University of Virginia Library

II

The differences which one discerns between the kinds of research into publishing history performed for different periods—the emphasis at one time on typography, at another on sales and distribution, or at

another on biography—constitute an index to the changing categories of materials available for various periods, as well as to the changing nature of the publisher's calling. There are basically five kinds of materials for the study of American literary publishing: 1) records, papers, and other files of the firms themselves; 2) the published trade catalogues of the firms; 3) contemporary national or regional bibliographies, or retrospective lists; 4) reminiscences and memoirs of publishers and others associated with the book-trade; 5) contemporary references, ranging from the publishers' own advertisements or posters to book reviews, columns of literary gossip, and lists of "books received." On the basis of the relative availability or scarcity of the materials in each of these categories, we can divide the study of American publishing into certain periods, in terms of methodology. It should go without saying that the books themselves, which the publishers produced, form the central material of study, toward which these five categories are various routes; but the scarcity of the books to be studied (or, for modern periods, their great proliferation) remains another factor, beyond but not unrelated to these five, which affects the methodology and the reliability of publishing historiography.

Because the third category listed above, consisting of the national bibliographic registries, is generally at the center of all attempts to establish the output of a given publishing firm, it is well at the outset to be aware of the peculiarities of the records available for different periods. For American bibliography, the chief retrospective lists are Evans, Shaw-Shoemaker, and Sabin, and one must, of course, rely on retrospective (rather than current) lists for the early period. The original twelve volumes of Charles Evans' American Bibliography, published between 1903 and 1934, cover the years 1639 through part of 1799, chronologically by year and alphabetically by author within the year; each volume has two indexes, one of authors and one of subjects, and a list (but not index) of printers. Clifford K. Shipton published a thirteenth volume in 1955, bringing the record through 1800, and Roger P. Bristol has now provided an author-title index (1959) and an index of printers (1961) for the entire set. Though Evans (with 39,162 titles) supersedes the only previous record, the famous "Haven list" (a 350-page supplement prepared by Samuel Foster Haven for the 1874 edition of Isaiah Thomas' History of Printing), there are still a great many omitted items—so that, until these are all brought together, a number of other lists and articles, like the Waters list, must be consulted.[34] The years 1801 through 1819

(amounting to 50,192 items) are now covered, in nineteen yearly volumes, by the most recent of these retrospective researches (1958-1963), the work of Ralph R. Shaw and Richard H. Shoemaker; these volumes are not as yet indexed. The third of these great catalogues, Joseph Sabin's Bibliotheca Americana: A Dictionary of Books Relating to America . . . , with 106,413 entries in 29 volumes (published between 1868 and 1936, and completed by such eminent bibliographers as Wilberforce Eames and R. W. G. Vail), is not, technically, a national bibliography, since it includes works relating to America published in other countries, but it is useful both because of its large scope and because of the additional bibliographical references it gives for many items. In using Sabin one should keep in mind the reductions in its scope made in 1929, 1932, and 1933. Before volume XXI (1929) the scope was Sabin's original one—to attempt the listing of everything connected with the Americas (North and South) down to the date of the current volume itself; beginning with volume XXI, only works to 1876 were listed. In 1932 (with part 130, beginning with "South Carolina") the date was pushed back to 1860, and in 1933 (with part 141, beginning "Stuart") to 1840. For certain categories, the cut-off date was considerably earlier in each case, and literary scholars should remember that, from 1932 on, most poetry, drama, and fiction published after 1800 was omitted.[35]

For most of the nineteenth century, one may use contemporary bibilographies, chiefly Roorbach, Kelly, and the American Catalogue. Orville Roorbach's original publication was partially retrospective, since he first issued his Bibliotheca Americana in 1849, covering the years from 1820. He brought out a current supplement in 1850, followed by a new consolidated edition in 1852; thereafter, three supplements (in 1855, 1858, and 1861) brought the record to 1861. His work consists of an author-title alphabet (no subject index), and one peculiarity (aside from the errors and omissions) is that the various elements of each entry are arranged in columns, so that, if one has the patience, it is possible to search for a particular publisher's books by running one's eye down the publisher-column of each page. James Kelly's American Catalogue (2 vols., 1866, 1871) is the companion work, using the same arrangement, for the years 1861-1870.

National bibliography in the last three decades of the century is bound up with the official trade journal, Publishers' Weekly, founded in 1872 by Frederick Leypoldt—but actually a continuation of various earlier journals like Charles B. Norton's Literary Advertiser, Literary Gazette (1851-55), Literary Register (1852-56), and Literary Letter (1857-62), the American Literary Gazette and Publishers' Circular (1855-72), and the Trade Circular and Publishers' Bulletin (1869-71).[36] Leypoldt's first American Catalogue (2 vols., 1880) lists, in two alphabets (author-title and subject) the books in print on 1 July 1876; one feature of interest to students of publishing is that there is an appendix of publishers' lists of their books published since 1876. Under the editorship of R. R. Bowker, the office of Publishers' Weekly put out seven permanent supplements to the American Catalogue (covering 1876-84, 1884-90, 1890-95, 1895-1900, 1900-05, 1905-07, 1908-10). It should be understood that the American Catalogue is based on the weekly record of new publications as listed in Publishers' Weekly; and it should be remembered that there are two alphabets in each volume before 1900, one after. Publishers' Weekly, of course, continues to the present, but the American Catalogue was replaced at the turn of the century by two new publications of the now well-known H. W. Wilson Company, the Cumulative Book Index and the United States Catalog. The first of these was published monthly, beginning in 1898, and then cumulated annually into one author-title-subject alphabet. The difference between this publication and the United States Catalog is that the latter does not record all books produced in a given period but only those still in print at a particular time. The first volume (1900) lists the books in print at the beginning of 1899 (in two alphabets, one for author, one for title); the second edition (1903) does the same for 1902 (now in one author-title-and-subject index), the third (1912) for 1912, and the fourth (1928) for 1928 (there was also a supplement to the second edition in 1906 covering the books published 1902-05). After 1928 there is only the Cumulative Book Index, brought together in huge four-year cumulations (beginning with 1957-58, two-year cumulations);

at that time its scope was increased to include all books published in the English language.[37] The student of publishing should not fail to notice the value of the comprehensive lists of publishers and their addresses in each of these volumes.

The historian of twentieth-century American publishing has one further national bibliography at his disposal, one that is far more important for his purposes than the Cumulative Book Index—the Catalogue of Copyright Entries issued by the Copyright Office of the Library of Congress. Though this record is limited to works copy-righted in the United States and is therefore not a complete record of publication, it is of obvious usefulness for establishing the core of a publisher's output and dating the titles, since it has an index that lists, in addition to authors, the copyright holders—who are, frequently, the publishers. Thus, while the Cumulative Book Index can be used only to check on titles after they are known (since it has no publisher index), the index to the Catalogue of Copyright Entries can at times be used to establish a basic, though almost certainly partial, chronological catalogue of a given imprint (basic in the sense that these listings constitute proof of the existence of the books, recorded as they are from the actual deposit copies).

Theoretically, copyright records should not be limited in their usefulness to the twentieth century, because the first American copyright law was passed in 1790. But the story of the repeated efforts of dedicated men to establish a national copyright catalogue is a very discouraging one.[38] Our principal copyright laws are those of 1790, 1870, 1891, and 1909. The 1790 law did provide for the deposit and registry of copies, but this procedure was to be handled by the various district courts, resulting in inefficiencies and inaccuracies even for those books which the authors or publishers decided to register. Our fragmentary published record of early nineteenth-century copyrights consists, then,

of only two lists: 1) the 1822, 1823, 1824, and 1825 supplements to S. A. Elliot's A List of Patents . . . (1820), containing about 950 titles deposited between 1796 and May 1825; 2) Charles Coffin Jewett's "Copy-right Publications," in the form of two appendixes to the 1850 report of the Smithsonian Institution, listing 2,057 titles deposited between 1846 and 1850.[39] The only other related published record for these years is the Library of Congress catalogues of holdings, then issued complete at ten-year intervals with annual supplements. The copyright-deposit books are incorporated into the alphabetical listing in the complete catalogues, but some of the annual volumes (like the one in 1846) have copyright entries listed separately; for the first part of the alphabet, the Alphabetical Catalogue of the Library of Congress: Authors (1864-80) is a place to check for the period after mid-century. In using these catalogues or the Smithsonian's records, however, one must keep in mind the shifting status of these places as depositories. Deposit copies went (from the district courts) to the Secretary of State until August 1846; to the Smithsonian, the Library of Congress, and the Secretary of State from 1846 until early 1859; to the Department of the Interior and nowhere else from 1859 to 1865; and to the Library of Congress as well as to the Department of the Interior from 1865 until the act of 8 July 1870, when the Library of Congress was made the sole depository. The importance of the 1870 act lies in the fact that it consolidated the entire copyright administration, including the function of registry formerly assigned to the district courts, into one central office.

It was not, however, until the celebrated "international" copyright law of 3 March 1891 that official provision was made for a published catalogue of copyright entries. Beginning 1 July 1891—and continuing to the present—these records have been published, but their early years were so experimental in form that one is justified in thinking of the copyright Catalogue as a twentieth-century reference tool. From the beginning it has recorded (like the two earlier brief catalogues) books deposited and therefore physically existing (in contrast to the district court records, which listed registrations of forthcoming books that may never have appeared), and the Catalogue was declared by law in 1909 to constitute prima facie evidence of the facts it contained. But this weekly Catalogue of Title-Entries, as it was first called, did not include the dates of receipt of deposit copies until during its

seventh year (beginning 13 September 1897), did not give the official copyright dates until 1898, and did not provide cumulated indexes until 1901. As a matter of fact, it did not become really satisfactory for reference until July of 1906, when the responsibility for publication of the Catalogue was shifted from the Treasury Department to the Copyright Office itself; at that time Thorvald Solberg, to emphasize the improved form which the Catalogue was to take on in his office, began a new series in the volume-numbering and changed the title to the Catalogue of Copyright Entries.[40] From that time on, a search of the copyright records is relatively easy and can be accomplished by recourse simply to the printed Catalogue; but information about earlier copyrights remains very difficult of access, though it is all available in the Copyright Office, since the record books of the clerks of the district courts for the period 1790-1870 (transferred to the Copyright Office in 1870)[41] and the records of the Office itself for the period 1870-1897 are imperfectly indexed.[42]

The Catalogue from 1906, then, until 1940 (when the War made necessary, unfortunately, a very abbreviated form of entry and index)[43] is a most remarkable work of reference. The entries, printed from the linotype slugs used for the Library of Congress cards, contain all the information (as to date, pagination, title-page transcription, and so on) available on those cards, plus certain other facts, usually three: 1) the copyright date; 2) the date of deposit of two copies in the Copyright Office; 3) the date of receipt of an affidavit of American manufacture.[44] It should be understood that, before the Act of 1909, the official date of copyright was the date on which the title was entered for registry, not the date on which it was published or received; since that time the date of copyright has been construed as the official date of publication reported by the publishers. Clearly, the appearance of any book may have been delayed beyond the predicted publication date, and the actual publication date may differ from the copyright date listed; but the fact remains that, since 1909, the copyright records do give the intended (and often actual) publication date, while before that time they provide only a terminus a quo. The date of deposit of copies is usually later than the copyright date, but with different significance for the pre- and post-1909 years. Before 1909 it was required that copies be deposited not later than the publication date— a fact which pushes forward the terminus a quo; after 1909, since the copyright date is identical with the publication date, the copies, obviously, were generally deposited after publication. The Catalogue lists, for published books, only those actually received and not simply all the titles registered in the Office records.[45] The third item, the affidavit

of American manufacture, was required only after 1909 and often differs (if at all) from the deposit date by a matter of days.[46]

With this information about national bibliographies as a background, it is possible to divide American publishing roughly into three periods, in terms of the methodology required for historical research: 1) the period before the copyright law of 1790, in which only retrospective lists are available; 2) the years between 1790 and the early 1870's, in which fragmentary copyright records may sometimes be used to supplement the somewhat unreliable Roorbach and Kelly lists; and 3) the time since the early 1870's, which saw the establishment, not only of the Copyright Office as the consolidated central agency, but of the Publishers' Weekly, the Publishers' Trade List Annual, and the American Catalogue. One should remember, too, for each of these periods, to refer to whatever national bibliographies of other countries (particularly England) are available; for one's task in the study of an American publisher must include, for each title, information as to whether it originated with him, was reprinted from an earlier British edition, or consisted simply of the British sheets with an American (or joint) title page and casing. The English Catalogue is especially helpful since it provides, from 1800 on, the month, as well as the year, of publication for each book and since it has generally been cumulated quinquennially.[47] The whole area of the relation between English and American publication dates (for both English and American works) needs to be investigated, as David Randall has tantalizingly implied by entering American publication dates in his catalogue of the Lilly Library exhibition (1963) of books on the Grolier List.

For the first of these periods, since the function of printer and publisher was not always distinct, publishing history is almost identical with typographical history. Papers and records of colonial printers do not, as a rule, survive (though there are occasional documents like the Franklin & Hall account book at the New York Public), and printers' catalogues of publications for this period are scarce (though Franklin, Hugh Gaine, Samuel Hall, and others did issue them). The index to Evans can be used to establish a basic list for a given printer, one that

may then be supplemented by reference not only to other lists of early imprints but to contemporary newspapers. The printer who published a newspaper was likely to advertise his own books prominently, and booksellers' notices also appeared regularly. Though the latter will probably not contain names of printers, they are useful for approximating publication dates of particular titles and sometimes for ascertaining prices. For example, John Mein inserted extensive lists of books for sale in his shop in the Boston Chronicle, which was published by Mein & Fleeming.[48] Kneeland & Green's announcements in their own paper, the New England Weekly Journal, are another case in point—as when they say, on 4 April 1738, that "In a few Days will be Published" an Essay Concerning Silver and Paper Currency and then report, on 11 April, that the Essay "This Day is Published." One does not, however, expect great accuracy in these notices: the same paper announced Eliphalet Adams' Sermon . . . on . . . the Execution of Katherine Garret as "Just Published" on 4 July and again on 18 July. Nevertheless, when the Massachusetts Gazette, on 24 November 1786, lists a new edition of Webster's Spelling Book (for sale by Peter Edes and John Boyle) as "this day published," one does at least have a rough indication of the time of publication. But more advertisements, unfortunately, will be for runaway slaves or tea than for books. Reviews may occasionally furnish needed information about a work, but much of the time the reviewing was not extensive enough to be a substantial guide nor prompt enough to be useful for dating. Reminiscences are scanty, too, but there are the journals of Hugh Gaine or Franklin's Autobiography to provide some insight into the workings of the book trade and printing establishments at the time.[49]

The next period, 1790-1870, offers more materials for investigation. If the papers of publishers are not exactly plentiful for these years, they are much fuller than for the preceding period—the Lea & Febiger Papers in the Pennsylvania Historical Society, further Carey papers in the American Antiquarian Society along with the Isaiah Thomas material, the Fields Papers at Huntington, the Dix & Edwards Papers and

the Ticknor Papers at Harvard, the large collection of papers concerning the publishing industry in the Harvard Baker Library[50] —and our two published cost books, of Carey & Lea and Ticknor & Fields, pertain to this time. The practice of binding catalogues or announcements into the backs of published volumes became widespread (thus preserving many which would otherwise be lost), and their very usefulness, occasionally, in distinguishing between printings of a book is also indicative of their value as a guide to the chronology of an imprint. Advertisements are still a help, but once the boundary of 1790 is crossed the copyright ledger books of the district courts offer a possible source of corroboration. The fact that Royall Tyler's The Contrast, for example, was advertised as "just published" in the Massachusetts Centinel for 22 May 1790 brings one at least to the vicinity of the publication date —supported by the copyright entry in the Pennsylvania district court record book on 15 June 1790. As the century moved on, the proliferation of magazines and newspapers which reviewed books, like the Knickerbocker, Democratic Review, Burton's, Graham's, Atlantic Monthly, Scribner's, and Broadway Journal, provides further possibilities for checking dates. The first publication of "The Raven" in book form can thus be pushed back as far as April 1845, since Vandenhoff's Plain System of Elocution, in which it appeared, was reviewed in the New York Weekly News on April 19.[51] Of course, the whole perplexed copyright situation at this time must be taken into account in any explanation of a publisher's decisions.[52] A good source of technical information for mid-century is Jacob Abbott's The Harper Establishment (1855). And the reminiscences of publishers or their friends are always worth consulting—especially such storehouses of information as Joseph T. Buckingham's Personal Memoirs and Recollections of an Editorial Life (1852), J. C. Derby's Fifty Years Among Authors, Books, and Publishers (1884), John W. Moore's Historical, Biographical, and Miscellaneous Gatherings . . . Relative to Printers, Printing, Publishing and Editing . . . (1886), Samuel G. Goodrich's Recollections of a Lifetime (1857), and James T. Fields' Yesterdays with Authors (1871) and Biographical Notes and Personal Sketches (1881). Douglas McMurtrie has reprinted (1929) Henry Lemoine's Present State of Printing and Bookselling in America (1796), and Mathew Carey's Autobiography (1829) has been reissued (1942). Less well-known memoirs can be turned up, too, like Walter Carter's Autobiography and Reminiscence (1907), Uriel Crocker's Memorial (1891), John C. Holbrook's Recollections of a Nonagenarian (1897), or Hubert H. Bancroft's Literary Industries (1891), and an important series of 41 reminiscences of American publishers appeared in the New York Evening Post between November 1874 and September 1875. To the extent that booksellers in the earlier years more nearly performed the promotional function of the publisher than the printer did, one may find much relevant information in book-trade directories of a given area, especially the retrospective ones issued by the New York Public Library.[53]

The really distinguishing feature, however, about this period is the great number of retrospective lists of regional imprints that are continually being made available. To be sure, for the Atlantic coast the checklists of early imprints take one back into the preceding period and for some western states take one up as far as 1890, but in general one can say that the bulk of this work has dealt with the first three quarters of the nineteenth century. The undisputed dean of regional imprint recording was Douglas C. McMurtrie, who had issued checklists of imprints for Chicago (1836-50), Colorado (1859-76), Louisiana (1764-1810), Maine (1792-1820), Michigan (1796-1850), South Carolina (1731-40), Tennessee (1793-1830), Utah (1849-60), and Wisconsin (1833-50), in addition to numerous briefer studies of imprints, between 1927 and 1935, before the work of the American Imprints

Inventory began. He was the natural choice as director of that phase of the WPA's Historical Records Survey. Between 1936 and 1942, under his leadership, with a central office in Chicago, the Imprints Inventory brought out 37 checklists which cover early printing in Alabama (1807-40), Arizona (1860-90), Arkansas (1821-76), California (1833-55), Chicago (1851-71), Florida (1784-1860), Idaho (1839-90), Iowa (1838-60), Kansas (1854-76), Kentucky (1787-1820), Massachusetts (1801-02), Michigan (1796-1850), Minnesota (1849-65), Missouri (1808-50), Nebraska (1847-76), Nevada (1859-90), New Jersey (1784-1800), New Mexico (1784-1876), Ohio (1796-1820), Tennessee (1793-1850), Washington (1853-76), West Virginia (1791-1830), Wisconsin (1833-63), and Wyoming (1866-90).[54] These lists represent the work of 2000 staff members who amassed fifteen million slips by searching 5000 libraries; the original intention was to record all pioneer imprints to 1876 (when the American Catalogue began)—or to 1890 in eight western states—but the project was unfinished at the time the WPA terminated. Four later volumes growing out of the Inventory have appeared under the auspices of the Bibliographical Society of America: the Dakotas (1858-89) and Arkansas (1821-76), edited by Albert H. Allen in 1947; Rhode Island (1727-1800) by John E. Alden in 1949; and Oklahoma (1835-90) by Lester Hargrett in 1951. McMurtrie himself also continued to issue volumes separately from the WPA series, such as those for Chicago (1835-50), Indiana (1804-49), Mississippi (1798-1830), Montana (1864-80), North Carolina (1749-1800), North Dakota (1874-90), Oregon (1847-70), and a number of New York towns. In addition, he had a few distinguished forerunners, such as Charles R. Hildeburn on Pennsylvania, 1685-1784 (1885), Stephen B. Weeks on North Carolina (1890), J. H. Trumbull on Connecticut, 1709-1800 (1904), and Lawrence C. Wroth on Maryland, 1686-1776 (1922); and, since 1935, several other states have found able recorders, notably Alabama (1807-70), California (1833-62), Maine (1785-1820), Maryland again (1777-1810), South Carolina, Tennessee (1861-66), and Texas (1795-1860), along with work on Vermont (to 1820) and West Virginia (to 1863).[55] Since 1950, students in the Department of Library Science at the Catholic University of America have turned out over forty regional imprint lists as theses, covering Connecticut (1801-10), Delaware (1801-62), Maine (1821-35), Maryland (1811-76), Michigan (1851-55), Mississippi (1831-40), North Carolina (1801-20, 1866-76), Rhode Island (1821-50), and a number of cities and other areas.[56]

Though far from complete, and published in a maddeningly inconvenient way, these imprint records furnish our most reliable guides to the publications of this period and should always be consulted in addition to the considerably less trustworthy Roorbach and Kelly. When indexed by imprint, they can be used (like Evans) to establish a basic list for a given firm. The essential difference, however, between the recording of imprints and research into the history of publishing should be borne in mind. The student of imprints is interested in the development and spread of printing; the student of publishing history is concerned partly with printing, but also with the economic factors entering into relations with authors, public taste, book distribution, and the like. The distinction between printing and publishing, important for all periods, becomes so pronounced during this period that the recording of imprints by locality can be no substitute for the further analysis of imprints by publisher. Imprint recording has been pursued industriously and has provided raw material for the historian of publishing, but it in no way reduces his obligation to rearrange that material in other patterns which reveal other kinds of significance.