University of Virginia Library

It has now been fifteen years since William Charvat made his important comments on "Literary Economics and Literary History" before the English Institute.[1] Those remarks suggested a great many lines of inquiry into publishing history which were then virtually unexplored and indicated their undeniable relevance— indeed, their crucial significance—for meaningful literary history. However difficult the facts may be to come by and however frequent the crossing of disciplinary boundaries that may be required, one should not have to insist on the essential importance of technological, geographical, and economic factors, or of publishers' policies and copyright laws, or of the facilities for mass education and for book distribution— the importance of such areas as these for an informed study of the course of literary history.

But if the relevance of these matters is obvious, what, one may ask, has been done to pursue the various lines mentioned by Professor Charvat? Or, to put the question more bluntly, how does it happen that, with so many graduate students searching for seminar and thesis topics, so few are directed toward work in a field where the labors of many men for many years to come will make only a beginning? It may be that the current fashions in literary scholarship are such that the instructor who must get out another article will choose to explicate a

given poem for the fiftieth time rather than survey the output of a given publisher for the first time. Or it may be that fewer members of English departments are interested in publishing history than in explication, and that fewer members of history departments are drawn to the history of publishing than to the history of labor organizations or steel companies. But surely one cannot argue that publishing history is less "literary" than the biography of an author or less "historical" than the analysis of a statesman's oratorical style. And in any field the accomplishment of certain basic tasks is a prerequisite to progress in more inclusive tasks—which is not to say that publishing history cannot be considered a legitimate subject of endeavor in its own right, but simply that literary scholars may think of it at times only as the groundwork for other investigations. At any rate, the fact remains that the history of American literary publishing can still be called, in relative terms, a neglected field.

To be sure, certain scholars, notably Professor Charvat himself, have drawn their graduate students into this area. In addition, American bibliographical journals have been hospitable to such research.[2] It is true also that, if the English had Cyprian Blagden to examine Elizabethan publishing, we have Rollo Silver and Lawrence Wroth to furnish us with details of the colonial publishers; if for nineteenth-century British publishing there are Edmund Blunden and Royal Gettmann, for American there are David Kaser, Warren Tryon, and Madeleine Stern; if the general course of British book production and distribution has been surveyed by Frank Mumby, the American has been treated by Hellmut Lehmann-Haupt.[3] We have our listings of

regional imprints, our index to Evans, our histories of individual houses, our registers of printers and booksellers in a given book-trade center, our editions of cost-books. But we do not have a complete inventory of regional imprints, nor histories of all significant publishers, small and large, nor analyses of all book-publishing centers, nor edited versions of all important surviving records of publishing firms.

We have, in other words, made an encouraging beginning, but we must recognize that the work of a handful of scholars, however dedicated and productive, can be no more than a beginning on a task of such magnitude. Comprehensive histories of American book production have been attempted,[4] and no one would deny that works like the Lehmann-Haupt volume have their usefulness—but it seems to me equally evident that further general histories would, at this stage, be pointless. Before anything approaching a full-scale history of American publishing can be embarked on, we must have the complete story of the individual publishers that make it up. It is helpful, as I say, to have had some of the broad outlines sketched in for us first; but the next step must inevitably be a return, for more intensive study, to the details on which those outlines were based. The writing of history always moves in such cycles, but in the writing of American publishing history we have arrived only at the beginning of the second stage, looking forward to the next level of synthesis and generalization. How are we to talk with authority about the characteristics of a particular publisher until we have listed every title he issued and discovered the circumstances of the publication of each title? How are we to comment, in any but pat generalizations, on the publishing of a particular period until we have made such a study of every publisher operative during that time? And how are we to trace with insight the course of American publishing from one period to another until we have examined each period in this way? It is my contention, therefore, that the small areas must be staked out next, before we can proceed to survey the wider, if only slightly greener, fields.