4 Comments
User's avatar
Zeja Zensi Copes's avatar

My smooth baby brain, once again failing to compute that companies change all the time: there was a Harper & Row???

Congratulations on the find! It’s amazing what kind of history can be held within a single object, and also how cheap that history is sometimes.

I hope the striking workers win. They deserve it (and let’s be honest, they probably deserve *much* more than what they’re actually asking for) and the industry as a whole desperately needs this win. We cannot afford to have another generation of workers scrounging for pennies. The longer publishers are allowed to mistreat people, the harder it’ll be to fix later.

And I know you’re deeply familiar with this being a native of the Rust Belt but *points at the world* so many things are in crisis now because they didn’t get handled 10/20/40 years ago. It’s about time something actually got fixed!

Expand full comment
Ben R's avatar

According to Google, $4 in 1818 is $94.61 today!

Expand full comment
Anne Trubek's avatar

Yes! Books were more of a luxury good then, and the literacy rate was quite low.

Expand full comment
Joyce Wycoff's avatar

Thank you for this history and insight. As a teenager I fell in love with Maxwell Perkins (mainly through Thomas Wolfe), and dreamed of publishing a book through Scribner's. The closest I came was co-authoring a book through Simon and Schuster, the umbrella company now sheltering Scribner. I hope the strike is resolved with a fair deal for the workers.

Expand full comment