BOOKS OF THE DAY

The English Book Trade (Michael Sadleir) Little Old New York (D. W. Brogan) ...

The Economic Basis of Class Conflict (Honor Croome) France and Munich (D. R. Gillie) Poland : Key to Europe (Michael Murray) ...

The Humanism of Hellas (W. B. Stanford) ...

Early Stages (Moray McLaren) ...

Western Roundabout (Pamela Hansford Johnson) ...

1044 ,

1045 1046 1046 1048 1048 1050 1052 G. K. Chesterton (R. A. Scott-James) Sketches of Central Asia (Christopher Sykes) ... Sir Ian Hami:ton Looks Back (Orlo Williams) ... State Interference in South Africa Red Strangers (William Plomer)

The Woman Who Was Poor (Graham Greene)...

Fiction (Kate O'Brien) .. 1054 1056 1056 1058 1058 1060 1062

THE ENGLISH BOOK TRADE

By MICHAEL SADLEIR Miss PLANT prefaces her book with these words :

" This study is designed as a contribution to the economic history of Great Britain. It is a strangely neglected chapter . . The economic development of the English book trade, the structural form which it gradually evolved, the problems of supply and demand which it encountered and overcame, the techniques which it adopted and discarded, the social and economic relationship which arose between masters and men have not hitherto been described and appraised."

This statement, in the sense intended, is true enough ; and

most excellently does Miss Plant remedy the neglect. But actually her book covers in addition and less satisfactorily a considerable portion of the ground covered by earlier writers (and in particular Mr. F. A. Mumby) for the inescapable reason that the economic aspects of the book trade cannot be disentangled from its personal aspects, nor can the methods of book production and book distribution be adjudged with- out reference to the changing tastes and habits of the public in whose service they are designed. That is why book-trade problems have never been stateable—nor ever will be state- able—solely in terms of economic reason or industrial good sense, and why Miss Plant, compelled to carry her investiga- tions beyond economics into the realm of psychological con- flict, has found herself confronted with two categories of material, which are really irreconcilable and with one of which she is ill at ease. So long as she is dealing with historical data and economic fact, she is concise, impressive and admirably informed ; but whenever she tackles those aspects of her subject which depend on the imponderables of temperament, fashion and commercial interest she is inclined to over- simplify and sometimes to dogmatise.

The English Book Trade is divided into two parts. "The Age of Hand Printing " offers a comprehensive study of the practice and economic background of book-production from the time of the manuscript book, through the early stages of printing to the coming of the mechanical press in the late eighteenth century. No branch of the subject has escaped Miss Plant's careful research. She traces the growth of Trade Organisation and of Division of Labour in the industry, as well as its changing location and growing output. She describes its equipment, the wages, and the working and social conditions of Printing Houses, the sources of supply and qualities of paper and binding materials. With matters more external to the industry she is no less thorough. Copyright ; the backwardness of England in comparison with European countries ; Terms of Publication in relation to the general financial background of the trade ; the development of a Demand for books and the various means adopted for stimu- lating and satisfying that demand—these are all carefully recorded.

Because, during this comparatively primitive period of book- trade practice, what happened is a matter of history and those to whom it happened are mainly forgotten, Miss Plant's method—her scrupulous gathering of evidence and fact, and their skilful compression under various headings—is suitable and satisfactory. These early chapters are packed with interest- ing information—some technical, such as prices of paper and processes in paper-making, methods of skin-curing and usage, progress in printing and in devising types of illustration ; some more general, including early attempts at an Association of Authors, details of subscription publication and share- The English Book Trade: An Economic History of the Making and Sale of Books. By Marjorie Plant. (Allen and Cowin. 16s.)

books, and the beginnings of advertising. But Miss Plant would have done well to comment on the problem of terminology. One of the main difficulties of writing about the book trade is its poverty of language. There may be no good alternative to the word " publisher "; but it is surely misleading, without a qualifying note, to talk about " pub- lishers " in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries ; and to use " bookseller " indiscriminately to designate a printer-distributor, a non-printing distributor and a man who catered to private libraries and sold old books as well as new, leads to confusion in more than one respect.

The second part of the book, " The Application of Mechanical Power," repeats the design of the first part and covers, no less exhaustively, the technical, industrial and eco- nomic developments from about 1800 to the present day. But unfortunately the dividing date imposed by the invention of mechanical printing does not coincide with those which really mark the emergence of the modern book trade; so that throughout the nineteenth century, while labour-conditions and technical processes are influenced by one set of circumstances, authorship, publishing, book prices and book-distribution are conditioned by another.

Thus the publisher, as entrepreneur, had made his perma- nent appearance by the last quarter of the eighteenth century. But he was often also a wholesale-bookseller, and in some cases remained so until the eighteen-thirties. The popular author, as an object of rivalry between publishers, dates from about 1820. Similarly the retail bookseller and the circulating librarian did not part company until the first decades of the nineteenth century. Not, in short, before 1840—as regards division of responsibilities, competitive fervour, experiments with prices, resounding successes and untalked of failures—did the book trade, as nowadays understood, really exist.

It arises, therefore, that Miss Plant, working on a chrono- logy of industry and economics, is a reliable authority on paper-making, printing, binding and illustrating technicalities; as well as on book trade factory legislation, apprenticeship, the rise of Trade Unions, &c. (and can claim to be the first to collect and arrange the data on these subjects), but is less convincing (because out of step with herself) when dealing with relations between authors and the trade, or between various branches of the trade, or between trade and public— which relations have been the subject of much recent study and have , really governed book-trade practice during the last hundred and fifty years.

One or two examples must be given of the misapprehensions into which Miss Plant has been led by her preoccupation with economic and technical, as opposed to commercial development. In her chapter on " Modern Bookbinding," she telescopes history to a dangerous extent. The plain wrapper of the eighteenth century was not regarded as even a temporary cover, as are the wrappers on French books today. It predated the assumption of binding responsibility by any trader, and was merely a " wrapping " meant to be discarded by the trade or private buyer for a leather (or part leather) binding to his taste. As for the persistent failure of repeated attempts to establish in England the paper-covered book, which is so general a feature of the Continental trade, this is less due to public insistence on books in stiff covers than to the prevalence of the Circulating Library, and to the absence of a general on-sale system to booksellers. Libraries, for obvious reasons, will not handle wrappered books, nor (except certain cheap series) will the trade, so that the public

have never had the opportunity of getting a taste for them. In a final paragraph of this same chapter is a too perfunctory comment on the dust-jacket. The development of an outside illustration to tempt the casual reader is an important chapter in the history of book publicity, and could with advantage have been traced back almost to the beginning of the nineteenth century.

A similar tendency to over-condensation marks the discussion of book prices, the struggle for the net-book, the piracy- problem, and the growth of costly advertisement. The Circu- lating Library habit tends to keep book-prices at conventional levels, not (as Miss Plant suggests) because subscribers insist on getting their money's worth in terms of published price, but because a library sets out to satisfy a minimum and not a maximum demand, therefore profits by buying as short as possible, and has no incentive to buy more of any one title no matter how cheaply it be published. The net-book agreement was only designed indirectly to help publishers ; its direct pur- pose was to keep alive serious booksellers, who do what they can to display and sell books that need salesmanship. Cut-price bookselling only affects big-selling titles, and the cut-price bookseller (who still exists in America, and is usually a depart- ment store) does nothing to help " difficult " books, but merely butts in on the easy prestige of self-sellers. As for advertising, it is part of the now fierce competition for popular authors, and cannot fairly be discussed without reference to the gradual strengthening of the author's position vis-a-vis the publisher, and the rise of the literary agent.

These necessarily brief indications of the less satisfactory features of Miss Plant's book are not given in denigration of its general utility. They merely seek to demonstrate that there comes a point in book trade history where codification is im- possible, because human nature, taste and self-interest outrage chronology and are indifferent to logic. Up to that point nothing but commendation can be given to The English Book Trade, which is an invaluable compendium of technical and economic facts, and as complete as a history can be which is a record of events rather than of their implications.