University of Virginia Library

A. The Purchase of Copies

1. Commissioned Books

When Nourse commissioned an author to write a book he normally specified (i) its length; (ii) the time allowed for completion; (iii) the fee; (iv) the means of payment of the fee; and (v) the assignment of the copyright in the first and future editions. The length of the book obviously varied according to subject, and the time allowed for composition according to both subject and length. Length was specified in printed sheets, according to format, and the normal form of agreement states that the type size shall be the same as that in some recently published work to give both the author and the publisher a standard of comparison. Variations of more interest are found in the fees paid, and in the means of payment.

(a) Fees

The fees which Nourse paid varied from £1.1s.od. to £3.3s.od. per sheet. The normal form of agreement was for a fee for the whole book, but a few are for payment by sheet; the pattern seems to be that Nourse paid by the

sheet when the length of the book was in doubt. Thomas Barlow, a lawyer at the Middle Temple, signed an agreement with Nourse on 4 January 1733 to write a 'Treatise concerning the Duty and office of a Justice of peace'; he was to be paid £2.2s.od. per sheet, for between 25 and 30 sheets of printed folio, including whatever tables, statutes, and precedents he thought it necessary to include. There was clearly some indecision about the probable size of the work; on 5 June 1734 a further agreement allowed Barlow to go up to 40 sheets. The publication of the book was, however, delayed for a decade. Not until 8 August 1744 did Barlow receive £126.0s.od., the payment for 60 sheets, but in a document of the same date, in which Barlow confirmed the assignment of the copyright to Nourse, it was acknowledged that he had actually written about 150 sheets. The book was published, as The Justice of the Peace: a Treatise, in 1745, in 154 sheets, with a further 5½ sheets of preliminaries. Clearly Nourse was not prepared to pay Barlow for having so greatly exceeded the limits set in the original agreement.

Nourse was, however, willing to allow some margin for error or change. When he commissioned John Mills to write 'a Work on the subject of Trade & Commerce' in 1765, it was agreed that the author would receive £2.2s.od. per sheet for 60 sheets, but he was allowed to go up to 80 sheets, pro rata, if necessary; Mills actually received £124.4s.od. between 5 June 1765 and 22 December 1766, the payment for just over 118 sheets, although the book was, apparently, never published in this form.[10] Even vaguer was the commission to Joseph Shaw to write 'a new treatise Intitled Parish Law' in 1731; for £2.2s.od. per sheet, 12°, Shaw was to write up to 15 sheets. More specific was the agreement with John Landen for his Mathematical Lucubrations; he was to be paid £1.1s.od. per sheet for 18 to 20 sheets, 4°. Landen almost kept within his limits; the book, which Nourse published in 1755, has 20¾ sheets, and five engraved plates. The same fee was paid to Marie Le Prince de Beaumont for her Magasin des Adolescentes, 4 volumes, 12°; and to Elias Palairet for a 'Dictionnary of the Ellipses' commissioned in 1760.

Agreements for payment by sheet are, however, exceptional; Nourse's normal form of contract was for a fee for a specified length of book. If the author exceeded that length he received no extra payment. Such a condition was explicit in the agreement with Robert Dossie for 'The Mysteries of Art displayed' in 1757, published in the following year as the first volume of The Handmaid to the Arts; Dossie was to receive £63.os.od. for 30 sheets, but was

to be paid the same even if one or two additional sheets proved to be necessary for the satisfactory completion of the book.

The £2.2s.od. which Barlow, Mills, and Shaw were paid seems to have been about Nourse's average fee. Dossie received the equivalent sum for three works, all in two volumes. Anthony Vieyra received only £1.1s.od. per sheet for a Portuguese dictionary, but he also had as much again in books. The next lowest cash payment was the £1.7s.od. per sheet which was the most that Thomas Deletanville could have earned from A New Set of Exercises upon the Various Parts of French Speech; he was to be paid £9.9s.od. for 7 or 8 sheets, including proof correcting. In fact, he received £15.15s.od. in all, the extra £6.6s.od. being for 3½ sheets which Nourse added to the original agreement at a later date. At the other extreme, the same author was paid £157.1os.od. for a French dictionary; this was commissioned in 1761, but the final payment, due on delivery of the manuscript, was not made until 1771, despite a two-year time limit in the agreement. The commission was for about 54 sheets, or approximately £2.18s.od. per sheet. Presumably Nourse, and his co-publisher Paul Vaillant, took into account the quantity of work involved, but there is still a marked contrast with the £1.1s.od. paid to Vieyra for his labours, even when his payments in kind are taken into account. As we shall see, however, Deletanville was a good deal easier to deal with than his fellow lexicographer.

Some authors received copies of their books as well as monetary payments; some were probably for presentation, but others could be sold, often to pre-publication subscribers. Vieyra was to have copies to the value of £210.os.od., or exactly the same as his cash fee. Marie Le Prince de Beaumont received 150 copies of her Magasin des Adolescentes, which compensated her for a fee of only £1.1s.od. per sheet for writing the book. William Lewis was to have 100 copies of his The New Dispensatory, a pharmacoepia which Nourse published in 1753; Lewis was paid £85.os.od., or just over £2.2s.od. per sheet, for 40 sheets, although the book as published has 42½ sheets, and 2¾ sheets of preliminaries. Elias Palairet was allowed 12 copies of his 'Dictionnary of the Ellipses', which we can assume were for presentation to actual or potential patrons whom this rising young cleric was cultivating; his cash payment was only £1.1s.od. per sheet, so Nourse drove a notably hard bargain in this instance. John Robertson had the same number of his Elements of Navigation for which he was to receive £2.2s.od. per sheet, up to a limit of £96.12s.od., or 46 sheets.

There is no means of knowing how these agreements were reached, but it seems that the publisher usually had the upper hand. Indeed some of them are written on manuscript pro formas which appear to be in a legal hand, and in which spaces have been left for the author's name, the title, and the fee. The initiative for payment in kind may sometimes have come from the author if he wished to send copies to patrons or friends or was already committed to subscribers, as Le Prince de Beaumont was with Magasin des

Adolescentes;[11] but it was also to Nourse's advantage, for it enabled him to conserve his supplies of liquid capital, a perpetual concern for all eighteenth-century businessmen. The agreements for payment in kind, whatever the motive, are distinctly atypical, and it is notable that Palairet, despite the two forms of payment, was treated rather badly by Nourse's usual standards, although, conversely, the treatment of Robertson was distinctly generous. In one case, books alone constituted an author's reward for her labours: Le Prince de Beaumont received 150 copies of Education complète, ou abrégé de l'histoire universelle, 3 volumes, 12°, 1753, but no monetary payment at all; her sales of her copies were not guaranteed for there is no list of prepublication subscribers.

(b) Methods of Payment

All the agreements have a clause in which the time and method of payment are specified. Nourse had three normal practices for books which he had commissioned. Sometimes he undertook to pay sheet by sheet as the work progressed, but this was possible only for books for which he was paying by the sheet; for such books, however, this method was almost invariable, for Barlow, Shaw, and Mills were all recompensed in this way, as was Landen for his Mathematical Lucubrations. A modified form of the same method was used to pay Vieyra and Deletanville for their dictionaries. Such arrangements worked to Nourse's benefit at least as much as to the author's; on the whole, it was the expensive books which were paid for in installments, which not only reduced Nourse's outlay at any one time, but also had the incidental effect of keeping the author at work. It is also notable, however, that Nourse paid by the completed sheet when the author was a man with whom he dealt infrequently, or only once. The authors from whom he regularly commissioned work were paid by a third method. Robert Dossie, the most frequent author in the extant agreements, was paid half of his fee when the book was commissioned, and half on the delivery of the manuscript. Deletanville, another prolific author, was, on two occasions, paid half of his fee on delivery, and half on publication; these payments were for The Child's Guide to the French Tongue in 1757 and 1758, and A New Set of Exercises in January and February 1758.

Payment before completion was obviously fraught with difficulties and dangers for the publisher. William Lewis seems to have failed to complete 'a New practice of Physick', for although he acknowledged receipt of £52. 10s.od., which constituted half his fee, on the day the agreement was signed, there is no receipt for the other half, and no evidence that the book was ever published. On the other hand, relations between Nourse and Lewis continued to be good, as we shall see, and we may suspect that this book was abandoned by agreement.

It is fortunate that in addition to the agreements there are some extant

accounts with authors, from which we can trace in detail the progress of a book, and of the payments for it. The account with Vieyra is particularly illuminating in this respect. In the agreement, dated 9 November 1765, Vieyra undertook to produce 200 sheets, 4°, for £210.os.od., plus copies of the book to the same value at Nourse's wholesale price; the £210.os.od. was to be paid in monthly installments of £5.5s.od. for as long as the work was in hand, and it seems that Nourse required evidence of this. In practice, Vieyra never had his £5.5s.od. per month regularly; on 6 December 1765, he received £10.1os.od., and the same sum, at two-monthly intervals, from February to December in the next year. The payments then became much less regular. He had his £10.1os.od. in February 1767, but no more until June, when he received five months' payment, a total of £26.5s.od., including, presumably, one month's work paid for in advance. The next payment, however, was not until February 1768, when Vieyra received £10.1os.od., a gap only partially filled by a payment of £21.os.od. in the next month. When these payments are taken together, it seems that Vieyra was not paid for two months in 1767, presumably months in which he did no work on the dictionary. In April 1768 he received a single month's payment; perhaps Nourse was trying to bring him to order, but, if so, he failed, for after that there is no regular pattern of payment at all. Vieyra had £10.1os.od. in November 1768, a single payment of £42.os.od. in 1769, the fee for eight months' work, and no more until he received £154.18s.6d. in September 1770. This figure is difficult to explain: he may have been doing other work for Nourse, but this is unlikely since the account is headed 'for the Portuguese Dictionary'; more probably, it was a pro rata payment for work actually completed. £7.7s.od. in February 1771, and £6.6s.od. in April of the same year, brought Vieyra's receipts up to £359.1s.6d.; this was considerably more than Nourse had contracted to pay, but as there is no record of the books given to Vieyra, it may be that Nourse subtracted the £149.1s.6d. from the value of Vieyra's complimentary copies. The book was finally published in 1773.

Nourse's accounts, like so many others in the days before books were open to inspection by the Internal Revenue, are often obscure and sometimes imprecise; some are little more than jottings of payments. Nevertheless, the outlines of his dealings with Vieyra are clear enough for us to draw some conclusions from them. If Nourse had intended the installment plan as a means of keeping Vieyra at work, he was unsuccessful in the long run, but at least he ensured that the dictionary started well, with 20 months of continuous work from December 1765 to July 1767, and another continuous period probably from October 1767 to April 1768. In the rest of 1768, however, only two months' work was submitted, and by September 1770, when he made his last payment, Nourse was certainly paying for work actually completed, rather than on a simple monthly basis. By July 1769, when he paid for eight months' work, it must have been obvious to Nourse that his outlay would exceed the £210.os.od. for which he had contracted, and it

seems to have been then that he decided to pay Vieyra pro rata. On the basis of the extant accounts it would seem that he suffered both losses and delays in his dealings with this author, and that he was a good deal more flexible than the letter of the contract allowed him to be even when Vieyra was not working consistently.

Deletanville was paid in equal installments for as long as he was at work on his French dictionary. Again the account survives, but it is easier to interpret than that with Vieyra. The publication was a joint one between Nourse and Vaillant, so that when Deletanville submitted his final account on 6 April 1771, half of the liability was Vaillant's. The publishers had undertaken to pay the author £154.1os.od. for about 54 sheets; Deletanville, an experienced author, submitted 55. He added, however, £34.7s.od. for a further 12½ sheets, 'necessary to compleat the work', slightly less than the pro rata cost; and another £1.1s.od. for 'the Dictionaire de Richelet' which he had bought to assist him. Of the resulting total, Nourse's share was £96. 9s.od.. In fact, Deletanville had been receiving his installments at regular intervals. He had £10.1os.1od. on 25 March and 25 September 1762, and 24 March 1763 (and presumably from Vaillant on the other quarter days), £15.15s.od. in October 1764, and further payments of £10.1os.od. in November 1765, and June 1767. Progress had been slow, but it had also been regular and reliable. Thus Nourse owed Deletanville £30.19s.od. which he paid three weeks after the author's final statement was submitted, on 30 April 1771. With a reliable author, this method of payment worked to the advantage of both parties: Deletanville had a regular income, and Nourse was able to spread his investment.

2. Unsolicited Books

(a) Purchases of Completed Manuscripts

In the surviving agreements there are only two certain instances of Nourse purchasing the unprinted manuscript of a work which he had not commissioned; it is significant that in both cases his terms were somewhat less generous than those for commissioned works. On 1 October 1769 Thomas Tyrrell agreed to sell Nourse the manuscript of 'Lettres et Memoires pour servir à l'histoire du Cap Breton ou Isle Roïale' for £31.1os.od., together with 100 books of the author's choice; Tyrrell was also to receive 25 copies of his own book when it was published, but there is no evidence that it was. In addition, Nourse would arrange for a translation to be made and printed, and again Tyrrell was to receive 25 copies; this translation, like the original, was not published, so far as can be traced. Although Tyrrell probably received the equivalent of Nourse's payments to his commissioned authors, the presentation of 100 books from his own stock was a far slighter drain on Nourse's liquid resources than cash payments would have been. It would, however, appear that the author retained the copyright, which gave him, theoretically, the possibility of additional income from the book in the future.

John Landen fared even less well than Tyrrell. In 1755 Nourse had published his Mathematical Lucubrations which he had commissioned at £1.1s.od. per sheet, but in 1760 they negotiated a contract which was less favorable to the author. When the agreement was signed on 22 January 1760, Landen had completed the manuscript of The residual analysis, which was expected to make about 30 sheets, 4°; in return for the copyright, and for the cost of printing, Landen was to receive 100 copies for his subscribers, from whom he derived his only income for the book. In fact, this work was notably unsuccessful. It seems that the intention was to publish it in two parts, for the first volume, 'Part 1,' has only 17 sheets and 5 plates; a manuscript note on the title-page of the copy in the Bodleian Library, Oxford (shelfmark Savile Ii. 15), records correctly that this was 'all that was ever published'. Landen was destined for distinction as a scientist, but was never a successful author.[12]

(b) Purchase of a Printed Edition

As an important London bookseller Nourse had the advantage of easy access to the national book distribution system which was effectively controlled by the leading members of the London trade. This placed him in a position to bargain with his authors, and especially with those who had already paid to have their books printed and now wanted a wholesaler and distributor. As a consequence, when he purchased the whole, or a substantial part, of an edition, he was able to drive a hard bargain. Thomas Lally, a clergyman, received nothing at all for 700 copies of his translation of The Principles of the Christian Religion except the cost of production, and the promise of £21.os.od. if there was another edition; there was not. John Palairet assigned a ½-share in his New English Spelling Book to Nourse in 1746, in return for the £10.1os.od. which Nourse had already spent on advertising the book; the implication of the agreement is that it was already in print and that Nourse had undertaken the marketing.[13] In 1750 Palairet sold all the rights in this book to Nourse for £15.15s.od.; the sale included the copper-plates which had to be engraved at the author's expense.

There are two rather more generous agreements. Palairet himself was the beneficiary of one of them, when, in 1733, he sold all 1,000 copies of the second edition of his 'Grammar' to Nourse for a total of £55.os.od., half of which was payable immediately, and half in six months' time. It is probably significant that this was at the beginning of Nourse's career when he was less able to deal from strength in contracting with authors, but he made a good bargain, for the 'Grammar' can be identified as The New Royal French Grammar which was frequently reprinted.[14] Finally, George Aylette, a surgeon,

received the equivalent of Nourse's commission payments for his 'compendium of Physick & Surgery' in 1768; the book, in 30 to 34 sheets, 8°, had been printed at the author's expense, but Nourse bought the whole edition for £52.10s.od. plus the cost of production, with a promise of £52.10s.od. for any and all future editions.