A Companion to the History of the Book (60 page)

Horowitz, Helen Lefkowitz (2002) ‘Another American Cruikshank’ Found: John H. Manning and the New Sporting Weeklies.”
Proceedings of the American Antiguarían Society,
112: 93–126.

Johanningsmeier, Charles A. (1997)
Fiction and the American Literary Marketplace: The Role of Newspaper Syndicates in America, 1860–1900.
New York: Cambridge University Press.

John, Richard R. (1995)
Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Kaser, David (1957)
Messrs. Carey & Lea of Philadelphia: A Study in the History of the Booktrade.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Kelley, Mary (1985)
Private Woman, Public Stage; Literary Domesticity in Nineteenth Century America.
New York: Oxford University Press.

Leonard, Thomas C. (1986)
Power of the Press: The Birth of American Political Reporting.
New York: Oxford University Press.

— (1995)
News for All: America’s Coming-of-age with the Press.
New York: Oxford University Press.

McGill, Meredith L. (2003)
American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting 1834–1853-
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Mott, Frank Luther (1962)
American Journalism: A History, 1690-1960,
3rd edn. New York: Macmillan.

Nord, David Paul (2001)
Communities of Journalism: A History of American Newspapers and their Readers.
Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

— (2004)
Faith in Fiction: Religious Publishing and the Birth of Mass Media in America.
New York: Oxford University Press.

Pasley, Jeffrey L. (2001)
“The Tyranny of Printers”: Newspaper Politics in the Early American Republic.
Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.

Raven, James (2002) London
Booksellers and American Customers: Transatlantic Literary Community and the Charleston Library Society, 1748–1811.
Columbia: University of South Carolina Press.

Schudson, Michael (1978)
Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers.
New York: Basic.

Sheehan, Donald (1952)
This
Was
Publishing: A
Chronicle of the Book Trade in the Gilded Age.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Starr, Paul (2004)
The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communications.
New York: Basic.

Stewart, Donald Henderson (1969)
The Opposition
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Albany: State University of New York Press.

Tebbel, John (1972–81)
A History of Book Publishing in the United States,
4 vols. New York: R. R. Bowker.

Tucher, Andie (1994)
Froth and Scum: Truth, Beauty, Goodness, and the Ax Murder in America’s First Mass Medium.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Warner, Michael (1990)
Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-century America.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Winship, Michael (1995)
American Literary Publishing in the Mid-nineteenth Century: The Business of Ticknor and Fields.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Zboray, Ronald J. (1993)
A Fictive People: Antebellum Economic Development and the American Reading Public.
New York: Oxford University Press.

— and Zboray, Mary Saracino (2005)
Literary Dollars and Social Sense: A People’s History of the Mass Market Book.
New York: Routledge.

24

The Globalization of the Book 1800–1970

David Finkelstein

Until the early nineteenth century, the production of books in Western Europe could be explained fairly simply in business terms. Early printers combined the roles of printer, publisher, and bookseller in one. They commissioned and bought rights to works, then produced and attempted to make a profit from the results. As trade increased to include international links, these roles began to be separated: by the late eighteenth century, many Western European cities had traders specializing specifically in publishing, subcontracting to printers, illustrators, and other related production specialists to complete material work on books and other printed texts, and subsequently selling the finished products to established, specialist book retailers.

The industrial revolution in nineteenth-century Britain allowed it to become a world leader in book production and dissemination. It used increased advances in technology to produce books more cheaply and transport them faster and further than its competitors. Britain’s empire also proved an ideal space for the development of a transnational, globalized book market. Books and texts were an important aspect of British intellectual domination of its English-speaking colonies, but it was never a one-sided activity. Technological innovation, working practices, and textual material circulated round: initially exported, absorbed, and adapted, it was then returned to be inserted and utilized in British settings to improve the book-trade system.

The results were emulated by other nations from the 1840s onward. As part of this evolution, by the turn of the twentieth century, international copyright treaties had been agreed and trade organizations had been founded to regulate, manage, and standardize world trade, further supporting the transnational circulation of texts. After World War II, international book publishing began a process of shifting from self-contained, nationally based organizations into large, transnational, corporate organizations. Multinational media mergers, begun in the 1960s, would reshape the economics of book publishing, accelerating a process begun earlier in the century of viewing books as one of many content sources within a larger mass-media communication industry.

Copyright and Technological Innovation

The rise of a reading public in Britain in the late eighteenth century (with interests in and ability to pay for printed works) created changes in the economic fortunes of authors and book traders, generating an audience from whom they could earn money if successful in capturing its imagination. Crucially, it would be the development of copyright as a legal concept that would lead to an international economic revolution, a result of eighteenth-century legal battles in Britain between English and Scottish factions.

Interpretations of who owned the results of an author’s efforts would be clarified in 1774 following a landmark legal case in London between a Scottish and an English bookseller. The case was argued with the legal help of James Boswell, the literary recorder of Samuel Johnson’s life.
Donaldson
v.
Becket
established the legal precedents and concepts of individual copyright ownership that would shape all following international interpretations of copyright. The judgment confirmed that no individual printer or publisher could claim perpetual copyright over intellectual property generated by authors, and confirmed earlier statutes that had granted sole reproduction rights to entrepreneurs who had purchased these rights for 14, then 28 years. France followed in 1778 with its own legal interpretation of copyright protection (rights that were subsequently strengthened in 1793 with further statutes). Austria followed in 1832, as did Germany in 1835. Over the next sixty years, other nations slowly adopted similar copyright laws (with increasing lengths of time assigned for copyright protection: 50, then 75 years from initial publication), but international copyright regulation was only to be achieved after much struggle with the ratification of the Berne Convention in 1887.

Changes in legal rights happened in tandem with major technological and market change. Book production was transformed by scientific and industrial innovations (see chapter 20). Steam-driven trains and boats speeded up delivery of books and print across national and international borders. Telegraph cables, based on technological breakthroughs in Britain and the US in the 1830s and 1840s, were laid across national, transatlantic, and international borders. The first underwater telegraph cable linking Britain and continental Europe was laid in 1850 and joined London to Paris; the first successful transatlantic telegraph cable between Europe and North America was laid in 1858, running between Ireland and Newfoundland. These developments, along with the establishment of dependable postal services, enabled quick and efficient circulation of information between authors, editors, publishers, and their readers.

This industrialization of printing and publishing systems was part of a larger industrialization of business across Western Europe. Mechanization enlarged market potential, shifting power in the book trade at the same time. As Robert Escarpit notes, “Faced with a developing market, printing and bookselling underwent a major change, as nascent capitalist industry took charge of the book. The publisher appeared as the responsible entrepreneur relegating the printer and bookseller to a minor role. As a side effect, the literary profession began to organize . . .” (1966: 22–3).

Among the first book-trade economies to change, partly in response to the technological advances made during the industrial revolution of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, was that of Britain. After 1780, we see a shift from small, individualized firms to large, multi-focused, family-led, corporate entities. Major publishing houses emerged which acted both as general and specialist list publishers. Family firms such as Blackwood & Sons, John Murray, Chambers, Smith, Elder & Co., Macmillan, and others, founded in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, would become pre-eminent in their field by the 1860s, dominating trade in Britain and profiting from exports to anglophone colonies worldwide. Some had printing operations attached to their editorial and production offices, but on the whole firms moving to consolidate reputations as “publishers” shifted the bulk of their printing onto the shoulders of specialist printing firms, who took advantage of new technologies to produce orders for several publishers simultaneously and at speed. By the late nineteenth century, the economic structure of the book market in Britain (and in turn Western Europe) would be firmly established, and firms that profited from its stability would dominate both local and overseas colonial markets.

Global Book-trade Expansion

Such success encouraged the free flow of books beyond national borders. Britain and its empire, it can be argued, was the first transnational, globalized economy to emerge as a beneficiary of the advances supported by industrialization (a point discussed further below). With Britain leading from the 1830s onward, its economic initiatives and success would be replicated across the Atlantic and in other European states, and the printing trade would be completely transformed over the second half of the nineteenth century. By 1848, Germany, the US, the Nordic countries, and elsewhere had modernized and adapted technology within their own book trades. In tandem with such changes there was a growth in an increasingly active bourgeois and reading public keen to consume the products of the printing press. Important European and US firms rising to prominence during this period include Hachette in France, Samuel Fischer and Bernhard Tauchnitz in Germany, George Putnam, Houghton Mifflin, and Harpers & Co. in the US, Gyldendals in Denmark, and Norstedts and Albert Bonnier in Sweden (Chartier 1981; Gedin 1982: 34–9; Hall 1996: 44).

Individual nation-states harnessed the British experience to their own ends. In the US, while printing had formed an important part of the eighteenth-century colonial experience, the “golden age” of US publishing and printing activity took place after 1830 with the advent of new technology which increased capacity and communication and allowed firms, such as Harpers in New York, or Carey, Lea in Philadelphia, to become nationally and internationally known (Hall 1996: 44). Their ability to dominate local markets was also due to their size and production rates: typically, American editions were three or four times larger than British print-runs (which averaged about 750–1,000 copies per impression), and prices a third or a quarter less. Inexpensive printings were partially enabled by widespread unauthorized printing, a particular concern of British sources from whom such material was “borrowed.” The problem of “piracy,” as it was viewed by British publishers affected by these actions, and US protectionist regulations against non-US manufactured material (justified by the industry as necessary for protecting national printing industry interests), would prove endemic through to the 1890s, when the US reluctantly adopted some measure of international copyright legislation under the Chace Act.

In France, change dated from the July Revolution of 1830, when state censorship was relaxed and liberal trade laws were instituted, and 1833 when general education became compulsory, thus encouraging an increase in the number of literate readers. The emergence of a mass press, catering to an increasingly literate urban French readership, dates to the appearance in 1836 of Emile de Girardin’s commercial daily
ha Presse
and its rival
he Siècle.
Within a year, general daily newspaper sales across Paris had risen from 70,000 to 235,000 copies a day; by 1870, sales had reached one million; by 1880, they had topped two million (Escarpit 1966: 28; de la Motte and Przyblyski 1999: 2). Textual innovations included featuring serialized novels (the
roman feuilleton)
, a method copied from British publishing practice. Among now canonical authors of nineteenth-century French literature initially published in this way were Balzac, Dumas, Emile Zola, and Flaubert.

Nineteenth-century French distribution sources also drew inspiration from British models – in the first instance, from the circulating library system begun by C. E. Mudie in London in 1842 (and which for over fifty years monopolized and dictated the terms by which Victorian fiction in particular was produced and distributed), and also from the newspaper and railway bookstall network developed by W. H. Smith. Guinevere Griest comments on Smith’s start: “In the early part of the nineteenth century Smith’s had been the leading newspaper agent of Britain, a position which was not relinquished when the firm started to expand with the railway bookstall business in 1848” (Griest 1970: 31). By 1862, Smith’s had obtained a monopoly on bookstall operations in almost all of the English railways (another retail competitor, John Menzies, would dominate the Scottish market), a position it would continue to occupy through to the late twentieth century. It would also venture into the publishing market, issuing in conjunction with Chapman and Hall from 1854 onward inexpensive, two-shilling paperback reprints of popular novels for sale specifically at railway stations (they were termed “yellowbacks” on account of the yellow tint of the paper covers).

French operators would imitate such innovations in distribution. The French publisher Louis Hachette, who had begun operations in Paris in 1826, had by the 1860s, through astute engagement with the French government as a major supplier of school textbooks, turned his firm into France’s largest publishing house. On his death in 1864, the firm employed 165 people and generated a gross annual turnover of one million francs. Visiting Britain in 1851, Hachette observed W. H. Smith’s railway bookstall successes. When he returned home he successfully lobbied for rights to establish similar bookstalls at French railway stations. As the railway network expanded (growing 600 percent between 1850 and 1870), so too did Hachette’s railway bookshop empire, extending to several thousand stalls and shops across the nation.

Hachette also copied Smith’s reprint series with his own “Railway Library” editions in the 1850s: he issued 107 titles in the first year of production, and another sixty in the second. Five hundred titles were published during the life of the series. Successful titles included works by Dickens, who accounted for twenty-eight volumes (of which
David Copperfield
was the most popular, selling 100,000 copies, and
Oliver Twist
a close second with sales of 83,000), Thackeray, George Sand, Victor Hugo, and the Comtesse de Ségure’s
Malheurs de Sophie,
which throughout the 1860s sold a steady 40,000 copies a year, eventually totaling 1.7 million sales (Gedin 1982: 39–40). Hachette would grow from strength to strength over the coming decades, opening outlets and selling in overseas book markets, such as Algeria and Turkey. On the eve of World War I, its annual turnover would exceed sixty million francs. After the war, however, Hachette ceased functioning as a family-owned firm, and throughout the twentieth century it would undergo a series of restructuring moves that led to its reformulation as an international, multimedia conglomerate empire, covering a wide area of entertainment work.

Nineteenth-century publishing successes such as these were matched by the publishing opportunities available amongst a cornucopia of published mass-media sources that included daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly journals. The rise in the number of journals seeking contributions enabled many authors to earn a living from writing. Literary property proved an increasingly valuable commodity, particularly as individuals gained stronger legal rights in their texts through crucial national and international rulings and trade agreements hammered out over the course of the nineteenth century. Publishers realized that leisure reading material could boost sales of journals and newspapers, as well as serve as useful advertising for their firm’s brand of fiction and nonfiction. The use of serialized material from the 1840s onward became ubiquitous in literary periodicals and newspapers, and a market developed through to the 1880s and beyond whereby texts (either pirated or legally purchased) would be serialized and circulated internationally: “stories from New York, fashion from France, information from Australia filled the democratic pages of the mid nineteenth-century miscellany” (Johnson-Woods 2000: 355).