C. Costs and Profits
Detailed accounts do not survive for the costs of production of most
of the books, and, unfortunately, the one exception is for a book with a
nonstandard contract. This exception is Le Prince de Beaumont's
Education complète, for which Nourse paid only in
kind, in
the form of 150 copies. An edition of 1,250 was printed in 1753, and the
account shows a loss of 6d., and 127 copies on hand (Table I). From the
remaining 127 copies, however, Nourse could make £22.4s.6d. at the
wholesale price of 3s.6d., and he may have charged 5s.od. retail, a
potential profit of £31.15s.od. He was a retail
TABLE I
Education complète, 1753: profit
and loss
account
| DEBIT |
£ |
s. |
d. |
CREDIT |
£ |
s. |
d. |
| Paper (120 reams &c.mmat; 14s.od./ream) |
84 |
0 |
0 |
860 copies to Dessan & Saillant for sale to Holland &c.mmat;
3s.6d. |
| Printing (48 sheets &c.mmat; £1.4s.od.) |
58 |
16 |
0 |
|
150 |
10 |
6 |
|
|
|
|
13 copies sold |
2 |
5 |
0 |
| Advertisements, &c. |
10 |
0 |
0 |
|
-------- |
|
-------- |
|
|
|
152 |
16 |
6 |
|
152 |
16 |
0 |
|
-------- |
|
-------- |
bookseller, and no doubt sold some copies in his shop, so that the profit on
the publication fell somewhere between these two figures.
Calculations of cost and profit on the other books must necessarily be
speculation, but we can base them upon three reasonably firm assumptions:
firstly, that 14s.od. per ream represented the quality of paper which Nourse
usually used, as comparison of Education complète
with his
other books suggests that it was; secondly, that his normal edition size was
1,000; and thirdly, that he paid his printers the average price calculated
from the Strahan ledgers, that is £1.os.od. per sheet set in Great
Primer, English, or Pica, the usual text types in his books.[15] These calculations, approximate
as they
are, nevertheless provide a context in which we can judge Nourse's
payments to his authors.
As an example, we can take Dossie's Elaboratory Laid
Open; the author received £31.10s.od. for 18 sheets, and in fact
delivered matter to fill 26. His fee is included in the costs (Table II). If
Nourse sold the whole edition at 2s.6d. wholesale, his profit was
£46.2s.od., or about 25% more than the author's income from the
book. Similar figures emerge if we approximate
TABLE II
Elaboratory Laid Open, 1758:
approximate
costs
|
£ |
s. |
d. |
| Paper (26,000 sheets = 52 reams app. &c.mmat; 14s.od.) |
36 |
8 |
0 |
| Printing (26 sheets &c.mmat; £1) |
26 |
0 |
0 |
| Advertisements, &c. |
10 |
0 |
0 |
|
-------- |
|
72 |
8 |
0 |
| Payment to author |
31 |
10 |
0 |
|
-------- |
| TOTAL |
103 |
18 |
0 |
|
-------- |
the cost of publishing a book by another of Nourse's major authors, John
Palairet. He was paid £21.os.od. for
Nouvelle introduction
à
la géographie moderne, including an abridgement of the
same
work, and the copperplates. The book was printed in 3 volumes, containing
53 sheets (Table III).
TABLE III Nouvelle introduction . . ., 1754,55:
approximate costs
|
£ |
s. |
d. |
| Paper (53,000 sheets = 112 reams app. &c.mmat; 14s.od.) |
78 |
8 |
0 |
| Printing (53 sheets &c.mmat; £1) |
53 |
0 |
0 |
| Estimated cost of paper & printing for 5 x 1,000
plates |
30 |
0 |
0 |
| Advertisements, &c. |
10 |
0 |
0 |
|
-------- |
|
171 |
8 |
0 |
| ½ author's payment* |
10 |
18 |
0 |
|
-------- |
| TOTAL |
181 |
18 |
0 |
|
-------- |
[_]
Note*: on the assumption that ½ was for the
abridgement
At a wholesale price of 4s.od. Nourse's profits would have been
£18.2s.od.; at 4s.3d. (a retail price of 6s.od.) he would have made
£35.12s.od.
These figures all exclude the cost of binding, as do Nourse's own
accounts for Education complète, although there was
probably at least a partial edition binding for that work. The copy in the
Bodleian Library, Oxford,[16] is uncut
in blue boards, and is the copy deposited under the provisions of the
Copyright Act. It has all the appearance of a trade binding, which would
clearly have to be added to the cost of production, but the wholesale copies,
especially those intended for export, were almost certainly sold in sheets.
Nourse's '&c.' may indeed include the cost of binding part of the
edition, although we have seen that in at least one instance he did spend
£10.os.od. on advertising. Whatever these minor costs may have been,
it is clear that Nourse made a comfortable margin of profit if an edition was
sold out, and that he was both able and willing to pay his authors fees
which bore a reasonable relation to his own profits.
