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.
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.
