A Companion to the History of the Book (59 page)

The transformation of commercial publishing developed in tandem with the broader economy. From the 1820s to the Panic of 1837, the United States experienced a long wave of sustained growth, bringing unprecedented prosperity to a burgeoning middle class and swelling demand for consumer goods, including books. The changes stirred the book trade, whose ranks were still small and scattered in various cities, chiefly Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, but with outposts along the trade routes to the West. Just as newspapers raced for the latest news from Europe, so booksellers hastened to reprint the most popular works in London. Driving this enterprise was the craze for the historical romances of Walter Scott, which gave a new respectability to reading fiction. No longer could publishers afford to wait and see if a title sold well enough in England to merit reprinting. With speed of the essence, booksellers paid to obtain advance sheets from London – a compensation of sorts to the publishers and writers being pirated. The “author of Waverley” and his imitators appeared in print as soon as they arrived in harbor. Courtesy of trade dissolved. Publishers invaded each other’s territory with rival editions of the same work, only to find themselves ultimately outflanked by the story papers, which nearly ruined the trade. There was no alternative but to satisfy the demand. The key to success lay in publishing new books. Mathew Carey, who had built his firm on the solid foundation of reprints and the Bible (which he kept in standing type and reissued as warranted), could not fathom why his son and successor was expanding the list of publications so rapidly. “There is nothing on earth worse than an old stock of books,” the son patiently explained. “Five-sixths of the whole sales are of books manufactured within the year.” Even that was not enough to beat the competition. Carey & Lea battled for dominance with the Harper Brothers for a decade; ultimately, the Harpers won. In a striking pattern of concentration, Manhattan emerged as the publishing capital of the nation, followed by Philadelphia, Boston, and Cincinnati.

The new business model reorganized publishing along modern lines. With flexibility and speed crucial to success in the competitive marketplace, the leading firms embraced technological innovation. Stereotyping, which preserved cast type on metal plates, allowed for printing on demand; firms could now reproduce works in smaller or larger lots, in response to changing needs. Papermaking machines and steam presses lowered costs, expanded output, and accelerated production. Even the centuries-old art of binding was mechanized. Taken together, these inventions transformed the appearance of books. Attractively packaged in cloth covers, illustrated with engravings, and neatly printed in large editions, each year’s titles from companies like Boston’s Ticknor & Fields, the industry leader in design, arrived, for the first time in book history, as uniform commodities on the market. It thus became easy to assign them fixed prices. Distribution was regularized in turn. Older cooperative arrangements gave way to an impersonal division of labor, as most publishers ceased to be old-style “booksellers.” Their specialized business was to organize the process of publication, bringing works into print at their own expense and risk and then selling them wholesale to jobbers and retailers nationwide. Thanks to the railroad, which extended steadily in the Northeast from the 1830s on and completed its transcontinental journey in 1869, a national book-trade system gradually emerged. From grand offices in Manhattan and other publishing centers issued an ever-expanding volume of books – some 1,350 in the year before the Civil War – to be disseminated across the country by wholesale jobbers, traveling salesmen, and retail shops. The independent bookstore was the hub of the system. In every major city and town, shopping for books became a convenient, everyday experience.

Sarah Payson Willis Parton was a prominent beneficiary of these changes. Better known by her pen name Fanny Fern, Parton achieved celebrity and riches as a newspaper columnist and novelist after years of struggling as a single mother to support herself and three young children. Born in 1811, she came of age with the press, witnessing in her own family the changing practice of journalism and the opening of new opportunities for commercial writing. Her grandfather had edited a patriot newspaper in Boston during the Revolutionary War; her father had enlisted in the fight against federalism as editor of the
Eastern Argus
in Portland, Maine, before giving up politics for religion and starting one of America’s earliest religious newspapers, the
Boston Recorder;
her older brother, Nathaniel P. Willis, fashioned a literary career as an urbane poet and genteel magazine editor. Yet, when financial disaster struck, the young mother, first widowed, then divorced, was cast on her own resources, with no help from her literary kin. To make ends meet, she tried teaching and sewing, then picked up the pen, submitting articles in the early 1850s to several Boston family magazines (the
Mother’s Assistant,
the
True Flag,
and the
Olive Branch).
For the sake of propriety, as well as to conceal her identity from inquisitive relatives, she adopted the pseudonym Fanny Fern. But her ambition burned bright, and it was rewarded by a shrewd publisher who collected her periodical pieces and issued them as a book with the title
Fern Leaves from Fanny’s Portfolio.
The volume was an instant success, selling 70,000 copies within a year. With a satirical wit that gave bite to sentimental prose, Fanny Fern won a huge following for her forthright pieces portraying the sufferings of poor children on New York’s streets and the burdens of women in a patriarchal world. As a literary professional, she reveled in her large sales and loyal fans. Her novel
Ruth Hall
(1854), a
roman-à-clef
about a brave woman writer trying desperately to feed her children, culminates in a remarkable financial reward: 100 shares of stock in a local bank, worth $100 each. For pouring “her own heart’s history” onto the pages of a book, the author has unknowingly earned a fortune of $10,000 – roughly what Parton herself had by then garnered in royalties from her books. That was far more than Parton’s grandfather and father had ever gained from political and religious newspapers.

The astonishing career of Fanny Fern is tribute to the forces behind the expansion of the literary marketplace by the mid-nineteenth century: the rise of national periodicals; the huge popularity of novels; the profitability of writing as a vocation, especially for women; the appeal of celebrities in popular culture; and the collaboration of author and publisher in creating and disseminating American literature. As much as anyone writing in her time, Sarah Parton demonstrated just how valuable intellectual property could be. Her financial coup was the product of the smart bargain she had made in selling the copyright to her works in exchange for a share of the revenues their publication brought in – a royalty agreement that remains standard practice today. Right from the start of the 1790 Copyright Act, Noah Webster had seen its economic uses, as had such female writers as the historian Hannah Adams and the feminist Judith Sargent Murray. So, too, had booksellers like Henry C. Carey, who was quick to buy the copyrights and finance the publications of James Fenimore Cooper and Catherine Maria Sedgwick in the 1820s and 1830s – investments that only gained in value after Congress extended the copyright term in 1831 to twenty-eight years (with a possible renewal for another fourteen). The complaints of literary nationalists notwithstanding, copyright facilitated the making of American literary careers. Both native and foreign works could come from the same presses.

It was not Fanny Fern, rooted in journalism and popular culture, whom the builders of American literature had in mind during the late nineteenth century when they established a canon of the nation’s major writers, but rather a coterie of New England males: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and a few lesser poets. The elite roster owed its existence to Boston publisher James T. Fields, who had the inspiration to market these authors, all issued by his company and its successors, as a rare breed of artists creating superior works of the imagination that truly deserved recognition as “literature.” Set apart from ordinary books by their elegant format and gathered into standard editions and distinguished series, such masterpieces claimed the status of American “classics” on a par with England’s best. “It is literature . . . that holds in precipitation the genius of the country,” decreed Houghton Mifflin editor Horace Scudder, “and the higher the form of literature, the more consummate the expression of that spirit . . .” This canonizing frame of mind, with its sacral view of art and its ranking of writers in a finely graded hierarchy, was well suited to the mood of the publishing establishment in the Gilded Age. The heirs and successors to the leading family firms – Appleton, Harper’s, Putnam, Scribner’s – liked to downplay the commercial aspects of their trade. Publishing for them was not so much a business as a profession with a high cultural mission. Happily, philanthropy coincided with self-interest. Through national magazines (
Atlantic, Harper’s, Scribner’s, Century
), major publishing houses served the cause of literature, while promoting their authors and advertising themselves.

It would be a mistake to idealize the publishing world of the late nineteenth century. Like any entrenched interest, industry insiders treated newcomers as interlopers. In the 1870s and 1880s, another wave of cheap fiction rose, with the appearance of George Munro’s Seaside Library and similar series. Consisting of foreign novels reprinted in magazine format, these books in disguise, like the earlier story papers, took advantage of postal regulations and circulated as second-class mail. Mainstream firms denounced this violation of courtesy, which Munro scorned as “ ‘a right of possession’ based primarily on the principle, or lack of principle, of first grab.” Only with US ratification of international copyright in 1891 were the reprinters driven out of business. Even so, the establishment continued to face stiff competition from subscription publishers, who did a handsome business selling Mark Twain, Ulysses S. Grant, and other popular writers by advance order to the vast countryside. Despite their huge sales, such volumes, sneered spokesmen for the regular trade, were “absolutely worthless,” with a “gaudy” appearance belied by shoddy construction – “gorgeous binding, usually in very bad taste, thick but cheap paper, outrageously poor wood-cuts, the largest type with the thickest leads.” Only the ignorant, seduced by silver-tongued salesmen, would accept such “humbug.” Clinging to a conservative vision of publishing as an elevated, gentlemanly affair, the leading firms stood apart from the expanding mass market cultivated by the purveyors of cheap books and the entrepreneurs of popular journalism.

Elite and mass media together strengthened national perspectives in American life at the expense of the local and the cosmopolitan. The process of change made for a more uniform, standardized print culture. It eroded the position of country editors as mediators between small towns and the wider world. It turned once-proud printers with dreams of owning their own presses into a permanent industrial working class. It converted the civic organs of the early republic into sales bureaus for consumer culture. And it gave vast license to the newspaper barons – Joseph Pulitzer, William Randolph Hearst – who built on the legacy of James Gordon Bennett and fashioned the “yellow journalism” of the 1880s and 1890s. But national institutions of print also spread literary culture at home and abroad, winning grudging respect for American writers even in London, where Fanny Fern was pirated not long after her US debut. Ultimately, the advance of the publishing media enabled Americans to see themselves and the larger world through native eyes. In that rise to literary independence, we can also discern an ebbing of the cosmopolitanism that once was central to American print culture. In a globalized world, where old habits of cultural nationalism clash with the urgent need for international understanding, the making of American literature was not an unmixed blessing.

References and Further Reading

Amory, Hugh and Hall, David D. (2000)
A History
of the Book in America,
vol. I:
The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Baldasty, Gerald J. (1992)
The Commercialization of News in the Nineteenth Century.
Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Barnhurst, Kevin G. and Nerone, John (2001)
The Form of News: A History.
New York: Guilford.

Brodhead, Richard H. (1986)
The School of Hawthorne.
New York: Oxford University Press.

Brown, Candy Gunther (2004)
The Word in the World: Evangelical Writing, Publishing, and Reading in America, 1789–1880.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Casper, Scott, Chaison, Joanne D., and Groves, Jeffrey D. (eds.) (2002)
Perspectives on American Book History: Artifacts and Commentary.
Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.

—, Groves, Jeffrey D., Nissenbaum, Stephen W., et al. (forthcoming 2007)
A History of the Book in America,
vol. III:
The Industrial Book, 1840– 1880.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Crouthamel, James L. (1989)
Bennett’s New York Herald and the Rise of the Popular Press.
Syracuse: Syracuse University Press.

Ellis, Joseph J. (1979)
After the Revolution: Profiles of Early American Culture.
New York: W. W. Norton.

Greenspan, Ezra (2000)
George Palmer Putnam: Representative American Publisher.
University Park: Penn State University Press.

Gross, Robert A. and Kelley, Mary (forthcoming 2008)
A History of the Book in America,
vol. II:
An Extensive Republic: Books, Culture, and Society in the New Nation, 1790–1840.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Henkin, David M. (1998)
City Reading: Written Words and Public Spaces in Antebellum New York.
New York: Columbia University Press.