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victory and defeat in the game might be measured in hours. When news arrived of a promising book to be published in Britain (or elsewhere, but Britain was the major source), the rivals would mobilize agents in London to track down advance sheets. If possible, they would secure an agreement with the original publisher and/or author for early access. Theywould then strive to outdo each other in getting the sheets to the United States. Multiple copies would go on different ships, in hopes that one would get there ahead of the rest. James Gordon Bennett's New York Herald would even charter small boats to intercept incoming vessels and save precious hours. Whoever won that race could then claim the work. The winners might then take one of three routes. First, they could make amendments to the text in a bid to claim legal copyright. This was tried by Darwin's American publisher, and in some cases led to important changes or additions to major works; but it was an expensive and risk prone strategy Second, they could rely on what was generally-but not always-acknowledged by the major houses as a "courtesy of trade." Or, third, they could simply accept that rivals were inevitably going to pirate the book within a few days anyway, and try to make as much profit as possible in the brief period of exclusivity. In practice, the risk was sufficient in many cases to make the third of these the least worst option.

Sheer speed therefore remained all-important, even after landfall. Once a volume was out on the streets of Philadelphia or New York, a publisher had scant days-sometimes hours-to capitalize on it before competitors issued their own impressions. Henry Carey thus complained to the secretary of state himself about the precious minutes his cargoes took to clear customs. And haste had textual implications: sometimes reprints omitted chapters, or substituted sections by other authors, or even included chapters that the author had drafted but intended to delete. Carey once had to issue an apology in the newspapers after publishing an incomplete text of Scott's Pirate.8

Major publishers retained agents in London to play the game. Their charge was not only to look out for new books in general, but to obtain by hook or by crook advance sheets of the best ones. Henry Carey was the first to hire such a figure. In April 1817 he wrote to Longman requesting a standing arrangement for new works. He especially wanted works by a string of specific authors, some of them readily recognizable nowadays (Byron, Edgeworth, Scott, Dugald Stewart, and the `Author ofWaverley" - Scott again, of course), others more obscure. He offered to pay £25o a year for prior access to copies, which must be sent by the "first and fastest" ships. Longman declined the offer, but passed the request on to a wholesaler and small-scale publisher named John Miller. Miller now became Carey's agent, a role he kept until 1861. He had a broad remit to seek out promising works. Only Scott stood outside his purview: after Scott's Edinburgh publisher, Constable, accused the Careys of appropriating proof sheets stolen from the printing house, they agreed to pay him directly for access. 9

Agents like Miller were empowered to negotiate for sheets, which meant that British authors, if they were lucky, might be offered payment for American reprints. The Careys offered Dickens £ioo for Nicholas Nickleby, and Scott would get £75 for one of his novels. Decades later Wilkie Collins got less than £i,ooo for The Woman in White, and conceded that even that had been generous, "with the pirates in the background, waiting to steal."10 Such sums were, the Americans insisted, ex gratia payments, not purchases of copyright. What a player of the game was paying for was time: a brief and unpredictable moment of de facto monopoly. As a result, the payments were also very small, at least by the standards a wildly successful author like Dickens came to expect in London. For ex ample, two years after Carey and Hart took a risk by reprinting the first four numbers ofPickwick Papers when Dickens was still