• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2079 0

war who had turned bandit. The Dubliners, Bishop Nicholson continued, were "able (as they order the Matter) to furnish their Customers with them at far lower Prices than they can bring them from London."8 That implied that most reprints were directed at Ireland. But soon the Dubliners turned their attention to more distant markets. By the mid-1730s, if not earlier, reprinting for export was becoming common. The most attractive colonywas America- another small market as yet, but one of enormous potential. Benjamin Franklin noticed "piratical" editions arriving from Ireland in 1747, subscribers for which included British army officers. Rather later, the notorious James Rivington would try to build a business by shipping Irish reprints to New York and making himself the conduit for their distribution throughout the country.9 The real prize was the British market, however. Reprints from Dublin began appearing there routinely too, and soon they could be bought in anyprovincial town. The fact became so notorious that reprints from elsewhere began to be attributed to Ireland too. A supposed Dublin printing of The Vicar of Wakefield, for example, actually originated in colonial Boston. Another Dublin imprint came from Paris; a third from Glasgow to Clearly, the booksellers in these places believed that Dublin was so strongly associated with reprinting that yet another reprint would not be questioned.

It was now that the London booksellers really began to object. They demanded a parliamentary investigation. It was soon discovered that even quite hefty volumes like dictionaries and Clarendon's and Burnet's histories were readily available in reprinted form. Five years of lobbying later, the inquiry resulted in the passage of a new law prohibiting imports of books first printed in Britain but now reprinted abroad. In other words, it outlawed not the reprinting of books as such, but the importation of the resulting volumes back into England. In theory, this was not much of a change. But its practical consequence was severe. It meant that all imported books from Ireland (or Holland) were likely to be impounded, since customs officers had no way to tell whether or not a given title had first appeared in London. And they were indeed seized: to give just one instance, in May 1768 officers boarded a ship with a cargo of Irish goods plus a selection of books including Swift's Works, Pope's Iliad and Odyssey, Rabelais, the Builder's jewel, Anson's Voyages, the Arabian Nights, and Churchill's poems (presumably the "piratical Edition of these Poems printed in Dublin, under a London Imprint"). They were all impounded as contraband. Irish books were also being seized on arrival in America at this time. In the end the Philadelphia bookman David Hall had to ask for shipments from Dublin to cease altogether, "as there are now always two of the King's Ships at least in our River." 11

If reprinting English books in Ireland for the Irish was acceptable, however, then so, by the same token, was reprinting Irish books in England for the English. This practice has had none of the attention accorded Irish piracy, but it too began early and became quite routine. In 1694 Benjamin Tooke was already defending it to Bishop King, whose Discourse on the inventions of mnen in the worship of God he had reprinted. If he had not undertaken it, he reassured the bishop, someone else would have. Besides, reprints made his words more widely available, and therefore allowed them to "doe more good" -which, Tooke pointed out, "must be your Lordships intention in printing it." This rather cocksure defense shows that a justification of unauthorized reprinting in terms of dissemination was already available. A generation later Edmund Curll excused his surreptitious edition of Pope rather similarly as a rehash of Faulkner's in Dublin. "All persons in this kingdom have a right to reprint such books as are first published in Ireland," Curll pointed out, and "such as are first published here may be lawfully reprinted in that kingdom." (The point did not escape Hardwick: Curll