University of Virginia Library

Cooper and John Fagan

In the productive final decade of his career beginning in 1840, in which
Cooper wrote sixteen of his thirty-two novels, for the most part the author

relied on his own handwriting to produce clear enough copy for his printers.
Manuscripts from this last decade show an author determined to make his
hand easier to read. During revision, Cooper often reshaped letters and, crucially,
by writing on lined folio sheets he avoided overcrowding his lines of
script (except at the unlined tops of pages where he often reverted to his old
habits of packing the lines in!). And from at least 1838, Cooper began to rely
more on a new form of publishing, involving his adapting of a fairly new
printing technology: stereotyping of standing type to enable printing (and
reprinting) from metal copies of hand-set type-pages without the expense of
recomposition. In his professional career, Cooper probably came to trust no
one in the publishing business more than John Fagan, who regularly made
stereotype plates for the Philadelphia firm Carey, Lea, and Blanchard. Carey
and Lea had published Cooper's last novel completed in America before his
departure to Europe, The Last of the Mohicans, in 1826 (which, according
to Robert Spiller, Fagan stereotyped.)[10] Upon Cooper's return to the United
States in 1833, Carey became his favored American publishers until their collapse
in the 1840s and his shifting of business to New York publishers in 1844.
Even after Cooper no longer used the Philadelphia publishers, he counted on
Fagan to oversee the typesetting and to prepare the stereotyped plates for
all his works from Home as Found (1838) to Ways of the Hour (1850).

As James Franklin Beard notes, "[t]heir relationship was a particularly
close and happy one, especially after Cooper began [with Afloat and Ashore]
the practice of financing the stereotyped plates of his books and leasing them
to publishers or booksellers for stated periods" (L&J, 4.446). For example,
Cooper counted on Fagan to deal with a minor problem of inscription that
vexed him through his career—keeping the spelling of his characters' names
consistent. As he wrote to Fagan on 4 March 1845 of his new book Satanstoe:

Instructions of such complexity betoken a collaborator who had earned
Cooper's trust. Perhaps this trust was in part born of economic necessity.
Having in Fagan a trusted collaborator probably assisted Cooper materially
in the 1840s when he was publishing typically two books a year (and for each
receiving half or less the income his earlier fiction had generated).

Further evidence of Cooper's close working relationship with Fagan
comes from the CE text of the two volumes of Afloat and Ashore (1844),
edited by Thomas and Marianne Philbrick. The editors have shown
that Fagan not only corrected Cooper's manuscript readings (and inevitably
introduced errors in the process); he also freely made small stylistic
changes and queried Cooper both on dubious readings and passages where he
disagreed with Cooper's intent. Fagan's copy-editing in preparation for initial

typesetting and subsequent stereotyping often effected Cooper's desire to
save the author from grammatical lapses. Without any known protest from
Cooper, Fagan subjected Cooper's manuscripts to careful and detailed copy-editing
involving hundreds of small, silent changes of Cooper's holograph, in
both accidentals and substantives. But by consulting the extant manuscripts,
the editors have identified over 1,100 substantive variants between the manuscript
and the first American edition where neither Fagan nor Cooper noted
the corruptions of Cooper's final intentions as inscribed in his manuscript.[11]

Not only did Cooper entrust his new books during this period to Fagan,
he counted on Fagan to see through the press the eleven revised texts he
prepared, at the end of his life, for the "Author's Revised Edition" issued
1849-51 by George P. Putnam. The first book in the series was the much-revised
Spy, for which Cooper admitted continued concern with printers
errors:

Cooper's implied license here, to "let nothing unintelligible pass," is for
him an extraordinary show of confidence in a collaborator who over the years
clearly he had grown to rely on implicitly—a collaboration far different from
his first with Andrew Thompson Goodrich in 1820. In the absence of textual
witnesses, however, assessing Fagan's role versus Cooper's own in making the
comparatively few revisions CE editors consider substantive in the Putnam
texts is difficult at best.[12]