12 
The Economics of Print
12 ALEXIS WEEDON
Four essential factors determine the economic value of a book: its worth as literary property, the cost of its manufacture, regulatory and institutional controls, and its price in the market. The history of the book trade can be read as the economic development of these four key areas. Tracing the development of these factors, this essay’s chief focus is on 19th-century Britain, when commercial and technological innovations changed the economic status of the book from a luxury item to an affordable product for the majority of the British population (see 22b).
Even before the invention of printing, book production was regulated through the craft guild of the Company of Scriveners in the City of London. By the mid-16th century the guild controlled the economic organization of book production, which was limited to London. The technical importance of printing and its economic advantage over hand copying gradually gave printers status and influence within the guild. However, printing increased the demand for paper which was imported by wealthy merchants—stationers—who were effectively the capitalists of the trade and held greatest sway within the Company. In 1557, the Stationers’ Company was granted a Royal Charter giving it corporate legal status and the right to self-regulation. The Company gained powers to regulate apprentices and apprenticeships and to seize illegal books, and it prohibited printing by non-members. This largely confined printing to London, centralizing the trade until the end of the 17th century (see 22a).
The Company’s custom of recording permission to print a book—a practice inaugurated in part to forestall adverse competition between its members—became regularized, and in 1559 the Stationers’ Register became the authoritative record within the trade of who had the right to print copies of a work. By Elizabeth I’s reign, registration had become the mechanism for recording the legal right to publish a work, and in 1637 this was confirmed in law.
Certain characteristics of the book business in Britain are evident in the early history of the Stationers’ Company: there is a strong institutional structure focused on London, an economic interdependence between the elements of the trade that emphasized their mutual business interests above rivalries, and a mechanism to assign and record the right to print copies of books. The Stationers’ Register and patents were early forms of copyright protection. Patents had been assigned by Henry VIII, and they gave the right to print the most profitable books to particular court favourites and their appointed printers. This concentrated economic power in an oligarchy, as the lucrative trade in educational and religious books (ABCs, almanacs, catechisms, psalters, and primers) was given to a few favoured members of the Company. Protests ensued, and as a result the patents were shared more widely amongst the members and became jointly owned property. In 1603 this arrangement was formalized into the Company’s English Stock. The Stock was divided into shares with a notional capital of £9,000. Fifteen Court Assistants purchased shares of £320 each, 30 Livery-men purchased shares worth £160, and 60 freemen or yeomen purchased shares worth £80 each. In the early 17th century, shareholders received a remarkable annual dividend of around 12.5 per cent. A large proportion of these co-owners were booksellers and paper merchants who had the capital to invest in the English Stock. The long-term effect of this arrangement was to separate the printing and publishing functions of book production—an outcome that was crucial to the parallel development of the printing industry and of publishing houses in the 19th century.
In 1637, however, the book trade was still small. There were approximately 26 active printing offices in London, and a printer might have two or three hand presses with a couple of journeymen and an apprentice. Essentially, they were small-scale family businesses. By 1730 the size of typical printing offices had increased, while the biggest firms became very large indeed: Jacob Tonson and John Watts, for example, employed over 50 men. In the 1750s, Samuel Richardson had three such establishments with more than 40 men in each. These were printing and bookselling enterprises, fuelled in part by the growing popularity of the novel and the 18th-century circulating library market.
The Printing Act (1662) confirmed the main elements of the trade after the chaos of the Civil War: it was almost exclusively confined to London, limited the number of presses, and ratified that entry in the Stationers’ Register was the proof of copyright ownership. The only significant change was that a Licenser, responsible for books and newspapers, replaced the Elizabethan system of approval by two religious or educational authorities.
The Civil War stimulated literacy and a growth in demand for news conveyed through print. In 1668, to gain access to this new market, the trade published the first term catalogues, or lists of new publications for booksellers. It was a significant innovation, which later became the basis of the national bibliography. During this time, wholesalers came to play a key part in the distribution of books. To recoup the expense of manufacture, copy-owners sold a portion of their press run at a discount to wholesalers, who then sold them on to booksellers. Significantly, the discount was calculated on the notional retail price of the book, foreshadowing the rise of the Net Book Agreement (1900), which regulated book prices for nearly the whole of the 20th century.
In 1695, the Printing Act lapsed and the value of English Stock declined, thereby eroding the control of the Stationers’ Company over the trade. Copy-owners feared the loss of protection of their copyright and an increase in piracy, so they replaced the institutional control of the Stationers’ Company by trade agreements directly with members of congers, associations of booksellers or printers who increased their power in the market by pooling their resources in a kind of joint-stock partnership. Such associations not only helped to ensure greater financial stability for their members, they also extended their range of distribution and provided a measure of protection from piracy. Such amalgamations of businesses are indicative of the tightness of the trade and the mutuality of interests in the production and sale of books. Similarly, shared ownership of a book was kept within the group of shareholders through trade sales. When shares in copyrights became available for sale, often through the estate of a former copy-owner, an auction was typically conducted exclusively for members of the book trade. After the legal protection of the Printing Act lapsed in 1695, this form of trade protection was all that was available until the first Copyright Act came into being.
During the 18th century, various legal remedies were tried to regulate the trade, including laws on copyright, trade protectionism, and taxation. The lapse of the Printing Act was also the end of licensing, and taxes on printed matter, introduced in 1711 and later extended, became the means of regulating access to print. They continued until the mid-19th century. By raising the price of newspapers and print, they effectively circumscribed their readership, excluding the poorer classes. Taxes could be claimed back on books sent abroad, however; for some publishers such as H. G. Bohn, this had the unintended benefit of supporting the growing export trade in books. The 18th century saw the first copyright Act—‘for the Encouragement of Learning’ (1710)—which gave protection to copy-owners of existing literary property for 21 years and of all new copies after the Act for 14 years. However, it was somewhat hastily drafted, and hence badly worded, leaving open the notion of perpetual copyright. Copy-owners were anxious about the extent of the protection it gave, especially after the initial 21 years had expired, and were concerned about the threat of imported books from emerging centres of printing in Edinburgh and Dublin. Thus, the booksellers put pressure on the government to protect the trade, and in 1739 the Crown passed an act that prohibited the import of English books. It was not to last, and in 1774 a legal judgement ruled that this protectionism was illegal, effectively ending the stranglehold of the London trade. This case (Donaldson vs Becket) was significant for another reason: it ruled against perpetual copyright. From then on copyright acts have set and adjusted fixed terms for copyright protection.
Authors hardly featured in the 1710 copyright Act, although they soon began to see how it gave them more of an economic stake in their work. In the 18th century, the author typically received a lump sum for the number of sheets the work would fill in exchange for its copyright. By 1800 limited-duration copyright was an economic reality, and profit-sharing agreements gradually became more common. During the 19th century the Society of Authors campaigned for royalty agreements so that writers might share in the financial reward of their success. Publishers turned their attention to creating markets within a growing and increasingly literate population. Some were able to make a good living from out-of-copyright books. For example, Bohn’s Libraries became renowned for their quality and affordability and opened up a market for other such series, which included books in copyright. Other publishers, such as Smith, Elder, & Co., paid highly for the right to publish fashionable works and to capture the tide of popular interest in a genre or author.
Industrialization and the consequent economic prosperity of 19th-century Britain significantly changed the costs of book production. Steam-powered machines revolutionized printing and paper manufacture (see 10, 11). The growth in population and improvements in general welfare and education increased the market for print, and there was an unprecedented growth in output. Print was the first mass media, and in the second half of the 19th century printed matter became ubiquitous—it was on hoardings in the street and on packaging in shops and homes (see 16). Booksellers and newsagents supplied a burgeoning number and variety of books, newspapers, and periodicals. This was the result of falling manufacturing costs, increased demand, and a freedom from the institutional and regulatory controls that had hitherto restricted access.
The market for books expanded as the population grew and the proportion of adults able to read also increased. Market growth meant that, from the 1860s to the 1890s, the industry was financially under pressure to increase productivity without raising costs. This drive for greater economy was achieved though a reduction in the factor costs of production, including: the price of paper, the mechanization of printing, the development of lithography, and limiting composition costs through the use of stereotyping, or taking plate moulds of set type.
Nevertheless, the book trade was not immune from the ups and downs of the economy. Some declines were peculiar to the trade, such as the crisis of 1826 when Archibald Constable, Sir Walter Scott’s publisher, and a number of other publishers and printers failed. Yet, the trade recovered by the 1830s. Other crises were international: following the Napoleonic wars, there were economic downturns in 1819, 1829–32, 1837–42, and 1847–8; similarly, optimism in the revival of trade after the American Civil War was short-lived. The 1864–6 monetary crisis in Britain was perhaps the most severe: it had been caused by a number of London discounting houses borrowing short and lending long. Several failed, including the greatest of the lenders, Overend, Gurney, & Co, pushing many businesses that relied on bills of exchange into bankruptcy, including Samuel O. Beeton, husband and publisher of Mrs Beeton. The ensuing financial emergency continued until 1867, reaching its most critical point on 12 May 1866, when the bank lending rate soared to 10 per cent. It was not to reach that level again until the outbreak of World War I.
J. Barnes has argued that such monetary crises spurred innovation in publishing. Certainly, many successes arose from experiments begun in economic depression. For example, Charles Knight and the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (SDUK) launched the Library of Useful Knowledge in the turbulent post-Napoleonic era. Each fortnightly issue cost 6d., and sales, often to the working or lower-middle classes, sometimes reached 20,000 per issue. Another publisher who profited from economic downturns was Tegg & Son. It dominated the remaindering market, and during 1825–7 made a successful business from buying at ‘vastly reduced prices the copyrights of works that had not sold well or whose proprietors had gone bankrupt’ (Barnes, 235). Innovative formats were another method of stimulating the market, as W. H. Smith found when he began his first railway bookstall in the depression of 1848. He tempted middle-class readers with the earliest of many railway libraries; Routledge, Henry Colburn, and other publishers followed. The success of Smith and his competitors was fuelled by a 19th-century vogue for publishers’ series or ‘libraries’, which supplied a market for self-education, for book collecting, and, in the latter half of the century, for schoolbooks.
The success of a format could also bring its own difficulties, however. When J. M. Dent launched Everyman’s Library in 1904, he set aside £10,000 to finance it. The initial volumes sold so well that he reprinted, tying up much of his capital in stock. Dent’s bindery did not have enough space to cope with the demand, so he moved his works to Hertfordshire, installed his printing machinery in the basement, and built new houses for his workers. These expenses cost him an additional £20,000, compelling him to go to his papermakers and to his bank for credit. As a major customer with a secure business, he was able to get it, but as Barnes has pointed out: ‘innovation depends on solvency, whether the times are prosperous or hard’ (Barnes, 239).
From 1876 to 1886 there was a considerable increase in the quantity of books produced in Britain. Economic historians have shown that the depression of 1873–96 had been of greater political than economic significance; although Britain lost her predominant position as the leading manufacturing country and growth was not as rapid as before, the economy also slowed in the US and Germany. Britain came to take a new pivotal role in international trade and financial services. In the publishing industry, trade to the empire was strongest during periods of colonial expansion. Customs figures for the declared value of book exports indicate that there was a strong early market in India from the 1820s to the 1840s (see 41). In the early 1850s, however, Australia became a significant consumer of British books: by 1868 the weight of books being shipped to Australia was five times greater than the weight to India (see 46). The export trade suffered reversals in the Australian financial crises of 1883 and 1890. Exports to British North America (later the Canadian Federation) grew in the late 1860s, so that by 1868 the tonnage to North America was double the Indian trade (see 49). From the 1890s, however, British publishers felt the effects of competition from indigenous publishing houses and sought to establish branches abroad to handle their trade in the colonies. Macmillan, for instance, opened offices in India in 1901. Their export trade had been developing over several decades, and from 1873 they had been designing specific editions for the Indian market. Similarly, William Collins & Sons opened a warehouse and showroom in Sydney, Australia, in 1874, and in New Zealand in 1888, and the firm also had travellers in India seeking out markets in Bombay, Calcutta, Madras, and Colombo. Such expansion was a typical feature of the internationalization of British book publishing.
On the manufacturing side of book production—paper and printing—capital investment in printing equipment was needed initially to fund powered presses from the 1830s to the 1850s, and subsequently to replace those presses with improved versions. From the 1860s printers, such as William Clowes, were investing in patents and were experimenting with composition machines and new photographic and platemaking processes. Similarly, in the papermaking trade, the Fourdrinier machine and its later improvements substantially increased output.
The invention of the papermaking machine had a profound effect on the book trade (see 10). As early as 1804, the Fourdrinier brothers registered a patent for such a machine; their invention was subsequently modified and improved by others. By 1825, over half of all paper in England was made by machine. Machine-made paper had the advantages of speed, flexibility, size, and quality. Testifying to the significance of the Fourdriniers’ invention, the book printer George Clowes explained the knock-on result of machine-made paper for the whole of the printing industry: it ‘has effected a complete revolution in our business; where we used to go to press with an edition of 500 copies, we now print 5,000’ (Plant, 331). Clowes’s works at that time was the biggest and most modern in the country; it printed on double-sized paper at a time when only about a fifth of book paper used was double. By 1886, however, this figure had risen to three-quarters. Quad papers succeeded double and by 1906 were the norm. This doubling-up of sheet sizes corresponded with the increase in the size of presses.
In the 30 years following 1866, paper costs were reduced by approximately two-thirds. This substantial decrease had a significant effect on cost of production. Contemporary sources explaining the decline in the cost of paper as a proportion of book manufacturing in the 19th century as a whole cite the earlier abolition of duty and the use of esparto grass and wood pulp in the manufacture of paper as two major causes. However, other variables also effected this fall: the mechanization of the process of paper manufacture; the availability and affordability of the raw materials for paper; and more economical presses and imposition schemes. Probably all these factors contributed to helping printers reap the benefits of mechanization, and ensured the more economical use of larger presses.
Although Clowes had already experimented with steam power in his printing office in 1823, it was a while before the printing machine itself was commonplace. Before 1820, the steam press was in use by five London printers: The Times, Charles Baldwin, Andrew Strahan, Richard Taylor, and Richard Bensley. Not all of these had double-size presses, and it was not until 1828 that the use of double sheets for book work was possible though the introduction of the improved Applegath and Cowper machine. The Times had printed its 29 November 1814 edition on König’s steam press, and later used Applegath and Cowper’s improved version, which could print double-sized sheets at the rate of 1,000 an hour, four times the speed of the hand presses. Throughout the 1830s and 1840s, other printers began to install steam engines and invest in powered presses. Steam-powered double-platen presses manufactured first by Hopkinson and Cope, then produced to an improved design by Napier, generally came into use during the 1830s. Running at up to 800 impressions per hour, their maximum size was double royal. This increased capacity fuelled experiments in cheap periodicals. Following the Library of Useful Knowledge, for example, the SDUK published its famous Penny Magazine and Penny Cyclopaedia. This was a boom period in periodical publishing. In 1836, Dickens published Pickwick Papers in part numbers. The novel was so successful that Chapman & Hall, Dickens’s publishers, had to use stereotypes to print multiple impressions. The stereotyping process enabled type to be cast to fit a curved surface, and this led to faster cylinder and rotary presses coming on to the market. During the 1860s and 1870s, the Napier steam presses were replaced by these fast, but initially less accurate, single-sided cylinder presses. Wharfedales, used in book work, could take the much larger quad demy sheets. In 1858 The Times moved to using stereoplates on cylinders; ten years later, taking advantage of the mechanization of paper manufacture, it dispensed with sheets and employed a rotary press that could take a continuous web of paper. This measure doubled its printing capacity.
Such machines made labour more productive. Both the double platens and the double royal Wharfedales used two operators, but the latter’s output was greater. The operators were usually boys, overseen by a machine-minder who made ready the press—that is, imposed the forme and put it on the press, adjusted the height of the type by inserting overlays, and packed cuts where necessary. When reprinting a work, fitting stereoplates saved time, as the initial labour of levelling the type was preserved in the cast. This reduced the making-ready, and hence production costs. Often some repair work was needed to the stereoplates, but it usually amounted to no more than a few shillings’ worth of labour. Such savings meant that it was cost-effective to reprint in shorter runs, though the effort of setting up the press and washing it down afterwards resulted in the fact that the unit cost for editions of fewer than 500 was markedly higher than for editions above that number. This partly explains why, from the 1860s to the 1880s, the most frequent quantity printed was 1,000 books.
As machining, make-ready, and paper costs varied over the century, so too did the unit cost for printing a book. Unit costs fell when the initial fixed setup cost could be divided among a larger number of books. As more books were printed, the fraction of the set-up cost was reduced until it was less than the combined cost of paper and machining for each unit. At this point the optimum press run was reached. By the 1890s, the optimum run for the publisher was as high as 30,000 copies, although this was obviously not the longest possible print run. It was not unusual for cheap fiction, for instance, to be printed in numbers of 100,000 or more on cylinder presses, although most quality book work was done on sheet-fed machines. Above the optimum press run, the unit cost consisted of the price of the paper, running the machine, and the wages and overtime of the machine-minder and his boys. For magazine publishers, such as Newnes, using faster perfecting cylinder and rotary presses, much longer press runs were economical, but initial set-up costs meant that runs had to be over 5,000 to be cost-effective. Publishers used these new, highly economical technologies in the penny market. Newnes, John Dicks, and others published editions of popular works, often printed in double columns, magazine-style, on cheap paper; they cost a few pence and were read by the working classes.
Chatto & Windus publish Choice Humorous Works of Mark Twain (1873); it was followed by a series of stereotype reprints, all produced by Ballantyne, Hanson, & Co. The publication ledger shows the growing importance of documenting and controlling costs. Chatto & Windus Archives
Although in the 40 years between 1836 and 1876 the average cost of machining gradually rose at a rate of approximately 7 per cent each decade, between 1876 and 1886 the average cost fell by 29 per cent, and in real terms by nearer half; it remained low until the turn of the century. The fall in paper costs after the abolition of the paper tax, then the replacement of the platen-powered presses by the larger cylinder ones in the 1860s and 1870s, meant that the real reduction in the cost of machining came after the beginning of the fall in paper costs. The percentage fall in the expense of machining cannot be wholly attributed to the incremental increase in paper size. The new machinery was more economical.
The main reason for the fall in the cost of book production was the move from double- to quad-sized paper and presses, and the use of stereoplates. Composition, for nearly the whole of the 19th century, meant hand composition. Experiments with mechanical means for the selection of type and its distribution were on the whole unsuccessful. When labour was plentiful, the main concern was the amount of available type. With the spread of stereoplates and typecasting machines in the 1850s, the quantity of type became less of a problem, and what concerned publishers and printers more was the extent of revisions which added to the rising cost of labour. Correction represented on average 35 per cent of the composition costs of books between 1836 and 1916, although the proportion varied considerably from title to title. The occasional text needed complete resetting, whereas others needed very little alteration.
Throughout the 19th century wage levels gradually increased, making labour more expensive. The main period of rising wages was from 1869 to 1876. However, compositors’ wages did not rise so sharply. Bowley’s and Wood’s studies show that compositors’ average wages—which in 1800–1810 had been much higher than their fellow workers in cotton factories, the building trade, and the shipbuilding and engineering industries—were by the 1880s at a similar level. Although there were wide geographical differences in the wages of union labour, non-union labour, and piece-work, a comparison of compositors’ earnings with Wood’s calculation of the mean wage of the period shows that compositors’ wages were falling relative to those of other wage earners. Rates of pay and employment levels varied considerably from county to county, causing concern among the typographical societies. In the crisis of 1826, for example, many compositors lost their jobs, and every London printing house allegedly had notices saying that compositors and pressmen need not apply. Even two years later, 800 out of 3,500 compositors and pressmen in the capital were out of work.
With the mechanization of paper manufacture and the adoption of printing machines, the labour-intensive work of composition was the next logical task to mechanize. However, typographical associations and print unions, which were concerned for the continuing employment of their members and for industry standards, resisted the introduction of composing machines. Their concern over quality was echoed by the printers. The Linotype machine used in America for book work had been gradually introduced into newspaper offices in Britain in the late 1870s, but the printer W. C. K. Clowes judged that although the Linotype was the right principle, ‘at present he did not think it was the machine for book-work’ (Southward, 82). Clowes’s firm invested in Monotype machines when they came into commercial use in 1897, pioneering many of their own modifications. The interval between the technology’s invention and its perfection meant that any effect on wages and employment patterns for compositors was deferred until the 20th century, when World War I pushed both prices and wages higher.
When printers moved to an industrialized system of setting and printing, replaced double- with quad-sized presses, and bought machine-made paper, they passed on to publishers the benefits of large-scale manufacturing through the reduction of basic unit costs. By adopting stereoplates, which conserved labour and allowed for a more flexible mode of production, they enabled publishers to tailor their product more effectively to the market. The most significant factor in the reduction of unit costs, however, was the reduction in paper prices (combined with its greater availability).
At the end of the 19th century, the newspaper and publishing industry consisted mainly of family businesses and partnerships. In the book trade, partnerships were often turned into family businesses when partners were bought out or lists were sold, and the business was handed down to the founder’s sons and grandsons. Printers apprenticed their sons to their clients’ businesses, and publishers found their sons places in fellow publishers’ and printers’ firms. In this manner, the trade was close-knit. However, after the trade crisis of 1866–7, it became increasingly common to adopt the form of a limited liability company and retain the family’s interest through their shareholding and by holding seats on the corporation’s board.
The publishing industry became an increasingly attractive field for investment, not least because the taxes on knowledge that had inhibited the growth of newspapers were abated, political control of the press was relaxed, and prosperity increased. The spread of industrialization, which affected printers and paper manufacturers, caused some concern to producers of books for export as by the mid-century European countries began to emulate Britain and became able to manufacture paper more cheaply. The commissioning and sale of books—the province of publishers and booksellers—was largely dependent on trading conditions in Britain and abroad. Tariff barriers were imposed to differentiate markets, and this affected both supply factors and, to a lesser extent, distribution; however, there were no barriers within the empire, and publishers’ colonial editions appear to have sold in good numbers. Perhaps more significant to the trade was the gradual extension of copyright protection. Although copyright law varied throughout the century, efforts to gain international agreements within Europe (by way e.g. of the Berne Convention) and, most significantly for British publishers, with the US, eventually paid off.
The economic, political, and legal framework that dictated the structure of the newspaper industry also affected book and magazine publishing, though not to the same extent. The mid-century pressures for political reform stimulated the proliferation of newspapers throughout the country. Politics, legal reform, and growing urbanization were agents of change. In the same way as the 19th-century book, periodical, and general publishing firms, so too was the newspaper industry built largely on the model of the family business. Ties between the industries were close, as Lee has stated: ‘Newspaper proprietors had customarily been recruited from the ranks of printers and publishers, and the tradition of proprietorship was deeply rooted and long-lived’ (Lee, 84).
In the book publishing industry, family firms and partnerships predominated. Such firms were typically valued prior to changing hands, which was either when a firm was being handed on to the next generation, or when a partner left and wanted to release his equity in the stock and good will. As sons (rarely daughters) came into the trade, they were placed in friends’ firms to learn the business, sometimes becoming partners, or else setting up partnerships independently when of age. Thus, a close study of 19th-century imprints often leads to tracing the kinship of publishers. Firms tied by blood, friendship, or the supply chain were also linked through capital investment, long-term loans, shares, and bills of exchange. Towards the end of the century, it became usual in both industries to adopt some form of joint-stock company, which necessitated returning a balance sheet with accurate statements of turnover and capital.
The registrations and returns of joint-stock companies were recorded annually in the parliamentary blue books that also noted if they had been wound up or were still in operation at the time they made their return. Although some 18th-century newspapers were organized as joint-stock companies, the real expansion came after the Companies Acts of 1854 and 1862, which offered the security of limited liability. From 1856, the details of their corporate finances were recorded in the blue books. Shannon has shown that the early companies invariably made a loss, causing many investors to be understandably cautious of the new system. Certainly, it seems that many printers and the vast majority of publishing companies remained in private hands. Lee has counted some 420 newspaper companies formed between 1856 and 1885. Only 247 ‘book, magazine, journal, art or general publishing or bookselling’ companies were registered in the same period: 38 in the first decade, 58 in the second, and 151 in the third. This rate of increase was below that of newspaper companies; yet, it reflected the expansion of joint-stock companies at the time. ‘Infant mortality’ in the first decade was 38 per cent among publishing companies, compared with 20 per cent among newspaper companies, though such early corporate demises too fell swiftly to 7 per cent and 10 per cent in the following two decades, slightly above Lee’s newspaper figures of 7 and 6 per cent.
In contrast with the newspaper trade, the number of publishing companies formed remained relatively low until the mid-1870s. In the early 1880s, the rate of formation increased as it did in the newspaper trade, with 26 new companies in 1885. It appears that the economic reversals of the mid-1860s did not affect the number of publishing companies registering, although it does seem to have made them more reluctant to submit returns and more cautious about estimating the company’s liability.
Much of the capital held by publishing companies is tied up in their copyrights, in contrast with printers, who invest in machinery and presses. Nevertheless, the industries were closely intertwined, and many of the companies’ statements describing their ‘object or business’ cross the boundaries between printer, publisher, and newspaper proprietor; for example, the Kilgore Newspaper and Publishing Company Ltd included as its business ‘newspaper and general printing & publishing’. Book printers such as Clowes partially or wholly owned copyrights as well as holding shares in publishing companies. By 1883, however, categories used in the returns make the distinction between newspaper proprietors and printers and publishers, and this may well reflect an increase in the industry’s specialization. From the blue books, it is evident that a larger percentage of publishing than of newspaper companies were medium to large (with a nominal capital £10,000 or above), although in the potentially dangerous period between 1866 and 1875 they were more cautious, and limited their liability to lower amounts. It seems too that more of the nominal capital was called in at this time than during the decades before or after.
Many companies were, of course, established to buy an existing enterprise, and a number of firms were formed for the purpose either of turning partnerships and family businesses into private companies or of buying copyrights in order to establish their own business. Between 1856 and 1865, 70 per cent of publishing companies had fewer than ten shareholders. This pattern was reversed in the following (economically troubled) decade when the risk was spread among a greater number of shareholders. Many of these larger companies were educational suppliers or providers of Christian literature ranging from newspapers to schoolbooks. Others were stationers, printers, or periodical publishers first and foremost, and listed publishing or bookselling as a part of their business. By the end of the 1880s there were many more moderate-to-large businesses whose main object was publishing and bookselling, such as Isbister & Company Ltd (1879) with £32,000 nominal capital and 18 shareholders; Chapman & Hall Ltd (1880) with £150,000 nominal capital and 104 shareholders; and Collins & Sons Ltd (1880) with £200,000 and 17 shareholders. All these publishers called on a fair proportion of their nominal capital: Isbister called in 90 per cent, Chapman & Hall 70 per cent, and Collins 88 per cent.
The hegemonic structure of the publishing industry was challenged by public investment in companies, alternative distribution systems, foreign competition in colonial markets, and ultimately by the reduction in the unit cost of the book. These factors led to a restructuring of the book trades, a phenomenon that had important commercial and cultural implications. Fundamental structural changes paved the way for the future direction of the publishing industry and became integral to 20th-century developments in the horizontal integration of the industry, by which smaller firms merged to form larger publishing houses that commanded a greater market share.
The growth in book production in the 50 years before World War I was higher than the growth in the reading public—a ‘catching-up’ after the setbacks of the mid-1860s. The increase in reading and book buying mirrored the rate of rising literacy. With World War I, both production and labour costs became more expensive. At the same time, however, composition machines—commonly Monotype machines for books and Linotypes for periodicals—were deemed of acceptable quality.
Price structuring, which from the 1870s had become a significant force in differentiating the fiction markets and had taken on greater significance after the collapse of the three-decker novel market, led to greater price specialization among publishers. In the 1920s and 1930s, some publishers concentrated on cheap reprint editions (e.g. Newnes, Rich, & Cowan) and others on inexpensive tie-ins with films—such as the Readers Library. In the middle price range Hodder & Stoughton sold genre fiction at 6s. and their ‘yellow backs’ at 2s. or 2s. 6d. Increasingly, authors’ contracts were for specific editions or price bands; other rights were sold separately. It was also the era of Penguin’s successful launch into the sixpenny market.
The great depression of the 1930s saw some lasting innovations. In 1932 Harold Raymond of Chatto & Windus initiated book tokens. Often given as gifts, the tokens were exchanged towards the purchase of a book, and customers usually spent more than the value of the tokens. The scheme thrived in the difficult economic times of the 1930s and consolidated membership of the Booksellers’ Association, since the bookseller had to be a member to claim his proportion of the value of the token. Similarly, the Left Book Club and Book Society’s book club, the British counterparts to the Book-of-the-Month Club and the Literary Guild in America, had considerable success, as they were able to offer new titles more cheaply by buying in bulk for their membership.
From the 1890s, literary agencies had grown to become a separate and profitable business. In 1935, Curtis Brown, the international literary agent, wrote that the days of the ‘good, kind, old-fashioned publisher who used to take over all of his author’s rights and re-sell at 50 per cent’ had gone. Successful literary properties commanded ‘so many widely varied markets and such intricate contracts’ that successful authors needed a business manager (Brown, 239–40). In the 1920s, serialization rights and translation rights usually brought in a lump sum, while royalty agreements for the differently priced book editions were often on a percentage return, depending on how many were sold. Options on novels and plays were eagerly sought as a source of stories for films; such rights could bring in a fixed amount, or be related to box office receipts. Agents found a business niche in negotiating and monitoring such contracts for a return of 10 per cent commission on what they brought the author.
World War I and then World War II profoundly affected the book trade. They imposed, if only for the duration of the conflicts, constraints which the trade had been free of for more than 50 years, ranging from restrictions on what could be published to shortages of labour and paper. However, the industry also supplied news of the war, propaganda, explanatory material, and advice through pamphlets and books. Stereoplates which had been stored for years in printers’ warehouses were melted down in the war effort, signalling the end of an era—and a welcome new beginning for those who wanted to put Victorian literature and its values behind them. The Census of Production revealed that the monetary value of the paper, print, and stationery trades increased by £3,481,000 between the first (1907) and the fourth (1930) censuses. Inflation accounts for some of the rise, but not all. The number of titles published annually rose, causing murmurings of ‘over-production’ from those in the trade. The four essential factors in the value of a book were well embedded, however. Copyright law was underpinned through international agreement; the printing and book-manufacturing industries were mechanized and competitive; the professional associations representing the booksellers, publishers, and authors cooperated in their members’ economic interests; and, significantly, the financial basis of this close-knit industry, the Net Book Agreement, had survived the two world wars.
Altick
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