American Publishing is Rooted in Theft

Ripping off authors since 1790

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I’ve been thinking about the dearth of historic perspective in the Penguin Random House anti-trust case as well as the commentary on it. (One notable exception here). The contrast has been sharpened as I’ve been researching 18th century American publishing over the past month.

One of the most fascinating bits of my research is discovering to what a huge extent American publishing is rooted in theft.

It was not until about 1790 that the term “publisher,” as we conceive of it today could be used to describe any American. (For more on early American publishing, see my posts on Mathew Carey, Phillis Wheatley, and paper in the colonies). And those early American publishers did not publish American writers. Quite the opposite. They looked down on what they called “native” writers. The living writers deemed worth reading and publishing were mainly British—maybe some French, and German, if a translation had been done by someone in London already, and could be ripped off for local readers.

Since there was no international copyright law, any book could be reprinted by any American and published under their name. So they would race to boats arriving from England to get the first copies of British original editions—of, say, Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe— take them to their print shops and meticulously recreate the text by placing each letter, one by one, backwards, into a compositor stick, then setting plates for each page, page after page, before sending the completed text block to a bindery to be stitched inside a leather cover, and sold.

As Henry Bradshaw Fearon wrote in 1819 after he traveled through the country:

The reading of Americans….is English; there being few native writers, and but a small number of these who possess the respect of even their own country men. Our novels and poetry…meet with an immediate reprint, and constitute practically the entire American library…Notwithstanding this voluntary national dependence, there are, perhaps, no people, not even excepting the French, who are so vain as the Americans.

So looked down upon were American authors that some publishers passed off American-written novels as written by a Brit, suggesting that a novel by, say, someone in Worcester, Massachusetts, had actually originally been published in London by an Englishman.  This is not to say early American publishing was not nationalistic: they were, in fact, very concerned with establishing American print shops, American paper mills, American printing machines, American-owned bookstores, and an American distribution system. They just didn’t include writers. Those should be foreign.

Today this is almost entirely flipped. The majority of American books are published by foreign companies (Penguin Random House, for instance, is not American-owned), and the production of those books is most often done in China and other countries.

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One of the British novels that Mathew Carey stole and published under his name would go on to become the bestselling American novel for a century. In 1794, Carey pirated a novel by Susanna Rowson,  Charlotte: A Tale of Truth, the story of a young girl who is brought to America by a nefarious British officer who then abandons her, leaving her sick, pregnant, and alone. It was published in 1791 by William Lane of the Minerva Press, which was then putting out as many books as he could, as quickly as possible, in a novel factory on an assembly line model of sorts. Lane advertised that he would pay writers  ‘a sum, from Five to One Hundred Guineas’ for “Manuscripts of Merit” and then just churned out the largely formulaic novels he received on a quantity over quality model. The established London publishing world looked down on Lane, describing him as a “leaden-headed dealer in books for the cheesemongers,” who sold his books not at stores filled with leather-bound books on wooden shelves but  “general stores, curio shops in seaside resort towns, jewelry shops, fishing-tackle suppliers, hardware stores, tobacconists, and apothecary stores.”

Charlotte: A Tale of Truth was not particularly successful for Minerva. Carey chose to recreate it in his print shop and sell it to Americans. He decided upon an initial print run of 1,000 copies—a fairly standard number for the time—and retitled it Charlotte Temple. The author, Susannah Rowson had just emigrated to the United States from England, where she had published several novels already. This one, which was set in American and short, was appealing to Carey for American readers. Since the book was also free to republish, Carey could put out his own edition without paying Rowson anything for copyright or royalties. In 1801, seven years after his edition was published, Carey sent Rowson a check for twenty dollars along with twenty copies of the book “as a small acknowledgment for the copy right of Charlotte.” Perhaps he did it because it was the right thing, or perhaps he did it because it was a way to prevent other American publishers from putting out their own pirated editions, a practice called “courtesy of the trade,” an informal system amongst publishers so they would not all come out with competing editions of the same books.

Charlotte Temple blew up. Sixteen years later, in 1812, Carey wrote to Rowson about its success:

“Charlotte Temple is by far the most popular & in my opinion the most useful novel ever published in this country & probably not inferior to any published in England…[its sales] exceed those of any of the most celebrated novels that ever appeared in England. I think the number disposed of must far exceed 50,000 copies; & the sale still continues”

The novel became such a sensation it was the bestselling book in the nation for a century. There was a “grave” for Charlotte in Trinity Churchyard in NYC, and  “until well into the 20th century, this real grave of a fictional character received far more visitors than the neighboring grave of Alexander Hamilton.

The success of Rowson—and, shortly thereafter James Fennimore Cooper and Washington Irving—who had to sell advance copies themselves in order to get publishing contracts—shifted tastes to those once bemoaned “native” writers. But Rowson—who was the primary breadwinner for a large household all her life—remained poor.

Notes from a Small Press is the newsletter by Anne Trubek, the founder and owner of Belt Publishing.  Subscribe to receive every post. Oh and don’t forget to grab a copy of  So You Want to Publish a Book?, the book based on this newsletter that other people say good things about.