University of Virginia Library

II

David Douglas began to publish Howells' novels in 1882 and it was not until 1913 that he ordered the last reprinting of one of them. His printer's records and the surviving letters between Howells and Douglas indicate, however, that the first of these three decades was the most important one; these were the final years before a copyright agreement was reached between the United States and Great Britain. The story of these years — of the friendship between Howells and Douglas and of their business dealings — must be reconstructed from rather miscellaneous materials, and it is best to divide it somewhat arbitrarily between the two editions that Douglas published of most of Howells' novels. The first of these was a regular octavo trade edition, selling for six shillings a volume, with which Douglas secured British copyright on all of Howells' new fiction in the 1880's. The other edition was printed for Douglas's American Author series; it was smaller in format and sold from one to two shillings a volume. It was with these cheaper editions that Douglas won his greatest success with Howells' works, and they will be discussed in the third section of this paper.

One of Howells' purposes was to secure British copyright. The Routledge v. Low case of 1868 had made it possible for aliens to secure British copyright by publishing their work first in Great Britain. The question of a residence requirement at the time of publication had been left unresolved, but in fact prior publication came to be acknowledged as sufficient grounds for copyright.[10] With this in mind, Howells sent copy for each serial installment of his novels sufficiently in advance of its publication in America so that Douglas could set and print that part of the novel for copyright deposit before the magazine appeared in the United States or went on sale in Britain. The result was a set of "books" at the British Museum (some were also sent to the Bodleian and to the Advocates Library in Edinburgh) made up of the several parts and representing technically the first published form of most of the novels Howells wrote in the 1880's.

One important question about these volumes is the nature of the copy from which they were set. The first of them, A Woman's Reason, was evidently set from Howells' manuscript. Writing on 16 October

1882 to Osgood about the novel, Howells said that he was "having it stereotyped at Edinburgh, according to my last understanding with you, and I have sent it to New York in print" (Rutgers). Since the first installment of the novel was published in the February 1883 number of the Century Magazine, it is evident that there was ample time for Howells to send his original copy to Douglas and then use Douglas's proofs as copy for the periodical. But after this novel, publishing deadlines were such that Douglas usually had to set his copy from magazine proofs, which he had to have early enough so that each month he could secure copyright before the arrival of the magazine from America. The deadlines for any given novel could give rise to bibliographically complicated situations, such as that of The Rise of Silas Lapham. Pressed by time, Howells sent Douglas a set of the magazine proofs before he had finished revising the novel. The result is that the parts Douglas deposited for copyright contain some unique authorial readings later revised for the magazine. Fortunately, one of the readings that can be recovered from the copyright deposit copies is the passage about dynamite — a sensitive subject in 1885 — that the editor and publisher of the Century Magazine called on Howells to change: "I tell you," says one of Howells' characters, "that in some of my walks on the Hill and down on the Back Bay, nothing but the surveillance of the local policeman prevents me from applying dynamite to those long rows of close-shuttered, handsome, brutally insensible houses."[11]

It is beyond the scope of this paper to detail the bibliographical tangles that resulted from Howells' efforts to secure British copyright. They will be reported in the individual volumes of the Howells Edition now being published. It is sufficient here to indicate their existence; that done, we can turn to another aspect, the economic one, of the regular trade editions of Howells' novels in Great Britain.

Howells had for some time been able to command higher royalties from his American publishers by owning the plates for his own books, and one of the advantages of his arrangement with Douglas was that the plates could be made more cheaply in Edinburgh than in the United States. Not only were labor costs lower in Edinburgh, but also Howells could recover part or all of his cost from the royalties paid him on the copies Douglas printed from the plates before shipping them to America. Douglas's letter of 12 May 1885, suggesting a minor

change in their arrangement, makes clear how it worked: Thus the arrangement for A Modern Instance and A Woman's Reason had been a conventional one, including the royalty, except that Douglas himself had no use for the plates Howells ordered and paid for. But after these first two books, because Douglas was more interested in his cheaper American Author series than in the regular trade edition, he asked that Howells begin to assume half the cost of composing type for the latter. Douglas had already told Howells (22 November 1884) that the demand for the trade editions of A Modern Instance and A Woman's Reason, of both of which he had printed 1500 copies, was disappointing, and by 5 February 1885 he had only lukewarm encouragement to offer: "You will be glad to hear that I have lost nothing on the whole by taking up your books, and I will add to the trifling royalties due to you a further sum of £20 and hope that the sales of the little volumes [i.e., the American Author series] will not 'dry up' for a year or two yet." In these circumstances, it must have gratified Howells to see that after a print order of only 500 for The Rise of Silas Lapham, Douglas could increase his printing of the trade editions of Indian Summer and the next three of his novels to 1000 copies.[12] Thus, Howells won at least a modest audience in Britain as a result of his arrangement with Douglas for regular trade editions of his novels.

This arrangement was maintained for The Minister's Charge, April Hopes, Annie Kilburn, and A Hazard of New Fortunes (except that Douglas printed only 750 copies of the last novel), until the passage of the International Copyright Law of 1891 prohibited the importing of plates for books to be published in the United States. Howells had sent Douglas the first part of An Imperative Duty on 25 April 1891, hoping that the whole could be set and stereotyped in time to get the plates into America before 1 July, when the new law went into effect. Douglas replied on 7 May that he would willingly publish the book and promised to get it set as fast as possible. But they did not beat the July deadline. Indeed, it was not until 20 September that Howells sent copy for the complete book to Douglas, and when on 2 October Douglas wrote to thank him for the proofsheets, he explained "I had already set up 32 pages in fscp 8°. according to your wish but as the new copyright act rendered further introduction of English plates into the States useless I cancelled the pages. It was mainly to afford a set of stereotypes at a less cost than you could get them in New York that I adopted the larger size."

Clearly Douglas was not much interested in the market for the regular trade editions of Howells' work and took them on, possibly at a loss to himself, only to accommodate Howells.[13] There is no way now to know whether Douglas did suffer a loss in providing plates for Howells, but the surviving royalty statements indicated how modest the continuing sales of these six-shilling volumes were. The statement sent on 24 January 1893 lists the following sales for 1892; five copies of A Modern Instance, ten of Dr. Breen's Practice, five of A Woman's Reason, three of Indian Summer, one of April Hopes, seven of The Minister's Charge, seven of Annie Kilburn, ten of A Hazard of New Fortunes, six of The Shadow of a Dream, and 614 copies of Mercy — Douglas's title for The Quality of Mercy, which he had published in 1892. It appears then that Howells' novels had a modest initial success

but afterwards did not sell; about the only comfort Douglas could offer in sending the statement for 1892 was that he was glad to see that the royalty on the American Author series was "more substantial this year than I was able to make it last, but I find that I can do comparatively little for you with the 6/. volumes."[14] The check Douglas sent with his statement was for £85/17/10, but the royalties due on the trade editions accounted for less than a quarter of the sum.

Clearly then it was not the regular trade editions but the cheaper American Author series that accounted for whatever fame or fortune Howells won in Great Britain. For where Douglas may not have been able to sell significantly more than 500 copies of The Rise of Silas Lapham at six shillings, he had by 1893 sold almost a dozen times that number at two to four shillings in his American Author series. It was the cheaper market that Douglas was interested in, the market where in the case of the popular A Chance Acquaintance Douglas could sell 14,000 copies within the first three years after he published it, another 5000 copies in the next seven years, and 10,000 more in the course of the ensuing twenty-one years before April 1913, when the last 1000 copies of the novel were printed for Douglas. The six shilling trade editions are interesting as a part of the effort American writers took to secure copyright in Britain and as presenting sometimes special bibliographical problems, but it is to the American Author series that one must turn for a measure of the popularity of Howells' novels in Great Britain.