Publishing
As the Gilded Age publisher Henry Holt once observed, a "book is a thing by itself. There is nothing like it, as one shoe is like another, or as one kind of whiskey is like another." Part commodity and part cultural artifact, often subject to the whims of popular taste, books have variable social and economic values that make their planning, printing, and merchandising a volatile and uncertain business. Yet the history of American book publishing is closely tied to commercial and industrial development in the nation at large.
American publishing, well into the nineteenth century, retained features of the original colonial trade. The Anglo-American book market developed within a provincial network of family and religious ties. Patronage was weak, religious and political censorship frequent, and capital in short supply. Seventeenth-century printers, such as Cambridge's Samuel Green, Philadelphia's William Bradford, and Maryland's William Nuthead, engaged in a local and inconstant trade. Their books were few and expensive, and their output confined largely to primers, catechisms, Psalters, almanacs, and the Bible; the last, in the early 1800s, was printed in twenty-four locations in Massachusetts alone. Even in the eighteenth century, the term publisher--exemplified by entrepreneurs like New England's Isaiah Thomas and Philadelphia's Matthew Carey-- could refer variously to an editor, printer, author, or compiler. Authors, under the subscription systems that began to appear in the 1760s, were commonly paid in kind--that is, with copies of their books. Titles originating in America still constituted less than half of the books sold. Because of the lack of an international copyright law, steady sellers like Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, and Samuel Richardson were habitually pirated.
Local printing continued to flourish in the early national era. In 1755 there had been about 50 printing houses; by 1860, there were over 380. But starting in the 1830s with the founding of such firms as John Wiley & Sons and the House of Harper, the trade was becoming more centralized and the village printer-bookseller a thing of the past. Technological and transportation improvements (stereotype plating, cylinder steam presses, railroads) made for larger printings, cheaper publications, and wider distribution. Children's literature, fiction, and magazines and newspapers challenged the popularity of devotional literature and almanacs. Meanwhile, penny press entrepreneurs like Frank Leslie, and dime novel houses like Beadle Brothers and Street & Smith, provided young, working-class audiences with a steady diet of sensational stories. Although data on audiences are fragmentary, the business of book publishing seems to have been conducted on three levels: the mass dime novel industry, cheap reprint companies that often supplied home subscription libraries in the West and South, and a group of genteel, northeastern houses that also published magazines. These last firms maintained an uneasy hegemony over elite and middle-class family reading. Victorian publishers like George Palmer Putnam, Charles Scribner, and Henry Houghton saw themselves as gentleman publicists and cultural gatekeepers; Boston's James T. Fields, for example, promised to "manufacture" Nathaniel Hawthorne "into a classic" while also maintaining a small literary salon.
The establishment of international copyrights in 1891 (whose effects were not entirely foreseen) altered the structure of the publishing industry. Initially backed by authors and major houses hoping to outlaw piracy, the copyright law in one blow doomed reprint houses, made the prices of U.S. authors competitive with those of Europeans, and--through a protectionist manufacturing clause--brought new prosperity to the American printing industry. As lawmakers had hoped, books written, printed, and published by Americans now outsold those of European rivals. But instead of the predicted stability, what followed was a period of intense competition, as U.S. houses competed heavily for both foreign and native-born authors.
A new breed of entrepreneur--Frank N. Doubleday, Walter Hines Page, George P. Brett of Macmillan's American wing--displaced the Gilded Age gentlemen publishers. Theirs was the top-down management style taking hold in other industries. Best-sellers were first recorded in the 1890s, as the newly founded trade organ Publishers Weekly began to keep track of sales. Authors were now commissioned to write books in advance, and even radical works like Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (1906) were given full-scale promotion. The dime novel, which had succumbed to the competition of Sunday newspaper supplements, was replaced by other experiments in mass publications like Haldeman-Julius's Little Blue Books.
In the twentieth century, the pattern was mixed. Successive waves of commercial concentration, retrenchment, and publishers' claims to cultural patronage occurred. Major publishers often subsisted by sustaining a back list of recurrent favorites and classics, by cross-subsidizing weak titles with best-sellers, and by developing increasingly elaborate subsidiary rights (by 1922, over a hundred novels had been made into motion pictures). Literary agents, grudgingly accepted after 1900, became commonplace. The twenties witnessed a virtual explosion of American fad books, historical outlines, and self-help texts. The Book-of-the-Month Club was founded (1926) as well as important firms like Simon & Schuster, Random House, Viking, and Boni & Liveright. Publishers and editors varied from patient patrons of authors (like Scribner's Maxwell Perkins) to ingenious publicists (like Bennett Cerf of Random House). The Great Depression forced many firms to experiment with covers, cheap popular novels, and ultimately paperback editions, the prototype being Robert de Graff's Pocket Books (1939).
Meanwhile, university presses, often begun on a small scale during the Gilded Age, capitalized on the expansion of scholarly publication following World War I. The Association of American University Presses (aaup), after tentative organization in the twenties, formally adopted a constitution in 1937. Academic publishers served the nation's cultural life by publishing scholarly monographs, anthologies, textbooks, periodicals, encyclopedias, and standard editions of classics. After decades of surging growth, university presses faced tighter budgets and stricter management in the 1970s; some formed consortiums like the University Press of New England (1971) or sought external philanthropic funding. In the 1980s, although individual sales of traditional scholarly books tended to decline, many academic presses expanded their annual lists, often aggressively marketing books in general interest categories previously offered only by commercial houses. By the mid-1980s, the membership of the aaup had expanded to over seventy-five publishing houses. Academic presses now accounted for nearly 10 percent of books published in the United States.
After World War II, paperbacks and, later, chain bookstores like B. Dalton's and Waldenbooks often dictated the merchandising horizons of the industry. Now book publishing attracted the interest of large conglomerates like rca and mca. To some, these takeovers brought greater efficiency, more direct access to specialized buyers, and skyrocketing royalties; to others, they meant severely trimmed back lists, overemphasis on "blockbuster" best-sellers, and even possible censorship. Despite the magnitude of the changes in publishing, it remained what colonial printer William Bradford had called an "Art and Mystery."
Bibliography:
John Tebbel, A History of Book Publishing in the United States, 4 vols. (1978).
Author:
Christopher P. Wilson
See also Literature; Magazines and Newspapers.
