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Notes
English Institute Essays 1949 (1950), pp. 73-91. Charles Fenton has more recently expressed a similar point of view in "The Lost Years of Twentieth-Century American Literature," SAQ, LIX (1960), 332-338; he says that English departments should offer more courses which provide opportunities for "an unhurried investigation of the history of American publishing houses, the role of editors and literary agents, and the nature of literary art in a democracy" (p. 338). It has also been nearly twenty-five years since Rollo G. Silver, in "Problems in Nineteenth-Century Bibliography," PBSA, XXXV (1941), 35-47, pointed out the need for lists of imprints of every publishing firm (p. 45).
Examples are J. Albert Robbins, "Fees Paid to Authors by Certain American Periodicals," SB, II (1949-50), 95-104; B. W. Korn, "Benjamin Levy: New Orleans Printer and Publisher," PBSA, LIV (1960), 221-264; William Charvat, "Melville and the Common Reader," SB, XII (1958), 41-57.— It should be emphasized, at the outset, that the footnotes in the present essay do not attempt to provide an exhaustive checklist of relevant material, a task impossible in many times the space; rather, they aim at presenting a representative sampling of the various approaches which have been used in research on American publishing and of the various types of materials available.
Blagden, The Stationers' Company (1960); Blunden, Keats's Publisher (1936); Gettmann, A Victorian Publisher: A Study of the Bentley Papers (1960); Mumby, Publishing and Bookselling (1930; rev. 1954). The American titles will be referred to below. Other well-known British studies are Ralph Straus, The Unspeakable Curll (1927); Dorothy Blakey, The Minerva Press (1939); E. V. Lucas, Charles Lamb and the Lloyds (1898); Falconer Madan, Oxford Books (1895-1931); Stanley Morison, John Bell (1930); F. A. Mumby, The House of Routledge (1934); Marjorie Plant, The English Book Trade (1939). Three other famous British books, useful for American studies as well, are Stanley Unwin's The Truth About Publishing (1926), Michael Joseph's The Commercial Side of Literature (1925), and Grant Richards' Author Hunting (1934).
The most inclusive is Hellmut Lehmann-Haupt, with Lawrence C. Wroth and Rollo G. Silver, The Book in America (rev. 1951). Earlier attempts to cover this ground were made by Isaiah Thomas himself in his History of Printing in America (2nd ed., 1874), J. C. Oswald in Printing in the Americas (1937), and Douglas C. McMurtrie in what would have been the most comprehensive of all, A History of Printing in the United States (but only volume II, on the middle Atlantic and southern states, was published, in 1936). The principal short survey is E. L. Bradsher, "Book Publishers and Publishing," in Cambridge History of American Literature, III (1921), 533-553; and a useful assemblage of material is Henry W. Boynton's Annals of American Bookselling 1638-1850 (1932). Though the influence of binding on sales and types of literature produced has not been sufficiently explored, an invaluable work is Bookbinding in America (1941), by Hellmut Lehmann-Haupt, Hannah D. French, and Joseph W. Rogers.
Work on Franklin begins with the pioneer effort of that industrious and notable American bibliographer, Charles R. Hildeburn, in A Century of Printing: The Issues of the Press of Pennsylvania 1685-1784 (2 vols., 1885-86); it continues with L. S. Livingston's Franklin and His Press at Passy (1914), J. C. Oswald's Benjamin Franklin, Printer (1917), William J. Campbell's Short-title Checklist of Franklin Imprints (1918), and the work of Randolph G. Adams; and it is now being carried on by C. William Miller, in such articles as "Franklin's Type: Its Study Past and Present," Proc. Am. Philos. Soc., XC (1955), 418-432, and "Benjamin Franklin's Philadelphia Type," SB, XI (1958), 179-206. A recent Drexel Institute Master's thesis, by C. P. Crowers, took up the "History of the Franklin Printing Company, Philadelphia, 1728-1954" (1954). The Stephen Daye press has been treated most frequently in discussions of the Bay Psalm Book and Eilot's Indian Bible—see especially George Parker Winship, The Cambridge Press 1638-1692 (1945); but its history and list of publications are given in R. F. Roden, The Cambridge Press 1638-1692 (1905), George E. Littlefield, The Early Massachusetts Press 1638-1711 (1907), and Lawrence G. Starkey's 1949 Virginia dissertation, "A Descriptive and Analytical Bibliography of the Cambridge Press" (also SB, II, 79-93; III, 267-270). The Grolier Club in 1893 issued a Catalogue of the William Bradford press (see also H. L. Bullen's account of the Bradfords in the Americana Collector in 1926 and J. A. Gallagher's 1930 study). Lawrence Wroth has told the story of William Parks (1926) and has listed the issues of his press.
For example, Dorothy L. Hawkins, "James Adams, the First Printer of Delaware," PBSA, XXVIII (1934), 28-63; Bradford F. Swan, "The First Printing in Providence [William Goddard]," in Essays Honoring Lawrence C. Wroth (1951), pp. 365-369;—or, later, Lota Spell, "Samuel Bangs: The First Printer in Texas," Southwest Historical Quarterly, XXXV (1932), 267-278.
Wroth, The Colonial Printer (rev. 1938) and Part I of Lehmann-Haupt (1951), pp. 3-59 (as well as works like Abel Buell of Connecticut [1926]); McMurtrie, A History of Printing in the United States (1936); Silver, many articles such as "Financing the Publication of Early New England Sermons," SB, XI (1957), 163-178, and "Publishing in Boston 1726-1757: The Accounts of Daniel Henchman," Proc. Am. Antiq. Soc., LXVI (1956), 17-36, and (with Wroth) the second part of Lehmann-Haupt (pp. 63-136).
Such as John T. Winterich's Early American Books and Printing (1935), Samuel A. Green's Remarks on the Early History of Printing in New England (1897), Charles R. Hildeburn's Sketches of Printers and Printing in Colonial New York (1895).
The imprint records are discussed below in connection with a later period, but of course those listing the earliest imprints for all the Atlantic coast states and for Louisiana and Kentucky do concern the pre-1790 period.
Lists of the issues of a few other presses have appeared; examples are Carl J. Weber, "Portland Printer [Benjamin Titcomb, Jr.]," in In Tribute to Fred Anthoensen (1952), pp. 3-16; and R. W. G. Vail, "A Patriotic Pair of Peripatetic Printers: The Up-State Imprints of John Holt and Samuel Loudon 1776-83," in Essays Honoring Lawrence C. Wroth (1951), pp. 391-422. And some studies of these printers mentioned have appeared—as Rollo G. Silver, "Benjamin Edes, Trumpter of Sedition," PBSA, XLVII (1953), 248-268.
Shipton, Isaiah Thomas (1948); Bradsher, Mathew Carey, Editor, Author and Publisher: A Study in American Literary Development (1912); Wroth, Parson Weems (1911); Kaser, Messrs. Carey & Lea of Philadelphia (1957) and The Cost Book of Carey & Lea 1825-1838 (1963). In addition, see E. S. Bradley, Henry Charles Lea (1931). Thomas has also been treated by Annie Russell Marble, From 'Prentice to Patron (1935), and Charles L. Nichols, Isaiah Thomas (1912), which contains a checklist of imprints, pp. 37-144. Other material about Carey appears in K. W. Rowe, Mathew Carey (1933), Rollo G. Silver, "Matthew Carey's Proofreaders," SB, XVII (1964), 123-133, and David Randall, "Waverley in America," Colophon, n.s. I (1935), 39-55; and Chester T. Hallenbeck draws largely on Carey to illustrate "Book-Trade Publicity Before 1800," PBSA, XXXII (1938), 47-56. E. E. F. Skeel edited the bibliography and letters of Weems (3 vols., 1929).
Charvat, Literary Publishing in America 1790-1850 (1959); Sheehan, This Was Publishing (1952); Stern, Imprints on History (1956). Miss Stern has also written on the colorful wife of Frank Leslie in Purple Passage (1953). Studies of lesser publishers of this period are Luke M. White, Jr., Henry William Herbert and the American Publishing Scene, 1831-1858 (1943), David S. Edelstein, Joel Munsell (1950), and David Kaser, Joseph Charless (1963).
Tryon and Charvat, The Cost Books of Ticknor and Fields . . . 1832-1858 (1949); Tryon, Parnassus Corner: A Life of James T. Fields, Publisher to the Victorians (1963), "Book Distribution in Mid-Nineteenth Century America," PBSA, XLI (1947), 210-230, and two articles on the distribution of Ticknor & Fields books in the South (Journal of Southern History, XIV [1948], 305-330) and the Northwest (MVHR, XXXIV [1948], 589-610); Charvat, "James T. Fields and the Beginnings of Book Promotion 1840-1855," HLQ, VIII (1944), 75-94; Austin, Fields of The Atlantic Monthly (1953); Weber, The Rise and Fall of James Ripley Osgood (1959). Letters from Hawthorne and Lowell to Fields are in AL, XXIII (1951), 360-362, and HLQ, XV (1951), 73-86.
Sutton, The Western Book Trade: Cincinnati as a Nineteenth-Century Publishing and Book-Trade Center (1961). See also Alvin Fay Harlow, The Serene Cincinnatians (1950).
Such as J. H. Shera on Oxford, Ohio (1827-41), in Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Quarterly, XLIV (1935), 103-137; Theodore Vonnegut, Indianapolis Booksellers and Their Literary Background 1822-60 (1926); R. M. Miller, "A Brief History of the World Publishing Company, Cleveland, Ohio," Western Reserve thesis (1957).
C. Harvey Gardiner, Prescott and His Publishers (1959). Other similar studies are Clarence Gohdes, "Longfellow and His Authorized British Publishers," PMLA, LV (1940), 1165-1179; Robert F. Metzdorf, "The Publishing History of Richard Henry Dana's Two Years Before the Mast," HLB, VII (1953), 312-332; Walter Harding, "A Sheaf of Whitman Letters," SB, V (1952), 203-210; L. T. Dickinson, "Marketing a Best Seller: Mark Twain's Innocents Abroad," PBSA, XLI (1947), 107-122; C. William Miller, "Letters from Thomas White of Virginia to Scott and Dickens," in Fredson Bowers (ed.), English Studies in Honor of James Southall Wilson (1951), pp. 67-71.
Raymond H. Shove, in Cheap Book Production in the United States 1870 to 1891 (1937; M.A. thesis at the Illinois Library School, 1936), treats such publishers as John W. Lovell, George Munro, J. S. Ogilvie, Aldine Publishing Co., Belford, Clarke, & Co. Herndon's dealings with Belford, Clarke are taken up in David Donald, "The True Story of Herndon's Lincoln," New Colophon, I (1948), 221-234.
Johannsen, The House of Beadle & Adams (3 vols., 1950-62). There has been considerable interest in this subject: Edmund Pearson, Dime Novels (1929); John L. Cutler, Gilbert Patten (1934); "The Beadle Collection," BNYPL, XXVI (1922), 555-628; Merle Curti, "Dime Novels and the American Tradition," Yale Review, n.s. XXVI (1936), 761-778; Ralph Admari's articles in ABC in 1933-34; "Iowa Dime Novels," Palimpsest, XXX (1949), 169-208.
Kilgour, Messrs. Roberts Brothers Publishers (1952) and Estes & Lauriat: A History 1872-1898 (1957). Samuel Charles Webster, Mark Twain, Business Man (1946); Tom Burnham, "Mark Twain and the Paige Typesetter," WHR, VI (1952), 29-36; H. L. Hill, Jr., "The American Publishing Company and the Writings of Mark Twain, 1867-1880," University of Chicago thesis (1959).
Kramer, History of Stone & Kimball and Herbert S. Stone & Co., . . . 1893-1905 (1940). See also John T. Flanagan, "Hamlin Garland Writes to His Publisher," AL, XXIII (1952), 447-457.
Joe Walker Kraus, "A History of Copeland & Day (1893-1899) with a Bibliographical Checklist of Their Publications" (Illinois M.A. thesis, 1941), 151 pp. See also his article on this firm in Publishers' Weekly, CXLI (21 March 1942), 1168-1171.
For example, Jack C. Morris' work on S. C. Griggs (1848-96) and McClurg (1872-1900) of Chicago (thesis, 1941), Charles H. McMullen's thesis on Robert Clarke (1858-1909) in 1940, Marjorie Stafford's "Subscription Book Publishing in the United States 1865-1930" (thesis, 1943), Rolland E. Stevens' "The Open Court Publishing Company 1887-1919" (thesis, 1943), D. P. O'Harra's "Book Publishing in the United States 1860-1901" (thesis, 1928), and term papers on "Publishers of Reprint Books" (1930) and (fairly widely circulated) "Brief Studies of General Book Publishing Firms of the United States" (1931).
Keith G. Huntress, "Thomas Bird Mosher: A Bibliographical and Literary Study" (Illinois Ph.D. dissertation, 1942). For Mosher, there does exist a 1914 catalogue, The Mosher Books: A List, with an introduction by Richard LeGallienne. See also James D. Van Trump and Arthur P. Ziegler, Jr., "Thomas Bird Mosher: Publisher and Pirate," Book Collector, XI (1962), 295-312.
John Lane and the Nineties (1936). See also Katherine L. Mix, A Study in Yellow (1960), and E. L. Casford, The Magazines of the 1890's (1929).
The story of McClure alone, especially his magazine activity, has recently been told by Peter Lyon in Success Story (1963).
Will Ransom, Private Presses and Their Books (1929) and Selective Check Lists of Press Books (1945-50). See also Ransom's articles in Publishers' Weekly in 1927 and 1928, and Irwin Haas, "A Periodical Bibliography of Private Presses," BB, XV (1934), 46-50 (and a later separate publication, 1937). Important volumes on individual presses include Thomas and Amy Larremore, The Marion Press (1943); Walter Gilliss, Recollections of the Gilliss Press (1926); Melbert B. Cary, Jr., A Bibliography of the Village Press (1938); George Parker Winship, Daniel Berkeley Updike and the Merrymount Press (1947).
Frank Luther Mott, Golden Multitudes (1947); Alice P. Hackett, Fifty Years of Best Sellers (1945); James D. Hart, The Popular Book (1950).
Chester Kerr, A Report on American University Presses (1949); Eleanor Harman (ed.), The University as Publisher (1961); Robert F. Lane, The Place of American University Presses in Publishing (1942).
Charles Lee, "The Book-of-the-Month Club: The Story of a Publishing Institution," University of Pennsylvania thesis (1955); an earlier basic account is Adolph Growoll, American Book Clubs (1897).
Examples are Paul L. Knapp's Illinois Master's thesis (1942) on the history of the publication of American physics books; T. B. Lawler, Seventy Years of Textbook Publishing (Ginn, 1938); John Lawler, The H. W. Wilson Company (1950); E. M. Fleming, R. R. Bowker (1952); Laurence F. Schmeckebier, The Government Printing Office (1925); LeRoy C. Merritt, The United States Government as Publisher (1943).
Frank E. Woodward, A Graphic Survey of Book Production 1890-1916 (1917); Orion H. Cheney, Economic Survey of the Book Industry (1931); William Miller, The Book Industry (1949); Frank L. Schick (ed.), Trends in American Book Publishing (1958); Chandler B. Grannis (ed.), What Happens in Book Publishing (1957); Basil Woon, The Current Publishing Scene (1952). Frank L. Schick, The Paperback Book in America (1958); cf. R. R. Hertel, "The Decline of the Paperbound Novel in America 1890-1910," University of Illinois thesis (1958). A further important source of such information is the official Census Report on manufactures for various years; see also John G. Glover and William B. Cornell (eds.), The Development of American Industries (3rd ed., 1951).
I should perhaps point out that I am currently preparing studies and catalogues of the firms mentioned in these two sentences.
Willard O. Waters, "American Imprints, 1648-1797, in the Huntington Library, Supplementing Evans' 'American Bibliography,'" Huntington Library Bulletin, no. 3 (1933), 1-95. A more recent supplementary list is the one by Lewis M. Stark and Maud D. Cole (NYPL, 1960); Roger P. Bristol is preparing the comprehensive list of such additions.
The explanation of the changes in scope is made in the last volume, XXIX (1936), ix-xi. Another similar work is the Elihu Dwight Church Catalogue, edited by G. W. Cole (5 vols., 1907).
The story of the evolution of these journals is told in LeRoy Harold Linder, The Rise of Current Complete National Bibliography (1959), pp. 129-144; Linder takes up all the attempts at American national bibliography, pp. 95-101, 127-155, 173-186, 211-217. The standard historical survey of this area is Adolph Growoll, Book Trade Bibliography in the United States in the Nineteenth Century (1898; reprinted 1939); an extensive list of national bibliographies appears on pp. xxiv-xxxvii—but see also the tabular analysis in Linder, pp. 251-254. Cf. two H. W. Wilson publications, Cumulative Bibliography: A Brief History (1912) and A Quarter Century of Cumulative Bibliography (1923).
Our present, more efficient, replacements for the United States Catalog are Books in Print (1948- ) and Subject Guide to Books in Print (1957- ), which are actually indexes to the annual collection of publishers' catalogues, the Publishers' Trade List Annual. Recently a publication resembling the old American Catalogue, in that it consists of cumulations of the weekly record in Publishers' Weekly, has been started, the American Book Publishing Record (1960- ).
This story has been fully told by Joseph W. Rogers in U. S. National Bibliography and the Copyright Law: An Historical Study (1960). A 28-page pamphlet, covering in summary form some of the same ground, was issued by the Copyright Office: Elizabeth K. Dunne and Joseph W. Rogers, The Catalogue of Copyright Entries (1960). Standard histories of copyright developments are Thorvald Solberg's Copyright in Congress 1789-1904 (1905) and R. R. Bowker's Copyright: Its History and Its Law (1912).
For the later part of the century there does exist a published record in one area, drama: Dramatic Compositions Copyrighted in the United States 1870-1916 (2 vols., 1916, 1918), with its 56,066 entries.
Issued in four parts, of which Part 1, "Books," concerns us here. But Part 1 is divided into two groups (gathered into separate annual volumes, with separate indexes), and the literary scholar should not fail to check both groups: while Group 1, covering published volumes, will be of principal help, Group 2 does contain pamphlets and plays, among other lesser works. (This arrangement changes slightly with the third series in 1947.)
For a useful survey of these copyright record books and an inventory of the ones surviving in the Copyright Office (315 original registers plus 300 more volumes of duplicate clerks' records, totalling about 150,000 entries), see Martin A. Roberts, "Records in the Copyright Office of the Library of Congress Deposited by the United States District Courts, 1790-1870," PBSA, XXXI (1937), 81-101. Though these records are highly important, few of them have been published. Among those few are Virginia Copyright Entries 1790-1844, ed. J. H. Whitty (1911); Norfolk Copyright Entries 1837, 1851-3, 1856-7, 1858-9, 1864, 1866-71, ed. Barbara Harris and J. C. Wyllie (1947); Douglas C. McMurtrie, "Early Illinois Copyright Entries [1821-50]," Chicago Historical Society Bulletin, II (1936-37), 50-61, 92-101; and William L. Jenks, "Michigan Copyrights [1824-29, 1837-70]," Michigan History Magazine, XI (1927), 110-143, 271-287, 445-458, 630-652; XII (1928), 108-124, 584-589, 740-743; XIII (1929), 121-126, 555-559; XIV (1930), 150-155, 311-313. See also Ruth Leonard, "A Bibliographical Evaluation of the Copyright Records for the United States District Court of Massachusetts, 1800-1809," Columbia Master's thesis (1944). Evans used some of this copyright information for the last decade of his coverage: see, for example, entries 33849, 33865, 34377, drawing on the records of Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and New York. Further discussion of those years is in F. R. Goff, "The First Decade of the Federal Act for Copyright," in Essays Honoring Lawrence C. Wroth (1951), pp. 101-128.
Between 1898 and 1901 the index is thorough but not published—it exists on cards in the Copyright Office (though a weekly index of proprietors did appear); from 1898 on, however, the Catalogue contains all the essential information about each entry that is available in the Office records and is thus an effective instrument for search, even though not indexed in its published form until 1901 (quarterly before 1906, annually after).
In fact, the last nine volumes of the second series, 1938-46, are unsatisfactory when compared with the preceding three decades. The form of entry was first abbreviated (by omitting certain facts, like pagination, to be found on the LC cards) in 1938; beginning with 1939 the index contained only authors (making it less useful for work in publishing history); from 1940 on, only the copyright date was given in the entry (not the deposit or affidavit dates); and in 1946 no index numbers were used, though an attempt was made to use LC cards again and give more information. The third series, in expanded format, began in 1947, with entries alphabetical by author (in two alphabets per year) and a title (but no publisher) index; the more recent volumes, however, do incorporate cross-references from the copyright proprietors (including publishers) into the main listing.
The significance of these items is not explained clearly in the Catalogue itself; the information in this paragraph is from a letter to me from Mr. Richard S. MacCarteney, Chief of the Reference Division of the Copyright Office, 31 July 1963. An example of the form these items take in the Catalogue is as follows: "© Dec. 13, 1919; 2 c. Dec. 29, 1919; aff. Jan. 5, 1920; A 559288; Stratford co. (20-364)."
Mr. MacCarteney points out that this may not be true for 1908 and 1909, since he says the statement about deposit as well as registration was omitted from those two catalogues.
The only other information provided is that for ad interim copyrights, when an American publisher wishes to declare his intention to publish in America a work first published abroad (it includes the date of his declaration as well as the date of original publication); there will be a later entry of the usual kind, if he actually does publish it.
If one needs to date an English edition more precisely than by month, one can then search the appropriate month of the Publishers' Circular to get a rough idea of the part of the month (with all the same qualifications expressed for Publishers' Weekly below).
See, for example, the Boston Chronicle, I (2, 16 May 1768), 191-192, 214-215. Mein has been discussed by J. E. Alden in PBSA, XXXVI (1942), 199-214.
Hugh Gaine's Journals were edited by Paul Leicester Ford in 1902; Franklin's Autobiography has, of course, appeared in many editions, and his Account Books were published by G. C. Eddy in 1928-29. Letters relating to Franklin and David Hall from William Strahan have been published in the Pennsylvania Magaine of History, X (1886), 86-99, 217-232, 322-333, 461-473; XI (1887), 98-111, 223-234, 346-357, 482-490; XII (1888), 116-122, 240-251; LX (1936), 455-489.
Papers of prominent editors, like the Griswold Papers in the Boston Public and the Duyckinck Papers in the New York Public, will also yield important publishing material, as will, frequently, the papers of individual authors. The Adolph Growoll Collection in the office of Publishers' Weekly provides further information, particularly in the form of clippings.
See G. T. Tanselle, "Poe and Vandenhoff Once More," AN&Q, I (1963), 101-102; cf. T. O. Mabbott, "The First Book Publication of Poe's 'Raven'," BNYPL, XLVII (1943), 581-584. This use of reviews is well known. Since it was the policy of most reviewers to print large extracts from the books reviewed, it is possible that the technique of using extracts to date revised versions, described for eighteenth-century work by William B. Todd in SB, IV (1951-52), 41-55, will be helpful here, too.
A good discussion of it is in Sidney P. Moss, Poe's Literary Battles (1963), pp. 337. See also, especially, Walter L. Pforzheimer, "Copyright and Scholarship," English Institute Annual 1940 (1941), pp. 164-199; and Andrew J. Eaton, "The American Movement for International Copyright: 1837-1860," Library Quarterly, XV (1945), 95-122. One of the main effects of the situation was, of course, the pirating of British works—hence the relevance of Lawrence H. Houtchens, "Charles Dickens and International Copyright," AL, XIII (1941), 18-28.
These include directories for New York (1633-1820) by G. L. McKay (1942), Boston (1800-25) by Rollo G. Silver (1949), Philadelphia (to 1820) by H. G. and M. O. Brown (1950), Baltimore (1800-25) by Rollo G. Silver (1953), Rhode Island (to 1865) by H. G. and M. O. Brown (1958), and St. Louis (to 1850) by David Kaser (1961). A related NYPL publication is Benjamin Lewis' A Register of Editors, Printers, and Publishers of American Magazines 1741-1810 (1957). Thomas Galvin prepared a thesis at Simmons College in 1956 on the Boston book trade, 1760-1790, G. A. Gaskill did one for 1825-1835, and R. W. Flint for 1835-1845.
A convenient account of this undertaking is McMurtrie's "The Bibliography of American Imprints," Publishers' Weekly, CXLIV (20 November 1943), 1939-44, which includes a complete list of these imprint inventories (they are also listed in Winchell's Guide to Reference Books, entry A163). McMurtrie's writings have themselves been listed to 1942 by Charles F. Heartman, McMurtrie Imprints (1942). See also The Douglas C. McMurtrie Manuscripts Collection at the Michigan State University: Some Possibilities for Research and Publication (1963).
These were done, respectively, by R. C. Ellison (1946); Robert Greenwood (1961); R. W. Noyes (1930); J. T. Wheeler (1938), A. R. Minick (1949), and R. P. Bristol (1953) —all for Maryland; Robert J. Turnbull (1956); Eleanor D. Mitchell (1953); Thomas W. Streeter (1955-60); E. F. Cooley (1937) and Marcus A. McCorison (1963); Delf Norona (1958).
A list of these theses, as of June 1953, appears in the Secretary's News Sheet (No. 28, p. 2) of the Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia. One of the theses is itself a useful record of imprint lists: C. G. LaHood, Jr., "A Survey of Regional Bibliographies and Checklists of Early American Imprints" (1956). See also Thomas W. Streeter, "Notes on North American Regional Bibliographies," PBSA, XXXVI (1942), 171-186. Some imprint lists are also being issued by the University of Rochester Press in the ACRL Microcard Series, especially for Virginia towns; and a series of lists, especially for Illinois (to 1871), were done as theses at the University of Illinois in the 1930's. Such lists also occur in periodicals, as Constance H. Humphrey, "Check-List of New Jersey Imprints to the End of the Revolution," PBSA, XXIV (1930), 43-149.
In the first half of 1901 a still different system was tried, in which each monthly list was a cumulative listing of all previous months that year. The inconsistency in the cumulations during these years may be simply due to individual libraries' policies about binding, since these cumulations seem frequently to be absent in April, July, and October, the very months when one would expect quarterly, instead of monthly, cumulations. (One is thus led to suspect that the cumulations were actually prepared but sometimes omitted in binding so as not to over-extend the volume—yet there seem to be no pages missing.) Rose Weinberg, Librarian of Publishers' Weekly, writes to me (18 October 1963) that, to her knowledge, the quarterly cumulation was never issued as a separate, and she can supply no further information about the cumulation policy at that time.
James B. Meriwether, in "The English Editions of James Gould Cozzens," SB, XV (1962), 216-217, shows that he is aware of this problem when he points out that publishers may change publication dates after sending the original one (with an advance copy) to the Copyright Office and when he says that he has checked "the generally reliable advertised dates in Publishers' Weekly." What he leaves unsaid, however, is that advertisements (and the listing in the "Weekly Record") depend on the whim of the publisher just as much as the copyright records and that he happened to be dealing with a publisher whose advertisements were "generally reliable."
The general index, on the other hand, may not yield information of the kind to be included on the cards, but it will certainly lead one to notes about the organization, location, and finances of the firm not usually available elsewhere, as well as to extensive information about the general state of publishing. An example of the way in which material exclusively from Publishers' Weekly can be rearranged into narrative history is the 1949 Windsor Lectures at Illinois: John T. Winterich, Three Lantern Slides (1949).
This information was supplied to me by Mr. Edwin B. Colburn, Chief of Indexing Services at the H. W. Wilson Co., in a letter of 23 August 1963.
See Princeton University Library Chronicle, XIII (1952), 164-168. A description of the Holt archives, as well as those of Scribner's, Harper's, and Dodd, Mead, is given by Donald Sheehan in This Was Publishing (1952), pp. 273-275. Occasionally, part of a firm's files will get published, like the letters of Scribner's famous editor, Maxwell Perkins, in Editor to Author (1950), or Sinclair Lewis' letters to Harcourt, Brace, in From Main Street to Stockholm (1952). Charles A. Madison, of Holt, is preparing a book to be entitled The Owl Among the Colophons; for his account of the relations between Holt and William James, see Saturday Review, 16 November 1963, pp. 24-25.
See also Grant Overton's When Winter Comes to Main Street (1922) and Publishers' Weekly, CII (30 September 1922), 1212.
Stokes, "A Publisher's Random Notes," and Harcourt, "Publishing Since 1900," in Bowker Lectures on Book Publishing (1957), pp. 3-27, 28-41; Huebsch, Busman's Holiday (1959).
Alfred Knopf, "On Making a Few Books," New Colophon, II (1949), 120-134; Alfred A. Knopf at 60 (1952), which includes an essay by B. W. Huebsch.
See Starr's "History, Warm," in the Fall 1962 Columbia University Forum and the general index to the collection. The Office also maintains a card index of names alluded to in all the interviews.
Burlingame, Of Making Many Books (1946) and Endless Frontiers (1959); Overton, Portrait of a Publisher (1925); Morgan, The House of Macmillan (1944); Reynolds, The Fiction Factory (1955).
Only a few can be mentioned, to indicate the range of these volumes: Book Publishing at 34 Beacon Street and One Hundred and Twenty Five Years of Publishing (Little, Brown, 1951, 1962); The Harper Centennial (1917); Thomas Young Crowell: A Biographical Sketch (1926); The Country Life Press (Doubleday, 1919); Seventy-Five Years, or the Joys and Sorrows of Publishing and Selling Books at Dutton's (1927); The House of Stokes (1926); One Hundred and Fifty Years of Publishing (Lea & Febiger, 1935); The First One Hundred and Fifty Years (Wiley, 1957); A Century of Book Publishing (Van Nostrand, 1948); The Hoosier House (Bobbs-Merrill, 1923); Two Score Years and Five: Quality and The Story of the Century Company (1915, 1923); The House of Appleton-Century (1936); One Hundred Years of Publishing (William Wood & Co., 1904); Seventy-Five Years of Book Publishing (Barnes, 1913).
A number of individual magazines have, of course, been studied, and work is now going forward on histories of "little" magazines—witness the publication, in 1963 alone, of books on the Freeman (by Susan J. Turner; originally written 1956), Reedy's Mirror (by Max Putzel), and the Dial (by William Wasserstrom). The standard history is Frank Luther Mott, A History of American Magazines (1938-57); and see James P. Wood, Magazines in the United States (2nd ed., 1956), and Frederick J. Hoffman et al., The Little Magazine (1946).
An enormous amount of work has been done in the history of American journalism. There are Frank Luther Mott's standard work, American Journalism (rev., 1950) and detailed histories of individual newspapers, such as Harry W. Baehr on the Tribune (1936), Frank M. O'Brien on the Sun (1918), Joseph E. Chamberlin on the Boston Transcript (1930), Richard Hooker on the Springfield Republican (1923), Philip Kinsley on the Chicago Tribune (1943-45), and Elmer Davis on the New York Times (1921). But there are hundreds of pioneer editors who have written autobiographies and who offer opportunities for significant research into publishing history—see the memoirs of these men, for example (by area and date of the memoir): Midwest—Ebenezer S. Thomas (1840), Eber Howe (n.d.), Jefferson J. Polk (1867), Marcus M. Pomeroy (1890), Hans Mattson (1891), Samuel A. Lane (1892), Edwin C. Manning (1911), Frank M. Mills (1911, 1924), John West Goodwin (n.d.), Tacitus Hussey (1919), William Dyer (1919), Frederick W. Allsopp (1922), Young Ewing Allison (1935), Lucien M. Harris (1937), Ira A. Nichols (1938), Arthur J. Russell (1943), A. B. Wood (1945); Far West—Abigail Duniway (1914), Jaret B. Graham (1915), Carlyle C. Davis (1916), James J. Ayers (1922), Fremont Older (1926, 1931), George F. Weeks (1928), Charles H. Leckenby (1945); East—Nelson Dingley (1874), Asa McFarland (1880), George W. Childs (1890), Marcus M. Pomeroy (1890), Adam C. Sandford (1909), Albert S. Pease (1915), George W. Oakes (1933).
One of the best is Charles E. Goodspeed, Yankee Bookseller (1937); see also Madge Jenison, Sunwise Turn (1923), Walter T. Spencer, Forty Years in My Bookshop (1923), D. L. Mann, A Century of Bookselling (1928), and William Brotherhead, Forty Years Among the Old Booksellers of Philadelphia (1891). For earlier periods booksellers and publishers are often identical, and book-trade directories or works like Worthington C. Ford's The Boston Book Market 1679-1700 (1917) offer useful guides. Book dealers' catalogues in all periods can be important, from John West's list of 1797 or the Americana catalogues of Robert Clarke of Cincinnati in the 1880's to the recent catalogues of Philip C. Duschnes which provide complete lists, for example, of the Limited Editions Club (No. 155) or the Gregynog Press (No. 161); see Archer Taylor, Book Catalogues: Their Varieties and Uses (1957). There are many famous catalogues in this field, among them Henry Stevens' A Century of American Printing 1701 to 1800 (1916) and (an exhibit catalogue) A. S. W. Rosenbach's One Hundred and Fifty Years of Printing in English America 1640-1790 (1940). Bookshops provide other aids, like the Month at Goodspeed's, which sometimes has valuable articles.
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