A Companion to the History of the Book (61 page)

International trade organizations and agreements were created to standardize and manage world trade in both general and book-specific areas. It is not coincidental that, as Eva Hemmungs Wirtén points out, “the first major international public unions, the International Telegraph Union (1865), soon followed by the Universal Postal Union (1874), are concerned with the intensification in international communication” (Wirtén, 2004: 31). These were followed by, among others, the organization and standardization of time through the creation of the International Date Line (Greenwich Meridian Time) in 1884; the setting up of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in 1875; the founding of the International Labour Office in 1901; and the development of the Universal Radiotelegraph Union in 1906. The reasons underpinning the founding of these organizations and unions in the early stages of each emerging technology “was not the creation of a single authority to manage world affairs,” but rather “the establishment of regulatory regimes for, in principle, the predictable and orderly conduct of pressing transnational processes” (Held et al. 1999: 43).

Exporting the Industrialized Book-trade Model

European print communication practices as remodeled in the wake of nineteenth-century technological innovations were successfully exported to other countries, drawing on European investment, technology, and skilled labor. Printing networks and activities would flourish or falter as determined by the specific needs of, and levels of support provided by, the ruling powers. In the case of the British, the setting up of print shops in their overseas possessions and colonies was initially part of missionary settlements and/or the official administration’s communication system. These would be followed by the export of skilled personnel, equipment, and working practices, enabling a local print culture economy to develop, though generally still dependent on the mother country for many of its needs (including the lucrative educational market, dominated by Scottish and English firms such as Thomas Nelson & Sons, Oliver & Boyd, Macmillan, Longman, and Oxford University Press).

New Zealand’s print heritage, for example, begins with the tradition of the missionary book, produced in the indigenous language of the area – in this case between 1815 and 1845 as part of missionary efforts at printing religious material in indigenous languages to be read by those they tried to convert. A second strand, English-language printing, developed in New Zealand from 1840 with the publication of a newspaper,
The New Zealand Gazette and Britannia Spectator.
Newspapers would become the primary expression of printing activity in New Zealand’s colonial development. As J. E. Traue notes, the growth was rapid: there would be “28 newspapers founded between 1840 and 1848 for a European population of 59,000; 181 newspapers founded between 1860 and 1879; 150 founded between 1880 and 1889” (Traue 1997: 109).

The establishment of print culture traditions in New Zealand, and their initial expression through the production of newspapers, is one mirrored in other colonial territories such as the West Indies, Hawaii, Tahiti, Indonesia, Kenya, and India (Anderson 1983; Cave 1986; Bayly 1996; Finkelstein and Peers 2000; Chakava 2001; Traue 2001). India, for example, witnessed the development of its print communication networks from the mid-1700s onward. While the technology and culture of mass media was at least initially largely borrowed from Europe, its audience was much more fragmented by language, region, and race. Interestingly enough, the British were among the last of the European powers active in India to introduce the printing press into their enclaves. It was not until 1761 that the British in India acquired a press, and even then it was a press that had been taken from the French. Its role was primarily the production of official documents and texts. Printing for popular consumption came much more slowly. The first newspaper in Calcutta was published in 1780, followed by one in Madras in 1785 and Bombay in 1789. By the mid-nineteenth century, newspapers and magazines were common elements in Anglo-Indian life. As one commentator noted in 1851, “The newspaper is as necessary an adjunct to the breakfast table in Calcutta as it is in London” (Hobbes 1851: 362).

Australia witnessed a similar trajectory of printing development. Throughout the nineteenth century there was little domestic book publishing undertaken in Australia; indigenous print production developed after the Gold Rush of the 1850s, and focused on the newspaper and magazine market, along with the undertaking of general trade work. Australian wholesale book distributors, such as George Robertson of Melbourne, circulated mainly British and North American produced titles, albeit with a focus on material of likely colonial interest. Australian writers found outlets for their work through two routes. The first consisted of publication or serialization in diverse local and regional newspapers and literary journals, of which there were many, often shortlived, examples. The second was seeking publication (or, in the case of initial Australian serialization, re-publication) with British publishers, particularly after the successful launch in the 1880s of rival inexpensive paper and cloth bound “colonial series” by Bentley, Sampson and Low, Macmillan, and others. The result was a flowing back to Britain of “raw” material, in this case literary work, which was then recycled in British colonial arenas through being published and sold in the Canadian, Australasian, and Indian markets.

In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Australian booksellers began to venture into publishing, often through co-publication ventures with British publishers. From the 1890s through to the 1960s, however, the Australian book market would be dominated to an exclusionary extent by British publishers, particularly after the adoption of the Australian Copyright Act of 1912, which “ensured that overseas publishers could dictate the terms of trade and oblige retailers to obtain their supplies from prescribed sources, thus fixing prices and maintaining them at a higher level . . .” (Kirsop 2001: 326). As late as 1961, 40 percent of British books were exported, of which 25 percent were destined for Australia alone (Johanson 2000: 254–82).

Printing and book culture developed at a different pace and much earlier in Canada, but was equally slow in moving beyond “job printing” (handbills, stationery, account books, and so on) and journalistic work to indigenous literary and prose production. As one survey suggests:

Publishing in Canada began with handwritten manuscripts, circulated privately. This gave way to the newspaper and general publishing output of printing presses using handset type, and thence to new technologies as they became available. Distribution of books, in the earliest years, was often by private importation or by purchase from the local printing office, before the population was great enough to support separate bookstores and distribution agents. (MacDonald 2001: 92)

The development of printing followed progressive settlement across Canadian provinces: the printing press arrived first in Halifax in 1751, then Quebec in 1764, Niagara in 1793, and Toronto in 1798. Work undertaken in this early period was usually jobbing printing; other main areas of production included state and religious material as well as newspaper publication. Until the late nineteenth century, the economy of print production and distribution in Canada was a combination of pragmatic, individualistic, and regionalized activity, with individuals functioning along older models combining printing, publishing, and distribution roles. As one commentator notes, “It was not until consolidation began with the arrival of large non-Canadian firms at the beginning of the twentieth century that this changed” (MacDonald 2001: 93).

Literary Agents

This range of national examples demonstrates the extent to which print production and book publishing often evolved along similar lines when successfully exported from Western Europe. At the same time, such print production and communication systems also proved part of a “distinctive, determinate set of interlocking, often contradicting practices” (Feltes 1993: 17). The increasing value ascribed to literary property, for example, created a role for new intermediaries such as literary agents to manage such commodities. Literary agenting would be one of the many innovations that characterized the twentieth-century book market. Agents’ expertise in negotiating intellectual property rights in a variety of areas beyond conventional book rights (such as the emerging mass-media areas of film, radio, and, from mid-century onward, television) shifted power to determine literary “value” from publisher to author. Their skill lay in recognizing and perfecting the mediating role of the agent as arbiter and evaluator of literary property, or, more precisely, as one commentator noted, in “participating in, and in fact becoming the source of, the valuation of copyright” (Gillies 1993: 22). Early agents such as A. P. Watt, who began his career in the later 1870s, James Brand Pinker, who began his agency in January 1896, and the formidably successful transatlantic American agent Curtis Brown, who began working in London in 1899, refined and expanded negotiations of material reproduction rights to cover a bewildering range of new outlets extending beyond standard print media boundaries. By 1925, for example, there were common cases of agents negotiating over twenty-six different rights to a book, including rights to playing card and cigarette packet pictures (Joseph 1925: 92–3).

As publishing grew more international in scope, particularly following the creation in the late twentieth century of multinational media conglomerates, the role of the literary agent evolved in scale and importance; agents became the main, initial “filter” of textual material presented for trade publication, replacing the publisher and publisher’s reader as the initial arbiter of literary value. The agent became a major mediator in print culture, as well as a significant presence in other media, negotiating contracts and the valuation of individual talent in sports, film, television, radio, and other entertainment arenas. The expansion signaled the continuing enfolding of print culture activity within other communication networks.

Globalization and the Twentieth Century

Such changes in nineteenth-century legal statutes, technology, business practices, and social formations created circumstances by which printed texts, manufactured more quickly and at increasingly cheaper cost, could be sold to more people, generating larger profits for publishers, and allowing individual authors to claim more profits from work produced. Much remained static during the first half of the twentieth-century, though the introduction in Britain of inexpensive Penguin paperback books by Allen Lane in 1935 was a significant moment in international book production. Penguin Books built on past experiments in paperback production, but the combination of visually distinctive covers, unconventional sales outlets, and profitable, original titles in paper rather than cloth covers demonstrated that there was an international mass market eager to purchase cheap paperback versions of popular texts. Lane followed this with the launch of the Pelican label in 1937, designed to market nonfiction titles (McCleery 2002). Other publishers moved to exploit the opportunities of the paperback: in the US, for example, Robert de Graaf founded Pocket Books in 1939, marketing populist titles with gaudy covers to reach wide audiences across the United States; in Britain, Pan Books was started in 1944, while Panther was created around the same time by two ex-servicemen interested in tapping into the market opportunities represented by armed forces personnel. All signaled a shift of focus to mass-market production.

These developments, along with further activities during the second half of the twentieth century, marked a steady move in book publishing to a position strongly dependent on mass-market strategies. As Richard Ohmann comments, “Publishing was the last culture industry to attain modernity. Not until after World War II did it become part of the large corporate sector, and adopt the practices of the publicity and marketing characteristic of monopoly capital” (Ohmann 1998: 22). To increase economies of scale, there was a tendency from the 1960s onward to join publishing houses together through mergers to form large, often transnational conglomerates. The general traits and practices of family-run and focused publishing houses began to be replaced by international corporate and economic business structures. It became part of a move by some to join together different “media platforms” for maximum efficiency and profitability (thus bringing books, newspapers, television, film, and music industries together under one roof).

One of the first corporate moments signaling this shift was the leading US firm Random House’s move to public ownership in 1959, its acquisition of the publishers Alfred Knopf in 1960 and Pantheon Books in 1961, then sale to the media giant RCA (Radio Corporation of America) in 1966. Other mergers and acquisitions occurred during the same period: the illustrious Scottish firm Thomas Nelson & Sons, founded in 1798 and for long a pre-eminent source of religious, educational, and such affordable pocketbook series as the famous “Nelson Sevenpenny Classics” (which offered cloth-binding reprints of well-known works at this low price), was taken over by the Anglo-Canadian media corporation Thomson in 1962, then systematically dismantled and amalgamated with other media acquisitions. The photocopying pioneer Xerox moved into the educational and ancillary print and information market through purchasing and merging University Microfilms, Inc. in 1962, American Education Publications in 1964, and R. R. Bowker Co. in 1967. On the European continent in 1965 the eminent German publisher S. Fischer (founded as a family firm in 1887) was sold to Holtzbrinck, a large financial firm that included Germany’s largest book club in their holdings. The US educational giant Houghton Mifflin became a public stock company in 1967. In 1968 the long-established British family firm of Longman was bought out and amalgamated with the multinational conglomerate Pearson. Longman Pearson in turn took over Penguin in 1970. Such takeovers matched the general trend in national and international publishing sectors; the annual merger rates in US publishing, for example, grew similarly quickly throughout the 1960s, peaking in 1968 at 47 and declining only slightly to 44 in 1969 (Coser et al. 1985: 25–6).