Piracy_ The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates - Adrian Johns [125]
What chance did the American system have? (He forgot to mention that one of those editions of Say had been issued by Carey himself.)
By these lights the one essential thing for any campaign, on any issue, was funding the press-all the more so in political economy, for in this field tracts must be distributed free, so unappealing were they to paying readers. "Nothing more was necessary" for his arguments to win the day, Carey thought, "than to give them free and general circulation."74 By circulation he meant reprinting as well as distribution. Copyright, he maintained, must be actively repudiated so that they would propagate from town to town across the south. His tracts and reprints frequently exhorted all and sundry to republish them. 75 The trouble was only partly that this was a crudely quantitative approach to a problem that was significantly qualitative. It was also that the sheer costs of such a practice were substantial. And Carey's frenetic pace militated against sponsorship because he could not wait for editing. A society with Carey in it was a society that had to vest its trust in him implicitly. Increasingly, they seemed reluctant to do so. He was left lamenting that half the projects that came to nothing, in all fields, did so because of "beggarly parsimony as to the expense of printing."76 The very manufacturers he claimed to defend seemed to regard him as "a wretched Grub-street garreteer." He was gaining a reputation as a hack, without even the lucre that might compensate for such a title. The last straw was the failure of one of his "societies for publication" -in this case a "Society of Political Economists" designed to get "sound doctrines" to southerners. It attracted only two subscribers. Carey finally gave up, signing off with a prediction that the world's greatest "experiment of free government" was set to fail amid "insurrection, civil war, and anarchy." And yet, he sighed, "all this evil might have been prevented, by an early and copious distribution of essays and pamphlets."77
THE AMERICAN SYSTEM OF INFORMATION
The effort took its toll. Carey burned through some $95,000 in a decade, more than half of it on his various campaigns. He found himself paying for the printing of pamphlets on credit, and passing on the embarrassing IOUs to the firm while insisting that his family make ever-greater economies. He even decided in effect to disinherit his children, believing that the family name could better be preserved through some public project. His son Henrygrew convinced that something must be done. The fortune of a publisher still rested on reputation, and this Mathew was endangering. Worse still, in transferring the company to Henry, Mathew had grossly overvalued its large backlog ofwarehoused law books - a form of albatross that many publishers still bore around their necks before stereotypingand this made its finances all the more vulnerable. The family entered the 18206 in desperate need of money. That need would persist and perhaps helped to drive its ventures in international reprinting.
The storm broke in 1830. Henry confronted his father in a series of letters that revealed the domestic side of the pirate utopia with an angry directness hard to parallel in its time. "You thinkyour family a happy one," Henry declared bluntly: "It is certainly not so." Maria and Susan, Henry's sisters, could barely get by and suffered from "depression." The damage that the family and firm would suffer should their public persona lapse was catastrophic, and the risk very real. Money was being drained by Carey senior's quixotic authorship. Mathew should retire from writing in order to preserve the family name.78 Seeking to impress the rationality of this policy, Henry composed an economic and emotional balance sheet. Parodying the kind of table Mathew Carey had long presented in his political-economic tracts, it compared the costs