page_887 < previous page page_887 next page > Page 887 example, promised to "manufacture" Nathaniel Hawthorne "into a classic" while also maintaining a small literary salon. The establishment of international copyrights in 1891 (whose effects were not entirely foreseen) altered the structure of the publishing industry. Initially backed by authors and major houses hoping to outlaw piracy, the copyright law in one blow doomed reprint houses, made the prices of U.S. authors competitive with those of Europeans, and  through a protectionist manufacturing clause  brought new prosperity to the American printing industry. As lawmakers had hoped, books written, printed, and published by Americans now outsold those of European rivals. But instead of the predicted stability, what followed was a period of intense competition, as U.S. houses competed heavily for both foreign and native-born authors. A new breed of entrepreneur  Frank N. Doubleday, Walter Hines Page, George P. Brett of Macmillan's American wing  displaced the Gilded Age gentlemen publishers. Theirs was the top-down management style taking hold in other industries. Best-sellers were first recorded in the 1890s, as the newly founded trade organ Publishers Weekly began to keep track of sales. Authors were now commissioned to write books in advance, and even radical works like Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (1906) were given full-scale promotion. The dime novel, which had succumbed to the competition of Sunday newspaper supplements, was replaced by other experiments in mass publications like Haldeman-Julius's Little Blue Books. In the twentieth century, the pattern was mixed. Successive waves of commercial concentration, retrenchment, and publishers' claims to cultural patronage occurred. Major publishers often subsisted by sustaining a back list of recurrent favorites and classics, by cross-subsidizing weak titles with best-sellers, and by developing increasingly elaborate subsidiary rights (by 1922, over a hundred novels had been made into motion pictures). Literary agents, grudgingly accepted after 1900, became commonplace. The twenties witnessed a virtual explosion of American fad books, historical outlines, and self-help texts. The Book-of-the-Month Club was founded (1926) as well as important firms like Simon & Schuster, Random House, Viking, and Boni & Liveright. Publishers and editors varied from patient patrons of authors (like Scribner's Maxwell Perkins) to ingenious publicists (like Bennett Cerf of Random House). The Great Depression forced many firms to experiment with covers, cheap popular novels, and ultimately paperback editions, the prototype being Robert de Graff's Pocket Books (1939). Meanwhile, university presses, often begun on a small scale during the Gilded Age, capitalized on the expansion of scholarly publication following World War I. The Association of American University Presses (AAUP), after tentative organization in the twenties, formally adopted a constitution in 1937. Academic publishers served the nation's cultural life by publishing scholarly monographs, anthologies, textbooks, periodicals, encyclopedias, and standard editions of classics. After decades of surging growth, university presses faced tighter budgets and stricter management in the 1970s; some formed consortiums like the University Press of New England (1971) or sought external philanthropic funding. In the 1980s, although individual sales of traditional scholarly books tended to decline, many academic presses expanded their annual lists, often aggressively marketing books in general interest categories previously offered only by commercial houses. By the mid-1980s, the membership of the AAUP had expanded to over seventy-five publishing houses. Academic presses now accounted for nearly 10 percent of books published in the United States. After World War II, paperbacks and, later, chain bookstores like B. Dalton's and Walden-books often dictated the merchandising horizons of the industry. Now book publishing attracted the interest of large conglomerates like RCA and MCA. To some, these takeovers brought greater efficiency, more direct access to specialized buyers, and skyrocketing royalties; to others, they meant severely trimmed back lists, overemphasis on "blockbuster" best-sellers, and even possible censorship. Despite the magnitude of the changes in publishing, it remained what colonial printer William Bradford had called an "Art and Mystery."  < previous page page_887 next page >

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