 | |  |
III
Since my own recent work has been concerned with publishing in the third of these periods, the years since 1870, I should like to comment on the available materials in somewhat greater detail and
Of the three chief tools for the period, two began in the early 1870's (both originating in the office of Frederick Leypoldt), and it is their indispensability which largely justifies dating this third methodological period from their inception. One is the Publishers' Trade List Annual, a device for making permanently accessible the yearly catalogues of nearly all publishers. Its basic purpose is obviously to make current catalogues conveniently available to booksellers, but the accumulation of non-current volumes on library shelves is a great boon to the student of publishing, who would otherwise have to contact the individual publishers he was concerned with, only to find, perhaps, that the ephemeral catalogues for various years had disappeared from the files. Most publishers of any significance have inserted their annual catalogue of publications in PTLA, and those who issued only a few titles in a given year often have a portion of a page in a special indexed supplementary section. In the early years there was an index and then the Publishers' Weekly annual list as well, but by the late 1880's the index was abandoned, to be revived only in 1902-04 before the inauguration in 1948 of Books in Print; in the 1890's the PW list was also discontinued as duplicative, so that the Annual by the turn of the century had evolved into its present form, consisting only of publishers' catalogues. The practice certain publishers have had of listing even their out-of-print books, as well as their forthcoming publications, makes this work the obvious and basic tool for research on a firm's output; the difficulties encountered in establishing the list for a publisher who did not submit his catalogues (such as Samuel French in the 1870's or Mitchell Kennerley for most of the period of his firm's existence) is testimony of the degree to which the information in this work is both essential and taken for granted.
Since a publisher's intentions, as reflected in his catalogues, do not always coincide with the facts as they turn out, one must therefore have recourse to the second of these tools, Publishers' Weekly. Established in January 1872 as the Publishers' and Stationers' Weekly Trade Circular, and changing its name to Publishers' Weekly on 2 January 1873, it is the chief source of book-trade news as well as of weekly lists of new publications. At first called "Order List of Books Just Published or Forthcoming" (arranged by publisher), this weekly list became, by mid-February 1872, the "Alphabetical List of Books Just Published" (by author), followed by an "Order List" (by publisher), and, by 18 August 1877, simply the "Weekly Record." From the beginning, the first issue of each month carried an "Alphabetical Reference List" of all books listed during the preceding month (with reference to the week of full listing), and sometimes these lists were placed together as an annual record, though the usual annual record through 1885 was an author and title index to publishers' summaries of their output (and each publisher was urged to make his first advertisement each year a complete list of the preceding year's publications). In 1887, however, the last January issue contained a full annual list (for 1886) with reference to the full weekly listing of each title, a feature that continued through January 1911 (for 1910). The "Order List," a rearrangement of each week's listing by publisher (and of obvious value to the student of publishing) was discontinued with the issue of 1 February 1908. Though not handled consistently, the years 1900 through 1911 generally had quarterly cumulations as well as monthly and annual ones—that is, the April issue would list, not simply books of March, but those of the first three months of the year; July would contain a six-month cumulation; and October would put together the publications of July, August, and September.[57] But after October 1911 there were no more quarterly cumulations, only monthly; and the monthly lists ended with December 1918 (in January 1919). These cumulations—whether annual (through 1910), quarterly (through
The third main tool, the Catalogue of Copyright Entries, has already been described. But one should remember the significance of entries both in it and in Publishers' Weekly—particularly since some scholars have used one or the other as direct and reliable evidence of publication dates. A book may not actually appear until long after the publication date given in the copyright record, or it may be out (in some cases) long before its entry in Publishers' Weekly. Both records are quite accurate, as much as it is in their power to be, but everything depends on the habits of the publishers. One publisher may never meet his announced publication dates; another may always meet them. One may not get his books delivered to the office of Publishers' Weekly promptly (and then deliver a large batch at one time); another may have them sent immediately upon publication. Disagreements among scholars as to the relative reliability of these records have usually arisen from the relative promptness and efficiency of the publishers on whom they were working.[58]
It is possible to construct a fairly efficient procedure, based on the nature of these tools, for establishing a chronological catalogue of a given firm's output. Such a procedure would consist, basically, of four steps. First, one should check the catalogues of the firm (for every year of its existence) in the Publishers' Trade List Annual, making a card for every title listed and keeping a record in one corner of each card
This much accomplished, one's second stop should be at the English Catalogue shelf. The arrangement there is alphabetical by author in five-year cumulations. One can tell from the first date recorded on each card the probable publication year, and one simply starts through the cards checking each title that falls within the span of the English Catalogue volume for the earliest years of the firm's existence. For each of these titles published in England, one should record the publisher and month and year of publication (and perhaps the number of pages, a rough clue—later—to whether or not the English and American sheets are identical). Any good catalogue of an American imprint must contain information about English publication and its relation to the American publication by the firm involved, and this information might as well be entered on the cards while they are in alphabetical order. If the cards falling within each volume of the English Catalogue are separated from the others after being checked, one not only will be sure of having checked all the cards but will have them arranged alphabetically within five-year groupings. It is true, of
The third stage of this process, for publishers after 1891 (and especially after 1906), is a search of the Catalogue of Copyright Entries; for publishers in the two preceding decades this step must of necessity be omitted, but in those cases some attempt should be made to secure copyright information directly from the Copyright Office. One starts through the cards again, this time checking the titles for any one year in the index to the appropriate annual volume and entering the index numbers (in use through 1945, as described above) on the cards. Any copyrighted work will be listed under its author, but any work copyrighted in the name of the publisher will be entered also (through 1938) under his name; it is therefore simpler to check the authors' names first, so long as one does not fail to glance at the publisher's listing before leaving the index, to make sure that no books are recorded here which were not announced in the publisher's catalogues and for which one thus has no card. The cards are then arranged by index-numbers, the index-numbers looked up, and further data placed on the cards: accurate title-page information, number of pages, size, price (sometimes), official date of publication, date of deposit of copies, date of affidavit, and name of copyright holder. Naturally one checks the unlocated items, as before, in the next succeeding volume. At this stage one's cards are roughly in chronological order according to copyright (publication) date.
The fourth round takes one to Publishers' Weekly, where one's task is lighter or heavier depending on the kind of cumulations made in the years involved (as explained above). In any case one's job is to locate the "Weekly Record" in which each title is listed. If the year is one with an annual cumulation, the work is relatively painless; if it is one without even monthly cumulations, it is indeed exasperating, but the chronological arrangement of the cards offers some guidance. For the years before 1908, with the weekly "Order List," one can search each issue without great effort and should certainly do it, as a further check on the possibility of previously unnoticed titles. The date of the
Unless one is particularly fortunate, however, the process does not operate quite this smoothly, and one will usually end up with a number of problem cards—titles found in the publisher's catalogues or advertisements and nowhere else, or titles first encountered in the copyright record or in Publishers' Weekly but seemingly never announced by the publisher. In the first of these cases, one may suspect that the books were announced by the publisher but never actually issued; still, one cannot be sure, since the works may not have been copyrighted and may not have been sent to the Publishers' Weekly office for record. So one begins searching for evidence of their existence—in the Library of Congress Catalogue, American Catalogue, United States Catalog, or CBI. If the LC catalogue has the book with the desired imprint, the question is answered; if not, but one of the other three has it, one must be wary. Unlike the copyright record, entries in those catalogues are not proof of a book's existence. The H. W. Wilson Company in the early years made a careful attempt to examine every book listed (a more attainable goal then than later), but in some cases it had to rely on information requested from a publisher (though never simply from his catalogue);[60] the publisher could report a book as "almost ready"
The second possibility—that a certain title is found in Publishers' Weekly or the copyright record but not in the publisher's announcements—is less serious, for if it is in the copyright record, it definitely once existed, even if no large library seems to have it today. If the source of the title is only the Publishers' Weekly, one must be more cautious. Entries in the "Weekly Record" are generally made from the books themselves, but sometimes they are not (in these cases there is fortunately an indication that the book has not been seen). An illustration of the problem this situation can create involves Jean Parke's Psalms of the Heart Restored. Because the book was listed in Publishers' Weekly for 8 November 1919 as published by Scott & Seltzer, I had assumed it to be the first book bearing the imprint of this short-lived partnership, though I did wonder why it was not listed in the Scott & Seltzer catalogue. The book is not in the Library of Congress, but I came across it in a bookshop and discovered that it bears the imprint of Temple Scott alone. While Publishers' Weekly transcribes from title pages if a book is at hand, the listing does serve the purpose of telling book dealers where a book can be ordered, and a firm's new
To compile a catalogue of an imprint, as this procedure illustrates, one must extract from the basic tools a category of information which they are not designed to yield up easily. The whole process, of course, has assumed that the publisher's own records are not available; but, even if they are, the same steps should be followed, both as a check on errors or omissions in them and as a source for information which they will usually not contain. The principal facts which only the publisher's files can supply are the dates of later printings (unless one can secure a late copy with a printing record on the verso of the title page) and the size of each printing. For the post-1870 period the papers of a great many publishers are still in their own offices. The appearance of the useful American Literary Manuscripts in 1960 revealed that at least Bobbs-Merrill, Longmans Green, McGraw-Hill, Norton, Prentice-Hall, and Viking have important holdings for the study of relations between literary authors and their publishers, but not all firms are desirous of being turned into research libraries (or even of having their papers housed in one), as the recent dispersal of material by Appleton-Century-Crofts demonstrates. If the records of some of the smaller firms of this period have perished through neglect, there is an increasing desire on the part of the libraries, vying in the manuscripts race, to acquire what remaining documents there are, while it is still possible. The Bentley Papers at Illinois, though not of an American house, are a case in point, as are the Henry Holt Papers at Princeton.[61] The New York Public Library has a number of important manuscript collections for this period, especially of the Century
As with the other categories of materials, there are far more (and far more useful) volumes of reminiscences for this period than for any previous one. The huge, basic books are Joseph Henry Harper's The House of Harper (1912) and I Remember (1934), George Haven Putnam's Memories of a Publisher (1915), George Palmer Putnam: A Memoir (1912), and Authors and Publishers (1897), George P. Putnam's Wide Margins (1942), George H. Doran's Chronicles of Barabbas (1935),[62] Henry Holt's Garrulities of an Octogenarian Editor (1923), and Walter Hines Page's A Publisher's Confession (1905) and Life and Letters (1925). Publishers of magazines have frequently furnished some of the best views of the publishing world, as L. Frank Tooker in The Joys and Tribulations of an Editor (1924), S. S. McClure in My Autobiography (1914), John Adams Thayer in Astir: A Publisher's Life Story (1910), and Edward Bok in The Americanization of Edward Bok (1920). But there are many other important firsthand accounts, among which the most revealing are Ferris Greenslet's Under the Bridge (1943), William W. Ellsworth's A Golden Age of Authors (1919), George Terry Dunlap's The Fleeting Years (1937), Robert Barrie's My Log (1917), John Barnes Pratt's Personal Recollections (1942), Theodore Bliss' Publisher and Bookseller (1941),
One other related category consists of the commemorative volumes issued by various firms to celebrate their anniversaries. Some of these are quite distinguished, like the 1899 and the 1905-06 Houghton Mifflin volumes, Appleton-Century-Crofts' Fruit Among the Leaves (1950), and Knopf's Borzoi 1920 and Borzoi 1925, while others are nothing more than pamphlets presenting a brief sketch of a firm's history; but whether they represent staff hackwork or considerable research by a signed author (such as Roger Burlingame's histories of Scribner's and McGraw-Hill, Grant Overton's of Appleton, Charles Morgan's of Macmillan, or Quentin Reynolds' of Street & Smith),[66] there is an enormous array of them,[67] and they often can provide a starting point for further work. At any rate, the problem for the post-1870
If the emphasis in this discussion has been on publishing historiography as the construction of documented publishers' catalogues, I have not meant to imply that there are no other important areas of investigation. Mention of publishers' reminiscences and of correspondence with authors suggests in itself some of the relations between the history of publishing and the cultural, political, and economic conditions prevailing at any particular time. Moreover, a thorough picture of publishing cannot fail to notice publishers of periodicals as well as of books. Publishers and editors of avant-garde magazines, in Greenwich Village, say, in the 1910's, offered important outlets for writers, existing side by side with experimental publishers of books and occupying an important place in the publishing scene; similarly, the full story of American publishing will deal with the pioneer newspaper publishers and editors of each locality, who often served a large group of people as its sole publisher and symbol of the publishing world. Some book publishers, like Fields or Harper or Huebsch, established important periodicals, but other magazines of great significance for literary and intellectual history, like the Port Folio or McClure's or the Little Review, are important in their own right as forces in publishing and deserve to have their stories told as part of publishing history.[68] As for newspapers, certainly there is no dearth of memoirs by pioneering editors, waiting to be utilized and the data incorporated into larger patterns of frontier publishing.[69] Another area which constitutes a
The emphasis here, as I say, has been on the detailed history of individual imprints. It should be a truism, but apparently is not, that a knowledge of the lists of individual publishers underlies all broader investigations into publishing history. Generalizations about the out-put of any publisher, about the characteristics of publishers in any period, or about the trends in American publishing from one period to another, must begin there. When George Parker Winship, forty years ago, was surveying the scholarship of American printing history, he felt obliged to defend the calling of bibliography:
| | |