A Companion to the History of the Book (62 page)

A noticeable trend in the latter part of the twentieth-century global book economy was its phenomenal expansion. It has been estimated that in 1850 annual world book title production totaled 50,000; in 1952, it had risen to 250,000 titles; by 1963, it equaled 400,000; in 1970, 521,000 (Escarpit 1966: 57–8; Milner 1996: 70; Zaid 2004: 21). Four language groups (English, French, German, and Spanish) dominated, accounting together for between 34 and 36 percent of these titles (Escarpit 1966: 61–2). As the dominance of multinational organizations in the book market increased, there was also a shift in who dominated international book markets, particularly in the anglophone world. Whereas in the nineteenth century, Britain led the way in terms of creating, defining, and exporting book-trade initiatives, in the mid-twentieth century, with the loss of its colonies as captive markets and the takeover and merger of many of its family-based firms, there was a noticeable shift toward the US and European rivals as significant players in the world market.

Three other important developments also took place in the global book market between 1800 and 1970, as Andrew Milner points out. First, there was a move away from fiction to nonfiction titles, or what Robert Escarpit has called “functional books,” particularly textbooks, providing “powerful testament to the commercial significance of the captive market delivered to the book trade by the systems of higher and secondary education” (Milner 1996: 70) Secondly, there was an expansion of “non-bookshop” distribution networks: mass-market distribution of book titles through non-traditional retail outlets (such as newsagents, supermarkets, department stores, and book clubs). A survey in the US in 1969, for example, found that “four general books out of five bought by or for individual American adults came to them from book-club or mass-market channels” (quoted in Milner 1996: 70). The phenomenon was replicated in other countries with developed book-distribution structures. Finally, the rise of the paperback as a significant vehicle for mass-market distribution of books in inexpensive formats enabled texts to reach far wider audiences worldwide than ever before. Whether that reach was enough to maintain the position of books as important communication tools in the increasingly globalized world media and information economy of the last quarter of the twentieth century is the subject of other chapters in this book.

References and Further Reading

Anderson, Benedict (1983)
Imagined Communities.
London: Verso.

Bayly, C. A. (1996)
Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India 1780–1870.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Briggs, Asa and Burke, Peter (2002)
A Social History of the Media, from Gutenberg to the Internet.
London: Polity.

Cave, Roderick (1986)
Printing and the Book Trade in the West Indies.
London: Pindar.

Chakava, Henry (2001) “The Origins and Development of Publishing Systems in English-speaking Africa: In Search of an Independent Model.” In Jacques Michon and Jean-Yves Mollier (eds.),

hes Mutations du livre et de l’édition dans le monde du XVIIIe siècle à l’an 2000,
pp. 339-49. L’Harmattan: Les Presses de L’Université Laval.

Chartier, Roger (1981) “L’ancien regime typographique: reflexions sur quelques travaux recents.”
Annales ES,
36: 191–209.

Coser, L. A., Kadushkin, C, and Powell, W. W. (1985)
Books: The Culture and Commerce of Publishing.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Duguid, Paul (1996) “Material Matters: The Past and Futurology of the Book.” In Geoffrey Nunberg (ed.),
The Future of the Book,
pp. 63– 101. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Eggert, Paul (2003) “Robbery under Arms: The Colonial Market, Imperial Publishers, and the Demise of the Three-Decker Novel.”
Book History,
6: 127–47.

Escarpit, Robert (1966)
The Book Revolution.
London: George G. Harrap.

Feltes, N. N. (1986)
Modes of Production of Victorian Novels.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

— (1993)
Literary Capital and the Late Victorian Novel.
Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Finkelstein, David and McCleery, Alistair (2005)
An Introduction to Book History.
London: Routledge.

— and Peers, Douglas Mark (2000) “’ A Great System of Circulation’: Introducing India into the Nineteenth-century Media.” In David Finkelstein and Mark Douglas Peers (eds.),
Negotiating India in the Nineteenth-century Media,
pp. 1–23. Basingstoke: Macmillan.

Gedin, Per (1982)
Literature in the Marketplace,
trans. G. Bisset. London: Faber and Faber.

Giddens, Anthony (1990)
The Consequences of Modernity.
Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Gillies, Mary Ann (1993) “A. P. Watt, Literary Agent.”
Publishing Research Quarterly,
9 (spring): 20-34.

Greco, Albert (1995) “Mergers and Acquisitions in the US Book Industry, 1960-1989.” In Philip G. Altbach and Edith S. Hoshino (eds.),
International Book Publishing: An Encyclopedia,
pp. 229– 42. New York: Garland.

Griest, Guinevere (1970)
Mudie’s Circulating Library and the Victorian Novel.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Hall, David D. (1996)
Cultures of Print: Essays in the History of the Book.
Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.

Held, David, McGrew, Anthony, Goldblatt, David, and Perraton, Jonathan (1999)
Global Transformations: Politics, Economics and Culture.
London: Polity.

Hobbes, Robert George (1851) “Calcutta.”
Bentley’s Miscellany,
30: 36I-8.

Johanson, Graeme (2000)
Colonial Editions in Australia, 1842-1972.
Wellington, NZ: Elibank.

Johnson-Woods, Toni (2000) “The Virtual Reading Communities of the
London Journal,
the
New York Ledger
and the
Australian Journal.”
In Laurel Brake, B. Bell, and D. Finkelstein (eds.),

Nineteenth-century Media and the Construction of Identities,
pp. 350–62. Basingstoke: Palgrave.

Joseph, Michael (1925)
The Commercial Side of Literature.
London: Hutchinson.

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’édition dans le monde du XVIIIe siècle à l’an 2000,
pp. 324-9. L’Harmattan: Les Presses de L’Université Laval.

McCleery, Alistair (2002) “The Return of the Individual to Book History: The Case of Allen Lane.”
Book History,
5: 85-114.

MacDonald, Mary Lu (2001) “The Modification of European Models: English Canada before

1890.” In Jacques Michon and Jean-Yves Mollier (eds.),
Les Mutations du livre et de l’édition dans le monde du XVIIIe siècle à l’an 2000,
pp. 84–93: L’Harmattan: Les Presses de L’Université Laval.

Michon, Jacques and Mollier, Jean-Yves (eds.) (2001)
Les Mutations du livre et de l’édition dans le monde du XVIIIe siècle à l’an 2000.
L’Harmattan: Les Presses de L’Université Laval.

Milner, Andrew (1996)
Literature, Culture and Society.
London: UCL Press.

de la Motte, Dean and Przyblyski, Jeannene M. (eds.) (1999)
Making the News: Modernity and the Mass Press in Nineteenth-century France.
Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.

Ohmann, R. (1998)
Selling Culture: Magazines, Markets, and Class at the Turn of the Century.
London: Verso.

Schiffrin, André (2001)
The Business of Books: How the International Conglomerates Took Over Publishing and Changed the Way We Read.
London: Verso.

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.

Traue, J. E. (1997) “But why Mulgan, Marris and Schroder?: The Mutation of the Local Newspaper in New Zealand’s Colonial Print Culture.”
Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand Bulletin,
21 (2): 107–15.

— (2001) “The Two Histories of the Book in New Zealand.”
Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand Bulletin,
25 (1): 8–16.

Williams, Raymond (1966)
Culture and Society 1780–1950.
London: Pelican.

Wirtén, Eva Hemmungs (1998)
Global Infatuation: Explorations in Transnational Publishing and Texts.
Uppsala: University of Uppsala Literature Department.

— (2003)
No Trespassing: Authorship, Intellectual Property Rights, and the Boundaries of Globalisation.
Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Zaid, Gabriel (2004)
So Many Books.
London: Sort of Books.

25

Modernity and Print I: Britain 1890–1970

Jonathan Rose

Around 1890, the British book trade became modern, in several important senses of the term. First, it organized to protect its interests. The Society of Authors had been launched by Walter Besant in 1884, followed by the Associated Booksellers of Great Britain and Ireland in 1895 and the Publishers’ Association in 1896. On January 1, 1900, these three organizations brought into force the Net Book Agreement, under which publishers could force booksellers to sell their books at a fixed price. This prevented the kind of ruinous discounting which, by the 1880s, was bankrupting booksellers and squeezing all but the best selling books out of the marketplace.

The main objective of the Society of Authors was to secure international copyright protection, which soon became a fixture of the modern literary world. The Berne Convention was ratified in 1887, and the Chace Act of 1891 brought the United States into the global system of literary property. Macmillan and Oxford University Press took advantage of the newly protected American market in 1896, when they both set up subsidiary companies in New York.

Meanwhile, the balance of literary trade was shifting. Through much of the nineteenth century, the American book trade had been “postcolonial”: dependent on cheap British imports and British literary models. Consequently, it did not serve American interests to respect international copyright. But, by 1891, the United States was finally becoming a major literary power: the Chace Act was ratified largely because Mark Twain and Bret Harte were now valuable export industries that were worth protecting. As the twentieth century progressed, American authors increasingly penetrated the British market, while it became less easy to market British authors to Americans. Between the world wars, Winston Churchill’s books did not sell well in the United States, though they were published by the distinguished house of Scribner. In contrast,
Inside Europe
(1936), by American journalist John Gunther, sold more than 100,000 copies in the UK in less than two years: it alerted the British public to the Nazi menace at a time when their own media treated Hitler with complacency, if not sympathy. The obscenely violent
No Orchids for Miss Blandish
(1939) sold half a million copies, making it the most popular novel in wartime Britain, where many readers assumed that the author (James Hadley Chase) was American. In fact, he was the son of an English army officer, but Chase knew what British readers wanted: he learned the conventions of hard-boiled American crime fiction from James M. Cain, and (with the help of an American slang dictionary) he banged out
No Orchids
over six weekends.

By 1890, most publishing firms were no longer one-man enterprises. They had become modern corporate business organizations, where publishers delegated responsibilities to specialized employees or departments dealing with editorial matters, marketing, or publicity. Screening of manuscripts was commonly devolved to professional readers, which had probably existed in some form since the 1830s. Edward Garnett was the most brilliant publisher’s reader of his day: he worked at various times for T. Fisher Unwin, Gerald Duckworth, and Jonathan Cape, nurturing the talents of Joseph Conrad and D. H. Lawrence. Frank Swinnerton lifted Chatto and Windus out of a literary slump, securing Aldous Huxley,
The Great Gatsby,
and Constance Garnett’s translations of Chekhov (though he would have nothing to do with Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams).

The literary agent was a more recent invention. The first, A. P. Watt, began work around 1875, followed by J. B. Pinker (1896) and Curtis Brown (1899). Initially, publishers denounced them as parasites and useless middlemen, and a few of them were frauds: Arthur Addison Bright cheated J. M. Barrie out of £16,000 before killing himself in 1906. But the agent clearly provided a necessary service in a modern and increasingly complex literary marketplace. As the number of publishers increased, each one developing a specialized list, the literary agent knew how to match the right author with the right firm, maximizing earnings for both. When a publisher purchased the copyright to a book, an agent could help sell the serial, overseas, translation, dramatic, film, and broadcast rights to other outlets. The agent also served useful editorial functions, helping authors to refine manuscripts and tailor them to specific markets and reading publics. Inevitably, agents began to specialize, with Watt retaining mainstream authors such as Rudyard Kipling, H. Rider Haggard, Lewis Carroll, and Arthur Conan Doyle. More experimental writers (Conrad, Lawrence, H. G. Wells, James Joyce, Henry James) were cultivated by Pinker, who had to work harder to sell them to editors and often advanced them money while they were still struggling to find an audience. By 1939, there were fifty-six UK literary agencies, rising to seventy-eight by 1974.

Dickens, George Eliot, and Anthony Trollope were probably the last novelists who addressed the entire English reading public, which, by 1890, was fragmenting into several different publics reading different kinds of books. Accordingly, publishers began to develop focused lists. Ward Lock specialized in light bestsellers by H. Rider Haggard, E. Phillips Oppenheim, and Edgar Wallace. Routledge and Kegan Paul developed a strong philosophy list, edited first by C. K. Ogden and later by A. J. Ayer. Swan Son-nenschein concentrated on sociology and socialism, including the first English translation of
Das Kapital
(1886). George Allen and Unwin also published leftist intellectuals (J. A. Hobson, Bertrand Russell, Harold Laski, Gandhi), as did Secker and Warburg (George Orwell) and Victor Gollancz, though Gollancz also had a strong stable of detective writers (Dorothy L. Sayers). B. T. Batsford specialized in architecture for both professional and general readers: the term “Batsford book” immediately called to mind their distinctively designed volumes on country life. Basil Blackwell focused on poetry, classic reprints, textbooks, and (later) science and medicine. Burns and Oates published for Roman Catholics, A. R. Mowbray for Anglo-Catholics. Frederick Warne produced children’s books written by Beatrix Potter and illustrated by Kate Greenaway, Walter Crane, and Randolph Caldecott. Mills and Boon began as a general publisher in 1908, but when the Great Depression created a demand for escapist romance, the company concentrated on that subgenre. And when Stanley Paul found that it could not compete with larger literary houses, it turned to its forte, sports and hobbies.

A small circle of publishers was responsible for all the great works of Victorian fiction, but around 1890 several new and innovative firms opened for business. William Heinemann scored a stunning success with his very first book, Hall Caine’s
The Bondsman
(1890), with sales of 450,000. His subsequent publication of Caine’s
The Manxman
(1894) in a one-volume, six-shilling format helped render the Victorian three-decker novel obsolete. His firm would publish Henrik Ibsen, Henry James, H. G. Wells, John Masefield, D. H. Lawrence, George Moore, Robert Louis Stevenson, Israel Zangwill, W. E. Henley’s magazine the
New Review,
and John Galsworthy’s
Forsyte Saga.
As an editor for Methuen (founded 1889), W. E. Henley recruited Kipling, Wells, Henry James, and W. B. Yeats. The firm also published T. S. Eliot, Edgar Rice Burroughs, the complete works of Oscar Wilde, and Albert Einstein’s
Relativity.
Edward Arnold (founded 1890) had E. M. Forster and Leonard Woolf; Archibald Constable (also 1890) had George Meredith and George Bernard Shaw. After Oscar Wilde was imprisoned in 1895, Leonard Smithers published the avant-garde literature that other firms were afraid to touch, including Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Symons, and Wilde’s own
Ballad of Reading Gaol
(1898). Grant Richards (founded 1897) produced typographically innovative editions of Shaw’s plays, as well as Samuel Butler, Baron Corvo, Ronald Firbank, Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell, A. E. Housman’s
A Shropshire Lad,
and James Joyce’s
Dubliners.
Gerald Duckworth (1898) published Lawrence, Virginia Woolf (his half-sister), the early works of Evelyn Waugh, and the plays of John Galsworthy (though he refused
The Man of Property).

These new publishers were all exploiting a growing niche market for modernist literature. Until fairly recently, critics took the modernists at their own valuation: as pure artists who utterly rejected commercialism. But once book historians like James G. Nelson (1989), Peter McDonald (1997), Joyce Piell Wexler (1997), and Lawrence Rainey (1998) began looking at publishers’ ledgers and literary agents’ correspondence, it became apparent that modernist authors and publishers were in fact shrewd profit-maximizing entrepreneurs. The Bodley Head, founded in 1889 by Charles Elkin Mathews and John Lane, was the fount of the poetry revival of the 1890s, publishing Richard Le Gallienne, John Davidson, Oscar Wilde, and the
Yellow Book.
Mathews and Lane worked out an ingenious formula for making poetry pay: they bought at bargain prices leftovers of fine paper, on which they printed a few verses, using large type, generous leading, and enormous margins, and they left the pages “uncut.” The visual effect was wonderfully artistic. Their advertisements emphasized the small print-runs (often no more than 500), which persuaded customers that they were acquiring something like a private press book. Only a philistine would have pointed out that they were getting very little poetry for the money, or that the royalties paid were minimal. As Margaret Stetz recognized, “John Lane devised the first modern sales campaign in publishing: the first to focus not on individual authors or titles, but on an entire line of new and unfamiliar merchandise; the first to create and to sell an image of the publishing firm itself” (Stetz 1991: 75). It also sold its customers an alluring self-image: anyone who bought a Bodley Head book was clearly a person of taste and discernment. Leonard Woolf likewise claimed that the Hogarth Press published books that commercial publishers would not touch, but he was a good businessman, and the press eventually generated a steady profit from the novels of Virginia Woolf and translations of Sigmund Freud. Joyce and Lawrence resorted to publishing limited editions of
Ulysses
(1922) and
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
(1928) with private presses in France, a lucrative strategy for “marketing modernism,” although (argues Joyce Wexler 1997) it limited their readership and deprived them of the editorial discipline they would have found in the mainstream literary marketplace.

That said, highbrow critics were not entirely wrong to perceive a disturbing trend toward lower-middlebrow literature. According to the
Bookseller,
before 1914 a publisher could print 1,000 copies of a novel, sell half of them, and still break even; but after the war, one had to sell as many as 2,000 to make a profit, thanks to sharply increased production costs. To hold down those expenses, the typical length limit for novels was reduced from 200,000 to 130,000 words. These economic forces discouraged experi-mentalism and well-developed narratives in favor of quick and easy formula fiction.

The modernists also had good reason to protest that they were victims of puritanism. The Obscene Publications Act became law in 1857, and in 1889 Henry Vizetelly was jailed for publishing Zola, though he claimed that the translations cleaned up the most offensive passages. Grant Richards published
Dubliners
(1914) only after he prevailed upon Joyce to remove some risqué language. When D. H. Lawrence’s
The Rainbow
(1915) was suppressed, Methuen did not attempt to defend it. In 1928, Jonathan Cape fought the ban on Radclyffe Hall’s
The Well of Loneliness,
but his barrister bungled the defense, falsely claiming that the novel did not portray lesbianism, and the case was lost.

In 1953, Seeker and Warburg secured an acquittal for Stanley Kauffmann’s
The Philanderer,
on the grounds that a book must be assessed as a whole and not condemned merely for a few obscene passages. That decision led to a more liberal Obscene Publications Act in 1959, which exempted books with real literary value. Allen Lane tested the new law by publishing an unexpurgated
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
as a Penguin paperback. This was a serious gamble: it seems to be a universal law of censorship that the likelihood of suppression varies inversely with the price of the book. As chairman of the Bodley Head, Lane had slipped James Joyce’s
Ulysses
past the Home Office by publishing first an expensive limited edition (1936) and later a cheaper trade edition (1937). But the authorities chose to prosecute the Penguin
Lady Chatterley,
priced at only 3s 6d, a point hammered home by the prosecuting attorney. “Is it a book you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?” he asked, evidently unaware that three of the jurors were women (who quite possibly enjoyed reading it). Penguin spent £12,777 on the trial and stockpiled 200,000 copies, but their victory made it a worthwhile investment. In just six weeks, two million copies of the paperback were sold, generating a profit of £62,000. Its success allowed the company to go public in April 1961: the shares (popularly known as “Chatterleys”) sold spectacularly (McCleery 2002: 169–78).
Lady Chatterley
was not the last literary work to be prosecuted for obscenity: Calder and Boyars had to defend Hubert Selby, Jr.’s
Last Exit to Brooklyn
in 1966 and ultimately won on appeal.

The era of modern literature was also the heyday of cheap uniform reprints. These series had proliferated ever since
Donaldson
v.
Becket
(1774) established that copyrighted works eventually entered the public domain. But after 1890, near-universal literacy, rising working-class and lower middle-class incomes, cheap mass-market publishing, and an ethic of “self-improvement” made it possible to sell inexpensive classics on an unprecedented scale. W. T. Stead began his Penny Poets series in May 1895; by October 1897, he had sixty volumes and well over five million copies in print. J. M. Dent’s “Everyman’s Library” was inaugurated in 1906 with a plan to publish one thousand volumes of the best works of world literature, though that goal would only be reached fifty years later. It offered all the predictable standbys, but it was not so narrow as some critics of the “traditional canon” have charged: American, Russian, and female authors were well represented, and some effort was made to include modern and Asian literature. By 1975, more than 60 million Everyman volumes had been sold worldwide, an invaluable resource for students and autodidacts.