paper, and expensive bindings. Publishers built and protected reputations through maintaining the high and showy material quality of their books. “The name of the publisher, like that of the author,” writes Richard Sher, “[took] on the role of a brand name, influencing perceptions of the ‘product’ and patterns of consumption in profound ways.”10 This reinforced a hierarchy of printed texts, from the hefty quarto volumes of new poetry associated with high-class metropolitan publishing to the cheaply printed ephemeral texts associated with less capitalized firms.
Such dynamics were evident far from London because most readers in eighteenth-century Scotland, Ireland, and North America encountered literary texts as either London imports or reprints produced in cities like Edinburgh, Dublin, or Philadelphia. A 1793 catalogue from Edinburgh publisher William Creech suggests London’s overwhelming importance in Scotland, especially as the origin for new, expensive, and large-format books.11 A discussion of “New Books” in The Scots Magazine in 1778 devoted eight pages to books published in London compared to only two pages for Edinburgh.12 Most books published locally in Scotland were at this time produced with London partnerships that were necessary to finance some projects and to reach the marketplace in the south. “I could wish a London Bookseller engaged in the publication,” wrote James Beattie regarding his Essay on Truth in 1769, “because otherwise it would be impossible to make it circulate in England.”13 At times, the Edinburgh trade manufactured new editions that rivaled the format of expensive London books, but even so, that city’s share in total production was relatively low. Only about 12 percent of the works of the Scottish Enlightenment—by authors like Beattie, Adam Ferguson, William Robertson, and David Hume—were published solely in Edinburgh without a London partner.14 A customer perusing William Creech’s 1793 catalogue would also have noticed a large number of cheap Scottish reprints of texts that originated in London. Printers in Scotland had long side-stepped London monopolies by trading heavily in such reprints, some of which were officially out of copyright but still claimed as protected.15 Largely permitted to sell and distribute books in local and North American markets, the Scottish reprint industry eventually got in trouble when it encroached upon England, as was the case with Alexander Donaldson, whose reprint of James Thompson’s The Seasons was at issue in the 1774 case that bears his name and that of the poem’s London printer, Thomas Becket.
Ireland’s book trade operated similarly to Scotland’s even though in the eighteenth century, it remained outside of British copyright and avoided the legal battles of the Scottish trade. In Dublin, book buyers chose between new London editions and cheaper, perfectly legal reprints, sometimes sold side by side. “In Dublin—as elsewhere [in Ireland],” Mary Pollard writes, “the wealthy customer usually preferred the London edition to any other,” while reprints satisfied the lower end of the market and, like reprints from Scotland, were also heavily exported to North America.16 As in Scotland, authors from Ireland—including Jonathan Swift, Oliver Goldsmith, and Edmund Burke—sought London publishers for prestige, profit, and convenience (if they lived there) and also because Dublin editions, unlike new editions published in Edinburgh, were not copyright protected in Britain.17 Some Dublin publishers established informal partnerships with London firms; George Faulkner, for example, published editions of Samuel Richardson by purchasing advance sheets of London texts so he could be the first to reprint them in Ireland.18 For the most part, however, elegant and expensive London imports competed for a reader’s attention with “reprints of London originals.”19 New literary works retained an especially strong association with London, since fiction and poetry were far less often reprinted than other kinds of texts.20
In North America before and after the Revolution, the book trade was also defined by the sale of London imports and cheap reprints, although many of the latter were also imported from Ireland and Scotland. Benjamin Franklin and James Rivington were supplied with books by business associates in London, and the latter bragged in the 1760s that he was “the only London book-seller in America.”21 The materiality of London-printed books sent clear signals: “Large paper, large format, and large type all enjoyed a high social status,” Hugh Amory writes about the colonial period, “generated not only by the ‘louder,’ attention-grabbing volume of the text but also by the conspicuous waste of paper.”22 Such volumes contrasted to the cheap reprints from Ireland and Scotland and also to local reprints by colonials, including some who had been book trades professionals in Ireland, like Mathew Carey, or in Scotland, like Robert Bell. In the last decades of the century, the market for reprints in America was met mostly by imports from Ireland. The transatlantic dynamics of the American book trade changed little up through the 1790s; before and after the Revolution, for example, Thomas Jefferson preferred to read London texts in their Dublin editions because of their price and more manageable size.23 Toward the end of the century, some important changes occurred, such as an increase in domestic reprinting, led by Carey; attempts to coordinate bookselling through trade sales; and an interest in new books of specifically American manufacture.24 But a new federal copyright law in 1790 that granted U.S. residents and citizens rights to their texts did not much affect the general pattern of American bookselling.25 The Gentleman’s Magazine corroborates this in a 1796 article about the U.S. trade; “serious books would only do as imported,” it writes, “as the people esteemed English-printed books much better than the productions of their own presses.”26 Charles Brockden Brown felt this keenly, as he admitted in a letter to his brother about arranging transatlantic editions of his novels. “The salelibility [sic] of my works will much depend on their popularity in England, whither Caritat has carried a considerable number of Wieland, Ormond, and Mervyn.”27 Up through the turn of the century, bookselling in North America was still characterized by the authority of the London trade, London imports, and the dissemination of London texts via cheap reprints.
The robust trade in reprints around the Anglophone Atlantic demonstrates the vibrancy of provincial publishing. But there was an important difference between two kinds of reprinting: the reprinting of old texts whose copyrights had expired and the reprinting of new texts (legally or illegally) from copyrighted London editions. The former practice was common everywhere following Donaldson v. Becket, including in London and England. Reprinting copyrighted texts, however, was largely the prerogative of provincial publishers. Before and after Donaldson, publishers in Scotland produced illegal reprints of in-copyright titles that undersold London editions, while Irish and American reprinters were not beholden to copyrights at all.28 In all of these areas, original London editions were sometimes sold alongside unauthorized provincial reprints that echoed their originals. This produced a kind of double vision in Scotland, Ireland, and North America that did not characterize the marketplace in England. This double vision emphasized the provincial book trade’s distance from London as it reinforced that city’s traditional importance as the origin for new literary texts. In the provincial marketplace, a new and imported London edition signaled its high cultural status directly through its own materiality, while a local reprint alluded to such status through its text’s known metropolitan origin. Distance from London was reflected in a reprint not in the book’s physical journey to the hands of readers, as was the case with an import, but rather through the reprint’s invocation of such distance as an immanent feature of the object itself. While readers of a London import were aware of its distant material origins, readers of a reprint felt the absence of a book’s original London edition as a ghostly presence within it.
The Provincial Book Trade After 1801
Events surrounding the turn of the nineteenth century led to significant changes even as London’s overall dominance persisted. Scholarship has typically marked the Donaldson decision as the most significant turning point in this period because the explosion of reprinting after 1774 expanded the availability of old texts. From the perspective of the provincial book trade, however, which had always trafficked in such texts, a later date emerges as more significant: 1801, the year of the Act of Union, which absorbed Ireland into Great Britain to create the “United Kingdom” and was accompanied with a Copyright Act that for the first time extended British copyright across the Irish Sea. The effects of this
