The Author's Empty Purse Revisited

The full title of my book is The Author's Empty Purse and the Rise of the Literary Agent. It tells the tale of the long quarrel between authors and publishers and of how, in the latter part of the nineteenth century, literary agents stepped into the fray on the side of authors, charging 10 percent for their friendship and doubling or tripling the incomes their authors got from publishers. A. P. Watt, the first notable English agent, printed and distributed a book full of testimonials to him from famous and obscure authors. Publishers fulminated against the agents but had to submit to them. The tale, of course, did not end there, and in the subsequent hundred and more years has taken an extraordinary turn. Today the literary agent is the publisher's friend more than the author's. "Do not send me your manuscript," the publisher's recorded telephone message says to the author, "but go find yourself an agent if you can. Agents are my first readers, charging nothing for being my friends, relieving me of a vast deal of reading and taking a major share of the regrettable task of rejection. I do hope you are not rejected."

Both of these partial tales are only mainly true. Watt also acted for publishers, and why shouldn't he? He was a publisher before being an agent, and he had publisher friends who wanted his services. Letters from them appear in his little book. And today presidents and prime ministers sell hundreds of thousands of words-to-be directly to publishers. The one constant in this continuing financial tale is the first half of my title, which means not enough money to earn a living by the craft of writing. The chief condition of authorship has always been, always will be, the empty purse. Among millions of authors around the world, agents become friends of select thousands, just as publishers did before them and still do. One small comfort for poor authors is in knowing that most of the select thousands will eventually be consigned to oblivion along with the millions.

I had no notion in the early 1960s that I would write any such book, and the book came about with fear and trembling as well as with great interest and pleasure. In the early 1960s Oxford University Press accepted a proposal of mine to publish a four-volume collection of Arnold Bennett's letters. Though Bennett is mainly an unremembered author in America today, he was a major figure on the English-American scene in the first third of the twentieth century, prolific and successful as novelist, playwright, essayist, pocket philosopher, travel writer, book reviewer, and libretto and film-script writer. The first volume contracted was for his letters to his literary agent, J. B. Pinker. For thirty years Bennett was with the Pinker firm, one of the two notable agencies first following Watt into business. Bennett's varied, detailed, and voluminous correspondence with the Pinkers was and remains a unique record of the financial progress of an author and of what is today called the history of the book.

My fear and trembling began when my publisher at Oxford said in his kindly cheerful way, "Of course you will want to say something about the rise of literary agency in your introduction." "Yes," I said, trying to betray nothing—nothing was what I knew about literary agency. Almost nothing was what I presently found in the catalogues of a dozen major libraries under the headings literary agency, agencies, literary, and literary agent. I had to go hunting among hitherto unknown, unimagined sources, running in circles around the huge catalogue-volumes under the domed reading room of the British Library in Bloomsbury or walking softly from side aisle to nave to altar of the Stirling Memorial Library in New Haven. I soon learned that literary agents who primarily negotiate copyrights for authors came into being about the same time as the new system of royalty payment to authors—from about 1865 to 1900. It seemed that I could understand this circumstance only if I understood...