A Companion to the History of the Book (67 page)

Lehmstedt, Mark (ed.) (2000)
Geschichte des deutschen Buchwesens
[History of the German Book Trade]. Berlin: Digitale Bibliothek.

— and Herzog, Andreas (eds.) (1999)
Das bewegte Buch: Buchwesen und soziale, nationale und kul-turelle Bewegungen um 1900
[The Eventful Book: The Book Trade and Social, National and Cultural Movements around 1900]. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.

Line, Maurice B. (2003) “Libraries, Reading and Publishing in the Cold War.”
Journal of Documentation,
59 (1): 105–8.

Martin, Henri-Jean, Chartier, Roger, and Vivet, Jean-Pierre (1986)
Histoire de l’édition française
[History of French Publishing], vol. 4:
Le livre concurrencé 1900–1950
[The Book in Competition 1900–1950]. Paris: Fayard/Cercle de la Librairie.

Nieuwsblad voor den boekhandel
[Newspaper for the Book Trade].

Remnek, Miranda Beaven (1991)
Books in Russia and the Soviet Union: Past and Present.
Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.

Santoro, Marco (2003)
Geschichte des Buchhandels in Italien
[History of the Book Trade in Italy]. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.

Simons, Ludo (1984–7)
Geschiedenis van de uitgeverij in Vlaanderen
[History of Publishing in Flanders], 2 vols. Tielt: Lannoo.

Tveterås, Harald L. (1992)
Geschichte des Buchhandels in Norwegen
[History of the Book Trade in Norway]. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.

Weel, Adriaan van der, Coppens, Chris, Dongelmans, Berry, et al. (eds.) (2003)
Jaarboek voor Nederlandse boekgeschiedenis
[Yearbook for Dutch Book History], vol. 10. Leiden: Nederlandse Boekhistorische Vereniging.

Widmann, Hans (1975)
Geschichte des Buchhandels vom Altertum bis zur Gegenwart
[History of the Book Trade from Antiquity till the Present], vol. 1. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.

Wittmann, Reinhard (1991)
Geschichte des deutschen Buchhandels: Ein Überblick
[History of the German Book Trade: A Survey]. Munich: Beck.

See also
publishers’ corporate websites.

27

Modernity and Print III: The United States 1890–1970

Beth Luey

The history of the book in the United States from 1890 to 1970 can be summed up in two words:
new
and
more.
More publishing houses, organized in new ways, and owned by more people from new social groups, published more books in new genres and formats, by an expanded group of authors, to be sold in new ways to more readers. In less than a century, American publishing ceased to be regional and became national and international. Small family firms became large corporations. Trade houses were joined by flourishing scholarly publishers and by textbook houses whose size and profits outpaced the rest of the industry. I will tell most of this story from the point of view of publishers and authors, but I will begin with a banker, for in this period the always uneasy balance between culture and commerce in the world of books shifted visibly toward commerce.

The Business of Publishing

In the 1890s, J. Pierpont Morgan made two major investments in books. In 1896, he acquired his first Gutenberg Bible at a cost of $13,500, launching his extensive bibliophilie activities. Morgan began by raiding the treasures of Europe, but over time he invested in American manuscripts as well, adding Twain to Milton. Other wealthy men acquired valuable books and manuscripts throughout the first two decades of the twentieth century, and these form many of the collections of today’s research libraries, including the Huntington Library in California, the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, and the Ransom Library at the University of Texas, as well as the Morgan Library in New York. Beginning in the 1890s, another wealthy man, Andrew Carnegie, donated more than $41 million to build 1,679 free public libraries in 1,412 municipalities in the United States alone. (Another 828 Carnegie libraries were constructed in other Anglophone countries.)

Although Gutenberg Bibles were beyond the reach of all but the wealthiest, books attracted middle-class collectors in the early decades of the twentieth century. As printing became more of an industry than a craft, the United States developed a parallel tradition of fine presses whose products were sought as works of art and as investments. Megan Benton describes “a ‘craze’ for finely made, physically distinctive books in the fifteen or so years that followed the First World War, an era in which buyers demonstrated a frenetic ‘willingness to absorb limited editions in limitless numbers’“ (2000: 3). The Great Crash of 1929 ended this craze, but manuscripts and first editions -limited or not – again became collectible in the 1940s and remain the subject of a lively trade.

Throughout the 1890s, J. P. Morgan had made another sort of investment in books: as a banker, he loaned money to the publishing house of the Harper Brothers. Most nineteenth-century publishing companies were owned by families or by partners. Morgan’s involvement in the Harper firm started the shift in ownership from families, first to private investors, and then to the public corporations that began to dominate the industry in the 1960s. When Harper’s had first issued stock in 1896, the Harper family bought most of it, and Morgan allowed the Harpers to direct the firm. Three years later, however, bankruptcy again loomed. Morgan demanded that the firm reorganize and took an active role in its restructuring and recovery. The directors, with Morgan’s approval, installed new management from outside the family. Morgan loaned Harper’s nearly $2.5 million over the years because, in his words, “the downfall of the House of Harper would be a national calamity” (Strouse 1999: 366). He never recovered his investment, nor did he press Harper’s for repayment. In the decades that followed, many publishing houses incorporated and sold stock, but few found investors as tolerant as Morgan.

Traditional publishing historians (as well as older publishers) once described the period from 1890 to 1910 as the time when publishing ceased to be an occupation for gentlemen and became a purely commercial venture. Modern publishing historians argue that publishing was always a business and that, even in its twenty-first-century conglomerate incarnation, it retains a claim to cultural status. The Harpers, Putnams, Appletons, and Scribners were all in the business to make money. As long as they controlled family firms and maintained close personal ties to authors, the profit motive was overshadowed by the cultural value of their wares. As the firms grew and issued stock, it became more difficult to ignore the fact that they were businesses.

Gentlemanly, high-culture values were also hard to affix to the fastest-growing sector of the industry: textbooks. As public education expanded, school books became big business. In 1890, a textbook trust called the American Book Company was capitalized at $5 million. Many of the companies that published textbooks did nothing else, including names still familiar: Ginn, Heath, and Scott, Foresman. Meanwhile, trade houses like Harper and Houghton Mifflin expanded their textbook divisions.

There were other indications that the book industry was growing more businesslike. The turn of the century saw the formation of both the American Booksellers Association and the American Publishing Association, organizations designed to promote the sometimes conflicting interests of these two groups. Authors, too, began to organize, though their efforts were largely ineffective: the Society of Authors was formed in 1884, and the Authors’ Syndicate in 1889. More important was the rise of the literary agent, who represented authors in their dealings with publishers. Literary agencies had operated since the middle of the nineteenth century, but in the 1890s agents like Paul Revere Reynolds and Flora May Holly became influential enough to raise the hackles of traditional publishers. Henry Holt described the literary agent as “a very serious detriment to literature and a leech on the author, sucking blood out of proportion to his later services” (Bonn 1994: 55). American authors, however, felt differently, and their agents helped them profit from their work.

The Rise of the American Author

By the middle of the nineteenth century, the United States could claim a literary canon, but few American authors could support themselves by writing. British writers dominated the market. An 1893 survey of libraries found the most popular authors to be Sir Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, Henry Bulwer-Lytton, and George Eliot; the lone Americans were Nathaniel Hawthorne and James Fenimore Cooper. In contemporary literature, though, Americans were doing better. The most popular recent books were
Ramona
by Helen Hunt Jackson,
Little Lord Fauntleroy
by Frances H. Burnett, and
Ben Hur
by Lew Wallace. British novelists remained popular in the first decades of the twentieth century, but Americans gained ground. Historical novels set in Europe were joined by romances set in the United States, especially in the South and West. American authors conquered the market with rural novels like
Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch
and
Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm –
all as Pollyannish as
Pollyanna,
which was published in 1913. Western novels by Jack London, Zane Grey, and others sold well in the United States and were translated into many European languages. These books were not, by some standards, serious literature, but their success indicates that the number of readers and book buyers in the United States had expanded beyond an urban elite. American authors could now claim more than a canon: they had an audience. The term
bestseller
was coined in 1895, and a number of lists were established during that decade, suggesting that books were at last becoming a mass medium.

American authors were helped by copyright legislation. Until 1891, the works of British authors enjoyed no copyright protection in the United States. Naturally, American publishers preferred publishing already popular English writers, without paying them, to publishing less well-known American authors who expected royalties. Charles Dickens and Anthony Trollope lobbied passionately for an international copyright agreement, but American publishers remained obdurate. In 1891, a compromise was reached that protected both British authors and American publishers: under the Chace Act, foreign works could be granted American copyrights, but only if the books were manufactured in the United States. British publishers could not simply export books across Atlantic and thus could not compete directly with American houses, and British and American authors found themselves on a more equal footing.

After World War I, American literary authorship entered a golden age. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, and Theodore Dreiser were all writing in the 1920s. They earned more for their writing than would have been possible twenty years earlier, though not always from their book royalties. Having profited from advances in printing technology, the inexpensive periodical rates of the 1879 Postal Act, and growing advertising revenues, national magazines could now pay authors handsomely for short stories. “Between 1919 and 1936, F. Scott Fitzgerald earned some $225,784 for his magazine fiction as opposed to only $66,588 for his novels. Theodore Dreiser, in the early 1920s, was still relying heavily on fees for magazine work to meet his day-to-day expenses” (West 1988: 107). A story’s appearance in a mass-market magazine not only paid well, it also promoted the author’s name and books. In fact, some of these magazines – for example,
Harper’s, Collier’s,
and
Scribner’s -
were owned by book publishers who used them to attract and spotlight authors.

By some accounts, the interwar period was also a golden age of editing. Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Wolfe, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, and many others benefited from the editorial attention of Maxwell Perkins at Scribner’s. Along with his contemporaries, such as Hiram Haydn at Crown and Saxe Commins at Random House, Perkins is credited with nurturing authors, befriending them, and guiding their careers. Activist editing was a fairly recent phenomenon: until the late nineteenth century, editors generally decided whether a manuscript was publishable but did not work with authors to develop their writing. The first well-known exception was Ripley Hitchcock, at Harper’s from 1890 to 1918, who directed Edward Noyes Westcott’s revision of what would become the bestselling novel
David Harum.
Hitchcock reorganized the manuscript, deleted subplots and characters, and altered the style. By the 1920s, such work had become common, though it was performed with different degrees of skill and tact. As the role of literary agents expanded and publishing became less personal, the editor’s role as friend, confidant, and mentor diminished, but thoughtful editing did not end with World War H Editors such as Jason Epstein, Roger Straus, Robert Gottlieb, and Michael Korda continued the tradition well into the 1960s.

A national market for books required an efficient distribution system. The railroads helped, but few Americans outside big cities could easily buy books: as late as 1931, the nation had fewer than eight hundred bookstores. The Book of the Month Club (BOMC), established in 1926, made up for this dearth by allowing people anywhere in the country to order books by mail. The club did not merely distribute books but publicized and promoted them. By 1929, the BOMC had more than a hundred thousand members. Rather than competing with booksellers, as retailers feared, the book clubs increased sales for everyone.

Publishers took advantage of that expanded market by reissuing classics, modern classics, and near-classics. Many firms offered elegantly bound sets of their most successful authors’ earlier works, while Grosset and Dunlap promoted inexpensive reprints. The Modern Library had been established in 1917; purchased in 1925 by Donald Klopfer and Bennett Cerf, it became the foundation of Random House. In its new incarnation, the Modern Library merged cultural status, fine design, and low prices in a highly profitable and critically acclaimed series. Of course, publishing in this decade was not all high culture: Simon & Schuster began in 1924 by producing crossword puzzle books.

A New Generation of Publishers

The established publishers of the 1920s came from the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant establishment, and they rarely welcomed ideas or employees with other ethnic origins. Fortunately, a number of ambitious young men – mostly Jewish – managed to raise the capital to start their own houses. Their ventures opened opportunities to new talent and ideas, and by the 1920s and 1930s they were offering the older houses real competition. Benjamin Huebsch founded his own company in 1905, publishing Maxim Gorky, James Joyce, and D. H. Lawrence. Alfred and Blanche Knopf launched their firm in 1915, the first American publishers to promote Russian literature. Boni and Liveright went into business two years later. These houses brought Americans the works of Nikolai Gogol, Ivan Turgenev, Emile Zola, Anatole France, Friedrich Nietzsche, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Sigmund Freud. They also promoted modernist and controversial American authors, including Eugene O’Neill, Ezra Pound, John Reed, and Upton Sinclair. Random House, founded in the 1920s, sought a larger audience but was noticeably more adventurous than the established firms.

These houses promoted new business methods as well as new authors. Their advertisements were less staid and more effective, and some of the publishers became near-celebrities. “Knopf’s egotism became part of the firm’s promotion. When announcing several minor volumes in 1919, he told booksellers that he would like them to have ‘the same confidence in my
Publishers’ Weekly
advertisements that I flatter myself you have in what I tell you when I meet you face to face” (Madison 1966: 324). Horace Liveright invested in Broadway plays and became well known in theater circles, while Bennett Cerf eventually became a television quiz-show personality.

Some of the new generation were also more willing to challenge the nation’s censorship laws. The newer houses were the most frequent targets of censors, and when in 1923 the Clean Books League sponsored legislation in New York, Horace Liveright led the opposition. It was at the legislative session considering this bill that New York state senator Jimmy Walker uttered his famous pronouncement: “No woman was ever ruined by a book.” The bill was defeated. The American Civil Liberties Union, founded in the 1920s, formed its National Committee on Freedom from Censorship in 1932 and became an effective advocate for the right to read. In 1933,
Ulysses
was found not obscene in a trial that Random House precipitated by importing a copy in a way guaranteed to be detected by the Customs Service. In 1946, the courts gave
Esquire
the right to use the mails, and the postmaster general’s powers to censor were limited. The two 1957 cases that continue to govern the federal courts’ decisions on obscenity –
Butler
v.
Michigan
and
Roth
v.
US –
established the idea that community standards must be applied to decide what is obscene. Since then, few attempts have been made to limit what adults may read; instead, censorship efforts have focused on children’s reading. Censorship cases relating to national security surface from time to time, and although no single doctrine has emerged, it is clear that the courts are reluctant to restrict publishers in any medium from disclosing matters of public interest.