Author-Publisher Relations Research Articles

Nautical Metaphors and Late-Victorian Literary Culture

Abstract This article reveals how nautical conceits were frequently used to articulate stylistic concerns and respond to publishing trends emerging in late-Victorian culture. Reviewers, authors, and press commentators described writing as akin to ship building or seafaring and employed marine metaphors to categorize and critique narratives as ‘vessels’ for certain characters or plots. For example, leisurely multi-volume ‘three-deckers’ were manned by a recognizable ‘crew’ of characters while modern literary ‘steamers’ were more sparsely populated and took shorter and more direct narrative routes. Many accounts discussed also show an acute awareness of commercial pressures of the book-trade and parallel developments in author-publisher relations. Rudyard Kipling, amongst others, envisioned the publishing world as a ‘seascape’ upon which works needed to be carefully launched—especially if the voyage was trans-Atlantic. His unusually inventive and intricate nautical metaphors anchor much of the article’s analysis, while close literary-critical readings of contemporary periodicals shed light on broader patterns of contact between literary and maritime cultures. The linguistic creativity with which the Victorian nautical imagination was expressed demonstrates the depth of maritime influence upon literary discourses of the period while also reflecting very real interconnections developing between nautical and literary industries.

When Foxes Rove: Jean Bouchet’s Regnars traversant, Basel–Paris–Brussels–Frankfurt–Dresden

As Cynthia Brown’s Poets, Patrons, and Printers has demonstrated, Jean Bouchet’s Regnars traversant (The Foxes That Rove)—first published in Paris c. 1503 with a fraudulent attribution to Sebastian Brant— plays an important role in the development of author-publisher relations in France. It also poses edifying interpretive challenges to its readers. Its governing metaphor, the fox as an image of human vice and dishonesty, is developed through a set of enigmatic woodcuts that depict the narrator’s visions and that must be deciphered in conjunction with the accompanying text. Various motifs in the woodcuts derive from a 1497 broadside by Brant, published in German (and probably also in Latin). The Regnars’ distinctive illustrations, and its combination of prose and verse, were no obstacle to further publication across linguistic and sometimes confessional boundaries. In 1517 Thomas van der Noot printed a Dutch version, De loose vossen der werelt (The Treacherous Foxes of the World), which he had probably translated himself. The Loose vossen was itself translated into High German, as Von den losen füchsen dieser welt (The Treacherous Foxes of this World), and published in 1546 by the Frankfurt printer Hermann Gülfferich. Sixty years later an unlocalized edition appeared with copies of Gülfferich’s images, some of them reversed. Matthes Stöckel published a revised edition, with a more pronounced Lutheran orientation, in Dresden in 1585. The successive translations and revisions are illustrated by increasingly elaborate woodcuts and adopt different approaches to translating verse. I examine the ways in which text-image interactions evolve as the Regnars travels eastward as well as the shifting configurations of verse forms and their meanings. The interplay of conservation and intervention across Dutch and German versions encourages us to reflect on what analytical tools might best elucidate the cross-cultural transmission of complex multimodal texts in early modern Europe.

Literature and Medicine in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press: Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, 1817–1858 by Megan Coyer

Reviewed by: Literature and Medicine in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press: Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, 1817–1858 by Megan Coyer Terry Barringer (bio) Megan Coyer, Literature and Medicine in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press: Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, 1817–1858 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017), pp. ix + 246, £70 hardcover, £19.99 paperback, open-access e-book. While Megan Coyer's title suggests a wide overview, the subtitle more accurately reflects the scope of her book: a detailed case study of one periodical in a tightly defined period. In the first half of the nineteenth century, Edinburgh was Britain's leading centre of medical education and research. It was also the centre of a thriving, politically contested periodical culture, where the ideas of the Scottish Enlightenment, Romanticism, liberalism, political economy, utilitarianism, piety, scepticism, and science jostled and competed to shape the thinking of an intelligent and informed rising middle class. Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine (originally and briefly called Edinburgh Monthly Magazine) was founded in April 1817. Its leanings were Tory, and with its mixture of reviews, satire, poetry, and fiction, it was envisaged as a combative rival to the Whiggish Quarterly Review. Although its underlying ideology was a compound of Romanticism and high Toryism and its style was controversial and combative, it promoted the values of human feeling and imagination. As Coyer writes, Blackwood's "avowed mission [was] to reunite intellect and feeling in all arenas of social and intellectual life" (126). With plentiful source material in the published volumes and the extensive archive at the National Library of Scotland, Blackwood's Magazine has already been well studied, most notably by David Finkelstein in The House of Blackwood: Author-Publisher Relations in the Victorian Era (2002) and Print Culture and the Blackwood Tradition, 1805–1930 (2006). Previous studies have been mostly concerned with the origins and business affairs of the periodical and its role in the literary development of such noted contributors as Thomas De Quincey, George Eliot, Margaret Oliphant, and Joseph Conrad. Coyer's study, the first to focus on Blackwood's medical content, was long in the making. She attributes the book's genesis to "one of several ideas scribbled in a note-book towards the end of my doctoral studies" (vii). She is currently a lecturer in English literature at the University of Glasgow, with a background in Scottish literature and medical humanities, but her first degree was in neuroscience. Drawing on this dual expertise, she examines the relationship between medical culture and the periodical press by drilling down into the writings, ideas, and careers of Blackwood's medical contributors between 1817, when the journal was established, to 1858, when the Medical Act created the General Medical [End Page 746] Council and consolidated the growing professionalism, status, and regulation of medicine in England and Scotland. Medical themes and representations can be found throughout Blackwood's pages. Coyer makes the case that Blackwood's, in this seminal period, enabled the development of new forms of popular medical writing that remained influential through two succeeding centuries. It also helped construct an idealised figure of a gentlemanly, humane, and literary medical man at a time when the medical establishment was tarnished in the popular mind by association with Burke, Hare, corpse-snatching, and the smells and sights of the dissecting room. Blackwood's was not the first periodical to engage with medical matters, and Coyer's first chapter looks in some detail at the Edinburgh context and its key medical men, especially those associated with the Edinburgh Review, published regularly from 1802. This periodical was noted for its literary criticism and standards of judgement and evaluation in the public domain. It was also popular with medical lecturers, who found that contributing to periodicals gave them increased visibility and a decided advantage in competing for students. Chapter two explores "The Tale of Terror and the 'Medico-Popular.'" Gothic tales of terror were a key genre for a periodical that saw itself as a champion of the invisible world against reductive utilitarian and materialist philosophies. Blackwood's favoured stories of intoxication (Confessions of an English Opium-Eater was originally intended for publication in Blackwood's), sleep, dreaming, phrenology, and deathbeds, often presented...

The Politics of Authorship: The Effects of Literary Property Law on Author-Publisher Relations

This article argues that the shift in author-publisher relations over the course of the nineteenth century, which has been characterized by scholars as alternatively either a “consecration” or a “degradation” of the author, was connected to a change in the law on literary property. Through a comparison of the terms of letters and contracts between authors and publishers before and after a landmark law of 1866, which extended literary property to 50 years after the death of the author, it shows that the new law favored publishers, by enabling them to monopolize and control the work of authors to an unprecedented extent. ( ch )

What Competencies Do Today's Academic Authors Need?

The traditional model of academic author–publisher relations was one-way and service led, publisher to author. Today the possibilities for content development are vastly greater, underpinned by the two main drivers of change: new technologies and globalization. But within this new order the author, as creator of content, assumes a greater significance, and disintermediation raises the possibility of managing without a publisher altogether. The author of this essay, a former academic/educational publisher now running an MA in Publishing program at Kingston University London, assesses the new competencies that academic authors need and the marketing opportunities and relationships they can harness to promote their work, and encourages them to both be proactive and make the most of the connections with their publisher and their university—to the benefit of all involved.

What Competencies Do Today’s Academic Authors Need?

The traditional model of academic author–publisher relations was one-way and service led, publisher to author. Today the possibilities for content development are vastly greater, underpinned by the two main drivers of change: new technologies and globalization. But within this new order the author, as creator of content, assumes a greater significance, and disintermediation raises the possibility of managing without a publisher altogether. The author of this essay, a former academic/educational publisher now running an MA in Publishing program at Kingston University London, assesses the new competencies that academic authors need and the marketing opportunities and relationships they can harness to promote their work, and encourages them to both be proactive and make the most of the connections with their publisher and their university—to the benefit of all involved.

"Sir, It Is an Outrage": George Bentley, Robert Black, and the Condition of the Mid-List Author in Victorian Britain

"Sir, It Is an Outrage":George Bentley, Robert Black, and the Condition of the Mid-List Author in Victorian Britain Solveig C. Robinson (bio) What at least is already very plain is that practically the majority of volumes printed within a year cease to exist as the hour passes, and give up by that circumstance all claim to a career, to being accounted or provided for. —Henry James, "The Future of the Novel" (1899) Max Beerbohm's "Enoch Soames" (1912) is a cautionary tale of a failed Victorian writer. Not comforted by reassurances that artists always have to wait for recognition, Soames yearns to be transported one hundred years into the future, so that he can consult his entries in the British Library catalogue. "I'd sell myself body and soul to the devil, for that!" he exclaims. "Think of the pages and pages in the catalogue: 'SOAMES, ENOCH' endlessly—endless editions, commentaries, prolegomena." The devil is seated conveniently nearby, so Soames gets his wish, only to discover that the solitary mention of him in the British Library catalogue is in conjunction with a story—this story—by Beerbohm. As the devil claims his due, Soames pleads with Beerbohm: "Try," he begs, "try to make them know that I did exist!"1 [End Page 131] Soames's obscurity is representative of the fate of most authors, particularly the myriads who toiled in the fields of Victorian fiction. John Sutherland has estimated that there may have been upwards of 3, 500 novelists published in Britain between 1837 and 1901, most of whom "will never emerge from the obscurity of the statistical mass." While compiling the Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction, Sutherland successfully identified 878 of those 3, 500, a representative sample that ranges from onetime authors to astonishingly prolific but nevertheless largely unknown figures. However, he acknowledges that there is a "still invisible sub-stratum . . . composed, one suspects, of failures, rank amateurs, third-rate hacks and utter nonentities." To investigate those in the "lower reaches," he muses, would require "some future literary archaeological tool."2 This tool exists, but it is an old-fashioned and unwieldy one. Victorian publishers' archives provide glimpses of the ordinary, inconsequential novices and third-rate hacks whose works swelled the lists of the Mudie's Circulating Library catalogues and whose works still remain, unconsulted, in the bowels of the great libraries. Occasionally, the readers' reports and correspondence in the archives can yield a surprisingly detailed picture of the day-to-day workings of the major publishing houses and of how those workings were experienced by the bread-and-butter authors who were destined not for posterity, but for that oblivion Henry James so coolly predicted for them in "The Future of the Novel." One such author is Robert Black (1829–1915). Black's correspondence with his publisher George Bentley (1828–95), head of one of the foremost Victorian fiction publishers, Richard Bentley & Son, is preserved in the Bentley Papers at the British Library. Although Black was a first-time novelist when he began negotiating with Bentley's in 1877, he was already a relatively experienced author: he had translated the memoirs of Leopold I of Belgium and a major history of France, had contributed both fiction and nonfiction to a range of periodicals, and had also published two collections of short stories.3 In fact, it is Black's sense that his literary experience entitles him to better treatment at the hands of his publisher that causes him to spring from the volumes of the Bentley letterbooks. In the midst of what at first glance appears to be a mundane correspondence about the editing of his manuscript "Love or Lucre," there is a stark declaration in a very black and bold hand, centered on the sheet of letter paper: Sir, It is an outrage—You will have to arrange with my solicitor.4 In order to understand the nature of the outrage, it is necessary to reconstruct what Peter McDonald has aptly called the "predicament" of the text,5 [End Page 132] by reviewing the production cycle of Black's book. What emerges is a view of Victorian author-publisher relations that looks very...

The House of Blackwood: Author-Publisher Relations in the Victorian Era (review)

The House of Blackwood: Author-Publisher Relations in the Victorian Era (review)

The House of Blackwood: Author-Publisher Relations in the Victorian Era (review)

Reviewed by: The House of Blackwood: Author-Publisher Relations in the Victorian Era Maura Ives (bio) David Finkelstein, The House of Blackwood: Author-Publisher Relations in the Victorian Era. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002. viii + 199 pp. $55.00 (cloth). The subtitle of David Finkelstein's The House of Blackwood: Author-Publisher Relations in the Victorian Era is somewhat misleading. Although Finkelstein does discuss a number of Blackwood's authors, including such prominent figures as Margaret Oliphant and Joseph Conrad, the book hopes to move beyond the limiting practice of viewing publishing history through the lens of authorship. It attempts this by alternating chapters on the firm's management and history with "case studies" of authorship intended to situate individual events and negotiations within larger cultural, political, and economic frameworks. Finkelstein's treatment of Blackwood differs from previous studies in focusing on the firm's later history, and especially in introducing materials heretofore unavailable or (if unflattering to the firm) suppressed. The result is an informative glimpse into the reasons for the firm's decline. Finkelstein notes the aesthetic and sociopolicitical conservatism that led Blackwood to reject writers such as Thomas Hardy, who "did not fit in with the firm's prevailing ideological and literary stance" (13). Blackwood's "stance" is further illuminated through its response to the printers' strike of 1872-73, an event unmentioned in other accounts. Rather than comply with demands for a shorter work week, Blackwood hired replacements, pressured its remaining workers not to support the strikers, and ultimately became a nonunion shop. While John Blackwood framed the firm's actions in "paternalist" terms, Finkelstein points to the obvious link between low labor costs and the firm's overall profitability (47). Finkelstein adeptly uses financial records and the details of business negotiations to situate authors and literary genres within the firm's overall production. He finds that the firm's overdependence upon sales of George Eliot's books backfired when demand for Eliot's work slackened at the end of the century. He also demonstrates that literary texts were not the only or even the main category of profitable texts for Blackwood, which also relied heavily upon religious, educational, reference, and military titles. Most telling, however, is the firm's continued refusal to abandon antiquated attitudes and business practices. Despite a steady drop in sales starting in the 1860s, Blackwood's management insisted that Blackwood's Magazine was a mainstay of the firm, while the refusal to adjust to the advent of literary agents literally cost the firm several important authors who turned to publishers who were willing to pay more. Finkelstein acknowledges that the Blackwood archives are "so vast it would take a lifetime to excavate fully" (vii); given that, one wishes Finkelstein had produced a more detailed study of the material he has unearthed thus far. Yet the trouble with this book is not so much its brevity, but its tendency to promise more than it delivers. For example, in his initial mention of the directorship [End Page 139] of David Meldrum, Finkelstein hints at scandal—"sums were calculated and worth assigned in order to establish how much to pay off the silent member of a secret partnership that had run the firm between 1903 and 1910"—and promises to tell the story of "how Meldrum became such a privileged insider" later in the book (4). But we learn only that Meldrum, a Blackwood author whose comments on literary contemporaries caught the attention of William Blackwood, was hired as the London office manager in 1896, and was valued for bringing new writers, including Conrad, to the firm. No details of the "secret partnership" emerge. Similarly, Finkelstein nods to book historians and theorists such as Robert Darnton and Pierre Bourdieu, but readers who expect a substantial engagement with theory will be disappointed. Still, there are many things that Finkelstein does well. The "case study" approach, and especially the chapter on John Speke's 1863 Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile, can be deft and provocative. A rich set of archival sources allows Finkelstein to document Blackwood's transformation of Speke's text, ostensibly a scientific treatise, into a saleable...

American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834-1853 by Meredith L. McGill (review)

MLR, 99.3, 2004 769 earlier chapter to 'production and the shop floor' (pp. 38-42) and 'distributing and marketing texts' (pp. 42-46) is not repeated in the chapter on the later period. Chap? ter 2 concludes with the statement that 'the labor strikes of 1872-73 resulted in a de-unionizing policy that was to remain in place until the turn ofthe century', but at least something should have been said about labour and labour relations in the period 1880-1912, especially as this area has already been acknowledged as 'one of the least explored in publishing histories' (p. 38). Finkelstein is one of the editors of the recent Book History Reader (London: Rout? ledge, 2002) and Chapter 1 of The House ofBlackwooddraws upon a number ofthe theorists present in that important collection, including Darnton, Bourdieu, and Janice Radway, and this and the following chapter rely heavily on Radway's idea, developed in her work on the US Book-of-the-Month Club, that different 'layers, levels and planes of literary production' coexist within institutions (such as publishing houses) which manage them in an 'unhierarchized fashion' (p. 19). Finkelstein uses Radway to justify the fact that he pays equal attention to the author-publisher relations that existed between authors involved in both literary and 'nonliterary' (p. 36) projects; and the chapters on the ghosting of Speke's Discovery ofthe Source ofthe Nile and the serialization of Reade's A Woman Hater in Blackwood's Magazine are among the best here. Both demonstrate how important author-publisher relations could be in shaping the final text, but they appear curiously under-theorized in relation to the chapters that precede them, perhaps because they have appeared elsewhere in similar form. Despite these limitations, this is an important book, which by extending the remit of the house history to include much more than just the author-publisher relations of its subtitle suggests a number of ways in which book historians can challenge and revise the 'official' history of the print culture of the Victorian era. University of Reading Stephen Colclough American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834-1853. By Meredith L. McGill. (Material Texts) Philadelphia: University ofPennsylvania Press. 2002. viii + 364pp. $39.95; ?28. ISBN 0-8122-3698-x. In American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834-1853, Meredith McGill takes aim at Michael T. Gilmore's close alignment, in his American Romanticism and the Marketplace (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), of capitalist de? velopment with the emergence of professional writing (p. 12). Rather, for her, 'the discourse of authorship develops not congruently, but at odds with changes in the conditions of production' (p. 49). Closely analysing the landmark case of Wheaton v. Peters (1834), she argues foran American exception to the British instance described in Mark Rose's Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1993). According to her, the American con? ception of copyright rejected the British Lockean basis of 'natural' personal property rights in favour of a public imperative based on readers' relation to texts as a kind of production (p. 62), within what she describes as a Jacksonian 'decentralization of power' (p. 108). As manuscripts moved into the publicity of print, they rather lost than gained private protection. Yet despite this keen recognition of the power of writing beyond the scope of print, McGill does not consider manuscript publication, so well treated for early modern Britain by Harold Love (Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford and New York: Clarendon Press, 1993)) and Margaret J. M. Ezell (Social Author? ship and the Advent of Print (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999)). This scholarship, after all, suggests more similarity between British and American 77? Reviews practice, even granted a transatlantic lag, than McGill's narrow analysis of legal discourse reveals. Moreover, exclusive focus upon printing distorts the overall pic? ture of the literary field, in so far as it severs everyday scribal production practices away from print. The introduction of this into McGill's argument, however, would undermine her Habermasian conflation of printing with the putative public sphere (after Michael Warner) and thus her juridico-politico (read: Republican) correction...

The House of Blackwood: Author-Publisher Relations in the Victorian Era by David Finkelstein (review)

768 Reviews in principle, these are hardly even defended (cf. Grimes, Lacoss, Natov): myths are reassuringly self-explanatory, to the point of turning Harry into Jesus: 'Harry began his life as myth, as magic infant, the force that alone kept evil at bay. Throughout the first four books, he has struggled to become a human boy' (Cockrell, p. 26). This Jesus-Pinocchio also fulfilseight out ofthe ten archetypes suggested by Grimes, for whom it is not yet clear at this stage if Harry Potter's mother is a virgin, thus preventing Harry from fulfillingthis particular Messianic requirement (p. 107). Farah Mendlesohn's contribution is the only essay which attempts to critique some of the volume's tenets. Her cultural analysis of the internal contradictions of concepts of genealogy in Harry Potter goes against the idea that 'biologically, genetically, an embryonic hero is likely to come from appropriately strong roots, good DNA (Pharr, p. 54). Her discussion of 'fairness' also sits uneasily next to the well-meant claims about 'Rowling's abhorrence ofthe class system' (Natov, p. 133). Similarly, her view on gender clashes not only with the enthusiastic 'Harry is no wimp' (Pharr, p. 62) but also with Dresang's critical efforts. Even though at times simply reversing the logic it criticizes and failing to question the role of the author (whom Mendlesohn occasionally chastises, thus failing back into the position of the critic-as-moralizer shared by other contributors), Mendlesohn's essay is a critical argument. This volume is full of good intentions, which exert their commonsensical power; The Ivory Tower and Harry Potter fails, however, to work as a critical analysis of a cultural phenomenon. University of Salford Daniela Caselli The House ofBlackwood: Author?Publisher Relations in the Victorian Era. By David Finkelstein. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. 2002. viii + 199 pp. $55- ISBN 0-271-02179-9. Founded in 1804, the Edinburgh publishing firm of William Blackwood & Sons is best known for its role in nurturing major literary talents such as George Eliot and Joseph Conrad. Blackwood is already the subject of two histories commissioned by the house, Margaret Oliphant and Mary Porter's study of 1897-98 and Frank Tredrey 's house history of 1954. David Finkelstein's The House of Blackwood is one of a number of recently published texts that consciously set out to reinvestigate and revise the 'official' history of print culture. As Chapter 1 makes clear, officialhouse histories tend to concentrate upon famous authors and literary texts while ignoring the collaborative process between author, editor, and printing house that allowed these texts to be produced in the firstplace, and the role of the publisher in distributing and marketing them once they had left the press. Chapter 6 helps to redress this imbalance by documenting William Black? wood' s struggle to get Oliphant and Porter to produce a coherent author-centred 'representation ofthe firm's self-image' (p. 128) in the 1890s, and two general chap? ters (2 and 5) covering the economic history of the business draw attention to the way in which Blackwood's involvement in the production of a wide range of non-literary texts, including atlases and dictionaries, helped the firm to survive in the volatile world of Victorian publishing. These general chapters cover the periods 1860-79 and 1880-1912 respectively and draw upon a wealth of new archival material deposited in the National Library of Scotland that even the previous 'ofncial' historians of the firm were unable to call upon, and Finkelstein must be praised for extending his interest to the later period, when the firm 'began aiming more directly at its steadiest customer base: the colo? nial audience' (p. 101). However, it is unfortunate that the attention given in the MLR, 99.3, 2004 769 earlier chapter to 'production and the shop floor' (pp. 38-42) and 'distributing and marketing texts' (pp. 42-46) is not repeated in the chapter on the later period. Chap? ter 2 concludes with the statement that 'the labor strikes of 1872-73 resulted in a de-unionizing policy that was to remain in place until the turn ofthe century', but at least something should have been said about labour and...

The House of Blackwood: Author-Publisher Relations in the Victorian Era

The House of Blackwood: Author-Publisher Relations in the Victorian Era

The House of Blackwood: Author-Publisher Relations in the Victorian Era

The Scottish publishing house of William Blackwoood & Sons, founded in 1804, was a major force in 19th- and early 20th-century British literary history, publishing a diverse group of important authors - including George Eliot, John Galt, Thomas de Quincey, Margaret Oliphant, Anthony Trollope, Joseph Conrad, and John Buchan, among others - in book form and in its monthly Blackwood's Magazine. In this title, David Finkelstein exposes the successes and failures of this onetime publishing powerhouse. He provides a general history of the firm, attending to family dynamics over several generations, their moulding of a particular political and national culture, the shaping of a Blackwood audience, and the multiple causes for the firm's decline in the decades before World War I.

The House of Blackwood: Author-Publisher Relations in the Victorian Era (review)

The House of Blackwood: Author-Publisher Relations in the Victorian Era (review)

Review: The House of Blackwood: Author-Publisher Relations in the Victorian Era

1Pembroke College Oxford The House of Blackwood: Author‐Publisher Relations in the Victorian Era David Finkelstein viii + 198 University Park, Pa. (The Penn State series in the History of the Book). Pennsylvania State University Press 2002 $55

The House of Blackwood: Author-Publisher Relations in the Victorian Era by David Finkelstein (review)

The House of Blackwood: Author-Publisher Relations in the Victorian Era by David Finkelstein (review)

The House of Blackwood: Author-Publisher Relations in the Victorian Era. (The Penn State Series in the History of the Book.). David Finkelstein

Previous articleNext article No AccessBOOK REVIEWSThe House of Blackwood: Author-Publisher Relations in the Victorian Era. (The Penn State Series in the History of the Book.). David Finkelstein William BakerWilliam Baker Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America Volume 97, Number 1MARCH 2003 Published for the Bibliographical Society of America Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/pbsa.97.1.24295810 Views: 1Total views on this site COPYRIGHT © 2003 THE BIBLIOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY OF AMERICAPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Review: The House of Blackwood: Author-Publisher Relations in the Victorian Era

Review: The House of Blackwood: Author-Publisher Relations in the Victorian Era

New Technology and the Changing System of Author-Publisher Relations

they are intriguing. My own work has addressed questions being asked by the professions and publishing community alike. But rather than focus on the subject in the most general sense, I prefer to consider one small piece of the big picture in order to better illumine the whole, if indeed one can speak of publishing in holistic terms. The specific question I should like to raise is whether it is any longer feasible to speak of the viewpoint of editors, publishers, and scholars as if they are each distinct windowless monads. Clearly, my very formulation of the problem suggests my sentiments in the matter. In some sense, the new technological environment will be defined as much by a new set of relationships between key players in the universe of publishing as by technological considerations alone. Certainly in the editorial process, the viewpoints of all other actors in the new publishing environment are central, if not shared in common. First let me note several contrasting, even opposing trends that affect the editorial process. At one end there is the tendency-which has been discussed for some time-toward monopolization in the publishing environment. It is no longer a secret, if it ever was, that a few giant publishers generate a greater portion of the business of publishing, in strictly fiscal terms at least, than at any time in the past. Indeed, the age of small old line houses which are individually owned or family managed is almost over. In such a publishing environment, the divisions of labor in the editorial process have become even more pronounced than at any time in the recent past. Publishers scarcely read what they publish, much less edit it. They either hire in-house acquisition editors (who in turn may scarcely read

Asymmetries in author-publisher relations

Asymmetries in author-publisher relations