Piracy_ The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates - Adrian Johns [98]
More significant, perhaps, are the individual cases of unauthorized reprinting that came before the guild's council for resolution. As early as 1698, Patrick Campbell and Jacob Milner were summoned for printing the title and preface to Cocker's Arithmetic in front of Hodder's quite different text, so that "those were deceiv'd that bought them for Cockers Arithmetick." (John Dunton was quite taken with this "pretty experiment," remarking that Campbell "had a natural aversion to honesty") The consequences proved less than serious: the next year Milner was elected warden, and theyear after that master.39 Generally, as in London, disputes like this would be delegated to a small group of referees. `According to custome," four individuals, two chosen by each party, would investigate.40 The referees were to interview the various parties and arrive at a solution. Their negotiations aimed at compromise, not at imposing a rule, and they were never recorded. For that reason we have tended to assume that they never happened. But it would be more accurate to say that we cannot tell how often they occurred. An arbitration between the Ewings and Peter Wilson over The Guardian is known today only because they themselves published the referees' verdict, and there is no way of knowing how many others there were. It is certainly clear that the practice was still viable well into the second half of the century, when two Catholic booksellers, Patrick Lord and Philip Bowes, resorted to it in a quarrel over Charles O'Conor's Case of the Roman-Catholics ofIreland.41
What does seem clear is that such refereeing departed from guild authority and became a matter of civility in general. (In London too there are signs of this happening: in the late 1730s, James Watson, pursued by Dodsley for pirating Pope, proposed a booksellers' arbitration, and adhered to it, with no apparent institutional involvement.) Scattered through the various controversies that broke the surface in the press during the century are repeated references to such a process, usually mentioned because one side or the other has refused to abide by its conclusion. In 1751, for example, Oliver Nelson refused arbitration when Robert Main (soon to be Samuel Richardson's agent) accused him of pirating a novel the sheets of which Main had procured from London. Such a refusal was seen as extremely serious-more so than the original offense. In one case a breach like this would prove serious enough to start a pirate war.42
A UNIVERSAL HISTORY OF INFAMY
As in London, then, in Dublin what literary property there was rested on forms of trade civility. It was focused in alliances among booksellers, initially ad hoc agreements to protect individual titles, later concords to create and sustain a broader propriety. But the most ambitious of these alliances then became something more. It aspired to set standards in general, as a "company of booksellers" in its own right. Insofar as the Dublin trade developed any institutional system of literary property, this "company" was it. The initiative is significant because it sought to meet a need that in later generations and in many other countries would arise repeatedly: a need to give civility an explicit form, and to codify courtesy. And, unlike earlier counterparts, it did not originate in church, state, or law, but in the mundane practice of the trade.
The roots of the company lay in the most ambitious publishing project undertaken in eighteenth-century Ireland. The Universal History was a massive compendium purporting to describe the entire human past. It had first been launched as a speculative project in the London of the late 172os. Its leading undertaker had been James Crokatt, a bookseller and informant to Parliament against Irish piracies whom Nichols called the greatest literary projector of his age.43 The intention was that by appearing in regular installments it could build up to four folio volumes while still reaching a wide readership. In other words, it was rather akin to the entrepreneurial works of Rayner, albeit