BOOK PUBLISHING

Early in the new twentieth century, the American publisher Henry Holt mourned the imminent death of the book. With cheap, flashy, and ever-changing magazines beckoning from every city street corner, he lamented, who would choose to read the relatively staid, cumbersome, and expensive book? Holt and others bemoaned the impending "massification" of print culture—ushered in by near-complete mechanization of production processes, unprecedented literacy levels, and a crowd of entrepreneurial publishers happy to hawk books like chewing gum or tinned tobacco, obliging the commonest of literary tastes. He feared that the book as he knew it, in a social and cultural as well as physical sense, could not survive the consequences.

His worries were not entirely baseless. The years following the Civil War had been an era of unparalleled growth in reading, fueled in part by a strong national drive for basic popular education and literacy. In the 1870 census some 80 percent of white Americans over the age of ten declared themselves literate (although fewer than a quarter of nonwhite Americans could make the same claim). Despite the notorious difficulties in measuring literacy and its uses, it was clear to all that an unprecedented number of Americans not only could read but also, with great energy and enthusiasm, they often did. And as Holt so bitterly noted, most of that reading was readily found in newspapers and magazines, which enjoyed wide, even national, audiences for the first time in the nation's history.

The American publisher Henry Holt voiced concerns shared by many at the turn of the century when he lamented that profit-hungry authors and publishers threatened the future of good literature. The centuries-old tension between the cultural and the commercial aspects of book publishing intensified in the late nineteenth century, and it remains a perennial aspect of the modern industry.

The more authors seek publishers solely with reference to what they will pay in the day's market, the more publishers bid against one another as stock brokers do, and the more they market their wares as the soulless articles of ordinary commerce are marketed, the more books tend to become soulless things.

Henry Holt, "The Commercialization of Literature," Atlantic Monthly, November 1905, p. 578.

But a vigorous growth in book publishing had also accompanied the push for universal literacy. Between 1880 and 1913, while the nation's population nearly tripled, the number of new titles published annually rose more than sixfold, from 2,076 to 13,470. Furthermore, those numbers generally reflect only trade titles, or books intended for purchase by "general readers," the sort of books sold in the early twenty-first century in a typical bookstore. Then as now trade publishing was dwarfed by other varieties of publishing, which distributed books to particular audiences through other channels. The textbook business alone was huge, swelled by a peculiarly American reliance on books for instruction, foreshadowing the vast markets for self-help and how-to books of the early twenty-first century. By 1860, for example, more textbooks were published each year in the United States than in all of Europe. Together with the robust activities of religious book publishers and those devoted to numerous ethnic communities, which also are rarely included in discussions of general publishing, the world of books and reading had grown vast indeed.

From the end of Reconstruction to the return of veterans from the Great War, then, as ever-growing numbers of readers presented new interests and new needs, publishers struggled both to satisfy and to shape those literary appetites. But theirs was neither a cohesive nor a coherent enterprise. Even in the sphere of general trade publishing alone, two fundamental types of publishing coexisted, sometimes in direct competition but more often operating in discrete arenas, serving different reading populations. Very roughly put, one addressed traditional audiences, typically educated readers for whom buying books was a familiar and well-regarded act; these readers were the primary audience for new works written by contemporary authors. The other vein of general publishing served less-sophisticated readers, many of whom were newly literate and unaccustomed to owning any book other than perhaps a family Bible. They were more likely to buy inexpensive reprint editions of older titles or simple formulaic fiction marketed by category more than by author.

This essay explores the activities of both strands of general publishing activity, which would gradually metamorphose into a more integrated, though no less complex, twentieth-century industry. The consolidation began soon after the Civil War, when the once largely regional nature of traditional American book publishing became solidly national, concentrated in three cities: Philadelphia, Boston, and especially New York. The mainstream industry was dominated by a dozen or so major houses, each governed by the literary, cultural, and business values of the men who ran them, men whose names continue to define the landscape of American publishing, even though none remain family-run businesses in the early twenty-first century. The Harper brothers in New York built the nineteenth century's largest publishing enterprise, and Charles Scribner, Henry Holt, G. P. Putnam, F. N. Doubleday, Henry Houghton, George Mifflin, and others all played important roles in shaping the nature of the maturing trade book business.

To understand publishers' roles in these heady decades of unprecedented demand for books and other reading material, one must trace the ways their methods of selecting, producing, marketing, and selling books are interwoven with the lively and sometimes volatile variety of those books' content. Because their markets were frequently different, traditional and popular publishers developed varying means of creating and distributing their wares.

EDITORS AND AUTHORS

Of the three fundamental components of the publishing process—editing, design and production, and marketing and sales—the last two were transformed more radically than the first between 1870 and 1920. Editorial practices also shifted dramatically, however, albeit with considerable grumbling and resistance. Before the 1890s or so, an unwritten but powerful code of "gentlemanly" conduct governed traditional publishers' dealings both with authors and with each other. This meant that an author was typically aligned with the same publisher throughout his or her career; publishers sought to develop and support their authors' careers, in tacit exchange for the authors' loyalty or promise to let them publish new works. An even stronger professional ethic discouraged one publisher from "stealing" another's authors. Charles Scribner particularly detested the commercial notion of bidding for a prized author's work, and he vilified any foolhardy writer or publisher who attempted to draw his house into the now commonplace practice.

In general, nineteenth-century traditional publisher-author relationships were both paternalistic and often mutually productive. Although they clearly needed each other and often enjoyed close personal friendships, many publishers and authors nurtured perennial grievances about the relationship. Most authors earned only modest royalties, and often they were paid nothing at all until a significant portion of the edition had sold and production costs had been covered. Furthermore, authors were commonly expected to bear the cost of manufacturing the stereoplates from which their books were printed. Publishers, on the other hand, perpetually complained (as many still do) about their precarious finances, lamenting that a chronic unprofitability of the majority of trade titles rendered theirs the "worst business in the world," as one mourned in 1906. In reality, both grievances were exaggerated. Although modest, authors generally earned more through royalties than through the earlier convention of a lump-sum payment, particularly on those fortunate titles that enjoyed strong sales. And publishers generally made respectable, though rarely lucrative, incomes from their livelihood.

Authors' most serious complaint was the lack of an international copyright law. Until the problem was remedied in 1890, American authors felt at an unfair disadvantage because publishers could issue pirated editions of foreign works, which could be sold more cheaply since no royalties were paid to the authors. This was far less common in traditional publishing than in popular, however. The low prices on which popular publishing depended were achieved by cutting costs as much in editorial as in manufacturing practices. Many popular titles were reprint editions of older, copyright-free "classics" as well as more recent works by such well-known British writers as Charles Dickens, despite their furious but futile objections. Most of these royalty-dodging pirated editions of British and French titles (primarily novels) were issued in one of the era's inexpensive, mass-produced series. Commonly known as "libraries," these sets of books with identically designed covers competed only indirectly with the standard clothbound editions in which American authors' new works were typically published. The popularity of such libraries was enormous. By the height of the craze in 1893, some ninety-four series vied for space on American families' bookshelves.

Popular publishers also issued a huge quantity of formulaic new fiction, commonly adventure stories, inspiring rags-to-riches tales, and sentimental domestic novels; these were often written on demand by hired writers for a set fee rather than royalties. A growing portion of the writers were women, who brought distinctive sensibilities to their fiction and kindled strong markets among women readers. Beginning with the huge success of dime novels in the 1860s, this phenomenon, known broadly as cheap fiction, frequently generated series of short novels featuring the same characters or settings. The partners Francis S. Smith and Francis Scott Street, for example, published several such series, including Frederic Dey's wildly popular Nick Carter books. When hot sales demanded publishing a new book each week and Dey naturally could not keep up, as many as five other writers were hired to produce the needed manuscripts. It was a small step from this and other instances of ghostwritten popular fiction to the "fiction factories" of the 1880s and 1890s. There a fleet of workers generated plot outlines by poring through newspapers for fiction-worthy accounts. These outlines were then sent out to writers on retainer with detailed specifications concerning the manuscript's length, deadlines, and payment fee.

While most authors writing for popular markets saw their artistic status diminish as they traded creative freedom for a reliable (and sometimes substantial) paycheck, conditions for authors writing for traditional markets slowly improved. Spurred in part by the changes wrought by the new copyright law, relationships between authors and traditional publishers grew more professional and businesslike in the 1890s. Reading's popularity by the end of the century catapulted some authors to celebrity status, giving them more clout in their dealings with publishers. A new player, the literary agent, emerged to forcefully safeguard authors' interests. The presence of agents helped push toward such modern practices as offering formal standardized contracts, relieving authors of a share of production costs, and paying advances or a portion of expected royalties before the work is actually published.

PRODUCTION AND DESIGN

The great boom in reading could not have happened without the dramatic changes enabled by the shift to industrialized production methods. The new technology that enabled the increasingly mechanized production process made print more abundant, less expensive, and more timely than ever before. Four central ingredients of this mechanization were the development of steam-powered printing presses; mechanical, wood-based papermaking; stereotype plate making; and mechanical typesetting. The quantitative differences the new technology made are astounding. At the beginning of the nineteenth century a skilled printer working with a handpress could produce about two hundred impressions an hour; power-driven mechanized presses in the 1870s could spew out more than thirty thousand impressions an hour. By the 1880s an entire edition of a novel could be printed in only ten hours.

As with most technological breakthroughs, however, one advance is often stymied by bottlenecks in other areas. Even the new Fourdrinier papermaking machines could not generate enough sheets to keep up with the presses' capacity until the transition at mid-century from rag pulp to wood fiber pulp. Thanks to the cheaper and more plentiful supply of wood, the amount of paper produced in 1900 eclipsed by a hundredfold that made in 1800, and the price of even the higher grade book paper had dropped to a tenth of its earlier cost. Without this dramatic saving in paper costs, the explosion of magazines and cheap books, bound in paper covers, would not have been possible.

Type presented the last two, stubborn bottlenecks. Composed mainly of soft lead, type could not stand up to the heavy wear of industrial printing. This was solved with the invention of stereotype printing plates. By printing with steel plates made from a mold of the original hand-composed type, not only could many more impressions be printed but also the type could be promptly distributed and recomposed for other jobs. The final great advance came in the 1880s, when two methods of mechanical typesetting triumphed over the many others vying for adoption: Ottmar Mergenthaler's Linotype system debuted in 1884, and Tolbert Lanston's Monotype machine appeared in 1887. Both methods substituted keyboard strokes for manual-type assembly, activating the mechanical casting of an entire line of type or of individual letters, and both systems produced fresh, sharp-edged type for each new composition at rates that far exceeded even the swiftest hand composition.

The commercial advantages of mechanized production were increasingly weighed against its aesthetic drawbacks, however. Machine-made paper was better suited for the high-speed printing process, for example, but it had little of the crisp durability of handmade. Similarly, when printers thinned their inks and printed with a light pressure to keep the presses running smoothly, many objected to the generally pale-looking pages that resulted. This only compounded complaints about the spindly, "weak" type styles that predominated in the era. By the 1890s, inspired by the arts and crafts movement and the revival of preindustrial book design values modeled by William Morris's Kelmscott Press in England, a handful of influential American publishers introduced a radical new look to their books.

Three firms in particular—Stone and Kimball (Chicago), Way and Williams (Chicago), and Copeland and Day (Boston)—led the way toward a dramatically new typographic style, one that emulated the darker, heavier letterforms and decorative woodcut borders and opening initials of medieval books and manuscripts. These pioneers helped to influence a profound shift in modern typography, away from the finely wrought, often ornately detailed Victorian style that showcased industrial achievement toward a new style rooted in the look of handcraft.

MARKETING AND SALES

Although technology had dramatically expanded the possibilities for print production, publishers realized they could not exploit them without effective ways to distribute and sell what was produced. This aggravated the perennial distaste many traditional book publishers felt toward publicity and marketing, stemming from their conviction that such activity sullied their gentlemanly demeanor. But theirs was a business, and promotional marketing was increasingly essential for success in the modern marketplace, even if one's wares included ideas and literature.

At mid-century, most traditional publishers depended on reviews for gaining attention for their books. Because they functioned primarily as publicity, reviews tended to be more like the early twenty-first century's "blurbs" in that writers, who were frequently paid to "puff " a work, served authors' and publishers' interests more than readers'. Some authors had no scruples about reviewing their own books with extravagant praise.

Book advertising in the modern sense of printed circulars, display ads in magazines, and so on emerged—with lingering misgivings and reluctance—for good around the turn of the century. Saddled with few of the qualms felt by traditionalists, popular publishers led the way in marketing breakthroughs. One of the first to embrace advertising was the maverick Caro Clark, the only woman publisher in Boston at the time. Through tireless personal appearances and lavish billboard and newspaper ads, she sold more than 200,000 copies of Quincy Adams Sawyer (1900) by Charles Felton Pigdin. Defending her brash temerity, which mortified many other publishers, she candidly credited her advertising for the strong sales of the otherwise unremarkable novel. Clark pioneered the practice of developing a striking, unified graphic identity for each title, an image or scene duplicated in posters and ads that potential customers could not help but notice and remember. By 1910 publishers had shifted this promotional function to memorably designed book jackets, making them the cornerstone of a title's advertising effort.

Peaking between 1902 and 1904, efforts to "boom" books included an array of ingenious and audacious stunts. In 1898, for example, effusive full-page magazine ads for Charles Major's best-selling romance When Knighthood Was in Flower sparked phenomenal interest in the book. Likening the author to Shakespeare and Sir Walter Scott, but coyly withholding his name to further intrigue readers, these ads yielded not only huge sales but also a popular stage version of the novel, an early version of the media "tie-ins" that still delight publishers in the early twenty-first century. Later, to promote a new edition of the novel, the publisher hired a man dressed in faux medieval armor to ride through the astonished streets of Manhattan.

Traditional publishers' deep-seated ambivalence toward marketing had a practical as well as an ethical dimension: creating a demand for books was pointless without sufficient means of getting copies into buyers' hands. Distribution woes were often acute in the nineteenth century; only a tiny portion of U.S. counties had even a single bookstore. Many Americans, especially those living in rural areas beyond the East Coast, did not even know such stores existed. Furthermore, then as now, the number of trade titles published each year far exceeded the space available to display and stock them in any retail store. Competing for precious shelf space, publishers sent agents known as travelers to visit far-flung shops and pitch the season's new titles to store owners. Travelers were thus crucial to both marketing and distribution; the integrity or persuasiveness of their pitches usually made a huge difference for most mainstream titles' prospects.

Given this paucity of bookstores, publishers sought other means of reaching buyers. By far the most successful was an old but effective method, direct sales through agents traveling from door to door. Some 90 percent of all books purchased before World War I were bought in this way. Armies of agents canvassed urban neighborhoods and the rural countryside, as many as twenty thousand of them in 1894 in Chicago alone by one estimate. Popular publishers particularly relied on direct sales through agents, since so many of their potential customers otherwise seldom if ever bought books. Canvassing agent sales thus expanded the markets for books and reading dramatically by helping many ordinary people develop new habits of, or at least attitudes toward, owning books.

The closing decades of the nineteenth century were the heyday of subscription publishing or selling titles by taking orders for copies, often before they were printed. This method diminished publishers' financial risks, assuring them of the sales they needed before proceeding with particularly expensive ventures. For example, nearly a million copies of William Cullen Bryant's Picturesque America (1874) were sold in this way; the handsome parlor book filled with engravings was typical of one of the mainstays of subscription book sales—beautifully, even extravagantly produced volumes meant for display more than for reading.

Subscription selling, however, channeled much of the new appetite for books toward a narrow variety and relatively small number of available titles, which usually received intense marketing efforts followed by huge sales. In addition to lavish editions like Picturesque America usually purchased to impress visitors with one's gentility, subscription sellers had particular success with books about the recent Civil War, which appealed to people's still-stirred patriotism. Some contemporary fiction sold well in this way as well, as Mark Twain's great success demonstrated; nearly all of his novels were sold though door-to-door subscription sales.

With the great growth in ephemeral print—newspapers, magazines, flyers, and so on—publishers were able to get word of new titles and series to vast new audiences, who then ordered copies by mail. Most popular books were distributed through the mail, not through retail outlets. Accordingly, low postal rates were key to cheap books' success; fluctuations in postage rates and regulations often hastened the crest, or the collapse, of each boom market for cheap books throughout the 1870s and succeeding decades.

TASTES AND TRENDS

Cheap books and serialized fiction in magazines popularized recreational reading in America as never before. From 1890 to 1914 the demand was so insatiable that literary historians refer to the era as the great Fiction Boom. While popular publishers eagerly supplied inexpensive editions of older novels and seemingly inexhaustible quantities of formula fiction, traditional publishers enjoyed the boom as well, issuing record numbers of original works by the nation's most respected mainstream novelists. Some of them sold spectacularly well.

Paradoxically, the boom market troubled many traditional publishers, who struggled to balance their financial need to publish books Americans wanted to buy with their responsibility for nourishing the nation's cultural and intellectual development. These were not always conflicting conditions, of course. Even so, throughout the era publishers and other voices of the literary establishment fretted that literary merit and popular taste had precipitously diverged—a seemingly eternal complaint. Most publishers managed to pursue both objectives, however, by publishing a spectrum of titles.

Although its editor at Harper's did not consider General Lew Wallace's novel Ben-Hur "legitimate literature," for example, the firm recognized its potential popularity and published it in 1880. The book sold more than half a million copies in the following decade and became the first blockbuster best-selling trade novel in the modern era. It paved the way for hundreds of other new mainstream novels whose popularity would make literary history. In 1894 Anthony Hope's The Prisoner of Zenda helped launch a huge market for historical romance novels, and Kate Douglas Wiggin's 1903 novel Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm similarly whetted the appetites of millions of readers for "home and Jesus" family novels.

On the other hand, although such popular titles clearly outsold serious ones, as they have always done, the era also sustained remarkably eager audiences for works recognized in the early twenty-first century as serious literary classics. The 1890s witnessed enthusiastic fan clubs for writers such as Robert Browning and Rudyard Kipling, and Shakespeare basked in near-cultlike reverence. Important nonfiction flourished as well. In the 1870s, the first university presses, at Cornell and Johns Hopkins universities, joined the publishing landscape. By 1919, thirty-eight university presses had been established, ensuring that important and provocative serious scholarship was disseminated throughout and beyond the nation's academic communities.

CENSORSHIP

With books and reading becoming more central than ever to American society by the late nineteenth century, new concerns arose about the nature and consequences of what was read. Most notoriously, Anthony Comstock (1844–1915) galvanized many Americans' worries when he proclaimed a new crusade to fight for "Morals, not Art or Literature." In 1872 the young Comstock persuaded the YMCA to sponsor his newly founded Society for the Suppression of Vice. The following year his tireless lobbying resulted in a congressional law outlawing the distribution of "obscene materials" and giving Comstock police powers to interpret and enforce it. For more than forty years Comstock terrorized booksellers and publishers, seizing hundreds of thousands of books whose morality he deemed suspect. He met little resistance until, in 1885, he began to attack the works of critically respected authors such as Honoré de Balzac, Émile Zola, and Leo Tolstoy. In 1905 George Bernard Shaw successfully defied Comstock's attempts to prosecute his works, but for the most part Comstock continued to exercise powerful control over American literary culture until his death. His work continued with unabated zeal into the 1930s under the leadership of his successor, John Sumner.

While some publishers stood firm in their defense of free literary expression, notably G. P. Putnam, Albert Boni, and Horace Liveright, most were fairly conservative themselves on moral issues. Houghton Mifflin of Boston refused to publish works of literary realism, for example, rejecting writers such as Theodore Dreiser and Upton Sinclair for the profanity and explicit violence in their work. And during World War I several New York publishers joined the efforts of a private group of writers known at the Vigilantes to ensure that only "patriotic," pro-British, and prowar sentiments were published. Others, however, recognized more shrewdly that attempts to suppress certain works usually only heighten their appeal. For every copy of a book confiscated by Comstock's forces, hundreds of others were avidly purchased, and works by controversial writers like Dreiser in fact enjoyed both critical success and substantial sales.

Although his 1905 prediction of the book's demise proved to be needlessly bleak, Henry Holt had astutely perceived that the nature of book publishing in America was fundamentally changing. By the end of the First World War, the traditional publishing world that he knew was poised to come of age as a modern industry. Despite his and others' anxious observations that traditional publishing was absorbing many aspects of more popular-minded publishing, time would quickly prove that it was largely energized—not suffocated—by the latter's commercial vigor. The strength of trade publishing in the 1920s and beyond was grounded in the legacies of both its popular and mainstream forebears.

See alsoChildren's Literature; Copyright; Dime Novels; Editors; Harper & Brothers; Houghton Mifflin; Little Magazines and Small Presses

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Megan Benton