• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1965 0

hailed this victory for `American enterprise" with street placards and press advertisements across the city. At the same time, cheap periodical pirates attacked Saunders's market from the bottom, reprinting his titles at a third of his prices. Saunders's pleas on behalf of "personal property" fell on deaf ears, and he soon gave up the fight. A decade later he could be found working as an editor at the Harpers'.13 Carey proved more robust: receiving Bul- wer'sRienzi on the same January day that the Harpers did, in less than two days he had five hundred volumes in New York retailers' hands. But this was war, and priority for once could not be allowed to win the day. The Harpers leaned on reviewers to ignore the Carey edition, and issued their own at only 5oc-aprice he could never match.

The outcome was a pyrrhic defeat for all sides. Not even the Harpers could make a profit at that price. So it was this sobering experience that forced the twoAmerican rivals to recognize that the gamewas driving them to mutual destruction. Carey used the occasion to cajole the Harpers into participating in what had long been his pet scheme to formalize a civility. The New Yorkers had always refused to participate, but now agreed to help define the "courtesy of the trade." Such a courtesywould be, Fletcher Harper testified, their only "protection against piracy." By "piracy" he meant not international reprintingthe courtesies were meant topreserve that-but conflicts within the United States itself.

Courtesies always had a protean and situational quality Indeed, that was one of their strengths. A generation earlier, Mathew Carey had proposed institutions-companies and fairs-to establish harmony, only to see them fail. These hopes never quite disappeared, Henry Carey himself continuing to dream of a single company upholding "Union."14 But experience implied that less institutional approaches might work better, if only because there was no authority for populist reprinters to resist. And they suited ageneration concerned to forge a collective sensibility through ceremonies and invented traditions. Trade dinners now became regular and ornate affairs, for example, with every kind of food cooked in all possible ways. Participants sat through speeches and toasts -sometimes upward of fifty-hailing the transcendent importance of printing and publishing for civilization. Ars artinm omninm conservatrixwas emblazoned on countless banners and floats in civil processions. Almost any excuse would do: Washington's birthday; the completion of an aqueduct; the return of troops from the Mexican War; the building of the University of Nashville; the laying of the transatlantic cable in 1858; and, of course, the supposed four hundredth anniversary of printing itself in 1840.15 It was in this context of relentless public representation, then, that courtesies took on real force once more.

Negotiations between Philadelphia and New York now articulated a few major customs. All hinged on priority of some kind. In order of increasing controversy, the list ran as follows:

Priority ofpublication. If a publisher issued an edition of a foreign work, that publisher acquired a right to it, for an indefinite period.

Priority in periodicals. If a periodical obtained advance sheets, this also gave an exclusive right to publish them in book form.16

Priority of receipt. The first to obtain advance sheets gained an exclusive right. But this was usually coupled with an obligation to announce an intent to publish; that is, it was subsumed into:

Priority of announcement. The first to announce publicly an intent to publish a given title acquired an exclusive right to it, provided that the firm actually had the complete work in hand. This was the first and most important convention in debate between Carey and Harper. It was sometimes called the "Harper Rule," although it resembled a custom that had operated in some European cities, notably Dublin. Because it begged the question of what a complete work was-did proof sheets count?-it gave rise to fierce battles.

Priority in authors.