Piracy_ The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates - Adrian Johns [174]
THE RULES OF "THE GAME"
Both the problem science faced and the strategy Youmans adopted to confront it were firmly rooted in the practices of mid-nineteenth-century publishing. Transatlantic reprinting became an incessant and frantic competition in the 1820S. Mathew Carey's successors in Philadelphia and New York found themselves in an endless contest to obtain the latest London works-novels, memoirs, travel books, even law and science-as quickly as possible, so as to be able to reprint them first and beat their rivals to the marketplace. Rival publishers whipped up excitement about the sheer speed of the enterprise, hoping to catch customers who otherwise could wait a week for cheaper reprints of their reprints. For more than half a century the practice of reprinting shaped what was published in the United States, how it was published, where it was published, and how it was read.
American reprinters took full advantage of print's industrial revolution. Mechanized papermaking was introduced in 1816, and Fourdrinier machines appeared from Britain just over a decade later. The machines made the raw materials of the business cheaper and massively more plentiful. For Mathew Carey they exemplified the ambition of America to become a land of manufactures; his late tracts proudly proclaimed that theywere printed on "machine paper." By the mid-i84os, when almost all papermaking was mechanized, the mills were producing ten times as much as in the earlyyears of the century. Rail then brought these massive quantities to the major printing centers, where steam presses devoured them. They churned out books and newspapers in huge numbers-numbers that Henry Carey always cited as proving the vibrancy of America's literary republic. Book production increased eightfold in a generation.3 And rail also brought print to new markets -passengers even found novels by Dickens serialized on the reverse of their timetables. Meanwhile, stereotyping allowed publishers to escape the burden of keeping huge amounts of type locked up in forms and books stored inwarehouses. Bymid-century virtually all popular reprints were being stereotyped. Once one publisher had stereotyped a work it was rarely worthwhile for others to do so. Instead they might rent the plates or buy sheets from the first, appending their own title page. The technology therefore helped secure trade courtesies, and some authors too embraced it as securing faithful editions. Thoreau complained that the Harpers, by seizing on the technique, had become dictators of public taste.4 It also accentuated the sheer importance of being the first to get one's hands on a work, however. So the enterprise of transatlantic reprinting became more febrile than ever.
The transatlantic reprint business came to be called "the game." It really dated from the craze for Scott's Waverley novels.5 To spectators it looked like a free-for-all, as publishers raced each other for every new and promising London book. Carey's firm (now run by Henry) fought tooth and nail with the Harper brothers in New York, while both took on upstarts like Grigg. Carey started out with the largest operation, and had extensive distribution networks, good international contacts, and a record in medicine, science, and engineering that the others did not share. But the New Yorkers gained ground because they had newer equipment, and their city enjoyed both better shipping links to Europe and faster transport routes to the interior. Before long Careywas begging for the last sheets of new books to be shipped from London in manuscript before they could even be printed, pointing out that his "opposition" had a large market on their doorstep and so could publish as soon as they had printed off a few copies; he, with a vast hinterland to address, could not publish "until we have at least 2000 or 2500," so he desperately needed "a few days start."7
As this implies, the difference between