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MEETING OF BOOKSELLERS.
A numerous Meeting of the Publishers, Booksellers, Stationers, and all others interested in the sale of the Holy Scriptures, was held yesterday evening at the Globe Tavern, Fleet-street, to take into consideration the recent attack made on the trade, as relates to the sale of Bibles and Prayer-books. As the nature of this attack may not be known to the generality of our readers, we shall endeavour to explain it by giving, in a few words, a short abstract of a Report made by a Committee, appointed on Thursday evening to investigate into its extent. It appeared from that report, that for two or three years past bills in Chauncery have been filed, and silently operating under the instruction of a patentee, against persons selling Edinburgh Bibles or Common Prayers. During the last term a hundred injunctions were obtained against different booksellers in London and the suburbs, and 90 are entered for the present term. At first the injunctions were only levelled against Bibles printed at Edinburgh, but lately they have been extended against Bibles, Testaments and Common Prayers, printed in England, with commentaries and notes. This proceeding has spread terror and dismay through the various booksellers both in town and country: especially as they have been likewise informed, that they cannot, under the existing law, sell any Bible in the English tongue, or in any other tongue whatsoever, of any translation, with note or without note, which is not printed at the press of the King's printer, or at the press[es] of the two Universities. As this system was rapidly spreading in every direction, the trade took it up, and assembled yesterday evening to discuss the propriety of resisting with all the energy which such an invasion of what they deemed their long established rights demanded. After some discussion, they entered into a resolution of appointing a Committee of 12 London booksellers, with full powers to adapt all such measures as should be requisite to terminate the depending prosecutions, and to prevent any future occurrence. This was followed by another resolution, empowering them to receive subscriptions to enable them to proceed in the cause. We understand that large sums were immediately deposited in the hands of the Commiittee, several persons advancing from twenty to thirty pounds each, and one gentleman in particular the large sum of 150 guineas.
From hints that were dropped in the course of the discussion, we are led to conjecture, that the great body of booksellers will immediately combine, and present a petition to the two Houses of Parliament, to obtain some modification of the present patent.
There can scarcely have been any ground for claiming that the King's printer and the two university presses had exclusive rights under "the present patent" to print the Bible in any language "with note or without note" . The allegation must have been made ad terrorem either by the patent-holders as an expendable bargaining position or, far more probably, by the booksellers in order to persuade the dismayed and terrified booksellers to contribute generously to the cause. Certainly nothing in the 1818 Law Report makes such
To the booksellers it must have seemed that all the struggles of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to secure access to the Authorized Version of the Bible must be repeated--with the additional threat that they might not be allowed to print even other versions of the Bible. To the patent-holders, it must have seemed that as long as they were resisting the invasions of the Scottish buccanneers, they might as well at the same time attempt to recover the exclusive right to print annotated and illustrated Bibles which they (or at least the King's Printer) had tamely conceded to the booksellers at large at the end of the eighteenth century. Plainly both sides were marshalling their troops along the legal border, enriching their war-chests, spreading propaganda, and preparing for the onset of hostilities for a war that threatened to spread commercial carnage on an international scale.
Alas! the documents I have seen do not enable me to present further battle-bulletins. Injunctions don't get recorded very extensively, even a barrage of them like this. And even if one could get evidence as to whom the injunctions were directed against, one still couldn't draw very useful conclusions unless one could ascertain that the injunctions were breached or that they changed the actions of the injunctee. The documents have, however, made plain some of the principles of literary property at issue in the war, and they have identified the combatants on the two sides fairly plainly. Whatever they said, both sides were fighting under the banner of Mammon, though the patent-holders doubtless preferred to be known as the party of Church and King. The cause of Church and King was vigourously led by Oxford University Press, seconded, at least financially, by Cambridge University Press. The King's Printer in London seems to have permitted the campaign rather than fostered it, and indeed at least in Oxford there seems to have been some suspicion that he had a foot in the enemy camp. Opposed to the Church and King party were most conspicuously the King's Printers in Scotland (Sir D. Hunter Blair & J. Bruce in Edinburgh), but Oxford had initiated hostilities in such a way that most of the substantial book-sellers in Britain were probably ranged against them.
Further, if report of the 1819 Meeting of Booksellers is to be believed, the Church and King party led by Oxford and Cambridge University Presses was not merely defending their ancient privileges of printing and selling unillustrated and unannotated editions of the Authorized Version of the Bible; it was attempting to extend these privileges very substantially, so as to prevent the sale of "any Bible in the English tongue, or in any other tongue whatsoever, of any translation, with note or without note, which is not printed at the press of the King's printer, or at the press[es] of the two Universities". The legal conquest of such a terrain would, of course, have been immensely valuable. And while it is clear that the Church and King party did not conquer this new terrain, it is equally clear that they did maintain their privilege of printing and selling the Authorized Version of the Bible in England.
In some ways, access to the word of God was as hotly contested by booksellers at the beginning of the nineteenth century as it had been among logocentric Protestants in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Should the King's Printers and the university presses have an exclusive right to God's Word as priests had had in former ages? There was money in God's Word, and in the nineteenth century the debate swirled about the issue not of who should read God's Word but of who should make a profit from it. The fortunes of the war are fascinating, but in religious terms there may be some doubt as to whether they are edifying.
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