Publishing for Libraries

At the Dawn of the Digital Age

Charles Chadwyck-Healey

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781350235960
• eBook ISBN: 9781350120969
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Library & Information Science
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Since the 1960s, Charles Chadwyck-Healey has been at the forefront of library publishing and the company he founded in 1973 remains a familiar brand name to academic libraries around the world. In this wide ranging book, Chadwyck-Healey charts his personal history of this constantly changing field, from the earliest days of reprint publishing, through microfilm, microfiche and CD-ROM publishing to the current digital age. He describes the early years of using computers in publishing and the introduction of the CD-ROM which was soon supplanted by online. Chadwyck-Healey was one of the first publishers to use both these new media. Focusing upon leading publishing endeavours around the world – in the USA, UK, Europe and post-Soviet Russia – this book includes vivid and informative first-hand accounts of such landmark publishing projects as the US National Security Archive, the catalogue of the British Library on CD-ROM, and Literature Online (LION).

1

Beginning

In October 1957 the Russians launched Sputnik 1 and I looked for it out of my window at school. As it was only 58 centimetres across, it is unlikely that I saw it. If I saw anything, a mere glint in the night sky, it might have been the much larger last stage of the rocket that propelled it. Short-wave radio hams, on the other hand, easily picked up its haunting signal.

In February 1968 I was summoned to a meeting by Clive Labovitch, the chairman and founder of Cornmarket Press, a publishing company in London for whom I was working. In the 1950s Labovitch and Michael Heseltine, whom he had met at Oxford, had created Cornmarket Press, which published Man About Town, the most fashionable men’s magazine of its time, and Management Today, an entirely new-style glossy business magazine with colour and outstanding design. But the successful partnership ended when Labovitch set off on his own taking with him their very profitable annual, Directory of Opportunities for Graduates, which was given free to every student leaving university, with every page paid for by companies advertising for students to apply to them for jobs. This was followed by Which University? and several other equally profitable titles. After the parting Heseltine started a new company, Haymarket Press, which grew into the well-known magazine publishing group. Cornmarket Press was making money and the directors wanted to diversify. I had needed a job and I joined the company as a telephone salesman, but I had some management experience and had brought them an idea for making training videos using the new small Sony video cameras that had just come on to the market. Now, Labovitch asked me to look at another new idea, one that had been suggested to his board by the chief librarian of Birmingham Reference Library (since 2013, the Library of Birmingham), one of the largest public libraries in the UK. It was to reprint out-of-print books for libraries. My brother Nicholas had worked for Arnold Fawcus in Paris who published beautiful facsimiles of the books of William Blake, but this kind of reprinting was different. Its utilitarian purpose was to republish for libraries books that were now out of print and could no longer be obtained from antiquarian/second-hand book dealers. The reprints themselves were made by rephotographing the book, with no added introduction and often with the reprint publisher’s own name and address overprinted on the original title page. The market for these reprints was libraries, not collectors. They were bound in plain buckram with no jackets because libraries tore them off.

I was given a week to research the idea and report back to the board. I knew immediately that it was what I wanted to do. My family were technical journal publishers, but I had never wanted to work either for the family firm, Morgan Grampian, or in traditional book publishing, which was badly paid and required an ability to understand what people wanted to read that I knew I did not have. I was more interested in finding the books of the past that were needed by libraries, and I also liked the idea of selling to libraries throughout the world, since in the 1960s there were few businesses that sold directly to their overseas customers. Most sold through agents and other intermediaries.

It was years before I understood the connection between the two events. The response in America to the successful launch of Sputnik (which had been within one second of being aborted due to a malfunction in the rocket) was almost one of panic. The USA, the dominant world power in the 1950s, had been overtaken by the Soviet Union, in what came to be known as the ‘Space Race’. Mortified, Americans decided that there were several reasons for this, and one of them was the poor state of science education in American schools and colleges. Life magazine’s cover of 24 March 1958 proclaimed in red letters on a black background, ‘Crisis in Education’. Within a year Congress passed the National Defense Education Act, a four-year programme in which billions of dollars were poured into the US education system. It has been described as, ‘a telling example of the usefulness of a crisis, real or imagined’ and its clever title invoking national security broke down the resistance that there had previously been to the federal funding of higher education.¹ Between 1954 and 1958, following the end of the Korean War, federal funding grew by fifty per cent² but in the next two years it quadrupled. In 1960 Clark Kerr, president of the University of California, Berkeley, appeared on the cover of Time, facing the challenge of what was described as ‘the tidal wave of students’.³ By 1968 0.25 per cent of US gross domestic product was being spent on research and development in universities and some of this funding went directly into university and college libraries. Many libraries in the USA had suffered from a lack of funding in the Depression and had not been able to buy the books and journals published in that period. While federal funding was intended primarily for the sciences, there was so much money pumped into higher education that, inevitably, some of it overflowed into the humanities and social sciences, and libraries used it to rebuild their collections. In the UK after the Robbins report on higher education in 1963⁴ nine new ‘plateglass universities’⁵ were founded, each with a new library with miles of shelves to be filled with the books and journals of the past. In Germany university libraries were being rebuilt after the destruction of the war and in countries as diverse as Australia and Japan there was new investment in higher education.

Traditionally libraries bought older books and journals from the antiquarian book trade and from backrun specialists who bought and sold runs of journals. Two of the latter were Dawson in the UK and Walter J. Johnson in the USA. But now the demand for these books and journals began to outstrip supply. A backrun journal supplier would find that the run of an important journal was missing some issues. Completeness increased the value of the run and the dealers began to reprint them. They would need permission from the original publisher and would have to pay a royalty and print at least 200 copies, but it was still worth it. This ad hoc reprinting was soon overtaken by the need to reprint the whole run of the journal because there were now no original sets, and gradually there emerged a new kind of publisher that published facsimile reprints of the journals, and later, the books of the past.

Walter J. Johnson, originally an antiquarian bookseller as well as a backrun dealer, had been the founder of one of the world’s most important science publishers, Academic Press. He also founded Johnson Reprint Corporation, which reprinted science journals and books, while his rival Hans P. Kraus, one of the greatest antiquarian book dealers of the twentieth century, founded Kraus Reprint Corporation, solely to make money to enable him to buy more antiquarian books. Because Johnson had monopolized most of the science publications Kraus concentrated on the humanities and social sciences. This was an important distinction because in the humanities and social sciences, unlike the sciences where monographs go quickly out of date, the books of the past are as important as the books of the present. Full-size reprints on paper were not the only medium being used to reproduce books and journals. Microfilm, or its more recent alternative, microfiche, were less expensive and more compact. Microfilm were rolls of 35mm film containing miniaturized images of pages. Microfiche were 105 × 148mm sheets of film, each containing a grid of ninety-eight images of pages. Both microforms, to use their generic name, had to be viewed in readers that enlarged the image of each page on a screen. The technology was unsophisticated and while it was liked by librarians for its convenience and compactness, it was disliked by most readers.

A few weeks later I was in the office of Bill Taylor, the chief librarian of the Birmingham Reference Library. Lit only by a table lamp on a winter afternoon, his spacious office was lined with mahogany bookshelves containing some of the treasures of the library. He had explained to the directors of Cornmarket Press that reprint publishing was dominated by American and European firms and he thought that British publishers should also participate. Over tea, he explained to me that the library contained the Shakespeare Library founded in 1864, a collection of thousands of books, many of which were housed in a special Shakespeare Memorial Room. This included a unique collection of acting versions of Shakespeare’s plays, editions of the plays published after Shakespeare’s death to the end of the nineteenth century, and he proposed that we should reprint them. After Shakespeare’s death his plays were considered to be unfashionable and in need of rewriting to conform to current tastes. In 1679 John Dryden wrote of Shakespeare, ‘Untaught, unpractis’d in a barbarous age … the fury of his fancy often transported him beyond the bounds of judgement.’⁶ David Garrick, the famous actor and impresario, summed it up in his ‘advertisement’ at the beginning of his version of Romeo and Juliet:

The Alterations in the following Play are few except in the last act, the Design was to clear the Original as much as possible, from the Jingle and Quibble which were always thought a great Objection to performing it. When this Play was reviv’d two Winters ago, it was generally thought, that the sudden Change of Romeo’s Love from Rosaline to Juliet was a Blemish in his Character, and therefore it is to be hop’d that an Alteration in that Particular will be excus’d; the only Merit that is claim’d from it is, that it is done with as little Injury to the Original as possible.⁷

It seems that Shakespeare’s profound understanding of human behaviour offended eighteenth-century sensibilities but by the end of the century original texts began to come back into favour and most of the earlier texts were forgotten. They were now red meat for academics looking for a fresh field relating to Shakespeare and the history of English literature and I could see that reprinting them was a good idea. They were also out of copyright so that no permissions were needed or royalties to be paid when we republished them. There was only a fee to be paid to the library that we negotiated with Taylor.

In those visits to the library in 1968 I was experiencing the last few months of the great late nineteenth-century library that the Birmingham city fathers had now decided to pull down. In 1974 it was replaced with a brutalist concrete block on an island surrounded by busy roads, predictably described by Prince Charles as ‘a place where books are incinerated not kept’.⁸ An unfortunate remark, as an earlier nineteenth-century library had burned down. Even though it was the largest and at times the most visited non-national municipal library in Europe it too was pulled down and replaced with another new library, of glass and steel, which opened in 2013.

Waveney Payne, the librarian responsible for the collection, was friendly and helpful and selected seventy-nine titles published in the period following the Restoration in 1660 to the death of David Garrick in 1779. The books were sent from the library to the printer to be photographed, and no text was added except for the Cornmarket Press name and address, and the publication date. Five hundred copies were printed and bound in a library-quality red buckram with the title blocked in gold on the spine. A few, which we thought might be sold in bookshops, had colourful jackets designed by a friend, Nick Jenkins, at the Royal College of Art. I produced a catalogue, a detailed list of all the books, with an introduction by Payne, and we were soon receiving orders for the complete set at the pre-publication price of £259.

I was now in charge of Cornmarket’s reprint division. Our first project was a success and an obvious sequel was a second series. A young academic, H. Neville Davies, chose fifty titles, mainly from the early nineteenth century, enhanced by new introductions written by Davies and his colleagues, and with jackets. Some librarians regarded reprints with disdain because nothing new was added to them and they were expensive. This was because the editions were small, the only buyers being libraries. There were other librarians who preferred reprints to original editions because they were new, were printed on acid-free paper and had strong bindings; original copies often needed rebinding and conservation, both of which were expensive. But in adding introductions and jackets I had misunderstood the market. The introductions ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Text
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Foreword Peter Fox
• Preface
• List of Acronyms
• 1 Beginning
• 2 Johnson Reprint Corporation
• 3 Chadwyck-Healey
• 4 Cambridge and Our Own Production
• 5 Official Publications
• 6 Visual Images on Microfilm
• 7 Carving up the Centuries
• 8 The Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps
• 9 Finding the Archives
• 10 The New York Times
• 11 France and Spain
• 12 Black Studies
• 13 The National Security Archive
• 14 The Last Years of Microform
• 15 The Silver Catalyst
• 16 Other Digital Ventures
• 17 English Poetry
• 18 Patrologia Latina
• 19 Periodicals Contents Index
• 20 Publishing Online
• 21 German Literature
• 22 Red Archives
• 23 Towards the End
• 24 The End
• Appendix 1: History of Microfilm Publishing
• Appendix 2: Microfilm Technology
• Notes
• Index
• Copyright