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Chaptev3 Distribution Even temperately conducted, the miscellaneous publishing business . . . is an extrcnicly h'~zardousbusiness. A hazardous business 111ustselect its risks carcf~illy.and therefore cannot succcssf~~lly be a large one, relativc to its rate of possible profit. At its \visest, it rnust bc a small business with large margins for profits. The chief problem for the publisher of clothbou~ldbooks in America during this century has bee11lack of an adequate distribution system. Because nineteenth-centuryAmerican publishers did not establish a nation- \vide systen~of marketing, twentieth-century publishers and authors have functioned at a disadvantage in business. Two of the no st important innovations in book distribution during this century-paperbacks and book clubs-were initiated during the txventies and thirties because trade publishers could not exploit the national market through conventional means. Both new methods tapped into modes of distribution that had alreadv been established. Paperback publishers used the existing network for magazine distribution; book clubs used the services of the U.S. mail.' Rut neither of these methods would have been so successful had ni~leteenthand early txventieth-century publishers bee11able to build an efticient distribution system for their books. Thc reasons for their failure to do so are tied in with the cultural development of the United States and with the business history of the country after 1850. Just as American writers took their first notions about authorship from the British, so American publishers (as so011as they were financially able, around the middle of the nineteenth century) sought to model themselves after their counterparts in Great Britain. Intellectually the United States was still very much tied to Britain throughout most of the nineI . For d n account of the founding .inti subsequent ucccss of the Kook-of-the-Month (:lub, scc Charles Lee. TltcHiddell Pzd~lzc:T / J ~ Stor? of tile Rook-uf-ti~e-~~oizti~ Clzlb (Garden City, N.Y.: l)oublcda\, 1yj8).Albo sec Joan Shcllcy Kub~n, "Self, Culture, and Self-Culture in Modern America: The Early History of the Hook-of-the-MonthClub," Jour~rulafilmevican Histow -I (19%): -82-806. A good li~rtoryof American paperhack publishing is Frank L.Schick, T ~ J C l'uperboz~~d Hook iil A w e i u (Nmv h r k : Kowkcr, 1958). Distribution I 35 teenth century, and it is no surprise that in publishing-as in philosoph!: education, and politics-\vc patterned ourselves after British or Continental models. Europeans typically saw Anlericall publishers as colntnercially minded buccaneers who made their profits by pirating the works of well-known European authors, particularly British authors. Established American trade publishers were keen to rid then~selves of this image and to do business in the manner of the great British and Continental publishers . "Courtesy of the tradem-an arrangement by which an American publisher paid a flat fee to a British author for the exclusive right to publish that author's work in the United States, and by which other American publishers kept away from that author-was in part a practical method of reducing competition and maintaining prices, but it was even Inore an effort by the American publisher to show the British publisher that he could behave in a gentlemanly fashion.* As early as the 184os, American publishers regularly traveled to London once or twice a pear to make business arrangements with English publishers and to be entertained by them. American publishers enjoyed these jaunts to the intellectual homeland; the nlen~oirsof such major nineteenth-century U.S. publishers as Janles T. Fields and George P. Putnam are filled with anecdotes gathered on these visits, during which they met and talked business with the promi~lentpublishers of LondonRichard Bentle): Frederick and Maurice Macmillan, William Heinemann , John Murray (the younger), George Smith, Sampson Low, John Blackwood, William Longman, and others-and during which they also met fanous British authors whose works they would shortly undertake to publish.Tl~ere mias no doubt about relative position and influence: British publishers enjoyed superiority over their American brethren because their houses were older, their backlists stronger, a ~ d their images more distinguished. It was American publishers who came to England in search of British books to publish and in hopes of persuading the British publisher to take on some of their own titles. Rarely did a London publisher visit America for the same purposes. 2. He11111~1t Lehmann-Haupt, in collab. \vith Lawrc~lce C. Wroth and Rollo G. Silver, The Book in America: A History of the...

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