The Professional Literary Agent in Britain, 1880–1920 (review)

As Peter Keating, Mark S. Morrisson, James C. Davis, and others have noted, the twentieth century began with conditions of overproduction in the markets for literary goods.¹ The flooding of the book market was already being noted in trade journals at the end of the nineteenth century. In broad strokes, the modernist production model functions as a dialectical response to these conditions, a negative image of underproduction. Lawrence Rainey proposes for modernism “a tripartite publication program—journal, limited edition, and public or commercial edition,” putting a lot of emphasis on the importance of the second term, the exquisite limited editions that effectively made every reader a patron of the modernist author.² The insulation of modernism in the collecting culture these editions enabled serves as a kind of indemnity against market risk. Yet, for all the rarified, small houses willing to preserve authorial privilege at all costs—presses such as the Hours, Black Sun, Cuala, Hogarth, Egoist, and other boutique operations recalling an arts-and-crafts ethos of the prior century—there were many more publicity-savvy firms, new and old, that kept modern, literary lists significantly invested in modernist trends.

The rise of the most famous publishers of modernist texts, with their attendant links to emergent advertising and publicity techniques, also testifies to a transition in consumer culture that enabled modernist risks and rewards for firms like B. W. Huebsch, Alfred A. Knopf, Boni and Liveright, Charles Scribner’s Sons, Harcourt Brace, Random House, Viking Press, and New Directions in the United States and Elkin Matthews, John Lane, Bodley Head, J. M. Dent, William Heinemann, Chatto and Windus, Faber and Faber, Methuen, Secker & Warburg, and Penguin in Great Britain. Dent’s Everyman Library was one such scheme, as was the Modern Library that Bennett Cerf bought from Boni and Liveright for Random House. Boni and Liveright’s fortunes—used to publish and promote Jean Toomer’s Cane, for instance—were made by packaging miniature volumes of William Shakespeare’s texts into Whitman’s chocolates.³ Beyond modes of production per se, two professional developments are germane to any consideration of this developing aspect of literary production in an age of literary oversupply: first, the rise of the literary publicist-figure, like Edward Bernays, who knew how to help publishers survive by leveraging one kind of book on others, and, second, the advent of the literary agent-figure, like J. B. Pinker, who knew how to negotiate these anxious conditions for authors.

Concerned with the latter, Mary Ann Gillies’s The Professional Literary Agent in Britain: 1890–1920 offers the kind of focused approach to the diverse material practices of modernist production that only a topic-, rather than author-, driven monograph can provide. The rise of the professional literary agent cuts across the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. On the whole, this superb text, which draws on book history and new bibliographic studies, relates the professionalization of the interactions between authors and publishers. The professional literary agent—who synthesized the skill set of a publisher’s reader, literary journalist, bookkeeper, copyright lawyer, and editor—promised the author expert knowledge in different horizontal publishing niches, the so-called “planes” of publishing.⁴

The power of agents as cultural intermediaries between authors and publishers rested on their demonstrated knowledge in creating value through publication and publicity in different markets delivering different literary demographics, on the one hand, and maintaining a stable of talented and reliable authors on the other. Agents were proficient not just in securing favorable book deals but also in slicing up the burgeoning periodical marketplace for their clients, making serialization deals and, perhaps most critically, knowing how to navigate the benefits of complex new copyright laws for their stable of authors. The two main protagonists of this study are A. P. Watt, the first professional agent, who was active from the 1880s until his death in 1914, and Pinker, who was active from the mid-1890s until he died in...