Wednesday, November 6, 2019

Piratical Publishers




The catch phrase “Publish or perish” is perhaps heard less frequently in the digital age than it once was, but one of the anxieties of younger scholars is the necessity of finding a press willing to publish their work.  I sometimes try to comfort such people by putting things into historical perspective.  The modern author, it is true, must find a publisher; the medieval author’s first task was to find a dispensable sheep.  Earlier periods of book production are much on my mind just at the moment because of a recent happy experience. 

Last Sunday saw the annual Dinner of the Friends of the Princeton University, a group to which I have belonged and in which I have played various small roles for many years.   There are not too many joint causes that are so uncomplicatedly benign as support of research libraries.  One classic definition of the role of universities—the preservation of old knowledge and the creation of new—would be difficult to pursue without well tended libraries.  It is true that we are experiencing a dramatic revolution in “print culture” generally, one that is driven by rapidly changing digital technology.  This is a dynamic process, not easily predictable, and it is uncertain where or when we shall emerge from it.  I recently met my first young literature professor who makes it a point of pride to own no actual physical books.  I think he’s nuts, but he may represent the shape of a future in which the word “librarian” is as likely to invoke ideas of computer science and of artificial intelligence as of Bodoni bold and card files.  Our group of Friends includes scholars, students, antiquarians, connoisseurs and collectors, print historians, and digital nerds in several categories.

Such diversity of bibliographical expertise presented me with a problem in my modest role of trying to help the leader of our group secure an engaging after-dinner speaker for our annual banquet.  Perhaps I should say it would have presented me with a problem were it not for my good luck in having been friends for the last half century with Robert Darnton.  Darnton, one of the great historians of the Enlightenment and the Revolution was my long-time colleague here before he was lured away by Harvard to be the director of their library system, a task to which he devoted the last decade of his official working life before his recent retirement.  In the meantime, among his prodigious scholarly production that has been recognized with prizes and awards too numerous to mention, are several important works dealing with book history, the history of printing and of publishing, and in general the many roles played by books and writers in the creation of the modern intellectual world.  You can see a bit of what he has been up to by visiting a fascinating website he has created.
   

                                                                            Robert Darnton   
Darnton’s topic, to which he has devoted one of his recent studies, was French book piracy in the era just before the Revolution.  He uses the word “piracy” to denote a variety of publishing practices that we would regard as very shady or simply outright theft of intellectual property.  Copyright law, especially international copyright law, is a relatively new thing in the Age of Printing.  Students of English literature will be familiar with the outrage of various important British writers of the Victorian era victimized by freebooting American printers and publishers.  Before the Revolution French books were published not by any legal “right,” but by the privilege of the King.  In one of his prefaces to his history of the Revolution, Jules Michelet contrasted medieval attitudes toward religion—centered in the idea of divine grace and favor bestowed upon an undeserving, punishable, and often punished mankind—with the idea of equable justice as a right emergent among intellectuals and future revolutionaries.  Like so many other aspects of governance in the ancient régime, the feudal relic of the royal privilege of publication advanced the maximal interests neither of those readers who turned to books for instruction nor of those who turned to them for delight. In the literate circles of Europe, as any reader of War and Peace knows,  the French language occupied the international role now played by English.  But the King of France was not yet the King of Everywhere, as Napoleon apparently set out to be, and dubious pamphlets actually manufactured in a Breton cellar might still gain traction by falsifying their place of publication as Amsterdam or Vienna, sometimes to the confusion of modern bibliographers.   In the “ordinary” commercial French book market there was a definitely dog-eat-dog spirit and a competition to get books thought or already known to be likely market successes into print as quickly as possible.  In this stampede the book’s actual author and whatever contractual arrangement had already been made usually played no part whatsoever.  The motive for the publisher was manifestly crass: to maximize the bottom line.  A small army of pirates scoured the printing houses of Europe for promising material to steal and put on the public market as quickly as possible.  If in your mind’s eye you picture all the old printers as noble humanists holding a newly discovered manuscript of Cicero in one hand and the platen-lever in the other, think again.  Darnton explained how ruthlessly “big business” and financial the publishing industry actually was.  Once a book left the printer’s shop it was fair game for the pirates, who specialized in cheap reprints swiftly produced and efficiently, if sometimes clandestinely distributed throughout the market.  Nor did the pirates always wait until a book was already in circulation.  The true industry leaders sometimes had paid spies in their competitors’ printing shops who could supply them with valuable “market research,” sales reports, and actual purloined proof sheets of promising materials in the process of manufacture.  By this means, Darnton said, an enterprising pirate could on occasion get his stolen “product” on the market even before the original had appeared.  The evening left me feeling strangely reassured: our current anxieties about fake news can perhaps be somewhat assuaged by historical precedent.  This was not one of those after-dinner talks one must consider primarily as a tax to be paid for the enjoyment of the crème brûlée.


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