Cheap Book Production In The United States, 1870 To 1891

Cheap Book Production In The United States, 1870 To 1891 was written as Raymond Howard Shove's master's thesis. The book's title may not sound terribly exciting but it's a well-written, carefully researched study of a little known but important period in American publishing history which followed the American Civil War, when "pirates" ruled not the high seas, but the American publishing industry. The inexpensive paperbound books produced during this period as part of the "cheap book libraries" were the ancestors of the modern paperback book, serving as a bridge between the early dime novels of the 1860s and the rise of the pulps which began with the revamp of Argosy as a pulp in 1896. Shove's book focuses on the publishers and "cheap libraries," (e.g., The Lakeside Library, The Seaside Library, Franklin Square Library, Lovell's Library; T.B. Peterson, George Munro, Hurst, Lovell, Worthington, etc.) in the period leading to the American copyright law of 1891. The first part of the book is a year-by-year chronicle of the birth and death of the "cheap libraries." The second part spotlights the individual publishers, including those noted above which were known primarily for cheap books and the major publishers (Harper, Dodd, Mead, Appleton, Henry Holt, Funk & Wagnalls, etc.) who jumped on the bandwagon with their own "cheap libraries." Because American copyright law applied only to American publications, European authors were unable to profit from the publication and sale of their works at extremely low prices during the nineteenth century. By the second half of the nineteenth century, the combination of high literacy, plummeting printing costs, and the most advanced postal and transportation system in the world had produced rapid growth in American book and magazine markets. One of the most lucrative revenue streams for U.S. publishers during this period came from churning out unauthorized copies of British and European books before their rivals could. Cheap pirated literature helped strengthen the book publishing industry and educate the rapidly expanding American reading public. Some American publishers sent agents to England with orders to grab volumes from bookstalls and ship them west by fast packet. Copy was then rushed from the dock to the composing room, presses run night and day, and books hurried to the stores or hawked in the streets. In the 19th century, the so-called “reprint industry,” which mined previously published books, largely British, dominated American publishing. And while "reprinters" bore most of the fixed costs facing any publishing concern (labor, materials, advertising, distribution) they had one great competitive advantage: they didn’t have to pay their authors. Until 1891, US law extended copyright protection only to works by American citizens, so these reprinters made a business model out of selling British or European books, generally without ever contacting (much less entering into an agreement with) their authors. It’s hard to think of a more obvious example of “piracy” than this, and authors from Charles Dickens to Oscar Wilde fumed about their vast lost revenue. A familiar anecdote describes Dickens fans, desperate to find out whether Little Nell was dead, storming the New York wharves as ships laden with the latest issue of Master Humphrey’s Clock docked. Some of those impatient fans, though, were probably publishers’ agents, frantic to grab their copies, get back to their presses, and be the first ones to market with a “pirated,” but entirely legal, American edition of the novel. Frustrating as it was to aggrieved British or European authors, the law had some justification. The US was a large but largely under-booked nation in the early 1800s. In keeping with the spirit of the US Constitution’s Copyright Clause, which emphasizes that the real goal of copyright is not first and foremost the protection of an author’s rights but the promotion “of Science and useful Arts,” the law subsidized the production and dissemination of books. A lot of books. A lot of cheap books that would, Congress hoped, spread across (and educate) our widely dispersed and unschooled nation. And while the 1790 Copyright Act assured American citizens of copyright protection, ironically it did little to cultivate a native literary culture: why sign up an American author and pay royalties when one could print a guaranteed seller like Tennyson or George Eliot instead, and pocket the difference? As a result, British literature dominated American reading through the 19th century (with notable exceptions such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which was, in a neat turnabout, widely “pirated” in Britain). The 1870s saw a rapid expansion of cheap book publishing by small upstart publishers. The lack of an international copyright agreement made it easy to reprint popular English and European fiction, and by holding the costs to a minimum the reprint house was able to turn a quick profit. Such a venture was the Seaside Library, which George Munro began in May 1877 with the publication of Mrs. Henry Wood's East Lynne. The Seaside Library was a series of cheap quartos (and later pocket-sized editions), often printed two or three columns to a page. Single volumes sold for ten cents, two-volume sets for twenty. Despite strong competition, the Seaside Library quickly dominated the market.... An average of 10,000 copies of each Seaside title were sold. By 1883 the overproduction of paperbacks caused such a glut that the American News Company, to cite one instance, returned to Seaside Library 1,200,000 copies it could not sell. Later Munro disposed of 3,000,000 of his unsalable reprints for $30,000 to soap companies which gave a free copy with each bar of soap. Other " cheap libraries" appeared beginning in l877 and followed Munro's example with dime editions of standard literature by well-known writers such as Dickens and Thackeray. Floods of light popular literature were published as well. The "cheap libraries" did a large share of their business with the class of books popular at the time in circulating libraries and railroad stations. In order that they might be sent through the mail at the cheaper magazine rates, each book published in one of the "cheap libraries" was given a volume and issue number together with the date of publication, just like a magazine. Cutthroat competition to see which publisher could price their books lower than everybody else put a number of the cheap book publishers out of business. In order that books could be published at low prices it was necessary that printing costs be low, and many printing establishments during the l880' s were forced into bankruptcy as a result of doing business on too close a margin. The "cheap books" movement threatened the "courtesy principle" of gentlemanly price-fixing adhered to by the large, established publishers such as Henry Holt. During the 1880s cheap books had flooded the American market to the chagrin of the major publishers. By 1890 authors, publishers, and printers' unions joined together to support an international copyright bill. America's pirate century only ended when the Chace Act was passed in 1891 which extended copyright protection to foreigners. The passage of the International Copyright Act in March, 1891, effective July 1, marked the close of the period of cheap book publishing which had been determined largely by a lack of international copyright. The cheap libraries did not thrive under the restricting influence of copyright. Their publishers, forced to compete with other publishers for new books so necessary to the life of the libraries, were soon out of the running. They found that it was impossible to publish such new books as they could obtain, at the former low prices, and so lost their main bid for popularity.