There has just been a small flutter amongst those who used to be
called stationers or text-writers in the good old days, before
printing was, and when even Peers of the Realm (now so highly
educated) could not sign their names, or, at all events, preferred not
to do so--booksellers they are now styled--and the question which
agitates them is discount. Having mentioned this, one naturally passes
on.
No great trade has an obscurer history than the book trade. It seems
to lie choked in mountains of dust which it would be suicidal to
disturb. Men have lived from time to time of literary skill--Dr.
Johnson was one of them--who had knowledge, extensive and peculiar, of
the traditions and practices of 'the trade,' as it is proudly styled
by its votaries; but nobody has ever thought it worth his while to
make record of his knowledge, which accordingly perished with him, and
is now irrecoverably lost.
In old days booksellers were also publishers, frequently printers, and
sometimes paper-makers. Jacob Tonson not only owned Milton's _Paradise
Lost_--for all time, as he fondly thought, for little did he dream of
the fierce construction the House of Lords was to put upon the
Copyright Act of Queen Anne--not only was Dryden's publisher, but also
kept shop in Chancery Lane, and sold books across the counter. He
allowed no discount, but, so we are told, 'spoke his mind upon all
occasions, and flattered no one,' not even glorious John.
For a long time past the trades of bookselling and book-publishing
have been carried on apart. This has doubtless rid booksellers of all
the unpopularity which formerly belonged to them in their other
capacity. This unpopularity is now heaped as a whole upon the
publishers, who certainly need not dread the doom awaiting those of
whom the world speaks well.
A tendency of the two trades to grow together again is perhaps
noticeable. For my part, I wish they would. Some publishers are
already booksellers, but the books they sell are usually only new
books. Now it is obvious that the true bookseller sells books both old
and new. Some booksellers are occasional publishers. May each
usurp--or, rather, reassume--the business of the other, whilst
retaining his own!
The world, it must be admitted, owes a great deal of whatever
information it possesses about the professions, trades, and
occupations practised and carried on in its midst to those who have
failed in them. Prosperous men talk 'shop,' but seldom write it. The
book that tells us most about booksellers and bookselling in bygone
days is the work of a crack-brained fellow who published and sold in
the reigns of Queen Anne and George I., and died in 1733 in great
poverty and obscurity. I refer to John Dunton, whose _Life and
Errors_ in the edition in two volumes edited by J.B. Nichols, and
published in 1818, is a common book enough in the second-hand shops,
and one which may be safely recommended to everyone, except, indeed,
to the unfortunate man or woman who is not an adept in the art, craft,
or mystery of skipping.
The book will strangely remind the reader of Amory's _Life of John
Buncle_--those queer volumes to which many a reader has been sent by
Hazlitt's intoxicating description of them in his _Round Table_, and
a few perhaps by a shy allusion contained in one of the essays of
Elia. The real John Dunton has not the boundless spirits of the
fictitious John Buncle; but in their religious fervour, their
passion for flirtation, their tireless egotism, and their love of
character-sketching, they greatly resemble one another.
It is this last characteristic that imparts real value to Dunton's
book, and makes it, despite its verbiage and tortuosity, throb with
human interest. For example, he gives us a short sketch of no less
than 135 then living London booksellers in this style: 'Mr. Newton is
full of kindness and good-nature. He is affable and courteous in
trade, and is none of those men of forty whose religion is yet to
chuse, for his mind (like his looks) is serious and grave; and his
neighbours tell me his understanding does not improve too fast for his
practice, for he is not religious by start or sally, but is well fixed
in the faith and practice of a Church of England man--and has a
handsome wife into the bargain.'
Most of the 135 booksellers were good men, according to Dunton, but
not all. 'Mr. Lee in Lombard Street. Such a pirate, such a cormorant
was never before. Copies, books, men, shops, all was one. He held no
propriety right or wrong, good or bad, till at last he began to be
known; and the booksellers, not enduring so ill a man among them,
spewed him out, and off he marched to Ireland, where he acted as
_felonious Lee_ as he did in London. And as Lee lived a thief, so he
died a hypocrite; for being asked on his death-bed if he would forgive
Mr. C. (that had formerly wronged him), "Yes," said Lee, "if I die, I
forgive him; but if I happen to live, I am resolved to be revenged on
him."'
The Act of Union destroyed the trade of these pirates, but their
felonious editions of eighteenth-century authors still abound. Mr.
Gladstone, I need scarcely say, was careful in his Home Rule Bill
(which was denounced by thousands who never read a line of it) to
withdraw copyright from the scope of action of his proposed Dublin
Parliament.
There are nearly eleven hundred brief character-sketches in Dunton's
book, of all sorts and kinds, but with a preference for bookish
people, divines, both of the Establishment and out of it, printers and
authors. Sometimes, indeed, the description is short enough, and tells
one very little. To many readers, references so curt to people of whom
they never heard, and whose names are recorded nowhere else, save on
their mouldering grave-stones, may seem tedious and trivial, but for
others they will have a strange fascination. Here are a few examples:
'Affable _Wiggins_. His conversation is general but never
impertinent.
'The kind and golden _Venables_. He is so good a man, and so truly
charitable, he that will write of him, must still write more.
'Mr. _Bury_--my old neighbour in Redcross Street. He is a plain
honest man, sells the best coffee in all the neighbourhood, and
lives in this world like a spiritual stranger and pilgrim in a
foreign country.
'Anabaptist (alias _Elephant_) _Smith_. He was a man of great
sincerity and happy contentment in all circumstances of life.'
If an affection for passages of this kind be condemned as trivial, and
akin to the sentimentalism of the man in Calverley's poem who wept
over a box labelled 'This side up,' I will shelter myself behind
Carlyle, who was evidently deeply moved, as his review of Boswell's
Johnson proves, by the life-history of Mr. F. Lewis, 'of whose birth,
death, and whole terrestrial _res gestae_ this only, and, strange
enough, this actually, survives--"Sir, he lived in London, and hung
loose upon society. _Stat_ PARVI _hominis umbra_."' On that peg
Carlyle's imagination hung a whole biography.
Dunton, who was the son of the Rector of Aston Clinton, was
apprenticed, about 1675, to a London bookseller. He had from the
beginning a great turn both for religion and love. He, to use his own
phrase, 'sat under the powerful ministry of Mr. Doolittle.' 'One
Lord's day, and I remember it with sorrow, I was to hear the Rev. Mr.
Doolittle, and it was then and there the beautiful Rachel Seaton gave
me that fatal wound.'
The first book Dunton ever printed was by the Rev. Mr. Doolittle, and
was of an eminently religious character.
'One Lord's Day (and I am very sensible of the sin) I was strolling
about just as my fancy led me, and, stepping into Dr. Annesley's
meeting-place--where, instead of engaging my attention to what the
Doctor said, I suffered both my mind and eyes to run at random--I soon
singled out a young lady that almost charmed me dead; but, having made
my inquiries, I found to my sorrow she was pre-engaged.' However,
Dunton was content with the elder sister, one of the three daughters
of Dr. Annesley. The one he first saw became the wife of the Reverend
Samuel Wesley, and the mother of John and Charles. The third daughter
is said to have been married to Daniel De Foe.
As soon as he was out of his apprenticeship, Dunton set up business as
a publisher and bookseller. He says grimly enough:
'A man should be well furnished with an honest policy if he intends
to set out to the world nowadays. And this is no less necessary in
a bookseller than in any other tradesman, for in that way there are
plots and counter-plots, and a whole army of hackney authors that
keep their grinders moving by the travail of their pens. These
gormandizers will eat you the very life out of a _copy_ so soon as
ever it appears, for as the times go, _Original_ and _Abridgement_
are almost reckoned as necessary as man and wife.'
The mischief to which Dunton refers was permitted by the stupidity of
the judges, who refused to consider an abridgment of a book any
interference with its copyright. Some learned judges have, indeed,
held that an abridger is a benefactor, but as his benefactions are not
his own, but another's, a shorter name might be found for him. The law
on the subject is still uncertain.
Dunton proceeds: 'Printing was now the uppermost in my thoughts, and
hackney authors began to ply me with _specimens_ as earnestly and
with as much passion and concern as the watermen do passengers with
_Oars_ and _Scullers_. I had some acquaintance with this generation in
my apprenticeship, and had never any warm affection for them, in
regard I always thought their great concern lay more in _how much a
sheet_, than in any generous respect they bore to the _Commonwealth of
Learning_; and indeed the learning itself of these gentlemen lies very
often in as little room as their honesty, though they will pretend to
have studied for six or seven years in the Bodleian Library, to have
turned over the Fathers, and to have read and digested the whole
compass both of human and ecclesiastic history, when, alas! they have
never been able to understand a single page of St. Cyprian, and cannot
tell you whether the Fathers lived before or after Christ.'
Yet of one of this hateful tribe Dunton is able to speak well. He
declares Mr. Bradshaw to have been the best accomplished hackney
author he ever met with. He pronounces his style incomparably fine. He
had quarrelled with him, but none the less he writes: 'If Mr. Bradshaw
is yet alive, I here declare to the world and to him that I freely
forgive him what he owes, both in money and books, if he will only be
so kind as to make me a visit. But I am afraid the worthy gentleman is
dead, for he was wretchedly overrun with melancholy, and the very
blackness of it reigned in his countenance. He had certainly performed
wonders with his pen, had not his poverty pursued him and almost laid
the necessity upon him to be unjust.'
All hackney authors were not poor. Some of the compilers and
abridgers made what even now would be considered by popular novelists
large sums. Scotsmen were very good at it. Gordon and Campbell became
wealthy men. If authors had a turn for politics, Sir Robert Walpole
was an excellent paymaster. Arnall, who was bred an attorney, is
stated to have been paid £11,000 in four years by the Government for
his pamphlets.
'Come, then, I'll comply.
Spirit of Arnall, aid me while I lie!'
It cannot have been pleasant to read this, but then Pope belonged to
the opposition, and was a friend of Lord Bolingbroke, and would
consequently say anything.
There is not a more interesting and artless autobiography to be read
than William Hutton's, the famous bookseller and historian of
Birmingham. Hutton has been somewhat absurdly called the English
Franklin. He is not in the least like Franklin. He has none of
Franklin's supreme literary skill, and he was a loving, generous, and
tender-hearted man, which Franklin certainly was not. Hutton's first
visit to London was paid in 1749. He walked up from Nottingham, spent
three days in London, and then walked back to Nottingham. The jaunt,
if such an expression is applicable, cost him eleven shillings less
fourpence. Yet he paid his way. The only money he spent to gain
admission to public places was a penny to see Bedlam.
Interesting, however, as is Hutton's book, it tells us next to nothing
about book-selling, except that in his hands it was a prosperous
undertaking.