• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

So it was that Dublin's reprint trade was resurrected in Philadelphia and New York. Robert Bell made unauthorized reprinting a revolutionary act; the loyalist Thomas Kirk reprinted Dugald Stewart and the Romantic poets; and Hugh Gaine did the same toAddison, Burke, and Chesterfield. Irish emigres built American publishing. They naturally based it on what they knew best: the customs of the Irish trade. But those customs could not simply be reasserted in such a different setting. The first generations had to invent principles for regulating propriety across a landscape with several centers, not just one. They also had to determine how those principles could be promulgated, upheld, and defended. This involved developing sustainable, practicable customs for exchange, credit, and communication across distances large and small. It also meant building up the habits that would embed such frameworks into everyday life at the level of the printing house, bookshop, and home. As in Ireland, therefore, reprinting did not mean abandoning civility-on the contrary, it made civility all the more important. For Carey in particular, the policies he advocated for print were part and parcel of campaigns promoting philanthropy, moral reform, temperance, the abolition of slavery, the shipping of freed slaves to Liberia, the relief of Greek refugees, and "internal improvement" (the building of canals, and later railroads). Creating a self-perpetuating engine of culture was part and parcel of establishing an industrious, independent, moral, free, and resilient nation.

Copyright was a consideration here, but at first a distinctly peripheral one. America had had a federal copyright law from 1790, to be sure. But it protected only authors resident in the country, and in practice was of limited appeal even for those. Of roughly thirteen thousand titles published in the 1790s, only about five hundred were registered for copyright. And periodicals were not covered at all.43 The law could certainly be invokedThomas Dobson told a nervous author in the mid-1790s to register awork to prevent its being reprinted "in such a manner as you would not wish to see" - but it did not yet have a central role. That author did not take Dobson's advice, and only from a later date do the archives of publishers begin to fill with certificates of registration. In the meantime, to some the very principle remained (perhaps conveniently) obscure: IsaiahThomas caught a rival red-handed, only to be told that copyright did not protect "a comn- plete work."44 There had never been much need for it, in truth. Reprinting in different cities had generally been uncontroversial because markets were overwhelmingly local. But no longer. Thomas fought to restrain what he called the "phrensy" of new piracy complaints, reckoning it "a duty I owe the trade" to uphold good order. He exhorted his peers to maintain "harmony and a good understanding" for the sake of the trade's public reputation. Thomas even told one printer tempted to patent a work (and hence to defend it aggressively) that doing so would be "unworthy of a man of honour." Space must be left for enterprising projects, he insisted, "or Genius, in America, must lie dormant." He considered proposing a referee system to that end, a la Dublin. But ultimately he acknowledged that the clashes were beyond his control. They proved "the necessity of a regulation in our business."45

The American trade had no guilds, but assertions of moral community - of "companionship" among journeymen, for example - had been heard long before the Revolution. As early as 1724, Boston's booksellers had considered a call to "establish themselves into a Company"46 Only after independence did such moves lead to anything substantive. Beginning when Franklin tried with Isaiah Thomas in 1788 to establish "regulations for the benefit of the trade," associations repeatedly appeared, not all of which evaporated quickly.47 The initiatives tended to take one of two forms: alliances of printers (masters and/or journeymen) to protect