each place, and is calculated to interest an intelligent traveller, without bewildering his readers with an account of all that may be seen. … He has adopted as simple and condensed a style as possible, avoiding stilted descriptions and exaggerated superlatives. As he is by no means ambitious of showing off any powers of fine writing, he has preferred availing himself of the descriptions of others, where they appeared good and correct, to



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Looking at Murray’s correspondence with authors over the decades, one finds him returning time and again to these same abiding principles. Every newly commissioned author is furnished with copies of already published handbooks as a literary model and any other information Murray had collected – such as other travel books or guidebooks, works about art, history or geography, but also letters and notes from various correspondents, referring to more practical aspects of travelling such as hotels and restaurants. Editors of new editions were routinely advised to strike out all superfluous passages, to correct all errors and make sure that the swiftly changing tourist infrastructure, in particular the expanding railway network, was duly recognised. Although some of the handbooks, such as Richard Ford’s Spain, Francis Palgrave’s Northern Italy, Ernest Mason Satow’s Japan, Edward Backhouse Eastwick’s India and Octavian Blewitt’s Italian handbooks certainly bear the distinctive marks of their authors, single authors and editors are rarely acknowledged,3 a procedure that underlines the overall signature of Murray as the guiding spirit. Murray often recruited authors from among his own circle of acquaintances – they include distinguished professionals and members of the Royal Geographical Society, the British Alpine Club and Athenaeum Club (Lister 1993: xxix), clergymen with archaeological interests, as well as full-time writers. From what the Murray letterbooks tell us, Murray apparently took good care of them. Although he probably never shared his authors’ views about adequate remuneration, he provided them with all the material they wanted and, in his correspondence, showed great attention to detail – sometimes more attention than his authors appreciated, as Murray always had the last word about the contents.4 Apart from these commissioned authors, Murray’s readers contributed a great deal of practical information to the handbooks, recommending hotels, physicians, guides and much more, as well as correcting information about prices or routes. Over the decades of the series’ existence, Murray’s strict management of authors and editors guaranteed a constantly high level of quality and a distinctive tone, which in the end led to the popular association of British tourism with the Murray handbooks series. This was reinforced by the fact that it was contained within a consistently uniform format, not only in the organisation of the information, but also in terms of style, outline, cartographic design, typography and binding. The familiar red linen binding made the Murray guides easy to spot in bookshops. It was in fact due to the



obtruding extracts from his own journals. (Hand-book for Travellers on the Continent 1836: 2)

marketing success of the Murray handbooks that Karl Baedeker adopted the uniform red cloth as well as Murray’s formula for his guidebooks and, although today this creation of a unique brand may not strike us as particularly extraordinary, it was John Murray who first devised a distinct market identity, one that is still detectable in the production of guidebooks today.

Advertising, publishing and distribution The publishing process of the handbooks was always flexible and economical: handbooks were kept unbound in sheets, and were bound up with the current Murray’s Advertiser. Lists of Murray’s other publications appeared as required on the end papers, updated just before the commencement of the travelling season. Murray had introduced the Advertiser as a bound-in appendix in order to subsidise his publication costs; it first appeared in the Hand-book for Travellers in the East in 1840 (Lister 1993: xxx). Issued annually, the advertising supplement was bound in with whichever handbooks happened to be printed in the year concerned, having no thematic or regional focus and being, in terms of contents, relatively independent of the guidebooks in question. Virtually any business interest involved in the tourist industry was invited to advertise its products or services: transport and shipping agents, bankers, hoteliers, shop owners, publishers and many others, all organised in alphabetical order by location. Needless to say, Murray made good use of the Advertiser for his own marketing purposes, reserving the end papers for the promotion of his own recent and forthcoming publications. Here, he would promote the impressive list of titles in the handbook series, but also his other series, which included Murray’s Railway Reading and Murray’s Home and Colonial Library. He would also compose lists of books under the rubric Books for Travellers, which appeared in the guise of a series designed for travellers, whereas in fact these were simply titles that related specifically to traveller’s interests, such as The Sanative Influence of Climate, with an Account of the Best Places of Resort for Invalids by Sir James Clark, Consolations in Travel by Sir Humphry Davy and popular travel narratives such as the famous Bubbles of the Brunnen of Nassau. Everything from Murray’s stock that was deemed to be of general interest to a target middle-class readership en route could be included here. With this flexible publishing policy, Murray could make multiple uses of his authors. The best example here is Byron, Murray’s most valuable asset, whose work was constantly being recycled, in various editions at




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various prices, its circulation promoted all over Europe:5 the Beauties of Byron’s Poetry and Prose could be purchased for 3s., Byron’s Childe Harold for 1s. in a Railway Reading edition and the two-volume Lord Byron’s Life and Poetical Works, recommended under Books For Travellers, cost 12 s. per volume. Not only in terms of their contents, but also in terms of their production and distribution, the handbooks were truly border-crossing texts: from the beginning, Murray created an efficient distribution network of agents and booksellers, taking care that the most recent editions of his handbooks, with their familiar red covers, were available to British tourists in bookshops in every major tourist destination. Even before the first handbook was published in 1836, Murray had contacted Galignani of Paris and made him an exclusive offer of any number of bound copies above 100 at the rate of 4s. 6d. a copy6 – this was 3s. less the market price of the book in Germany. Forty years later, in the 1874 edition of the Hand-book for Travellers to the Continent, the following appear as publishers and distributors of the English Versions of the Handbook, altogether representing a highly efficient circulation system: Paris, Galignani; Leipzig, Black and Armstrong; Mannheim, Artaria & Fontaine; Cologne, Dumont and Schauburg; Berlin, Duncker & Humboldt; Aix-La-Chapelle, Mayer; Coblentz, Baedeker; Frankfort, C.Jügel, F. Wilmans; Hamburg, Perthes & Besser; Vienna, Rohrmann & Schweigert; Brussels, Pratt & Barry; Amsterdam, Nayler and Co. – all testifying to the fact that the success of the series was as dependent on its distribution network as on its contents.

Cultural and economic impact In the course of the nineteenth century, the Murray handbook became formative of a distinctive way of cultured and educated travelling to the continent. It was embraced by the British middle classes not only as a guidebook but also as an etiquette manual. Murray, who was more than aware of the parochialism and linguistic ineptitude of the average British tourist, took great care not only to provide them with up-to-date and precise information about sites of interest and the operations of the tourist infrastructure, but also to teach them the culturally accepted codes of behaviour that identified them as members of a cultured elite. The British middle classes were the ideal target group for Murray’s guidebooks, because they possessed enough economic capital to visit the countries concerned, and had a high regard for cultured society. Murray’s series proved successful, because he could mould it on the



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aspirational as well as the economic resources of his readers. With the handbook’s intellectual format, structured through copious literary references and a display of encyclopaedic knowledge, Murray clearly aimed at the educated bourgeoisie. Altogether, the handbook series drew on the cultural capital of its target group just as it increased it: eventually, the guidebooks themselves became synonymous with their consumers: namely, well educated, middle-class English tourists. The brand awareness of the Murray guides became so widespread that British tourists were often depicted as caricatures with a Murray guide in their hands,7 and travel writers and writers of fiction would widely refer to Murray as the reliable source for factual information.8 Murray’s interest in foreign countries, a taste for foreign art, history and cultural practices, combined with a distinct sense of what it meant to be British, all supported the habitus of the British abroad. Whereas continental guidebooks would mainly be of interest to tourists who spent at most several months in a foreign country, this was different in the guide to India: here, the function of the guidebook as an indispensable reference guide for colonial officers who actually lived there was of utmost importance. The Handbook to India which was first published in 1859 and went into twenty-two editions, the last being issued in 1970, was the only Murray guide that remained in print long after the series had been sold. It not only provided travellers to India with the necessary background knowledge but also served as an obligatory manual in the colonial context. Advising European standards of civilisation, the Handbook to India supported the colonial order through detailed information about colonial dress codes for men and women, advice on how to deal with the natives and understand their behaviour, advice on the consumption of food and alcohol and on medication. The 1949 edition still advised the traveller to wear a flannel cummerbund as a protective device against cholera (quoted in Cohn 1996: 154). Apart from the cultural importance of the series, namely the promotion of social cohesion among a certain class of tourists, one should also remember the profound economic impact Murray’s handbooks were to have on local tourist industries. An unfavourable comment in a Murray guide could drive a hotel proprietor or even a whole town into economic distress. Numerous letters in the John Murray Archive tell moving stories of desperate hotel owners or magistrates who beg Murray to reconsider negative entries about their establishments. The city of Pau, for instance, had experienced a serious decline in visitors after a remark in an edition of the Handbook to France from the early 1870s about the state of the sewage system, which it claimed was responsible




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for frequent outbreaks of malaria. Earlier editions of the handbook (1856 and 1864) had singled out Pau as an attractive place of a mild and dry climate and a favourite with the English as a residence during the winter months, but this influx of British tourists was seriously to diminish following the publication of these claims. From Murray’s correspondence with concerned citizens of Pau (whose letters do not survive), stretching over nearly eighteen months from December 1873 to March 1875, we learn that Murray was incorruptible as far as the objectivity of his handbooks was concerned: Dear Sir, I am this day favoured with your note of March 20. I rejoice to know that the remarks in the HB for France respecting the deficient drainage and sewerage of Pau have had the effect of inducing the Municipality to provide an effective remedy for these great evils. I feel that I have merited the thanks both of the Citizens & of all stranger Visitors if the result should prove to be the removal of these evils. As however there is no evidence as yet that anything has been done I do not see what further steps I can take in the matters. I have no prospect at present of a new edition of this HBook being called for. At least not during the present year. However, as soon as I receive positive assurance & evidence that the works of the new sewerage are making good progress, I will undertake to cancel at my own expense the passage in my handbook. If this Edition be still un-exhausted I will take care that the passage denouncing the bad drainage & malaria shall not be reprinted in any future edition.9 Dear Sir, I am favoured with another long letter regarding improvement began or proposed at Pau but your statement seems to me to leave things just as they were. A sewer only began is no better than no sewer at all & I am at a loss to understand what effect upon the drainage and salubrity of your town can be produced by the Election of a New Mayor and Municipal Council. Everything seems about to be and nothing done. When you can prove to me that the sewerage & water supply are finished & in operation – faits accomplis I will alter the passage in HBook to which you are so much indebted for calling attention to the subject. You need not mind the charges I will cancel the page then willingly at my own expense.10 The example of Pau is an outstanding one, because it demonstrates how the whole economy of a town dependent on tourism could be deeply 10.1057/9780230299368 - The Culture of the Publisher's Series, Volume 1, Edited by John Spiers


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affected by the printed word. But these effects can be also observed at the level of single establishments, particularly shops and hotels, whose proprietors often had oriented their complete business structure, their investment in and distribution of stock, according to the tastes and demands of British tourists. This fragile economy was likely to collapse if a subsequent edition of Murray failed to advise its readers to visit the respective establishment.

The satellite series John Murray had a much more inclusive approach to tourism than some deterministic theories of reading might lead us to assume. Acknowledging British tourists’ intellectual and material needs as active consumers,11 he launched satellite series to meet other demands, such as Railway Reading and the Home and Colonial Library. While these books were not directly related to travelling, they were designed particularly for itinerant readers: affordable, light in weight and content, and comparatively thin. Murray’s Home and Colonial Library was a short-lived venture, which ran from 1843 to 1849. Murray had recognised that the demand for affordable books in India was vast, and he answered it by inaugurating a series designated primarily for the British Overseas. Like the Railway Reading series, the Home and Colonial Library was made mainly of reprints, thereby allowing him to cut down production costs considerably. The fact that Murray crafted the Colonial Library mainly out of reprints does not mean that he did not take care to include the most recent and topical works. The inclusion of Darwin’s A Naturalist’s Voyage, originally published by Murray in 1839 in three volumes, clearly demonstrates Murray’s focus on topicality. But what was really lacking was fiction, and perhaps the timing of the Colonial Library was premature: the rival firm of Macmillan went on to create a highly remunerative Colonial Library four decades later.12 The Railway Reading series, reflecting the increased mobility of nineteenth-century readers, was designed to furnish the railway traveller with ‘sound information and light amusement, printed in large readable type, and suited for all classes’,13 taking the material circumstances of railway travel into account – an atmosphere where travellers required some distraction, but not of a challenging kind. It also catered to a change in social circumstance, where reading was less of a solitary pursuit and more of a public act. The series was clearly targeted at the same class of consumer as the Murray handbooks: well




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educated middle-class travellers (and in terms of gender certainly more masculine than feminine, a fact reflected in the higher proportion of male to female travellers). Murray’s Railway Reading was of course just one among the various series for railway travellers published from the 1840s onwards, the most successful of which was to become Routledge’s Railway Library. In general, these books, distributed on the railway bookstalls, were usually light reading, often humorous, but there was also non-fiction material such as biographies or condensed works by canonical authors. Mary Hammond, arguing for the ‘railway as an engine for social change’ (Hammond 2006: 56), has drawn our attention to the railway as a symbol for modernity’s disruptive class potential, enabling more people to travel cheaply. Hammond reminds us that in the course of the century the contents of railway bookstalls had changed from titles that could be labelled as reforming, self-help and educative, to more easily consumed fiction, often of the sensational kind (Hammond 2006: 56). In this context, she quotes an article from The Times from 1851, in which the author appears to be shocked at the rather ‘unmitigated rubbish and worthless mass’ he finds at London bookstalls, with the exception of a few titles that are anthropomorphised by the author as ‘well dressed gentlemen’, gentlemen that would not have been out of place in Murray’s Railway Reading Series:14 Nimrod on the Chace, 1s. 6d., 1851. Nimrod on the Turf, 1s. 6d.,1851. Nimrod on the Road, 1s. 6d., 1851. Music and Dress, 1s., 1852. Lockhart’s Life of Theodore Hook, 1s., 1852. The Flower Garden, 1s., 1852. The Honey Bee, 1s., 1852. The Art of Dining, 1s. 6d., 1852. Ellesmere’s Character of Wellington, 6d., 1852. Hallam’s Literary Essays and Characters, 2s., 1852. Mahon’s Joan of Arc, 1s., 1853. Milnian’s Fall of Jerusalem, 1s., 1853. Mahon’s History of the Forty-Five, 3s., 1851. Wilkinson’s Ancient Egyptians, 2 vols., 2 s., 1852. Maurel’s Life of Wellington, 1s., 6d., 1852 Layard’s Popular Account of Nineveh, 5s., 1852. James’ Aesop’s Fables, 2s. 6d., 1853. Oliphant’s Journey to Nepaul, 2s. 6d., 1852.



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Head’s The Emigrant, 2s. 6d., 1853. Campbell’s Life of Lord Bacon, 2s. 6d., 1853. Hollway’s Month in Norway, 2s. 6d., 1853. Lockhart’s Spanish Ballad, 2s, 1853. Lucas’s History as Condition of Social Progress, 1853. Croker’s Historv of the Guillotine, 1s., 1853. The Beauties of Byron’s Poetry and Prose, 3s., 1853. Taylor’s Notes from Life, 2s., 1851. The Rejected Addresses, 1s., 1854. Penn’s Maxims and Hints on Angling, ‘Chess,’ &c, 1s, 1855. Life of Sir F. Buxton, 2s., l854. Byron’s Childe Harold, 1s., 1851. Essays from The Times, 2 vols., 4s. each, 1852. Gifford’s Deeds of Naval Daring, 2 vols., 2s. 6d. each, 1854. Stanhope’s Science, 1s., 1856. Bees and Flowers, 2s. Washington’s Life, 2s. 6d., 1855. Puss in Boots by Otto Speckter, 1s. Clearly, these titles are in perfect compliance with the class, level of education, taste, interests and gender of Murray’s envisaged readership for his travel books. All in all, the Railway Reading series consisted of a potpourri of serious reading and entertainment, largely dominated by a perceived masculine taste. A strong emphasis on biographical history (fifteen titles) and male leisure and sports (Charles James Apperley’s very popular Nimrod books, which Murray had also published in a single volume, were divided for the Railway Reading series into three separate volumes) stands against a relatively insignificant number of literary titles. Byron is cannibalised yet again, and even fewer are the titles directed at an exclusively female readership. In general, female travellers clearly were regarded as an important group of potential customers on the railway. The railway – ‘pulling all classes with one engine’ – was a symbol of egalitarian, democratic change, allowing women to seek out new destinations beyond the domestic sphere. The enormous expansion of the railroad system in the early Victorian era dramatically reorganised the public sphere, while at the same time the private sphere of the home enjoyed its greatest prestige. As Beth Muellner has argued, as soon as women entered this new realm of mobility, it was required that they would comply with the norms and social codes of female behaviour, maintaining respectability and modesty by creating realms of domesticity inside the public sphere of the railway (Muellner




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2002: 37–45).15 Some of the titles to be found on the Railway Reading list reveal keen understanding of exactly this tendency. Light reading such as The Flower Garden, The Art of Dining and Music and Dress represents not merely the kind of innocent amusement that the series advertised; given the socially complex situation of female travellers – and especially unaccompanied female travellers on the railway, they could, in the contested public space of the railway compartment, serve as props for the enactment of polite behaviour, providing uncompromising reading material based on the idea of female improvement. In terms of price Murray’s railway books were competitive with other railway series, owing something to the fact that the publisher merely recycled many of his own titles for the series, turning them into cheap condensed versions. This perhaps is the main reason why the series turned out to be less than successful. Murray, who was not principally a publisher of fiction, neglected to acquire copyrights for novels, seemingly unaware of the fact that fiction was the genre on which prospering railway libraries were largely based. In a letter to John Barrow Murray writes: My dear Barrow, … Entre nous (I do not wish this repeated) my Railway Readings are not very successful. I know not how much longer I shall carry them on – and at present I have engaged to take so many works – some of them actually in the press – that it does not suit me to engage for many more.16 Given that W. H. Smith was not to install his first railway bookstall until 1848, and that the economic success of Murray’s series would have been largely dependent on such distribution infrastructures, we might speculate that, had Murray held out a little longer until the bookstalls were more generally spread, and readjusted his plan accordingly, the series might have been more lucrative. He had tried to create a library for the railway, which he regarded ‘as a travelling schoolroom or an opportunity for public displays of taste’ (Hammond 2006: 63), but had failed to catch the public imagination. Recent works on the reading habits of railway travellers in the nineteenth century have argued that the secluded railway compartment was seen by most travellers not as a stage for the display of cultured taste and erudition, but rather as a liminal space, allowing for a degree of momentary escapism, and thus an affirmation of more profane reading pleasures (Daly 1999; Marcus 2000;



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Hammond 2006), or, as Richard Hoggart aptly put it, functioning as a ‘release-valve’ for people who would not take their railway reading home (Hoggart 1967: 210). Cutting across received notions of class and taste, the railway as a reading site rapidly developed its own complex semiotics. By identifying the readers of the Railway Reading series too easily with those of the handbooks, Murray had failed to recognise that reading habits, albeit formed by education and class, could also be contextual and situational. Not only did the Railway Reading series fail, but by the late 1860s the Murray handbooks also seemed to have lost considerable ground in their competition with the Baedeker guides (Gretton 1993: xxi), and their cultural significance was no longer equalled by their domination of the guidebook market. Consequently, Murray’s authors began to be deeply concerned about the drop in sale figures. Reverend Armfield, one of Murray’s editors, wrote to Murray in 1868: It might serve your interest to know that some of the booksellers I spoke with in Germany said that a good sale had been lost this year by the late arrival (or non-arrival, I forget which) of the South German hdbk. In all directions Baedeker seems immensely active with well-revised editions, and in travel one cannot fail to see that notwithstanding the lack of polish as compared with the handbooks, he is getting a good sale even amongst English travellers.17 Likewise, Dr Lambert T. Mears, an author of the Italy and France handbooks, referred in a letter to Murray on 10 May 1877 to the superior quality of Baedeker’s maps: In your present letter you again remind me of the great cost of maps and plans but I can only reply as I have done on each occasion before that the handbooks produced by your foreign competitors are superior in maps, plans and details generally and I think that an editor must bear this steadily in mind if you are to retain the position you once held.18 Clearly, cheaper costs of production, a highly efficient strategy of regular revisions and new editions, and distinctly less emphasis on erudition and on literary and historical references, in other words cultivated taste – in short the adaptation of his books to the changing demands of the market shaped by mass tourism – had made it possible for Baedeker to win the game. Murray’s primarily innovative insistence on factual description,




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which had marked the departure from the subjective travelogue in 1836, had become obsolete by the 1870s, when lengthy descriptions appeared to be less commendable. Perhaps even more important was Murray’s relatively lax revision policy. Karl Baedeker, who despite being his main competitor was after all Murray’s much committed and well meaning friend, expressed his concerns about a serious lack of consideration as far as the details of travel circumstances were concerned as early as 1858: Mein verehrter alter Freund! Längst schon habe ich Ihnen mittheilen wollen, dass es Zeit ist, die Handbooks einer gründlichen Revision zu unterwerfen und sie von mancherlei veraltetem, mancherlei Unrichtigkeiten und besonders von den vielerlei Gasthofs-Irrthümern zu reinigen. Es thut mir ganz weh, wenn ich sehen muss, wie das Vertrauen zu den Handbooks abnimmt, wenn ich sehen muss, das neuere unwürdige guidebooks in vieler Engländer Hände gesehen werden. Ich war kürzlich in der Schweiz, die meisten Engländer hatten „Gregory’s Practical Swiss Guide“ und die Schweizer Buchhändler sagten mir, dass sie 50 Gregory verkauften, bevor 1 Murray gefordert wuerde. … Hätte ich die Zeit, so würde ich selbst die Feder zur Hand nehmen, leider werde ich aber mit meinen eigenen Büchern nicht fertig. Es bleibt mir nichts übrig, als auf die neuesten Ausgaben derselben zu verweisen (Deutschland 8. Auflage habe ich Herrn Williams für sie gesandt, die ganz umgearbeitete Auflage der Schweiz werde ich Ihnen auf demselben Wege im Februar zugehen lassen), die in Betreff der Gasthöfe und auch sonst ziemlich zuverlässig sind. In der Beurtheilung der Gasthöfe ist unser Standpunkt zwar verschieden, was aber für den englischen Standpunkt passt, fühlt sich bald heraus. In der 12. Auflage von Northern Germany, für deren gütige Einsendung ich bestens danke, sind selbst bei viel besuchten Orten Gasthöfe noch genannt, z.B. Rheinischer Hof in Neuwied, die seit 8 Jahren bereits verschwunden sind (vgl. Baedeker Rhein 7.,8.,9. oder 10. Auflage, was also durch Vergleichen leicht hätte vermieden werden können). Heute beklagte sich ein Engländer, dass er in dem Tunnel von Weilburg, den Murray „lighted by gas“ (North. Germ. P. 503) nenne, beinahe ertrunken sei, indem der Tunnel nicht einmal mit Oel wie die Stadt Weilburg erleuchtet werde. Kurz ich wiederhole, dass das Vertrauen welches Ihre Landleute Ihren Büchern schenken, es Ihnen zur Pflicht macht, eine recht gründliche Revision vornehmen zu lassen.



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Es sind grossendlich nur Kleinigkeiten, aber Kleinigkeiten wobei der Mensch, namentlich der hungrige und durstige, der in Erwartung eines guten „dinner“ oder „supper“ war, die Enttäuschung sehr übel nimmt. Neun Zehntel aller Dankes- und Berichtigungsbriefe, die mir besonders im September und Oktober in grosser Anzahl zukommen, betreffen Gasthöfe und ähnliche Anstalten. Auch englische Briefe laufen wohl ein, Aufforderungen, einen englischen Baedeker drucken zu lassen.19 Baedeker here informs Murray that tourists are beginning to lose confidence in the Murray handbooks, and that it is time to revise them thoroughly and eliminate their many infelicities. By way of an example Baedeker mentions that Murray’s Handbook to Northern Germany still includes inns that had been closed eight years previously (and consequently had been omitted in his own last four editions of the Baedeker to Germany) and that a tunnel is described in the Murray handbook as being lighted by gas, when the lighting was in fact so poor that an Englishman complained about having nearly drowned. Baedeker concludes with the observation that he has recently received correspondence from English tourists asking him to print a Baedeker guide to Germany in English. The shortcomings identified by Baedeker were to continue: by the 1880s, Baedekers were outselling the Murray handbooks, and in 1901 the handbooks were sold on to Edward Stanford (Gretton 1993: xxxiv). The last titles to be published were Japan and Scotland in 1913 and, although the Blue Guides are often considered the historical successors of the Murray handbooks, the series finally went under with the onset of the First World War, the only exception being the Handbook to India. In the early days of tourism, Murray’s superior achievement had been the identification of a distinctive social group of travellers – generally well educated middle-class tourists and their demands for comprehensive factual information. In later years, he failed to recognise serious changes in the social formation of tourists as well as in their changing reading habits and tastes: the new classes of tourists often lacked the educational background to enjoy the handbooks’ intricate web of lengthy literary quotations and historical anecdotes, and when travelling became faster and less time was spent in individual places, the need for elaborate descriptions was clearly waning. There is, however, a coda to the story: the 1970s saw a renewed interest in Victorian tourist practices and nineteenth-century representations of foreign countries. Consequently, some of the John Murray handbooks were reprinted: The Handbook for Switzerland appeared in the




Barbara Schaff

Victorian Library, published by Leicester University Press in 1970, and the Handbook for Devon and Cornwall was published by David & Charles Reprints in 1971. Such reprints were not only informed by a nostalgic longing for what some regard as the innocent beginnings of mass tourism. They give credit to the cultural significance of the Murray handbook series as important documents of the taste, self-image and interests of the Victorian English middle classes, and they serve to remind us of the ingenuity, entrepreneurial spirit and tenacity of a truly European publisher. With the hindsight of 180 years of guidebook publications, one cannot but acknowledge Murray’s outstanding achievement: in the words of Jack Simmons, the handbooks ‘exemplify many of the best standards of excellence of their time: reliability, derived from their thorough preparation; a solicitous concern for the reader; curiosity, constantly alert; sound judgement, resting on a robust common sense’ (Simmons 1970: 29).

Notes 1. This work was supported by a European Visiting Research Fellowship from the Royal Society of Edinburgh to explore the material in the John Murray Archive relating to the Handbook series. I am grateful to the National Library of Scotland and the Centre for the History of the Book, Edinburgh for their generous support and assistance. 2. John Murray III had written the Handbooks to the Continent (1836), Southern Germany (1837), Switzerland (1838) and France (1843) himself, but when, after the death of his father in 1843, he became responsible for the entire publishing business, he invested his future efforts in the commission and strict regime of the series’ authors and editors. 3. In the case of Ruskin, who corresponded with Murray about the Italian handbooks, Murray sometimes quoted from Ruskin’s letters and marked the quote with an ‘R.’ 4. T. Lambert Mears, an author who was commissioned to revise the handbooks for France an Italy, complained about the lack of authorial freedom in a letter to Murray: ‘I have always considered the omission of Savoy from the French handbook as a great defect and in 1873 I asked you to let one make the descriptions of the E. of France with the exacting frontier but you thought it better not and consequently on the one hand the whole of Alsace Lorraine remains in the book whilst on the other Savoy is excluded.’ Incoming Letters of T. Lambert Mears, 10 May 1877, The John Murray Archive, NLS, Acc.12604/1801. 5. James Buzard has observed how Murray exploited Byron’s poetry as place references in his handbooks in order to add atmosphere and emotion to the factual guidebook discourse (Buzard 1993: 127ff.) 6. Murray’s Letter books, The John Murray Archive, NLS, Letter to Galigani 2 August 1836, p. 195. MS.41909.



234

7. see for instance W. M. Thackeray’s humorous digs at British tourists in his Irish Sketchbook (1898). W. B. Lister assumes that the reason for some handbooks being rebound in black was the high recognition effect of the red binding which made tourists an easy prey for local tourist industries – the black binding helped tourists to remain undisturbed (Lister 1993: xxxii). 8. For example, Charles Dickens, Pictures from Italy (1846): ‘If you would know all about the architecture of this church, or any other, its dates, dimensions, endowments, and history, is it not written in Mr Murray’s GuideBook, and may you not read it there, with thanks to him, as I did!’ (Dickens 1866: 25). 9. Letter book 15 April 1868 to 10 April 1878, letter from 23 March 1874, The John Murray Archive, NLS, MS.41914. 10. Letter book 15 April 1868 to 10 April 1878, letter from 6 March 1875, The John Murray Archive, NLS, MS.41914. 11. As a complement to the handbooks on the continent, Murray produced travel talk books, which, however, do not qualify as a series, because they consist of one phraseology book, which was much amended and changed in the course of twenty-seven editions, supplying the traveller with German, French and Italian translations of useful phrases. It is an interesting source to observe changing tastes, travelling habits and attitudes towards other cultures. 12. These foreign and colonial series were meant to be marketed exclusively in the colonies at greatly reduced prices and virtually every major publisher in Britain at some point joined in. The idea was first tested by John Murray with forty-nine titles (1843–9). Others followed: Bentley, sixteen titles; Routledge, thirty titles; Macmillan, 640 titles between 1886 and 1916. Macmillan’s was clearly the most successful series: it had the longest run (over thirty years) and the largest list. But the credit of inventive genius is owed to John Murray, who was the first to recognise the enormous opportunities of several affordable and qualitatively highly profiled series for the British Abroad – as travellers or colonial officers. 13. This is the byline for the series that Murray used in his advertisements. 14. In a letter to the editor of the Journal Notes and Queries from 1916, John Murray IV gives a complete list of his father’s series, although in the advertisements for the series on the end pages of some handbooks, this list is exceeded by several titles. Altogether, however, the complete series should not have consisted of much more than about fifty titles (compared to Routledge’s 1,277 volumes). Letter book, The John Murray Archive, NLS, MS.41986. 15. For a detailed analysis of the implications of railway travel for gender norms see also Amy G. Richter (2005). 16. Murray’s Letter books 1853, 2 July 1853, The John Murray Archive, NLS, MS.41912. 17. Letters of various correspondents concerning ‘Murray’s Handbooks’. The John Murray Archive, NLS, MS.42613. 18. Ibid. 19. Letters of various correspondents concerning ‘Murray’s Handbooks’, 6 October 1858. The John Murray Archive, NLS, MS.42613.




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Buzard, James (1993) The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to ‘Culture’ 1800–1918. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cohn, Bernard S. (1996) Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Daly, Nicholas (1999) ‘Railway Novels: Sensation Fiction and the Modernisation of the Senses’, English Literary History, 66 (Summer): 461–87. Dickens, Charles (1866) Pictures from Italy and American Notes, Volume 1. New York: Hurd and Houghton. Gretton, John (1993) ‘Introduction’, in W. B. C. Lister (ed.), A Bibliography of Murray’s Handbooks for Travellers and Biographies of Authors, Editors, Revisers and Principal Contributors. Dereham: Dereham Books, pp. i–xxv. Hammond, Mary (2006) Reading, Publishing and the Formation of Literary Taste in England 1880–1914. Aldershot: Ashgate. Hoggart, Richard (1958) The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working-Class Life; with Special References to Publications and Entertainments. London: Chatto & Windus, 1967 edn. Lister, W. B. C. (ed.) (1993) A Bibliography of Murray’s Handbooks for Travellers and Biographies of Authors, Editors, Revisers and Principal Contributors. Dereham: Dereham Books. Marcus, Laura (2000) ‘Oedipus Express: Trains, Trauma and Detective Fiction’, New Formations, 41 (Autumn): 173–88. Muellner, Beth (2002) ‘The Deviance of Respectability: Nineteenth-Century Transport from a Woman’s Perspective’, Journal of Transport History 23(1): 37–45. Murray, John (1836) A Hand-book for Travellers on the Continent, Being a Guide through Holland, Belgium, Prussia and Northern Germany. London: John Murray. Murray, John (1874) Handbook for Travellers on the Continent, Being a Guide through Holland, Belgium, Prussia and Northern Germany. London: John Murray. Pel Hillimmons, Jack (1970) ‘Introduction’ to the reprinted version of Murray’s Handbook for Travellers in Switzerland (1838). Leicester: Leicester University Press. Richter, Amy G. (2005) Home on the Rails. Women, the Railroad and the Rise of Public Domesticity. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.



Selected bibliography

a priori assumptions, hazards of, 15, 16, 17, 20, 45–7 Aaronovitch, David, 14 access, to classics, 207 to canon, 207–8 to cheaper books, 10, 11, 24, 35, 39, 47, 51, 54, 59, 76, 79, 80, 82, 83, 85–96, 104, 107, 140, 153, 155–60, 165–70, 174, 180, 188–99, 205, 217, 218, 230 to citizenship, 31 and control, 11 to educational books, 139 to markets, 8 to military/political documentation, 163 to modern books, 207–8 to power, 6 to print, 12, 17, 44 to reader experiences, 19, 43 regulated, 153 to works in foreign languages, 63–4 Ackerley, J. R, 189 adaptive processes in markets of discovery, 38–9 adaptive change, 20, 38–9 processes of discovery, 38–9 responses to consumer preferences, 20, 38 Adorno, Theodor, 10, 48 advertising, 10, 21, 22, 24, 34, 37, 48, 50, 55, 66, 107, 151, 161, 164, 166, 168, 169, 174, 178, 190, 207, 223 aesthetic value and economic value, 30, 55 aesthetic appeal, 23 aesthetic critic, 129 aesthetic dimensions of classics, 134 aesthetic experience, 132 aesthetic pleasure, 4

aesthetic study of literature, 134 aesthetic system, 21 aesthetic theory of aesthetic response, 55 African-American bio-bibliography, 143, 146, 153 black fiction, 148 black film directors, 147–8, 152 black noir and crime literature, 142–4 black women, 142, 148 canon, 43, 151 detective fiction, 155 fiction and authenticity, 149–50 hip-hop/rap generation, 147–8 Howard, Gerald, and influence at W. W. Norton, 43 literature, 143, 148 magazines, 150–1 males, 149 market, 142, 155 novel, 154 popular fiction, 141–55 pulp fiction, 141–55 readers, 148, 153 readers, authenticity appeal as publishing strategy, 149–50 women writers, 143 agency, problem of in social revolutions, 16 aggressive wars, 6 Albatross Press, 202–18 adapted French bibliothèque ideale model, 204 Albatross Almanack, 204, 205, 206 Albatross Crime Club, 202 Albatross Giants, 202 Albatross Modern Continental Library, 195, 201–7 Albatross Press in France, 203, 207, 208, 210–14, 217 Albatross Press in Germany, 203, 207, 208, 210–14

237



Index

Index

Albatross Press – continued Beach, Sylvia, 204, 207, 208, 215, 216 buys paperback rights, 167 cheap books, 207 cultural capital, 205 Davis, Sir Edmund, 202–3 distribution, 207 elegance of books, 202 Enoch, Kurt, 203, 210, 214 extends author’s range, 208–9 failure after 1939–45 war, 211 forging new readerships, 207 Friends of the Albatross, 205 Hachette, 211 heyday, 1932–9, 202 historical importance, 209 Holroyd-Reece, John, 203–4, 205, 207, 209–10, 214–15 institution of modernism, 209 Lawrence, D. H., 208, 209, 213, 216, 217 major player, English-language books on continent, 202 package psychology, 205 policy/positioning, 204–5 Reader’s Cards, 205 reader’s responses, 206 sales concept, 205 shapes market, 203–4 shapes tastes, 203–8, 212 Tauchnitz, competes with, 204, 207 Tauchnitz, demotes, 203–4 Tauchnitz, purchases company, 203 third reich, 203, 207, 208, 210–14 translations, 203–4, 210–11 Wegner, Max Christian, 203, 204, 209, 214 Aldington, Richard, 188, 189, 191, 192, 193, 198, 209 Alison, Jennifer, 4, 16, 50 Althusser, Louis, 10 Altick, Richard, 32, 48, 74, 86, 149 America, circulating libraries, absence of, 44 America, copyright, see USA Copyright America, Library of, 88, 94–6, 104 anti-slavery movement, 92

entrepreneurship, 15 markets, 24 America, National Endowment for the Arts Agency report on Afro-American reading, 148 America, Norton’s Anthology of African American Literature (H. L. Gates, ed.), 143 America, nuanced interpretations of nationalism, 6 American Bible Society, 50 American black noir and crime literature, 142–4 American black women, 142, 148 American/British and American ideas/ appreciation of literary education, 134 American processes of cultural borrowing/straddling, 151 American readerships redefined, 141–55 American Library, Paris, 208 American magazines, 150–1 American Sunday School Union, 50 American Tract Society, 50 American Universities, teaching of literature, 134–5 Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities, 6, 53 Angus & Robertson, 4, 16 anti-business academic bias, deleterious impact on understanding and book history, 16, 31, 49, 50 Armfield, Rev., 231 Arnold, Matthew, Culture and Anarchy, 24–5 aspirational purchases, 32 auction records ‘audience’ as a classification, 28–9 Austen, Jane, and ‘canon’, 26 Australia and ‘tyranny of distance’, 8 Australian publishing, 4, 16, 50, 52 authenticity and Afro-American fiction, 149–50 authenticity and Harrap’s Poetry and Life Series, 126, 130 Autobiography (A. Trollope), 23 autodidacts, 85, 130–3, 189



238

back-list, 19 Baedecker, Karl, 223 Baldwin, James, 143 Balzac, Honoré de, 24, 76, 77 Barbier, Frédéric, 62 Bawdon, Edward, 96 Beach, Sylvia, 204, 208–9 Beardsley, Aubrey, 177–9, 185 Before Columbus Foundation, 151 behaviour, problems of recovery from the past, 9, 13, 17 Bell, Clive, 189 Bell, John, 52, 74 Belloc, Hilaire, 189 Bell’s Circulating Library, 75 Bennett, Arnold, and ‘canon’, 26, 30, 54 Literary Taste and How to Form It, 135–6, 139 Phoenix Library, 197–8 Riceyman Steps, 26 Bentley, Richard, 27, 55, 235 Bibliographie de la France, 67 bibliographical knowledge, limits of, 9 Bibliography of African-American writers, 143 Bibliotheque (series or library, French term), 72 Bierce, Ambrose, 197 Birkerts, Sven, 48, 53 black film directors, 147–8, 152 Blackwood’s Magazine, 164 Blainey, Geoffrey, 8 blaxploitation cinema, 147 Bloch, Marc, 20 Bloom, Harold, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages, 103 Blumenfeld, Samuel, 143, 146 blurb, 11, 23, 38 Bogue, David, 78 Bohn, Henry George, 78 book-buyers and self-image/ self-definition, 32, 193 book-sellers Berlin bookseller [ Jewish, unnamed], 212 Boni, Albert, 96

Galignani, 219, 224 Lebègue, 75 Ménard and Desenne, 64, 67–9, 75 Parker, James, 107 Pino, Oriolo, 198 Raymond, Pierre-Henri, 68 Ravier, Louis, 65 Robertson, George (Melbourne), 4, 16, 50, 52 Robertson, George (Sydney), 4, 16, 50, 52 Woolworth’s, 198 book trade employees, lack of information, 34, 50 book industry and the State, 43 books, as an archive in themselves, 13 as discrete individual commodities, 21 as signifiers of taste, 4 Booth, Charles, unexploited archives, 48 Life and Labour of the People of London, 48 Bosanquet, Bernard, 136 Bourdieu, Pierre, and ‘canon’, 4, 49 making a name, 204 ‘positions’/fields of forces, 42 taste/classification, 39 ‘brand’/feedback, 19, 21, 24, 36–9, 42, 48, 90, 160, 205, 222–3 competition between series, 42–3 La distinction, Critique sociale du jugement [Distinction], 4, 153 The Field of Cultural Production. Essays on Art and Literature, 53 Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, 216 symbolic capital converted into economic capital, 204 British and Foreign Bible Society, 50, 107 Brontë, Charlotte, 29 Brown, Madox, 172 Buchan, John, 156–70 Burke, Edmund, 8, 117 Burrow, John, 19 Byron, Lord, 117, 223–4, 229, 234



Index 239

Index

cabinets de lecture, 75 canon, definition of, 4, 23, 26, 89 academic influence on, 90 African American women, 90 African Americans, 90 Albatross Press, 208 architectural tradition of, 90–1 attacks on canon, 27–8 Austen, Jane, and canon, 26 Bell, John, series, 74 Bennett, Arnold, 26 Bourdieu, Pierre and ‘canon’, 49 canonical poets, 125, 192 centre and periphery, 90 Christian church and canon, 89 commodification, 51 continually evolving, 90, 92 controverted, 22, 142 copyright obstruction of series selections, 94–8 Critical Enquiry papers, 89 cultural/political roles in formation of canon, 26 culture wars, 142, 151 cumulation of past experience, 28 defence of, 27–8 evolving perceptions of, 88–90, 102 feedback, 28 feminism and canon formation of, 26 French collections and canon, 66–7, 72–87 influence on reading decisions, 27 keeps people reading, 27 literature and canon in France, 66, 88 making of, 4, 57 multiple canons, 89 national and regional canons, 89–90 national self-imagery and canon, 26 the New Criticism, 90 old canon and its influences, 26 opportunities due to larger markets, 26 outmoded canons, 91–2 pedagogical tool, 27 poetry, 52 risks of marginalizing past experience by revision, 28

scientific canon, 49 secular novels/canon, 89 Shaw, George Bernard, 98 social construct, 89 universities and canon, 90 values, 26 western canon, 89 works at periphery, 89 works cease to be canonical, 89 canonicity, a social construct, 99 Canons, (R. von Hallberg, ed.), 89 capital and the ‘making of meanings’, 1, 2, 12, 28, 36 Carlyle, Thomas, 47, 49 cartels, 12, 39, 48 Carter, Henry, 110, 123 Casper, Scott, E, 24 Cassell, John, 79, 85, 86, 87, 157, 267, 180–1, 185, 186 Centre for Cultural Studies Birmingham, 47 Cerf, Bennett, buys Modern Library list, 99 establishes new firm Modern Library Inc., 99 partnership with Klopfer, Donald S, 99 reorganises business of Random House, 100 see also Modern Library of the World’s Best Books Chandler, Raymond, 150 change, drivers of, 8 Chartier, Roger, 63, 72–3 cheap/cheaper books, 22, 39, 72–87 Cheeson, W. H, 180, 186 Chesterton, G. K, 189 children’s literature, collusive efforts of parents etc, 9 evolution of assumptions concerning nature of children’s taste, reading habits, and use of books, 9 opportunities for research, 9, 47, 50 circulating libraries, 12, 31, 44, 55, 59, 71, 75, 193, 199 Clark, William, Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University, 92–3, 103



240

classic, (definition of), 23, 74 Colclough, Stephen, 48, 51, 53 ‘censorship of price’, 51 historical reader, 48 readers: books and biography, 53 Coleman, D. C, 42 Coleridge, S. T, 4, 28 ‘Collection’, (series, definition of), 23 Colley, Linda, 6, 7 Colinvaux, Paul, The Fates of Nations, 3, 6, 7, 23 Collini, Stefan, 21, 48 Collins, John Churton, 126, 134 Collins, Wilkie, 198 colonialism, 6, 8, 56, 236 colporteur novels, German, 23 commodification, and democratic utilitarianism, 29–30 conceals individual choices, 4 in French collections, 72–3 George Gissing example, 179 hegemonic, 10 inherent in nature of print, 184 positive aspects, 30 in transformed markets, 21 commodity culture, ambivalence of, 43 Conrad, Joseph, 172–3, 177, 180 consumer, access to citizenship, 31 alienation from consumer perspectives destructive to scholarship, 17 chain-retailers, 50 demand and willing revenues, 29–31, 43, 46 John Murray publications, 224–5 priority for study, 47 re-conceptualised, 206–7 reshaped by markets, 10 research, 40 self-definitions of, 32 sovereign, 4 consumer information and how gathered, 43–4 consumption, patterns of, 29, 203–8 changing patterns of fiction publishing, 31

Charlotte Brontë’s view, 29 cumulative impact of publishing decisions, 31 George Eliot’s view, 29 Harry Snell’s view, 29 marketing in France, 72–3 Chartier, Roger, Culture écrite et société. L’ordre des livres (XIV–XVIIIe siècle), 63 communism, failed 20th century experiments, 46 continental mass-market and Albatross Press, 209 Chatto & Windus, 194 Cooper, Clarence, 146 Cooper, James Fenimore, 18 copyright, canonicity, and reprint publishing, 88–105 absence of, 37 Boni, Albert, 98 Buchan, John, 166 Canada, 98 canonical works, 95 cartels, 12, 19 Charpentier, Gervais, 83 creates assignable property right, 5 Collins’s series 1657, 167 Conrad, Joseph, 180 copyright deposit libraries fail to gather cheap books, 13 copyright, England, from 1710, 5 Daily Mail series, 167 Dickinson, Emily, 95, 100–1, 104 France: copyright liberalised, 65 France: 1777 decrees, 65 France: 1789 reforms, 65 France, 1793, literary heritage moved to public domain, 65 France: copyright in reign of Louis XVI, 66 Hemingway, Ernest, 94–5, 99 history and copyright law, 105 international copyright law, 217 Library of America, 94–6 Melville, Herman, 92, 96 Modern Library of the World’s Best Books, 95–102



Index 241

Index

copyright, canonicity, and reprint publishing – continued Nelson’s series, 66–8, 156–8, 160 out of copyright series, 188 Phoenix Library, 188–201 popular copyright novels, 180 Random House, 95–102 Scott Fitzgerald, Scott, 94–5 Scribner, Charles, Jr., 95, 104 stereo-typing, 18 Tauchnitz protects, 203 Trollope, Anthony, 49 Unwin, T. Fisher, 181 USA: copyright, Connecticut law, 1783, 5 USA: Copyright Act 1790, 5 USA: Copyright Act 1842, 96 USA: Copyright Act 1909, 95, 98 USA: Copyright Act 1976, 95 USA: copyright extended to foreign authors, 96 USA: Copyright Extension Act 1998, 95 USA: domestic manufactured produce protected, 98 USA: extended, copyright, to foreign authors, 96 USA: imported sheets ineligible for copyright, 97 USA: interim copyright, 1909 Act, 98 USA: manufacturing clause, 98 USA: works by foreign authors, 96, 98 Cowen, Tyler, and acceptable status, 49 generational shifts, 49 incentive, 49 individual perceptions, 49 personal fields of composition, 28 Craigie, Pearl, 173–5, 178, 183–4 Crawford, Francis Marion, 78 Culture (R. Williams), 25 Culture and Anarchy (M. Arnold), 24–5 Culture and Society 1780–1950 (R. Williams), 25, 89 culture, as a signifying system, 25 Arnold, Matthew, 24–5

debate about revisions of, 26–7 definitions of, 24–6 publishers’ series as manifestation of, 25 Williams, Raymond, 25–6 Curtis, George William, 92 Curtis Brown literary agent, 20, 203 David, Lorraine, 65 Davis, Sir Edmund, 202–3 De Beauvoir, Simone, 14 Defoe, Daniel, 31 de Girardin, Emile, 75 Delany, Paul, and economics, 16 monetary theory of literature, 45 open markets enabling hostile products, 51 social valuations, 45 demand-curve, 19, 35 demand, priority of, 3, 47 Dent. J. M, 22, 85, 193 De Quincey, 30 designed objects, 21 Dickens, Charles, 24, 235 Dickinson, Emily, 95, 100–1, 104 discharge of fixed costs, strategy for, 18, 19, 38 discovery process, 43–4, 48 Distinction (Bourdieu, Pierre), 4 distribution, 22, 36, 63, 84, 108, 206, 219, 223–4 Douglas, Norman, 104, 198 Douglass, Frederick, 143 Drabble Margaret, 30 drivers of change, 8 Duby, Georges, 7 Dymer, Clifford, 2 Easy Rawlins novels, 142 economics and methodology, 16 economic models and publishing history, 17 educated travelling, culture of, 224 Edwards, Oliver (pseud. Sir William Haley), 177 Eliot, George, 29 Eliot, Simon, canon, 28 context of meanings, 26 ‘dance of the texts’, 28



242

data, 16 economics, 126 opportunity cost/price, 43 problem of evidence, 19 research process, 14 three-volume novel, 87 Eliot, Simon, Nash, Andrew, and Willison, Ian, 54 Eliot, Simon, and Rose, Jonathan, 14, 16 Eliot, T. S, 47, 130–1 Ellison, Ralph, 143 emigration, 8 empiricism, as necessary approach in scholarship, 40, 45 broad framework, 46 value of, 13, 15 employees in all agencies of print, 34, 50 entrepreneurship, taken seriously, 4 Albatross Press, 204 Baedecker, Karl, 231 children’s literature, 9 distinguished from ownership, 46 general factor in change, 8 History of the Book in America, A (Gross and Kelley, eds.), 16 Jackson, Mary J., 9 John Murray, 234 Erickson, Lee, 16 ethnic minorities, writing recovered, 14 evidence, its status/value, 20 exchange value, 2 ‘facts’, and their problems, 15 Fairchilds, Cissie, 65 Falconer, Lanoe (pseud. Mary Elizabeth Hawker), 173–4, 181–3, 185 Mademoiselle Ixe (Lance Falconer), 173–7, 181–2 Faulkner, William, 90, 94, 99, 197, 198, 200, 211 Febvre, Lucien, 73 Fell, Dr. John, 106 female readerships/writing, 13, 26, 31, 36, 84–5, 90, 141–3, 148, 174, 184, 228–30

female travellers, 228–30 female writing recovered, 141 Fergus, Jan, Provincial Readers in Eighteenth-Century England, 62 Finkelstein, David, 16, 50 Fischer, David Hackett, 14 Fish, Stanley, and meaning, 32 Ford, Madox Ford (Hueffer, Ford H.), 172, 178 Fournier, Francois-Ignace, Nouveau dictionnaire portative de bibliographie, 66 France: for French series, see full list of series cited France, 5, 62–71, 72–87, 96, 126, 146, 161, 164, 207, 208, 211, 214, 217, 226, 231, 234 access, 84 advantages of series, 83–6 Albatross Press’s influence, 207–8, 210–11, 214, 217 author contracts, 83 autodidacts, 85 bibliographical sources, 63–65, 66–69, 72 Bibliographie de la France, 67 bibliotheque, meaning re-defined, 72 bibliotheque (series or library, French term for), 72 biblotheques, types of, 72 book trade/individual booksellers, 62–87, 75 cabinets de lecture, 75 canon, 66–67, 84 canonisation, 86 Cazin 18mo formula, 66 chapbooks, 73 Charpentier, Gervais, 73, 75–8, 83–85 Chartier, Roger, 63, 72–3 classics, 67 collection (series), 72–86 commodification, 72–3 consumer marketing, 72–3 copyright, 65–6, 83 Desenne, Alexandre, 68 Desenne, Grégoire-Joseph (‘Desenne fils’), 68



Index 243

Index

France – continued detective novels, 81 Didot, François Ambroise, 74 differing models of literary series, 85–6 discount catalogues, 65, 67 distortions of view, 63 distribution, 84 editorial formulae, 73–4, 80 Fayard, Arthème, 73, 80, 86, 204 female readers, 85 Flammarion, Ernest, 73 Flammarion, 80, 82 format anglais, 76 format Charpentier, 76 format compact, 76 format jésus-velin, 76 French Albatross Press, 214 Hachette, 23, 73, 78–9 international trade networks, 63–4 law of the cheap market (La loi du bon marché ), 74–6 Lévy, Michel and Calmann, 73, 79 Livre de poche, Hachette, 78, 82 Ménard and Desenne, 64, 67–75 Ménard, Émile-Eustache-LouisRené, 68 Ménard, Louis, 68 Michel Lévy, 78 modern series (dates, 1830–60), 74–8 money trail, 33, 64–5, 69, 106 non-profit publishers, 81–2 oeuvres durables, 76 oeuvres completes, 76 pocket-books, 81–2 popular publishers and standard publishers distinguished, 79 populuxe market, 65 price, 75–6, 78, 81 publishing realigned on foreign patterns, 67 publishing strategies, 73–4, 80 Revolution and abolition of guilds, 67 second-hand book trade, 69 serials, 76 series, 62–87

series of popular novels (dates, 1880–1920), 80–2 standardisation, 86 wars, impact of, 81–2 Fournier, François-Ignace, 66 Frankfurt school, the, 10 Fraser, Robert, 16 Fraser, W. Hamish, 16 front-list, 19 Frowde, Henry, 199, 123 Fry, Roger, 189 Furet, Francois, 15 Fyfe, Aileen, 9, 44, 49 Gagnier, Regenia, 16 Gallagher, Catherine, The Body Economic, 3, 16, 18, 25, 30 Galsworthy, John, 172 Galtier-Boissière, Jean, 68 Gans, Herbert, 151–2 Garnett, Constance Black, 172, 189 Garnett, David, 189, 191, 192, 194 Garnett, Edward, 171–2, 179–80, 183 Garnett, Richard, 128, 172 Garvey, Ellen Gruber, 48, 50 Garvice, Charles, 158 Gates, Henry Louis (ed), Norton’s Anthology of African American Literature, 141–2, 143, 151 gender, differing roles, 123 political power, 7 ways of reading, 31, 36 Gerald, Marc, 143–4, 145, 146, 152 Germany, 2, 44, 79, 82, 85–6, 202–18, 220, 231 Gettman, Royal A., 16 Gibbs, Henry Charles Hamilton (Cosmo Hamilton), 178 Gissing, George Robert, 178–81, 185–6 Givens, A. (ed.), Spirited Minds: African American Books for Our Sons and Our Brothers, 143 Goines, Donald, 146–7, 148, 150, 152 Gonconagh (pseud. W. B. Yeats), 174 Gramsci, Antonio, 10 Green, James N., 18 Gross, Robert A., and Kelley, Mary (eds.), A History of the Book in



244

America.Volume 2, An Extensive Republic. Print, Culture, and Society in the New Nation, 1790–1840, 16, 55 and entrepreneurship, 16 guide books, 219–36 Guillory, John, 30 Hachette, Louis, 23, 73, 78–9 Haldane, J. B. S., 189 Hall, Stuart, 47 Hamilton, Cosmo (pseud. Henry Charles Hamilton Gibbs), 178, 180 Hammond, Mary, 5, 16 handbooks, 160, 168, 219–36 Harlem renaissance, 142 Harper & Brothers, 24 Harper, J.& J., 17 Harrap’s Poetry and Life Series, purposes of, 128–9 Hawker, Mary Elizabeth (wrote as Lanoe Falconer), 173, 183, 185 Hayek, Friedrich von, 23, 48 Hemingway, Ernest, 94–5, 99, 209, 213 Herbert, Christopher, 47 Hesse, Carla, Publishing and Cultural Politics in Revolutionary Paris, 1789–1810, 65 Heydrick, Benjamin, How to Study Literature: A Guide to the Intensive Study of Literary Masterpieces, 134 Himes, Chester, The End of a Primitive, 146, 152 Himes, Chester, Yesterday Will Make You Cry, 146, 150 historian’s craft, difficulties of, 15 historical reader, difficulties of recovery, 13–14, 19, 30–1, 34–5, 45 identity of, 28–30 imprecisions in language, 14 Hobbes, John Oliver (pseud. Pearl Richards Craigie), 173–5, 178, 183–4 Hoggart, Richard, 231 Holmes, Heather, 50 Holroyd, Michael, 28

Holroyd-Reece, John, 203–4, 205, 207, 209–10, 214–15 Horkheimer, Max, 10 Howard, Gerald, 143, 145, 148, 149 Howsam, Leslie, 74, 149, 183, 186 Hudson, William Henry, editor of Harrap’s Poetry and Life Series, 126–37 Elizabethan Shakespeare series, 132–3 on aesthetic experience and poetry, 131–2 on authenticity in literature, 130–3 Introduction to the Study of Literature, An, 129, 135–6 on literature and personality, 129–36 Meaning and Value of Poetry, The, 132 Hughes, Richard, 189, 194 Hugo, Victor, 91 Hunt, Lynn, and writing cultural history, 15 Hunter-Miller Report, 142 Huxley, Aldous, 188, 189, 192, 196, 197, 200, 209, 213, 216 Huxley, Julian, 189 hypertext, 222 ideology, 31 identity and nation, 6 Imagined Communities (B. Anderson), 6, 53 imprint, reputation of, 19, 38, 48, 152, 169 India, 225, 227, 233 information from consumers, uniquely how gathered, 43–4 intended reader, 141 Ireland and ‘English’ literature, 7 nationhood, 7 Iser, Wolfgang, and ‘implied’ reader, 39, 46 reader participation, 39 Isherwood, Christopher, 200 Italian series, 74–5, 82 Jackson, Mary J., 9 Jakes, John, 24



Index 245

Index

Jefferson, Roland, S, 152 Jerome, Jerome K., 178 Jevons, William S., and inscrutability of individual minds, 35 Juratic, Sabine, 62 Kent family chronicles series, 24 Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (R. Williams), 89 Klancher, Jon P., 28–9 Klopfer, Donald S., 99 King, Andrew, 37 King, Richard Edward, 47 Kirsop, Wallace, contributions to book history, 32 auction records, 33 bibliographical controls, 47 books as an archive, 34 book-trade sources, 33 contexts of texts, 33 distribution, 33, 63 economics, 26 historical method, 32 Hobart town, 64 opportunity cost/price, 43 material frame of change, 33 money trail, 33, 64, 69 private library catalogues, 33 Kitchin, G. W., 109–10, 122 Kuskin, W., 184, 186 la loi du bon marché (law of the market), 75–6 labour theory of value, displaced, 47 Labrouste, Henri, 90–1 Lane, Sir Allen, 202 Lawrence, D. H., 60, 208, 209, 213, 216, 217 le roman-feuilleton, 76 Library of America, 88, 94–6, 104 Leary, Patrick, 50 Lebègue, bookseller, 75 Lee, Spike, 148 Lehmann, Rosamund, 188, 194 Leighton, Sir Frederic, 126 legitimacy of publisher/author/agent, 42 lending libraries, 219 Levine, Neil, 90–1, 103

Lewis, Wyndham, 191, 197, 198, 199 Library of Congress classifications, 92 Library (series, definition of), 21, 23, 85 Liddell, Henry, 107 Lightman, Bernard, 9, 47 literary education, British and American ideas/appreciation of, 134 Livre de poche, Hachette, 78, 82 Long Revolution, The (R. Williams), 26 Loughran, Trish, 6 Macmillan, Alexander, 107–10, 112–13, 115, 116, 119 Macmillan’s Colonial Library, 121–4, 134–51, 227 Macmillan, Daniel, 113 Macmillan, publishers, 64–5, 107–8, 121–4, 134–51, 227 Madan, Falconer, 110, 123 Mademoiselle Ixe (Lance Falconer, pseud. M. E. Hawker), 173–7, 181–2 Making of the English Working Class, The (E. P. Thompson), 30 Mandrou, Robert, 73 Mann, Peter, 4 Mansfield Park (J. Austen), 26 Manutius, Aldus, 88 Marcuse, Herbert, 10 marginal utility, and consumer, 30–1 utility and value, 30 markets, centrality of, 13 adaptations by Karl Baedecker, 231–3 disdain of, 31 gains of taking seriously, 30 learning from, 21 mass market and cheap editions, 158–9 modern targeted sales, 40 monopoly, 17 Mudie’s ‘Select Circulating Library’, 31, 55, 87 necessity of sympathy with, 32 positive processes, 38–9



246

processes of discovery, 46 unique source of consumer information, 43–4 Marshall, Alfred, 1 marxism, 10, 23, 46, 47 Marzials, Frank, 128 mass culture, 10, 37, 86 mass market for black books, 142 mass market on continent, 209 mass markets/marketing, 10, 54, 60, 106–7, 142, 157–8, 198 mass market paperback, 146 mass media, 57 mass of the people, 129 mass production, 10, 52, 106–7, 158–9 mass production of fiction, 52, 158–9 mass production of popular books, 66 mass reading public, 53, 67 mass tourism, 219, 231 worthless mass, 228, 234 Maugham, Somerset, 172, 177 Ménard and Desenne, 64, 67–9 Mellot, Jean-Dominique, 62 Melville, Herman, 28, 92, 95–6 Mercier, Louis-Sébastien, 74 Milford, Humphrey S., 119, 123 Milne, A. A., 189, 199 Miller, Andrew H., 11, 29, 43, 49 Modern Library of the World’s Best Books, 88–104 Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (M. Twain), 100 Albert Boni conceived series, 96 Albert Boni partnership with Horace Liveright, 96 Albert Boni left firm, 99 business reorganised as Random House, 100 character of list, 99 competitive strategy, 100–1 first batch of titles, 96 founded, New York 1917, 88 impact of copyright on selections, 95–102 Liveright Inc. and Harrison Smith acquired, 99

Liveright, Horace, significance as a publisher, 99 Liveright, Horace, neglect of Modern Library, 99 Modern Library and evolving perceptions of literary canon, 88 Modern Library list slashed in 1970s, 101 Modern Library revived 1996, 101 modernist assault on Victorian culture, 96 second batch of titles, 98 sale of Modern Library to Bennett Cerf, 99 Serf begins use of imprint of Random House, 99 Serf establishes (in partnership with Donald S. Klopfer) new firm, Modern Library Inc., 99 Serf and partner acquire firm of Harrison Smith and Robert Haas, 99 works of Emily Dickinson, 100–1 modernism, 27, 50, 51, 60, 99, 199, 209, 217 Mollier, Jean-Yves, 67 Moncrieff, C. K. Scott, 189 monetary theories of literature, 45 Monro, Harold, 189 Montague, C. F., 189 Morley, Henry, 79 Morrison, Toni, 142 Mosley, Walter, Devil in a Blue Dress, 142–3 Mottram, R. H., 196 Moulton, R. G., literary appreciation, inductive criticism, 134 Mudie, Charles and ‘select’ circulating library, 31 Muller, Max, 119 Murray, John, firm of, 17, 219–36 Murray’s Advertiser, 223 Murray’s Handbooks, economic impact, 225–7 McCleery, Alistair, 34, 50, 211, 213 McKenzie, D. F., 50 McMillan, Terry, Waiting to Exhale, 142



Index 247

Index

Nash, Andrew, 50, 167 nation/nationhood, and identity, 6 Benedict Anderson’s views, 6 competition for niche spaces/ resources, 3, 6–7 diverse genesis, 6 ecological analysis of, 7 imagined political idea, 6 self-image, 7, 219 Trish Loughran’s views, 6 Nouveau dictionnaire portative de bibliographie (F.-Ignace Fournier), 66 National Endowment for the Arts Agency report on Afro-American reading, 148 Nelson consideration of American market, 159 Nelson, Ian, 165–6 Nelson, Thomas Arthur, 156, 161 Nelson reprints in Chinese, proposed, 159, 168 in French, 159 in German, 159 in Hungarian, 159 in Russian, proposed, 159 in Spanish, 159 Nelson’s History of the War, 161 Nelson’s Map Book of the War, 161 Nelson’s War Atlas, 161 new fiction publishing in 1890s, 157, 181 Newbolt, Sir Henry, 165 New England Tract Society, 50 niche (a series as), definition, 3, 22 national competition for resources proliferation of from late 18c onwards, 3 Nicholls, Beverley, 197 Nord, David, 50 North America, markets, 24 nuanced interpretations of nationalism, 6 Norton’s Anthology of African American Literature, (H. L. Gates, ed.), 143 Norton, W. W, 141–55 package psychology, 145 number trade, the, 49

Ohmann, Richard, Selling Culture: Magazines, Markets, and Class at the Turn of the Century, 10 brand, 48 shaping product, 22 and transforming capitalist social relations, 10 Okely, Judith, 14 Olivero, Isabelle, 63, 72–87, 204–5 opportunity cost, 29, 43–4 Orwell, George, 22 ‘old canon’, 26 Oxford University Press, Clarendon Press Series, 106–24 Bibles, 106–7, 122 British and Foreign Bible Society, 107 Carter, Harry, and Falconer, Madan, OUP bibliographical record, 110, 123 Children‘s books, 119 Clarendon Press Series and English Texts, 110, 117 classics, 112, 117 Fell, Dr. John, 106 Frowde, Henry, 119, 123 History of Oxford University Press, 110, 122 impact of modern technology, 113 Kitchin, G. W., 109–10, 122 the Learned side, 106–9, 111, 122 Liddell, Henry, 107 list of 108 OUP series, 21 London business offices, 119, 122 Macmillan, publishers, 107–10, 112–13, 115–16, 119, 128 Madan, Falconer, and Carter, Harry, OUP bibliographical record, 110, 123 mass production/mass marketing, 106–8 medical publications, 119 Milford, Humphrey S., 119, 123 New Clarendon Press Series of Classical Authors for the Use of Schools, 119 other OUP series, 119–21 OUP General Catalogue 1916–17, 119–20 Oxford Reference Dictionary, 23, 24



248

Parker, James, 107, 122 poetry list, 122 Price, Bartholomew, 107 production data, 110–119 restructured in 1780s, 106 role of Alexander Macmillan, 107–10, 112–13, 115–16, 119 royalty payments, 109 School Book Committee, 108–10, 122 series marketing, 109 Shakespeare, 118 World’s Classics, 88, 94, 119, 123–4, 167 paratext, 11, 34, 37, 76, 84, 88, 141, 144, 145, 149, 171, 189 Parker, James, 107 Parley, Peter, 23 part-works, 5, 23 patterns of consumption, 17, 29 Pemberton, Max, 180 ‘Penguinisation’, 199 perceptions of foreign countries, 220 perceptions of reader’s sense of self, 13 performative space, 42 Perry, Charles, 146 Petroski, Henry, 21 Phoenix Book Company ( J. M. Dent), 193 Phoenix Library, 188–201 advertising/marketing, 189–96 Albatross Continental Library competition, 194 art editor Geoffrey Whitworth, 189, 192 collectable, 190 batch issue, 191 Bennett, Arnold, 197–8 book buyer market at home, 193, 198–9 brand, 190 Centaur Library, 196 circulating libraries, 193, 199 colour coded, 189 continental market, 194 cultural distinction, 190 culture of consumption, 193 design and format, 188–91 dynamics of literary market, 199

editorial standards/selectivity, 197–8 Hogarth Press, 200 launched, 188–9 modernism, 198 new books in series, 191 New Phoenix Library, 200 paratext, 189–91 Prentice, Charles, 188, 193, 194, 195, 196, 198, 200, 201 price, 188–96 print runs, 192–9 production costs, 192 profit margins/sales, 192–9 Raymond, Harold, 191 reprints by contemporary authors, 188 sales staff, travellers, 194–5 Smith, W. H, 198 stereo-plates, 192 St. Martin’s Library, 196 Tauchnitz, 194–5 Pinker, J. B., 180, 209 piracies, 65 Pitt the Elder, 1st Earl of Chatham, 8 Plomer, William, 200 Plumb, Sir J. H., 8 Postrel, Virginia, 48, 51, 58 Potter Harry, 23 Pound, Ezra, 102, 205, 217 Powys, T. F., 188, 189, 198, 199, 200, 201 Practical Teacher, 157–8 Price, Bartholomew, 107, 113, 122 Price, Leah, 32 price, 7, 43–4, 45, 51, 72–87, 128, 188, 207 pricing strategies, 72–87, 128, 188 private library catalogues, 33 publisher as an entrepreneur, 13 publisher’s archives, 48 publishers/distributors cited Albatross Press, 202–18 Albert Boni, 96 Albin Michel, 204 Anglo-American Publishing Company, 182 Antoine du Verdier, 72 Anton Kippenberg, 203 Armand Colin, 82



Index 249

Index

publishers/distributors cited – continued Arnold Mondadori, 203, 210 Arthème Fayard, 204 Ballantine Books, 149 Bennett Cerf, 99, 150 Bernhard Tauchnitz, 194, 203–4, 208, 212–13 Black & Armstrong, 224 Boni & Liveright, 93 C. Jugel, 224 Calmann-Lévy, 82 Casey & Lea, 18 Cassell, UK, 128, 151, 180–3 Cassell, USA, 181–3 Charles Knight, 17 Charles Prentice, 188, 193, 194, 195, 196, 198, 200, 201 Charles Scribners’ Sons, 956 Chatto & Windus, 188–202 D. Appleton, 182 Daily Mail, 167 David & Charles, 234 Donald S. Klopfer, 99 Dumont and Schouburg, 224 Duncker & Humboldt, 224 Editions Perlado, 79 Edouard Charton, 80 Edouard Dentu, 80 Edward Stanford, 233 F. Wilmans, 224 François de La Croix du Maine, 72 G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 181–3 Galignani, 219, 224 Gallimard, 82, 208 Garnier-Flammarion, 82 George Brown, 160, 164–5 George Doran, 163, 169 Grant Richards, 167 Gustave Havard, 79 Hachette, 23, 73, 78–81, 85, 204, 211, 213 Harold Raymond, 139, 191 Harper & Brothers, 183 Harper, J. & J., 17 Harrap, 125–40 Harrap, George G, 125–40 Harvard UP, 95–6 Heath, D. C, & Co, 133 Heinemann, W, 126

Hiard, 75 Hodder & Stoughton, 164–5 Hogarth Press, 200 Holloway House, 146 Horace Liveright, 96 Ian Collins, 203 Insel Verlag, 203, 204, 209 Isbister, 134 J. S. Tait & Sons, 181–3 J. M. Dent, 85, 167, 188, 193 J. W. Arrowsmith, 157 Jackson, Walford and Hodder, 171 Jacques Schiffrin, 82, 84 John Holroyd-Reece, 203–4, 205, 207, 209–10, 214–15 John Long, 167 John Murray, 17, 219–36 Jonathan Cape, 188 Joseph Bry, 79 Jules Tallandier, 81 Karl Baedecker, 223–4, 231 Kurt Enoch, 203, 210, 214 Leicester UP, 234 Librarie Stock, 204 Library of America, 88, 94–6 List Verlag, 208 Little Brown, 100 Liveright, Inc., 99 Longman, 17 Macmillan, 64–5, 107–10, 112–13, 115, 116, 119, 121–4, 128, 134–51, 156, 227 Mannheim, Artaria & Fontaine, 224 Marpon, E., 80 Marshall, Japp & Co, 171 Martin Secker, 188, 199 Max Christian Wegner, 203, 204, 209, 214 Mayer, 224 Michel Lévy, 78 Nayler & Co., 224 Nicholas David, 84 Nicholson and Watson, 82 Nouvelle Revue Critique, 210–11 Odyssey Press, 202 Oxford UP, 106–24 Pascal Covici, 93 Pearson, 167 Penguin Books, 88, 199, 200, 202, 207



250

Perther & Besser, 224 Peter Davies, 166 Pino Orioli, 198 Plon, 204 Pratt & Barry, 224 Random House, 88–105 Reichner Verlag, 208 Richard Bentley, 27, 55, 235 Robert Mournier, 82 Roberts Brothers, 100 Rohrmann & Schweigert, 224 Rowholt, 82 Samuel Putnam, 93–4 Siegfried Unseld, 202 Simms and M’Intyre, 41 Stanley Unwin, 171, 181 Swan & Sonnenschein, 128 T. Fisher Unwin, 171–87 Thomas Nelson & Sons, 156–70 W. Blackwood & Sons, 163 W. W. Norton, 141–55 Werdet, 75 William Collins, 203 World Publishing Co., 100 publishing as a business, 4, 13 publishing strategies, 18–19, 72–87, 100–1 Putnam, Samuel, 93–4 race and taste, 151 Railton, Stephen, and audiences, 28 railway bookstalls, 78, 177, 193, 198, 228, 230 railway compartment, meaning of this space, 230–1 Railway Library (G. Routledge), 18–23, 33, 228 Railway Library (Bibliothèque des chemins de fer, Hachette), 23, 78–9, 213 ratio of supply and demand, 17 rational-choice economics, 16 Raven, James, 12, 16, 17, 39, 58, 62, 71 Business of Books: Booksellers and the English Book Trade, The ( J. Raven), 58, 62, 71 cartel controls and risk-avoidance in markets, 39 economic models, 16–17

entrepreneurship Judging New Wealth. Popular Publishing and Responses to Commerce in England, 1750–1800 ( J. Raven), 58 Practice and Representation of Reading in England, The ( J. Raven, H. Small, and H. Tadnor eds.), 58 trade structures, intellectual production, and defining literary art, 12 Ravier, Louis, 65–6 Raymond, Pierre-Henri, 68 Reade, Charles, 198 Reader cards (Albatross Press), 205–6 readership of English-language books on European continent, 207–8 reading, a more individualistic activity, 3 ‘Reading nation’, 17 Reading Nation in the Romantic Period, The, 17 Reading Nation in the Romantic Period, The (W. St. Clair), 59, 62, 127 readers conceptualised: active, actual, angry, annotating, autonomous, careless, common, conscripted, critical, emblematic, encoded, forgotten, gay, historical, ideal, implied, informed, inscribed, inter-active, mock, model, professional, receptive, resisting, scanning, semi-interested, seven ages of, specific, super, travelling, woman, 34–5 Reclam, Anton Philipp, 79, 85–6 Religious Tract Society, 50 Republic in Print, The (T. Loughran) Richards, Grant, 123 Rigogne, Thierry, Between State and Market: Printing and Bookselling in Eighteenth-Century France, 62 risk, and cartels, 39 cheap, 8 consumer research, 40 entrepreneurship, 18–19 strategies to limit, 38, 42 Rolfe, Frederick, 197



Index 251

Index

Rolland, J. F, Conseils pour former une bibliothèque, ou catalogue raisonné de tous les bons ouvrages qui peuvent entrer dans une bibliothèque chrétienne, 66 Rolls, Eric, 51 Rose, Jonathan, 19, 30 Routledge, George, and Railway Library, 18–23, 33, 228 and cost recovery/pricing strategy, 18 Rowbotham Sheila, 14, 30 Rowland, William G, and ‘canon’, 26–8 Rowling, J. K, 23 Ruskin, John, 23, 49, 59, 96, 234 Said, Edward, 32 sales, 16, 18, 28–9, 35, 37–8 Afro-American books, 142, 152 aggregate demand, 35 Albatross Press, 205, 207, 210–11, 213–14 back-list, 19 by lowering price, 18 Chatto & Windus Phoenix Library, 188, 192–9 consignment, 56 copyrights, 69 discount, 65, 67, 69, 70, 176, 193–4 France, 72–87 Harrap’s Poetry and Life series, 125, 134 Modern Library, 100–1 overseas, 19 over time, 45 recovery of, 48 reputation, 49 rights, 4 sales staff/travellers, 50, 194–5 Scribner’s, 95 security, 37 T. Fisher Unwin, 177, 183–4 T. Nelson, 161, 164, 168–9 undependable, 48 willing revenues, 43 W. W. Norton, 145–9, 151–3 Schivelbusch, Wolfgang, 8 Scialtiel, Margareta, 202

Scott, Joan, 7 Scott, Linda A., 50 Scott Fitzgerald, Scott, 94–5 Scottish Review, 160 Secord, James A., 9 Seldon, Arthur, 16, 48 self-fashioning and cheap series, 138 Selling Culture: Magazines, Markets, and Class at the Turn of the Century (R. Ohmann), 10 serials, in English, 5, 23, 48 serials, in French, 76 Seymour, Terry, 22 Shell, Mark, 16 Shelley, P. B., 28, 49 Sherman, William, and reading practices, 40 Shakespeare and Company, Paris, 204 Sharp, William, 128 Shaw, J. F., 48 Sher, Richard B, The Enlightenment and the Book: Scottish Authors and Their Publishers in Eighteenth-century Britain, Ireland, and America, 62 Shils, Edward, 90, 103 Simmons, Herbert, 146, 152 Simmons, Jack, 234 Singleton, John, 148 Small, Helen, 58 Smith, Adam, 12, 28, 29 Smith, W. H, 78, 177, 193, 198, 230 Snell, Harry [Lord], 29 social revolution, academic ‘lit. crit.’ hope of which hinders book history, 15 Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, 50 Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, 50 Spencer, Herbert, 126 Spiers, John, 1–47, 59, 87, 128, 138, 140, 141, 167, 168, 203, 205, 208, 209 By Book or By Crook, The Secret History of a Victorian Publisher, 47 Spithover’s, 219 Squires, Claire, and evidence, 497 Stanford, Edward, 233 stationers’ Company Apprentices, 50



252

Stephen, Sir Leslie, 128 stereo-plating, 18, 48, 121, 192 Stewart, George R., 91 Strachey, Lytton, 188, 189, 192, 197, 200 strategy and publishing approaches, 17, 18, 22, 37 and Albatross Press and package psychology, 205 authenticity in appeal to AfricanAmerican readers, 149–50 cost recovery, 18 inter-textual networks, 220 investment for cheap edition production, 158 and W. W. Norton and package psychology, 145 Stringer, Vickie, 152 Sunday School Union, 50 series cited 10/18, or Folio, 82 Adelphi Library, 184, 196 Albatross Crime Club, 202 Albatross Giants, 202 Albatross Modern Continental Library, 195, 201–7 Aldine British Poets, 88 Aldine editions, 22, 88 Anecdota Oxoniensia, 119 Auteurs célèbres, 80 Autonym Library, 171–87 Baedecker Guides, 231–4 Bell’s British Poets., 74 Bell’s British Theatre, 74 Bell’s Shakespeare, 74 Bentley’s Standard Novels, 27 Biblioteca scelta, 74 Biblioteca Universal, 79 Bibliotheca Universale Rizzoli, 82 Bibliothèque anglaise, 77 Bibliothèque bleue, 73 Bibliothèque Charpentier, 73 Bibliothèque chrétienne, 78 Bibliothèque d’élite, 78 Bibliothèque d’une maison de campagne, 75 Bibliothèque de l’Enfance, 69 Bibliothèque de l’honnête homme, 76

Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 82, 88 Bibliothèque de poche, 78 Bibliothèque des amis des lettres, 75 Bibliothèque des chemins de fer, 23, 78–9, 213 Bibliothèque des merveilles, 80 Bibliothèque du suffrage universel, 80 Bibliothèque française, 67–8 Bibliothèque Franklin, 80 Bibliotheque ideal, 204 Bibliothèque impériale, 87 Bibliothèque nationale, 79 Bibliothèque nouvelle, 78 Bibliothèque omnibus, 79 Bibliothèque philosophique, 78 Bibliothèque scientifique internationale, 80 Bibliothèque universelle des dames, 72 Bibliothèque universelle des romans, 66 Bilingual Series, 126 Books for Travellers, 223 Cabinet Encyclopaedia, 27 Cameo Series, 171 Centaur Library, 196 Children’s Library, 178 Clarendon Press Library Editions, 120 Clarendon Press Series, 106–24 Classical Library, 78 Classiques des 16e, 17e et 18e siècles, 78 Collection Armand Colin, 82 Collection d’ouvrages français, 74 Collection des meilleurs ouvrages français, 75 Collection des meilleurs romans français, 75 Collection Michel Lévy, 78 Collection Nelson, 160 Collection Payot, 82 Collection Pourpre, 82 Collins’ Pocket Library, 88 Contemporary Men of Letters, 126 Dilettante Library, 128 Ecclesiastical Library, 78 Editions de l’Olivier, 143



Index 253

Index

series cited – continued Editions of France, 81 Elizabethan Shakespeare, 132 English Classics, 133–4 Everyman’s Library, 22, 85, 167, 188 Family Library, UK 17; USA, 17 First Novel Library, 172 Folio, or 10/18, 82 Foreign Classics for English Readers, 126 GF, 82 Great Writers, 125 Green Cloth Library, 184 Green Library, 7 Hachette classics, 81 Handbooks for Travellers, 219–36 Handy Volume series, 183 Harlequin, 81 Harrap’s Poetry and Life Series, 125–40 Herbert Strang’s Romance of Modern Invention, 119 History of English Literature, 165 Home & Colonial Library, 219, 227 Idées, 82 Incognito Series, 183 J’ai Lu, 82 John Buchan’s Annual, 165 Kingsway Shakespeare, 133 Knapsack Guides, 219 Knickerbocker Nuggets, 183 La Librairie Franklin, 80 Lakeside Library, 87 Larrouse Classics, 81 Le Livre d’aujourd’hui, 81 Le Livre national, 81 Le Livre plastic, 82 Le Livre populaire, 80 Le Livre universel’, 81 Le Roman cosmopolite à 6 francs, 81 Le Roman policier, 81 Les Classiques pour tous, 81 Les Maîtres du roman, 80 Les Veillées littéraires illustrées, 79 Librairie de la Bibliothèque démocratique, 80 Librairie du suffrage universel, 80 Library of America, 88, 94–8 Library of Useful Knowledge, 17

Lisez, 81 Living Library, 100 Livre de poche, 78, 82 Livre populo, 80 Loeb’s Classical Library, 17 Lovell’s Library, 87 Lutetia Classics, 168 Macmillan’s 7d. Series, 156 Macmillan’s Colonial Library, 121–4, 134–51 Marabout, 82 Mermaid Series, 171 Modern Bibliothèque, 80 Modern Library of the World’s Best Books, 88–105, 150 Monthly Series, 50 National and World Library, 86 Nelson Library of Copyright Fiction [7d.], 158 Nelson’s 7d Library, 162 Nelson’s Alert Arithmetic, 168 Nelson’s Cameos of Literature, 168 Nelson’s Continental Library, 164 Nelson’s Cycle of Song, 168 Nelson’s Handbooks of Moral Instruction, 160 Nelson’s Highroads of Geography, 168 Nelson’s Highroads of History, 168 Nelson’s Highroads of Literature, 168 Nelson’s Royal Treasury of Study and Song, 168 Nelson’s Sevenpennies, 156, 158 Nelson’s Shilling Library, 156, 268 Nelson’s Short Studies in English Literature, 168 Nelson’s Young Folks’ Bookshelf, 168 New Adelphi Library, 188–9 New Century Library, 156, 167 New Clarendon Press Series of Classical Authors, 119 New Phoenix Library, 200 New Readers’ Shakespeare, 133 New Sixpenny Classics, 156, 162 Nineteenth Century Poets, 165 Old School Books, 141 Oxford Classical Texts, 119



254

Panthéon Illustré, 79 Parlour Library, 41 Penguin Books, 82, 88, 199, 200, 202, 207 Penguin Classics, 88 Petite Bibliothèque nationale, 81 Philological Library, 78 Philosophical Library, 78 Phoenix Library, 188–202 Phoenix Living Poets, 200 Pocket Library, 180 Popular copyright Novels, 184 Pseudonym Library, 171–87 Railway Library, 18–23, 33, 228 Railway Reading, 219, 227 Reader’s Library, 198 Red Cloth Library, 173 Roman policier, 86 Romans à 4 sous, 79 Romans illustrés, 79 Romans populaires illustrés à 20 centimes, 79 RoRoRo series, 82 Sacred Books of the East, 119 Scientific Library, 78 Seaside Library, 87 Série noire, 46 Series of Old Welsh Texts, 119 St. Martin’s Library, 196 Standard Library, 78 Standard Novels, 26 Story of the Nations, 171 Succès, 81 Tauchnitz Collection of British and American Authors, 194, 203–8, 212–13 Teaching of English, 165 Teaching of History, 165 Traveller’s Library, 188–9, 198, 199 Tudor and Stuart Library, 119 Two-Shilling Library of New Novels, 156 Universal Bibliothek, 79, 86 Unknown Library, 181–3, 186 Unwin’s Colonial Library, 172 Unwin’s Library, 172 Unwin’s Shilling Novels, 184 Unwin’s Shilling Reprints of Standard Novels, 184

Unwin’s Sixpenny Edition, 184 Vest Pocket Series, 183 World’s Classics, 88, 94, 98, 119, 123–4, 167 series, definition of, 23, 167 acculturation, 6, 10 advantages of series in France, 83–6 agent of cultural exchange, 10 aggregate market demand, 35 Albatross Press concepts of series, 205 authors, 11 Belgian series, 82 Bibliotheque, 72 books long in print, 12 booksellers, guide to, 36 canon, 10 capital accumulation, 12 Catholic and religious market, 63 Cazin, 65–7 charisma, 92–3 collecting instinct, 84, 190 Collection (series, definition), 72 considered holistically, 5 copyright impact on selection of titles to be included in series, 94–8 creation of 19c technology, 63 cultural convention, 21 cultural issues, 12 designated readers, 39 differing models of literary series, 85–6 documents individual choice, 45 dominant cultures, 11 editorial formulae, 73–4, 80 French series, 62–87 gatekeepers, 11 German series, 79, 82 guide to booksellers, readers, and authors, 22 Harper & Brothers, 24 ideologies of authorship, 10 Italian series, 74–5, 82 legitimacy, 28 populuxe market, France, 65 positional properties, 45 quantifiable results, 29 reorganisation of audiences, 12



Index 255

Index

series, definition of – continued role in segmentation of marketplace, 46 shaping taste, 206 significance of, 21 social and economic work, 45 social benefits of study, 1, 12 Spanish series, 79 training regime, 135 transmission of cultural values, 11 uniformity in appearance, 189–91 visual aesthetic of commercial culture, 11 St. Clair, William, 12, 16, 17, 18, 26, 39, 43, 44, 45, 48, 49, 208, 209 access, 17 Albatross Press, 208–9 Beach, Sylvia, 208–9 book-trade and state, 43 cartels/anti-competitive practices, and conditions for intellectual production, 12, 39 control and risk-avoidance, 39 economics/economic models, 16–17 influence of reading on mentalities, 43 intellectual property and textual controls, 43, 48 old canon, 26 price, 43 publisher’s archives, 48 readerships, 43 sales figures recoverable, 48 state of mind of reader, 44–5 three-volume novel, 18 tourism, 219–36 what was actually read, 44 Tadmor, Naomi, 58 Tarantino, Quentin, 147 taste and classification, 39, 203–8, 212 taste and race, 151 Tatlock, Lynne, 2, 3, 44 Tauchnitz of Leipzig, 167, 172, 194–5, 203–4, 206–8, 212–5 taken over, 203 texts and effectual values, 29 Theory of Moral Sentiments, The (A. Smith)

third reich, 203, 211–14 Thoreau, Henry David, and classics, 22 Walden, 22 three-volume novel (three-decker), 11, 18, 54, 75–6, 87, 157, 181 Thompson, E. P, 30 Thompson, Jim, 150 Times Literary Supplement ‘Afterwords’ (W. St. Clair), 59 Toomer, Jean, 143 Topham, Jonathan, 48 tourism, 219–36 trade, the, 19, 33 trade and wars, 6, 8 trade press, 33 travel writing, innovations by J. Murray, 220 trial and error, 20, 38, 122 Trollope, Anthony, 23, 49 Turner, Nicki, 152 Twain, Mark, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 100 tyranny of distance, 8 Unwin, T. Fisher, 157, 171–87 ‘value’ and ‘marginal utility’, 30–1 values, source of, 30–1, 44 productivity, 4 Van Peebles, Melvin, 146, 152 Vieusseux, Gabinetto, 219 Vincent, J. R., and historical method, 19 visual aesthetics of commercial culture, 11, 189 voluntary purchases and value, 30 Wadsworth, Sarah, 16 Walker, Alice, 142 War, The, news magazine, 161 war, trade and enterprise, 8, 81–2, 90, 98, 156, 166, 199, 211–13 Warner, Sylvia Townsend, 188, 200 Webb, Beatrice, 15, 60 Weber, Max, 92 Wedgwood, Josiah, 20 Weedon, Alexis, 16, 48 Wegner, Max Christian, 203, 204, 209, 214



256

Wesleyan Methodist Association, 50 West, James L. III, 16 Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages, The (H. Bloom), 103 Wexler, Joyce Piell, 50 what stayed in print, 12 wholesalers, 93 Wilde, Oscar, 125 Williams, Alfred A., 146 Williams, Raymond, culture, 25–6 Centre for Cultural Studies, Birmingham, 47 Culture (R. Williams), 25 Culture and Society 1780–1950 (R. Williams), 25, 60 Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (R. Williams), 89

Long Revolution, The (R. Williams), 26 ways of seeing, 28 willing revenues and consumer impact, 29–31, 43, 46 Willison, Ian, 20, 51, 54, 56, 61, 201 Winship, Michael, 16 Woodmansee, Martha, 16 Woolf, Virginia, 200, 209 Wright, Richard, 143, 150 Yeats, Jack B, 172 Yeats, W. B, 172, 174 Zola, Émile, 24 L’argent, 77



Index 257

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