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C. Costs and Profits

Detailed accounts do not survive for the costs of production of most of the books, and, unfortunately, the one exception is for a book with a nonstandard contract. This exception is Le Prince de Beaumont's Education complète, for which Nourse paid only in kind, in the form of 150 copies. An edition of 1,250 was printed in 1753, and the account shows a loss of 6d., and 127 copies on hand (Table I). From the remaining 127 copies, however, Nourse could make £22.4s.6d. at the wholesale price of 3s.6d., and he may have charged 5s.od. retail, a potential profit of £31.15s.od. He was a retail

TABLE I
Education complète, 1753: profit and loss account

               
DEBIT  £  s.  d.  CREDIT  £  s.  d. 
Paper (120 reams &c.mmat; 14s.od./ream)  84  860 copies to Dessan & Saillant for sale to Holland &c.mmat; 3s.6d. 
Printing (48 sheets &c.mmat; £1.4s.od.)  58  16  150  10 
13 copies sold 
Advertisements, &c.  10  -------- 
--------  152  16 
152  16  -------- 
-------- 
bookseller, and no doubt sold some copies in his shop, so that the profit on the publication fell somewhere between these two figures.

Calculations of cost and profit on the other books must necessarily be speculation, but we can base them upon three reasonably firm assumptions: firstly, that 14s.od. per ream represented the quality of paper which Nourse usually used, as comparison of Education complète with his other books suggests that it was; secondly, that his normal edition size was 1,000; and thirdly, that he paid his printers the average price calculated from the Strahan ledgers, that is £1.os.od. per sheet set in Great Primer, English, or Pica, the usual text types in his books.[15] These calculations, approximate as they are, nevertheless provide a context in which we can judge Nourse's payments to his authors.

As an example, we can take Dossie's Elaboratory Laid Open; the author received £31.10s.od. for 18 sheets, and in fact delivered matter to fill 26. His fee is included in the costs (Table II). If Nourse sold the whole edition at 2s.6d. wholesale, his profit was £46.2s.od., or about 25% more than the author's income from the book. Similar figures emerge if we approximate


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TABLE II
Elaboratory Laid Open, 1758: approximate costs

                   
£  s.  d. 
Paper (26,000 sheets = 52 reams app. &c.mmat; 14s.od.)  36 
Printing (26 sheets &c.mmat; £1)  26 
Advertisements, &c.  10 
-------- 
72 
Payment to author  31  10 
-------- 
TOTAL  103  18 
-------- 
the cost of publishing a book by another of Nourse's major authors, John Palairet. He was paid £21.os.od. for Nouvelle introduction à la géographie moderne, including an abridgement of the same work, and the copperplates. The book was printed in 3 volumes, containing 53 sheets (Table III).

TABLE III Nouvelle introduction . . ., 1754,55: approximate costs

                     
£  s.  d. 
Paper (53,000 sheets = 112 reams app. &c.mmat; 14s.od.)  78 
Printing (53 sheets &c.mmat; £1)  53 
Estimated cost of paper & printing for 5 x 1,000 plates  30 
Advertisements, &c.  10 
-------- 
171 
½ author's payment*  10  18 
-------- 
TOTAL  181  18 
-------- 
[_]
Note*: on the assumption that ½ was for the abridgement
At a wholesale price of 4s.od. Nourse's profits would have been £18.2s.od.; at 4s.3d. (a retail price of 6s.od.) he would have made £35.12s.od.

These figures all exclude the cost of binding, as do Nourse's own accounts for Education complète, although there was probably at least a partial edition binding for that work. The copy in the Bodleian Library, Oxford,[16] is uncut in blue boards, and is the copy deposited under the provisions of the Copyright Act. It has all the appearance of a trade binding, which would clearly have to be added to the cost of production, but the wholesale copies, especially those intended for export, were almost certainly sold in sheets. Nourse's '&c.' may indeed include the cost of binding part of the edition, although we have seen that in at least one instance he did spend £10.os.od. on advertising. Whatever these minor costs may have been, it is clear that Nourse made a comfortable margin of profit if an edition was sold out, and that he was both able and willing to pay his authors fees which bore a reasonable relation to his own profits.