University of Virginia Library

John Miller: First Transatlantic Publisher's Agent
by
James J. Barnes

By the beginning of the nineteenth century the publisher's agent was a well-established personality in the British book trade. As distinct from an author's agent, nowadays often referred to as a literary agent, a publisher's agent at this time acted primarily in negotiations between publishing houses, marketing and distributing books with a view to sharing expenses. Later in the century agents began to be used for transatlantic negotiations, and by all accounts John Miller was the first to make a specialty of American books.[1]

He began as a bookseller in London about 1804, but did not concern himself with American publications until 1817 when he learned that a Philadelphia bookseller, Mathew Carey, was prepared to spend $250 a year to get the latest British publications as quickly as possible.[2] Carey came to Miller's attention by way of Carey's son-in-law Charles Robert Leslie, who was a friend of Washington Irving, whose Sketchbook Miller began to publish.[3] However, after the first volume appeared in early 1820 Miller found himself financially unable to continue the series. Fortunately Irving prevailed upon John Murray to bring out the remaining portions of the work, and we must surmise that Miller was forced to spend much of 1820 re-establishing himself, his reputation, and his credit. The panic of 1819 caught many worthy men unawares but Miller had sixteen years of solid trade experience behind him, and by November 1820 had recuperated enough to venture an offer of transatlantic service to Mathew Carey and Son.[4]

The precise terms of their agreement are not known, but it is possible

to reconstruct the essential features from their correspondence.[5] Miller's main task was to procure early copies of forthcoming English books, the earlier the better, and send them in duplicate to Philadelphia. The sooner Carey received such works, the quicker he could get the jump on his Amercan competitors in the feverish business of British reprints. Duplicate copies were sent by different vessels to minimize delays and losses. From Miller's letters to Carey it appears that the typical elapsed time between London and Philadelphia was six to eight weeks, but it is clear that a host of uncertainties and misfortunes constantly plagued transatlantic business arrangements. The Careys lodged periodic complaints about the slowness of service, the mishaps which befell long-awaited best sellers, and the quirks of fate which provided competitors with copies ahead of themselves.[6]

Miller's long experience in the trade gave him access to many publishing outlets. Not infrequently he could inform Carey that he had been lucky enough to obtain a particular book a few days or even a week in advance of publication. And when a publisher proved unwilling to part with an early copy, Miller was not above inducing his personal friends to part with their complimentary or review copies. He treated the Careys as if they were members of the London book trade, and therefore considered them eligible for trade terms which included wholesale prices for duplicate copies, a reduction of twenty to thirty-three percent from the retail price.

Because Miller was under instructions to send copies of many of the popular works of the day, fiction and non-fiction alike, Carey's costs were greater than anticipated in spite of Miller's economies. The wholesale price of each work ranged from 13s to 24s, with packing and postage extra; so instead of the earlier estimate of $250 per year, annual expenditures amounted to well over $500. This being the case, the Careys themselves lost no opportunity to economize, and once they decided whether or not to reprint an English work, they immediately sold the duplicate or unwanted copies through the normal American bookselling channels.[7]

It was not long before Miller was being asked to broaden his activities. By the spring of 1821 he said he would take a dozen copies of Carey's Journal of Medical and Physical Science for sale in London. He also agreed

to handle a few of Carey's law publications, though he doubted that these would find much of a market in Britain. Most noteworthy, however, was a further proposal from Philadelphia that Miller accept the formidable task of coordinating all of Carey's new and second-hand importations from London. At this time American booksellers and publishers still imported most of the British books they sold, hazarding to reprint only the most popular. Miller was quite willing to act as Carey's agent in this way provided that the number of importations was large enough to make it worth his while. Accordingly, he decided to charge five percent on the gross value of the shipments, including packing and dock charges. On the other hand he anticipated saving Carey money, since, as a member of the London book trade, he could take advantage of special trade discounts above and beyond the usual wholesale prices. He could also secure additional discounts by paying ready cash, purchasing books at publishers' trade sale dinners or upon the day of publication, ordering in large quantities, and buying at auctions and remainder sales.

If all went smoothly, Carey stood to gain both as a bookseller and as a publisher. However, Miller set one pre-condition for doing the job: in order to take advantage of such trade terms he had to be supplied in advance with adequate funds. He made this point clear from the outset in view of his embarrassed financial circumstances following the panic of 1819. Complying with this requirement, Carey supplied Miller with an initial £20, but within six months this was totally exhausted and another one hundred pounds or five hundred dollars was needed to continue the assignment. Thus began what became a recurring refrain from Miller, constantly lamenting Carey's inability or unwillingness to send him adequate funds. In November 1822 Carey was still about £100 in arrears. In casting about for whom or what to blame this on, Miller attributed part of the trouble to the way in which Carey transferred funds from Philadelphia to London: via someone in, of all places, Gibraltar. No wonder reimbursement was delayed!

Carey's banking practices were not quite so absurd as they seemed. Every American businessman who owed money to an Englishman was plagued by the problem of transferring funds. Throughout these years American currency was considered "soft." Its value on the international market fluctuated wildly. In good times the rate of exchange penalized Americans eight to ten percent, and in bad times the penalty was much greater. American banks often refused to handle any transfer of funds, in all likelihood because they were unable to sell dollars for pounds. This being so, Americans who owed money in England tried to work out a fair exchange of goods in kind, insofar as possible, trading specific articles instead of dealing in money at all. John Miller was himself a party to such an arrangement involving Jared Sparks, the American historian, and the Boston bookseller and publisher Hillard, Gray & Co. Both Sparks and Hilliard, Gray imported British books from Miller; the former for personal

and professional needs, and the latter for business purposes. At the time Sparks also happened to be the editor of the North American Review, which was published by Hilliard, Gray & Co. Thus, in order to cut down on transatlantic cash payments and to balance debts, Miller would purchase a certain number of issues of the Review to sell in London. Since Miller imported a number of other American publications as well, an elaborate and confusing accounting took place every six months whereby both parties calculated the value of direct exchanges before reckoning their respective bills.[8]

Two types of expenditures weighed particularly heavily on the Careys. One was the purchase and importation of original engravings from London, and the other, payments to British authors and publishers for advance copies of their works. Engravings were always a problem because reprint houses like Carey liked to think that they offered their American customers everything that the original British volumes contained, only in a much cheaper and more convenient form. However, since British works were often enhanced by elaborate illustrations or maps, reprinters either had to try to imitate the illustrations at considerable expense and perhaps with inferior workmanship, or secure casts of the original woodcuts. Either course made sense only for expensive works such as gift books, atlases, and medical works. A case in point arose in September 1821 when Miller tried to induce Carey to import the plates of a new illustrated edition of Shakespeare. Miller's proposition was that Carey buy a set of plates and use them together with a reprinted text. Since the work was going to appear in parts in England, Carey would have ample time to re-set type in America, and with outright ownership of the plates also, he would be assured a monopoly. As far as one can tell, Carey declined Miller's suggestion.

However, by the 1830's the practice of importing plates had become much more common. In 1834 the tables were turned when Carey & Lea wanted a set of the plates for Roget's book on physiology published by William Pickering. They instructed Miller to offer Pickering £70 or £80 for them, about four times the manufacturing cost. Yet they doubted whether Pickering would see the advantage of cooperating with an American firm.[9]

Carey & Lea could have had the illustrations engraved satisfactorily in America, and they were also somewhat wary of dealing with London due to a recent instance of poor craftsmanship for which $500 worth of corrective work had to be done in Philadelphia.[10] Still, if due safeguards were imposed, Carey & Lea saw mutual advantage in negotiating the sale in spite of having to pay £100 for the plates, instead of £70 or £80, plus a 33 percent import duty on the cast.[11] At first one hundred pounds seemed a sizeable amount to risk in such a venture, but not long afterward they found themselves authorizing Miller to offer Longman as much as £600 for the cuts of their Encyclopaedia of Geography.[12]

Miller deserves credit for being one of the first to develop the practice of paying British authors and publishers for advance sheets of forthcoming works. As early as 1822 he helped Carey negotiate with Constable in Edinburgh and Cadell & Davis in London for Scott's Peverell of the Peake.[13] Twenty-five pounds per volume was the going rate, and since Scott's novels usually appeared in three or four volumes, Carey spent £75 or £100 for each new work. Paying this amount insured Carey a few days' head start in printing and distributing the latest Scott novel in the American market.

Carey's competitors tried to foil his system, but thanks to Miller, Carey enjoyed more than his share of successful publication debuts. The largest payment he ever made for advance sheets was £295 during the 1820's in anticipation of Sir Walter Scott's Life of Napoleon. Not until the early 1850's did American publishers again offer this much money for advance sheets, and then it presaged a new generation of publishers and authors like Harper & Bros. and Bulwer and Dickens. Expenditures for early copies during the 1830's typically came to less than £50. In 1835 Carey felt that Miller had paid too much when he offered Capt. Chamier £15 for a forthcoming work. Miller was authorized to pay R. R. Madden only £10 for early sheets of his book on travels to the West Indies. Rarely did Carey go as high as £45 for a new novel by Lady Morgan.[14]

Miller's commission on such sales was usually 25 percent of the sale price. This he deducted from the amount forwarded to the British author or publisher. Occasionally he had to content himself with a mere 10 percent when Carey & Lea failed to make it clear to the author that Miller was entitled to one-fourth of the £15 purchase price.[15] Unfortunately, his career

provided little more than a hand-to-mouth existence interspersed with occasional periods of comparative comfort. At about the time he began to recover from the effects of 1819-20 he found himself in the vortex of 1825-26. In the spring of 1826 he reported to Carey & Lea: "'Our trade is getting worse and worse—all confidence is destroyed—.'"[16]

It was probably the 1825-26 depression that forced Miller to sell his shop and again relocate his business. Sharing his embarrassment with Jared Sparks, he wrote:[17]

Carey & Lea themselves suffered setbacks in 1834-35 and again in 1837-41. For example, a word of caution went out to Miller in early 1835 as to the choice of new books he should send for reprinting.[18]

Six weeks later they noted:[19]

Miller misunderstood the reason for their advice and took offense at what he construed as criticism of his selections. Amplifying the reason for their instructions Carey & Lea reiterated,[20]

Despite the periodic trade crises on both sides of the Atlantic and the marked changes in the publishing business of Mathew Carey and his successors, Miller continued to act as their London agent until the end of his active business career. The Careys, for their part, continued to rely on him decade after decade. Together they established a pattern for others on both sides of the Atlantic. Unwittingly, perhaps, Miller found that his loyal services to the Philadelphia publishers often precluded doing business with other American firms. The more competitive ones wanted their own special agents in London, and so it happened that Harpers eventually employed Obadiah Rich and Sampson Low, and in the course of time Appleton took on Charles Layton, and Ticknor & Fields used Delf and Trubner.

More than anyone else Miller set the pattern for a number of other entrepreneurs in London and elsewhere. At one time or another he had been a publisher, an author's agent, a publisher's agent, a dealer in new and second-hand American books, an exporter of British books to America, and an acknowledged authority on the ways of the transatlantic book trade.

APPENDIX The Business Addresses of John Miller

What follows is based on a variety of sources, including letters to and from Miller, advertisements in catalogues and trade periodicals, and a wide range of London street and trade directories. Occasionally complicating the task of reconstruction was the existence of more than one J. Miller among the ranks of the London book trade. Nor is it possible to be very precise as to when, within a given year, Miller moved from one premises to another. Fluctuations in the trade and in his personal fortune prompted many of the moves prior to 1830, when he became identified as the agent for American books on Henrietta Street, Covent Garden.

According to a letter from Miller to Carey of 12 May 1821, Miller had already been in business for seventeen years. That would have placed the opening of his shop in London about the year 1804. However, we cannot locate a reasonably firm address for him until 1811, when he is listed at 6 Bridge Road, Lambeth. Between about 1813 and 1819 he was listed at 25 Bow Street, and for some portion of 1819-20 he could be found at 10-11 Burlington Arcade, Piccadilly. Briefly (1820-21) he operated from either 14 or 41 Lisle Street near Leicester Square, depending upon which street directory one consults. He then settled for a time (1821-23) at 69 Fleet Street.

During the years 1824-27 he occupied premises at 5 New Bridge Street, Black-friars. It was during these years that street directories began to list him as a specialist in American publications. Then follows a series of other changes, no doubt reflecting the commercial instability of the late 1820's. He was definitely at 40 Pall Mall by April 1827 according to one letterhead, and at 23 St. James Street in April 1830 according to one of his printed catalogues. But it was not until sometime in 1831-32 that he finally settled at 13 Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, remaining at essentially the same location until the conclusion of his business career in 1866. The only change from about 1840 onwards was a move from 13 to 26 Henrietta Street.

Notes