University of Virginia Library

To the literary scholar publishers seem surprisingly cavalier about their records which have passed into the dead-file state. Firms not infrequently bestir themselves to produce a history, but once this is accomplished their concern is over and the archives are laid waste by dust, decay, and neglect — if, that is, they escape the ravages of destruction schedules. Busy publishing houses are not, of course, libraries, and most of them have neither the staff nor the time, and almost never the space, to maintain proper control over an ever-burgeoning mass of paper. Yet these very same

neglected publishers' archives are fast becoming, together with the records of the periodicals of the period, almost the last major untapped reservoir of primary materials available to the scholar of nineteenth-century publishing. During the war, portions of the archives of several English publishers were dissipated into the smoke over the City. The book trade survived and the buildings were restored, but the lacunal bombsites of literary and publishing history can never be filled. That the disaster served, in part at least, to arouse a belated interest in publishers' archives is evinced both by the increasing use made of them by scholars since the war and by the institutionalizing of several major collections during this era of academic affluence.

A number of recent studies have served to put the publisher of the nineteenth-century into perspective by examining the impact of widespread literacy and the rise of a mass reading public on all phases of the cultural and sociological current of the age:[1] But there is a notable paucity of systematic studies on the publishing of the period — there are even few printed listings of books published by individual firms[2] — and bibliographical knowledge in this area is still in its infancy.[3] If, as Simon Nowell-Smith says in his new book on Victorian copyright, "the legal, commercial and general aspects of bibliography deserve as much attention as the enumerative and analytical because of the assistance they can give to . . . the understanding of writers and their texts,"[4] the cumulative value of the documentary materials to be found in publishers' archives is not simply historical. In fact, precisely because they contain such a wealth of information, especially correspondence, touching on all aspects of the book-making process — from submission and selection of manuscripts to marketing the finished product and payment of authors' fees and protection of mutual

rights, publishers' archives are rich natural lodes for the bibliographical prospector, whether his interest be historical, enumerative, analytical, descriptive or critical.

It is not really possible to be more than speculative about the specific textual significance of a collection of papers such as the British Museum's Macmillan archive, which has not yet been systematically catalogued. However, the research potential of the archive can be projected from a survey of the publishing history of the firm, with such aids as Charles Morgan's The House of Macmillan (1943), and from published studies that have utilized portions of the firm's archive. The Macmillan archive, though vast, is not quite virgin territory. Several groups of manuscripts from its reserves have been tapped by various scholars — notably those of Matthew Arnold, Lewis Carroll, the Rossettis, Thomas Hughes, Hugh Walpole, and Henry James.[5] The five volumes relating to the company all contain extracts from the archive, but although they provide some idea of the immensity of the collection and of its ultimate significance to scholarship, these "Macmillan books,"[6] and indeed the formal research deriving thus far from the papers, have hardly made a dent in the available mass. The purpose of this paper is to describe the extent of the Macmillan archive and to relate the story of its recent dispersal, a complicated affair that provides its own object lesson for literary scholars and bibliographers alike.