Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [542]
Harpers’ success spurred competitors. The House of Appleton retained its number two status by producing Spanish-language books for the Latin American trade, commencing the New American Cyclopedia (the greatest literary enterprise yet attempted in the United States), and securing rights to Webster’s Elementary Spelling Book (which became the number two seller in the world, right behind the Bible). Behind the Appletons lay a pack of up-and-coming rivals including A. S. Barnes, Charles Scribner, David Van Nostrand, E. P. Dutton, and, scrappiest of all, the youthful George Palmer Putnam.
Putnam teamed with John Wiley in 1840 and quickly established an agency in England to forage for European books with which to rival Harpers. He also propelled Wiley and Putnam into building a strong domestic list, a focus he continued after setting up on his own in 1848.
Again, women writers and readers proved crucial to the expansion of the publishing world, particularly after 1850, when Putnam published Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World. Warner had grown up in the fashionable town house of an affluent and genteel New York family, received an excellent education, and thrived on the city’s cultural offerings. In the Panic of 1837, however, her father lost his fortune and took the family into impoverished upstate exile. Warner took to writing in hopes of making money and submitted a pious and sentimental novel to Harpers, which rebuffed it with the single word “Fudge.” Brought out by Putnam, however, Wide, Wide World became a publishing phenomenon. It went through fourteen editions in two years, becoming the most successful novel yet written in the United States, and touched off a flood of domestic parlor books by and for women. Despite the strictures against women speaking in public, which if anything had sharpened since Fanny Wright had been howled from her platform, writing for the public became an acceptable extension of woman’s sphere. Male publishers were simply not prepared to turn down the kind of revenue ladies generated, and “scribbling women,” with the help of their consuming sisters, carved out a niche in the flourishing industry.
By 1857 there were at least 112 publishers in New York City. While most were “respectable” houses, emphasizing genteel, religious, and domestic literature, others catered to a rougher readership. These outfits churned out blood-and-thunder adventures, sadomasochistic romances laced with sex and horror, and lurid accounts of patrician villainy or plebeian roguery. Nearly 60 percent of all fiction published in the United States between 1830 and 1860 was of this ilk.
In 1846, four years after the federal government banned importation of erotic material, an indigenous pornographic publishing industry arose when William Haynes, an Irish surgeon who immigrated to New York, reinvested the money he’d made publishing Fanny Hill in the United States in the production of cheap erotic novels like Confessions of a Lady’s Waiting Maid (1848). Most such paperbacks—usually octavosized pamphlets with yellow or pink wrappers, priced at twenty-five cents—were aimed at a youthful male audience and written by men, some of whom achieved heroic levels of productivity. In the 1850s New York sensationalist George Thompson whipped off nearly one hundred steamy potboilers—with titles like City Crimes (1849), New-York Life (1849), and The Gay Girls of New-York (1853)—portraying group sex, nymphomania, miscegenation, and incest in the Five Points. This plethora of pornographic confections, often replete with lustful woodcuts, led one New York reformer to wonder: “Will not the steam-presses create licentiousness faster than police regulations can drain it off?”
In the 1850s New York’s competing book publishers discovered, as had their counterparts in journalism, that cooperation could be in the interest of all. The market’s growth in size and scale had made it ever more difficult for companies to inform backcountry stores about new titles. Nor was it easy for distant booksellers to get to New York for the fall and spring trade