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By Root 1882 0

symbolic choice. Robertson's book was the most valuable literary property the London trade had ever bought. It was a veritable emblem of the perpetual propriety of the metropolitan trade. Robertson had received the stupendous sum of £4,000 for the copyright. Bell's piracy, accordingly, was easily the greatest commercial publishing project ever produced in the colonies. It sold at roughly 5o percent of import prices. He followed it with Blackstone's celebrated Commentaries on English law, and the two books together-Robertson's with its Enlightenment historiography of progress, Blackstone's with its articulation of a common-law tradition of liberty-became major ideological resources for the revolutionaries. But they were only the most prominent of what became in Bell's hands a virtual canon of expropriated literature. He reprinted Samuel Johnson, Lawrence Sterne, and the Scottish chemist William Cullen. EdwardYoung's Night Thoughts, Goethe's Werther, and, after independence, Buchan's Domestick Medicine all came from his press. Of course, he also reprinted Thomson's Seasons, as any self-respecting pirate of the time did. And he even proposed to do Hume, though for once he seems to have failed to follow through. With Paine's Commonsense, Bell published the first edition, only to fall out with the writer and see Paine facilitate rival impressions across the region- a hoisting by his own petard that saw the tract become the manifesto of the Revolution. In all, his list amounted to a declaration of hostilities against London and London's book trade. And in farming out the actual printing of these books to others, Bell effectively inaugurated in America the role of the publisher.11

Bell added his own Address to Robertson's history to articulate his purposes. This Address was by far the most significant defense of colonial piracy. It was a slight document, perhaps, when set against Donaldson's; but it had a Paine-like directness of its own. Bell first thanked subscribers for what he called "this practical proof of your alacrity to promote native fabrications," thus identifying his piracy with the drive for American manufacturing. He then recommended extending the same approach to books in general. But here he moved to rebut the charge that this was (in his own rendition of the Londoners' position) "an infraction on the monopoly of literary property in Great-Britain." Even if such a monopoly made sense in a land of luxury, "overgrown with riches," it made none in a growing nation. Ireland proved the point. `As soon as any new Book appears in London," Bellremarked, "it is immediately reprinted by the Irish booksellers." They had already reprinted Charles V twice, Blackstone three times, and the Universal History twice, all "without rendering the smallest pecuniary regard either to Authors or Booksellers." This had fostered an unprecedented reading public eager for "literary knowledge." "This high-born privilege of freely disseminating knowledge," Bell proclaimed, had transformed the Irish nation. It had been "not only Humanified, but almost Angelified." Moreover, Blackstone himself argued that a monopoly like copyright did not extend beyond Britain to any other "country governed by an Assembly of Representatives," which Bell took to include the colonies. The London booksellers had known this when they had paid Robertson his four thousand guineas, so they could hardly complain of injustice now. It would be "incompatible with all freedom" to hold that "an American's mind must be entirely starved and enslaved in the barren regions of fruitless vacuity, because he doth not wallow in immense riches equal to some British Lords." Bell's was therefore an act of liberty. In his proclamation could be discerned a program of piracy that would survive the Revolution and help shape the nation it produced."

IMITATION AND IMPROVEMENT

Robert Bell survived the Revolution to spend his last years as an itinerant and controversial book auctioneer in the new nation. When he died in September 1784, Mathew Carey, having just escaped the redcoats in Dublin,