Piracy_ The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates - Adrian Johns [124]
Alexis de Tocqueville famously marveled at the propensity of Americans for forming associations of all kinds. At first glance, Carey's string of almost indistinguishable initiatives seems to fit Tocqueville's image. He was constantly launching projects, or societies, or committees within societies, for causes that ranged from Sunday schools to the settling of freed slaves in Liberia. He fretted when he was not included on committees; one such occasion led to two pages of private agonizing about his unpopularity, concluding with the thought that "Mankind are not worth the sacrifices I make." Yet what leaps out at a modern reader of Carey's diary is how far his America failed to live up to the Tocquevillian vision. His circulars received minimal responses, or, later, none at all. He was dismayed by how infrequently his works were reprinted in New York and Boston- and then on "paper only fit for ballads." He circulated notices to manufacturers, but found that he "might as well have sought to raise the dead." He collected his own works into a 55o-page volume on political economy and sought to publish it, but few subscribed and he lost $300. A weekly paper, the Political Economist, devoted largely to reprints, likewise failed. Reprints of Hamilton's Report also ended up being charged to him. His proposed societies found few backers, and his argument with the secretary of war proved fruitless. In 1824 he came up with a plan to reprint thirteen key works in favor of the American system, and to have them stitched into twenty thousand almanacs destined for readers in the refractory southern states. The cost would be less than $2 per hundred, he thought, and if eachwere read by twenty people, they "could scarcely have failed to revolutionize public opinion." But again he found no sponsors. (Such ventures tended to fail even when funded, in fact, as southern post offices would find ways to lose the tracts.) Although his tracts were initially "republished with flattering encomiums in most of the newspapers," after awhile the appetite died. Even his beloved canal project succeeded, to the extent that it did, only in the face of "apathy torpor, and destitution of public spirit."72 Carey privately expressed himself "disgusted" at the refusal of wealthy men to support a cause in their own interest. "Why should I waste my time," he wondered, "labouring to serve a community, in which there is not the shadow of public spirit"? Several times he resolved to withdraw from the fray. But that was one resolution he could never keep. And when he did withdraw from one society, it promptly collapsed.73
The problem, at root, was that Carey believed publishing was what a Tocquevillian association was for. He consistently gauged influence by measures familiar to apublisher: numbers of editions, sizes of impressions, rates of subscription, steadiness of sales, and manner of distribution.
Of the Boston Report, a flimsy, frothy, superficial publication of 198 pages, there were three editions printed, of (if I am correctly informed) 2000 copies each, within a few weeks, one in Boston, one in New York, and one in this city.... Of Smith's Wealth of Nations, and Say's Political Economy, there have been four editions printed in this country, 4750 copies in the whole. The first edition of Say, of 750 copies, was sold in three years; the second, of 2000 copies, has been sold in four. The tendency of these works is to paralize our industry, and, to a certain degree, to render the United States virtually colonies of the manufacturing nations of Europe. Of Raymond's Political Economy, a work far superior to either, there have been only two