The history of the book war : fair book prices versus Publishers' Trust prices / [Times Book Club].

  • Times Book Club.
Date:
1907
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The history of the book war : fair book prices versus Publishers' Trust prices / [Times Book Club]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    a point that was fully appreciated by Lord Camden sixty years later, when an important copyright case was carried to the House of Lords, and a Booksellers Copyright Bill was defeated mainly by his efforts. Against that Bill petitions were presented by the country booksellers, and by the Glasgow booksellers, who feared the tyranny of the London trade, then aiming at perpetual copyright. The effect of giving booksellers, or publishers as we now call them, a per- petual freehold in books, was forcibly summed up by Camden, in words prophetic of what has actually been accomplished with a terminable copyright as regards all but books that outlive the period. He said: “ All our learning will be locked up in the hands of the Tonsons and Lintons of the age, who will set that price for it their avarice chooses to demand, till the public become their slaves as much as their hackney compilers now are. Instead of salesmen the booksellers of late years have forestalled the market and become engrossers.” That was the effect of the limited copy- right of 8 Anne, c. 19, operating upon a prior state of things, in which practically all MSS. were in the hands of bookseller-publishers. Before that Act was passed the author had no choice but to sell his manuscript for cash, and had no further interest in the book from a monetary point of view. If the book did not sell very well, there was no temptation to piracy. If it sold well, at a price much above the cost of pro- duction, there was a temptation for another bookseller to go to the expense of composing, printing, binding, and publishing it afresh. In this lay the security of the public. Excessive prices were always liable to be cut down by competition.