• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1883 0

even Carey's own Philadelphia company seems to have claimed a right to reprint works formerly owned by those who became its members. And then there was the problem of figures like the John Brown who declined to join because, as he ingenuously put it, he preferred to be free to reprint others' titles. Brown's objection clarified a major disadvantage with this kind of strategy in general: that it could only be effective for those within the company's ranks. Brown and his like might become rogues, effectively free to pirate at will provided they were prepared to endure blacklisting. His case therefore spurred renewed efforts "to settle the Priority of claims to new works" in general. Meanwhile the company exhorted members to "discountenance" bringing into Philadelphia books to which its members already laid claim, including those hitherto brought in openly through the exchange system. The company's authority was evidently rather frail. Eventually it found itself in the humiliating position of receiving an offer from an outsider to sell it copies of one of its own most highly profitable titles, Aesop's Fables. It summoned up enough pride to reject this offer, lest it "encourage the printing of any work, the right whereof, belongs to this Company." But soon afterward it shut its doors for the last time. On a larger scale, much the same fate overtook the American Company too. For a couple of years it seemed to thrive, but far-flung booksellers soon learned to use its channels to distribute reprints of major publishers' titles. The very system that Carey had inaugurated to prevent piracy turned out to have facilitated it. This "evil that had not been foreseen," as he called it, outweighed all the company's advantages. Both company and fair col- lapsed.56

Not everyone was distraught. It is interesting, given their grand aspirations, that Carey's companies and fairs encountered real opposition, not least from some who might have been expected to be enthusiastic. Andrews in Boston, for example, feared that they would "do more harm than good."57 And at least two Philadelphians other than Brown refused to join Carey's company. One was Robert Campbell, who specialized in cheap reprints of English books. Campbell almost certainly saw in the association a threat to his mode of business, and refused to have anything to do with it-prompting the company in a moment of bravado to adopt a policy of reprinting on anyone who pirated a member's works. The other was William McCulloch, who bluntly told Isaiah Thomas that all such institutions, especially Carey's "peculiar hobby horse" of the fair, were "useless, if not pernicious." McCulloch refused to believe that a customary regime could work, and disdained arguments for it as mere moralism.58 Yet another Philadelphia opponent was John Bioren, who made his living by reprinting other booksellers' titles and declined to recognize any institution that claimed the authority to stop him. The company blacklisted Bioren. It proved an ineffective sanction: he did indeed go bankrupt, but not until a decade and a half after the company itself had expired.

Most consequential, however, were perhaps the radical attacks in the press that cast Carey's efforts as a "conspiracy" of monopolists and capitalists -a "combination of rich booksellers against authors andprinters." That is, he found his schemes cast as the successors, not to the great German fairs, but to the very force he most violently despised-the perpetual-copyright conspirators of London. Both the existence and the terms of this opposition mattered. Carey's camp was beginning to trumpet what would become a broad political-economic ideology hugely important in antebellum American politics, based on a supposed "harmony of interests" between agrarian, manufacturing, and mercantile classes. The artisanal critique threatened to give the lie to that idea, in the very area that its major advocate might have been expected to know best.59

A NETWORKED SOCIETY? ASSOCIATION AND ITS FAILURES

When mid-nineteenth-century British authors like Wilkie Collins