BOOKSELLING

BOOKSELLING. Among the Greeks the trade of the bookseller (βιβλιοπώλης) was unknown. It arose towards the end of the republican age at Rome, when the literary taste of the nobles demanded an increased supply of books. The Roman booksellers were called bibliopole, and sometimes librarii, though this term properly belonged to the slaves who were employed in the transcription of MSS., &c. The bookseller's shop was called libraria or taberna libra. In Rome, the principal marts for books were the Argiletum, and the Vicus Sandalarius, as St Paul's Churchyard, Fleet Street, and Paternoster Row, have been in London. The great booksellers of the time of Augustus were the Sosii. (Cic. De Leg. iii. 20, Phil. ii. 9; Mart. iv. 71, xiii. 3; i. 4; Aul. Gell. xviii. 4; Hor. Ep. i. 20, 2; Ars Poet. 345, &c.)

Booksellers are in many places ranked among the members of universities, and entitled to the privileges of students; as at Tübingen, Salzburg, and Paris, where they have always been distinguished from the vulgar and mechanical traders, and exempted from various taxes and impositions laid on other companies. An acquaintance with booksellers' marks or signs, as expressed on the title-pages of their books, is of some use, because many books, especially in the last century, have no other designation. The anchor is the mark of Raphelengius at Leyden; and the anchor, with a dolphin twisted round it, is that of the Manutii at Venice and Rome. The Arion denotes a book printed by Oporinus at Basle; the Caduceus or Pegasus, one printed by the Wecheluses at Paris and Frankfurt; the cranes, by Cramois; the compass, by Plantin at Antwerp; the fountain, by Vascosan at Paris; the sphere in a bal-

ance, by Janson or Blaew at Amsterdam; the lily, by the juntas at Venice, Florence, Lyons, and Rome; the mulberry tree, by Morel at Paris; the olive tree, by the Stephens at Paris and Geneva, and the Elzevirs at Amsterdam and Leyden; the bird between two serpents, by the Frobenuses at Basle; the Truth, by the Commelins at Heidelberg and Paris; the Saturn, by Colinaeus; the printing-press, by Badius Ascenius; and so of the rest. See BIBLIOGRAPHY.

The traffic in books was in ancient times very inconsiderable, so that the book merchants of England, France, Spain, and other countries, were distinguished by the appellation of stationers, as having no shops, but only stalls or "stands" in the streets. During this state the civil magistrates took little notice of the booksellers, leaving the control of them to the universities, of which they were supposed to be the more immediate retainers, and which accordingly gave them laws and regulations, examined the correctness and fixed the prices of their books, and punished them at discretion. But when, by the invention of printing, books and booksellers began to multiply, it became a matter of more consequence to regulate their proceedings; and hence sovereigns took the direction of the bibliopoles into their own hands.

As despotism and a free press are incompatible, wherever the power of the sovereign has been unlimited, or ecclesiastical authority has prevailed, the trade of bookselling has been put under rigorous restraints. It is only under free and constitutional governments that it is open and unrestricted.

In Britain the business of bookselling is carried on by three classes of tradesmen: 1st, Those who are chiefly en-

gaged in the publication of books, who may be considered as the manufacturers. 2d, The wholesale booksellers or middle-men, who purchase large numbers from the publishers, with the view of supplying from their extensive stocks the demands of the retail dealers. 3d, The retail booksellers, through whom the public are more directly supplied. The terms on which books are published vary according to the agreement made by the author with the publisher. Sometimes the bookseller purchases the copyright for a fixed sum, and takes the whole responsibility upon himself; sometimes the author and bookseller agree to divide the risk and the profit, or only the profit that may be realized on an edition or editions; ¹ or the author may publish on his own account, taking the chance of profit or loss upon himself, paying a commission to the bookseller on the amount of sales.

London is the great seat of the publishing trade in Great Britain; the only other towns where it is prosecuted to any considerable extent are Oxford, Cambridge, Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Dublin. The following is the number of persons returned as booksellers and publishers in England and Scotland at the census of 1851:—

In Ireland, from the calculation of an extensive bookseller in Dublin, the numbers are as follow:—

The editor of the Publishers' Circular says, that after careful calculation he finds that "the issues of new publications and new editions are now averaging together 4380 volumes per annum, which, after making full allowance for the improvements in our system of registration, shows an annual issue of nearly one-fourth over that of ten years back. This conclusion is drawn from a pretty safe average, that of four years, thus:—

"This does not include pamphlets, of which we have only taken the record during the last three years:—In 1850, there were 1198; in 1851, 940; and in 1852, 908; the noticeable excess for the first year arising from the pamphlet-writing on the Papal question, upon which there were no less than 180 published during one month."

The book trade of France is carried on much in the same way as in England.

From the last number of the Journal de l'Imprimerie for 1851 we gather the following statistics of the productions of the French printing-houses during the last ten years:

or an average per year of 6436 works. The same presses printed, in 1851, 485 musical works, and in the ten years 3336, or an annual average of 333.

There have also been published 1014 engravings and lithographs, and during the ten years 13,085, or an average of 1308.

Two hundred and fifty-three maps and topographical plans have also been published during the year; during the ten years 1005, or a mean of 100 a year.

Thus it appears that nearly in every department of press-work the year 1851 is in advance of the average of the last ten years. The grand total of works published in France during these ten years, engravings, musical works, maps, and plans, is 81,994.

The bookselling and publishing trade in Germany is differently organized from that of either England or France, and, upon the whole, is carried on by a class of persons of superior intelligence. The principal booksellers of Russia, Holland, Italy, and Hungary, are Germans or their descendants. In Germany there is a much larger number of publishers than in any other country of the same size, and they are not, as in Great Britain or France, confined to a few of the principal towns, but are scattered about over the whole country, though, of course, their chief sales are in the numerous small capitals and university towns. The German publishers generally, owing to the small cost of paper and print compared with the expense in England or France, and the comparatively small remuneration to the author, realize, if they sell the whole of an edition, a much larger percentage of profits; but owing to the system there prevailing of sending almost all their works in the first year on sale to the different parts of the country, they are generally obliged, in order to give a book a fair chance, to print a much larger edition than there is any immediate prospect of selling. On the other hand, by this means of making known new books, very little is expended in advertising.

There are no wholesale booksellers in Germany, as the term is understood in England and France, the publishers being generally in direct communication with all the principal retail booksellers in every town on the Continent, many of them keeping as many as 1000 to 1500 trade accounts open. But every retail bookseller has his agent or "commissioner" at Leipzig, and sometimes in other towns in the south of Germany, to whom all parcels for him are sent and forwarded in one package once or twice a-week. This agent also acts as his banker with the trade, almost all payments being made at Leipzig from one agent to another, their weekly or bi-weekly settlements being carried on in a small way on the plan of the clearing-house of the London bankers. At Easter, however, when the general balances of all the booksellers connected with the German trade are made and paid on the booksellers' exchange at Leipzig, the sums are very considerable.

Owing to the facility with which the trade of publishing can be carried on in Germany, the absence of all difficulty in immediate communication with the whole retail trade creates a much larger number of publishers in proportion to the number of books published than elsewhere; in fact, almost every bookseller is a publisher to some extent. Nevertheless, the principal publications are in the hands of a limited number of publishers in the strict sense of the word; and, to some extent, they confine themselves to particular classes of publications.

In the United States of America the business of bookselling is carried on to a large extent, principally in books reprinted from English copyright works. These being produced at the mere cost of paper and printing, the authors deriving no benefit from their writings, the American

booksellers are enabled to sell at prices greatly below those of the English market. Of late years, however, they have published many valuable original works, chiefly in theology, law, and natural history.

The publisher of Norton's Literary Gazette estimates the number of volumes published in the United States from July 1850 to July 1851 at 1298, embracing 213,049 pages, and forming 1176 distinct works. The principal towns in which the bookselling business is carried on in the United States are Boston, in which there are 78 booksellers and publishers; New York, in which there are about 130; and Philadelphia, in which there are about 120. In Baltimore, Cincinnati, St. Louis, as well as in all the considerable towns throughout the United States, some books are published; and everywhere there are retailers of school and miscellaneous books.

Repeated attempts have been made to induce the American legislature to sanction an international copyright law. Committees of the senate have reported in favour of the measure, but the lower house, composed of the representatives of the people, have constantly resisted it; nor is it likely they will agree to a measure, though just in itself, which would prevent their constituents from appropriating the productions of British authors at a greatly reduced price, and which might at the same time diminish the trade of paper-makers, printers, bookbinders, and all engaged in the manufacture of books. (See COPYRIGHT.) From the low price at which the reprints of popular English books can be produced, the sale is often four or five times greater than in Britain. It is calculated that 125,000 copies of Macaulay's "England" were sold in America, when scarcely a fifth of that number were sold in Britain. The profit of these, at the selling price of 32s. or 8s., would amount to $1,000,000, but as they were supplied at 80 cents, the profits amounted to only 100,000. In this case there is no remuneration to the author, the type is small, and the paper thin and inferior; and as a large sale can be calculated on with certainty, very large editions are thrown off by machinery, so that the cost is reduced to little more than that of the paper. "But it will be asked," says Mr Carey,¹ "is it right that we should read the works of Macaulay, Dickens, and others, without compensation to the authors? In answer it may be said that we give them precisely what their own countrymen have given to their Dalton, Davy, Parry, and the thousands of others who have furnished the bodies of which books are composed, and more than we ourselves give to the men among us engaged in cultivating science—fame." Authors have often had but scanty fare, but if they were confined to Mr Carey's luxuries their condition would hardly be improved. Mr Carey informs us that there have been sold in the United States in five years 80,000 volumes of the 8vo edition of the Modern British Essayists; of Macaulay's Miscellanies, in 3 vols. 12mo, 60,000 volumes; of Miss Aguilar's writings, 100,000 volumes in two years; of Murray's Encyclopaedia of Geography, more than 50,000; McCulloch's Commercial Dictionary, 10,000; of Alexander Smith's poems, in a few months, 10,000. The sale of Thackeray's works has been quadruple that of England, and that of Dickens' works counts by millions of volumes. Bleak House alone sold to the amount of 250,000 in volumes, magazines, and newspapers. Bulwer's last work reached about two-thirds of that number; Alison's Europe 25,000 copies; of Jane Eyre there have been sold 80,000.

The universality of education in the United States is the main cause of an extensive publication of books. Everybody must learn to read and write, and everybody must have books; hence the great circulation, not only of foreign but of domestic literature. The sale of many of their more popular works, especially of educational publications, is prodigious:

the sale of the works of Peter Parley counts by millions; of Morse's Geography and Atlas (50 cents), not less than 70,000 are sold yearly; of Abbott's histories, 400,000; Emerson's Arithmetic and Reader count almost by millions; of the Boston Academy's collection of sacred music, costing a dollar per volume, the sale has exceeded 600,000; and the aggregate sale of five books by the same author has probably exceeded a million. Of Webster's Dictionary in 4to (price 86), the sale has reached from 60,000 to 80,000 volumes, and of the royal 8vo (83.50), 250,000. Of all American authors, excepting the writers of school-books, Washington Irving has circulated the greatest number of volumes. Prior to the publication of the edition of his works by Mr Putnam, the sale had amounted to some hundreds of thousands, and yet of that edition, selling at 5s. per volume, the sale has already risen to 144,000 volumes. Of Uncle Tom's Cabin the sale has amounted to 295,000 copies. Of the works of Prescott, Bancroft, Kent, Barnes, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Bryant, Willis, Curtis, Sedgwick, Sigourney, and many others, the sale is exceedingly great. The copyright of Judge Story's books is understood to yield above £1,600 a-year, and other American authors have received large sums for their copyrights. The term of the copyright is the same in the United States as in Britain—forty-two years.

The number of semi-monthly, monthly, and quarterly journals, according to the last census, was 175. Every pursuit in life, and almost every shade of opinion, has its periodical. Dental surgery alone has five, while in all Europe there are but two. The proportion which republications of British books bore to original works published in America during the six months ending June 30, 1853, was 169 republications to 522 original.

"Less than half a century since," says Mr Carey, "the race of literary men was scarcely known in the country, and the amount now paid for literary labour is greater than in Britain and France combined, and will probably be in twenty years greater than in all the world beside." This is certainly an American exaggeration; liberal as the remuneration has been to authors in the United States, it is not to be compared to the sums paid for copyrights in Britain; but looking forward to the next century,—when the English language shall be spoken in the whole of North, and in a great part of South America, when new nations of the Anglo-Saxon race will occupy Australia, and when the English colonies in all quarters of the globe shall have extended their boundaries and increased their inhabitants, and when education shall have been universally spread,—what a glorious prospect opens for the English authors and booksellers of future generations!

The profits allowed to booksellers appear to the superficial observer unreasonably large; but that they are probably smaller than those of other trades is proved by the fact that the same amount of capital, industry, and intelligence employed in other branches of business, is generally found to yield a larger income to those engaged in them.

The selling price of a book, compared with the cost of the paper, printing, and binding, appears extravagant; but let us follow the process by which the individual volume reaches the individual reader. The reader in Edinburgh desires his bookseller to supply him with a volume published in London at 20s.; he writes to his usual correspondent, as it is impossible to keep accounts with every publisher; if his correspondent allows 25 per cent. he will expect 10 or 15 from the publisher for himself; and before the volumes reach their ultimate destination, many of them percolate through three or four different hands, each entitled to a share of profit which is not too much for risk, &c.; so that before the demand reaches the original publisher, in many instances, he does not receive a half of the selling price,

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poor. and is glad at the end of three or four years, if, besides the loss of interest of money, he has not a large proportion of the edition lying on his hands as waste paper.

In 1852 the booksellers of London formed a kind of trade-union, by which they attempted to exclude from the trade all who would not keep up their prices to what was called the regular rate. This, like all associations of the kind, soon fell to pieces, and various plans were proposed by which the readers might be furnished with books at a smaller deduction from the cost of production. It has not, however, been found possible to dispense with the machinery by which the productions of the press can be distributed through the mass of readers; and this convenient machinery must be paid for till one less costly be discovered which will accomplish its objects as well. (A. B.)