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By Root 2044 0

from each other. With a premium on speed, their texts were often defective-or deliberately altered. A Dickens novel might be augmented with a smidgeon ofThackeray. But the reprinters claimed that they had a right to make such changes, because they were retrofitting the cultural products of monarchies for readers in a republic. The New World in particular campaigned loudly for this right to remove insidious traces of aristocracy. It even criticized the Knickerblocker as aristocratic for trying to register copyright s.13 This being so, the papers also brought back to the fore the epistemic implications of piracy. So rapid and so various had reprinting become that it might be unclear where original authorship lay, let alone if it conferred any rights.

This was dramatically demonstrated in the case of an author who was not only a creature of the reprinting system, but one hailed as the first great American writer: the mysterious Charles Sealsfield. Originally a Carey discovery back in 1829, Sealsfield eventually authored a total of eighteen novels, many set in the frontier regions of Louisiana and beyond. When a prominent German critic nominated him as proving the advent of a valid American literary culture, the New World took to pirating him. But in March 1844 the Boston DailyAdvertiserventured a public guess that Sealsfield was a model author in avery different sense. So perfect a creature was he of the pirate sphere that the man himself did not exist-he was a product of the same sensationalist publishing economy that produced the notorious Lunar hoax and Edgar Allan Poe's balloon caper. Proponents of literary property immediately began charging that "some publisher who lives by stealing the brains of foreign authors" had simply invented "Sealsfield" from a farrago of materials purloined here and there from periodicals - this being a common practice of the story papers. The New World responded by adducing frontiersmen's testimony that his works must reflect firsthand experience of conditions out west, and by the timehonored tactic of putting his original manuscripts on display, but to little avail. What ensued demonstrated a deep, pervasive uncertainty about authorship itself. Perhaps Sealsfield was British, some wondered; perhaps he was a European who had plagiarized American writers; perhaps he was a phantom. Britain's Blackwood's Magazine began to publish Sealsfield's work too, and this complicated matters still further. Some American critics assumed that the New World was reprinting Blackwood's material, rather than vice versa - at which point Poe himself condemned the whole thing as a "laughable or disgusting instance of our subserviency to foreign opinions." The question of the author's very existence, and implicitly of American literary prowess, seemed to hang absurdly on the contingencies of transatlantic shipping.

In point of fact, Sealsfield did exist. But he was a shadowy and evanescent character, in the manner not just of American piracy but of middleEuropean political intrigue. An escapee from a Prague monastery, he had taken on a false name, offered his services as a spy to Metternich, and, after traveling widely in the western states ofAmerica, settled down in Switzerland and become a behind-the-scenes operative for Louis Na- poleon.24 Even so, there was a real sense in which the anxieties over his reality represented a confirmation of Kant's point about the corrosive power of piracy as ventriloquism, updated for in an industrial and nationalistic age.

In 1839 a storypaper called the Corsair appeared that seemed to represent a non plus ultra of the pirate sphere. A rival summed it up as "a total infringement on the decencies of civilization." For once, its province can unambiguously be called pirate publishing, because the paper itself eagerly embraced that label. Distributed by mail to around 2,50 0 subscribers - and therefore a minor example of the genre-it assumed the rhetorical identity of a buccaneering vessel. Its crewwas entirely composed of previous victims of piracy, including a French surgeon and