Publishing

Principles and Practice

Richard Guthrie

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781847870155, 9781847870148
• eBook ISBN: 9781446291955
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Study Aids
• Subtopic: Study Guides

"This is an indispensable and highly-readable study of the publishing industry past, present and future. For students and professionals in publishing it provides an authoritative, up-to-date and reliable account of their complex and rapidly changing industry. For those interested more broadly in the role the creative industries play in the modern world this is a fine introduction. It is to be highly recommended."
- Iain Stevenson, Director, UCL Centre for Publishing

At last, a readable, authoritative and comprehensive book for students, readers and practitioners in print and digital publishing.

The book guides the reader through the history of publishing and the main issues facing the industry today. Among these are:

• Legal conundrums
• Cultural conflicts
• Trade practices
• Publishing within and across sectors
• Editorial requirements
• The challenge of electronic publishing
• Making your ideas count in print
• Rationalization and the growth of corporate publishing cultures

The result is an exciting one stop guide, written with real flair and aplomb. Packed with helpful real-world examples and illustrative interviews this practical resource leaves no stone of the publishing industry unturned.

1 A HISTORY OF BOOKS

In the time of Eumenes II of Pergamum, in Asia Minor (197–159 BC), vellum or parchment, made from dried animal skin, was first used in the form of two-sided leaves for writing on and reading. Eumenes created the Library of Pergamum, a great advance in the ancient world.

The earliest prototype of the book, the vellum codex, appeared in Greece and moved on with history to Rome, where, initially, a technique of wax inscriptions on bound wooden boards was used. Known in Latin as a codex from caudex, or tree trunk, the codex progressed to using vellum for leaves. Around 400 AD, the codex began to overtake the papyrus scroll as the main publishing technology and product of its time.

THE PAPYRUS SCROLL

The papyrus scroll was the first light, versatile, portable method for publishing script and images. Invented in ancient Egypt some 5000 years ago, papyrus scrolls were woven from papyrus leaf. Strips of the leaf were soaked in water and lain side by side and then over again at right angles. The material was then left in the sun to dry, the resin of the leaf fusing the cross strips. After the drying process, the sheet was polished and then was ready for use.

A papyrus scroll had a life of about 200 years, but only if carefully preserved in a dry place and climate. Humidity affected the longevity of papyrus. The scroll was still used extensively in the Mediterranean basin until about 1100 AD. Conceptually, the scroll lives on in roll-up maps and design documents, and in published lists such as the electoral roll.

THE FIRST PARADIGM: FROM VELLUM CODEX TO PRINT BOOK

First appearing commercially in the bookshops of ancient Rome, the vellum codex was developed for the publication of religious tracts, creative texts, the expression of ideas, history and learning. From 400 to 1000 AD, book production grew quickly throughout the Mediterranean basin. The book figured prominently from 700 to 1300 AD in the Arabian empire stretching from Teheran to Cordoba. Due to all the handwork involved in creating books they soon became symbols of status. The tenth century Grand Vizier of Persia was said to be so proud of his book collection that he travelled everywhere with 117,000 handwritten and bound volumes, loading them alphabetically onto 400 camels, which were taught to walk in alphabetical order. At that time only 500 volumes existed in Paris.

During the Middle Ages, central and northern Europe caught up with cultural developments. Scriptoria (scribe or scrivener shops) sprang up throughout Europe. Hand-produced books were extremely arduous work and took months, sometimes years, to complete. Books were made to order on the sell and produce business model. Books were available and affordable usually only to clerics, wealthy merchants and the aristocracy, the only members of medieval European society who had any real use for them.

In the mid-fifteenth century, book production became mechanical in Europe for the first time. Already a sophisticated cottage craft industry, book production leapt forward with Johann Gutenberg’s invention of the first viable industrial prototype and machine for mass printing. Moveable wood block and sand-cast type printing techniques had existed in Korea and China centuries before, but it was Gutenberg’s invention that revolutionalised publishing. In a stroke of huge paradigmatic proportions, this technological shift created the world’s first mass-market business model, though it was many centuries before books began selling on a truly mass scale.

Combining wine press technology and jewellery techniques (moveable metal type pieces), the Gutenberg press reduced manuscript production time and costs by a massive 90%. Printers could now print copies in numbers they believed they could sell (the produce and sell model), rather than producing books requested by order. Economies of scale now affected production decisions. Instead of being only for the powerful and wealthy few, books were now potentially available to a very wide readership. An invigorated European book trade began the search for increased custom, growing its power in the process.

Other social improvements were needed to expand the book trade, however, not only a leap forward in technology. Literacy needed to grow, and this took centuries to mature across Europe. At the dawn of the sixteenth century in England, only 10% of women and 30% of men could read to any level of proficiency. Initially, literacy tests were rudimentary, based on whether men or women could sign their names. It was only in the mid-nineteenth century, when working-class Britain began to participate in the explosion of literacy enabled by printed books, that mass sales of books became a reality.

At first, even though the printing press was welcomed, some wealthy Europeans were determined to maintain the handwritten tradition as well. Manuscript production continued against the odds right up to 1600. But by that time, printers were already able to produce over 1,200 printed sheets a day. Printers stopped imitating manuscripts and developed new formats and styles. Faced with the overwhelming success of the print book, the craft of handwritten manuscripts disappeared.

The 42-line Gutenberg Bible, itself a product of the manuscript tradition, was the initial default design. Basic book form was a work in progress and design changes came relatively slowly, but the trade in books changed radically, almost overnight. With the sell-through model, timeliness, cost and speed of information distribution to market became the driving factors of the whole trade.

The growth of printing in England followed continental Europe by a quarter of a century, but the English book trade made up for lost time. With the importation of the printing press into England in the mid-1470s, books arrived at a time of historical and cultural flux. Books helped England emerge from its isolation. At the time very few Europeans had visited England. Few continental Europeans spoke or even knew of English. The new printing press and growth of English books was the first step in an exponential growth in importance of the English language throughout the world.

1475–1533: THE EARLY ENGLISH TRADE

William Caxton was the pioneering English print book trader. Caxton’s first publication, The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye, was produced in 1475, compiled from the French original by Raoulle Fevre, first printed in France in 1464. Caxton had begun translating the text in 1468. Other printers, such as John Lettou, also set up in London at the time. In 1482, Lettou and his new partner, William de Machlinia, printed England’s first law book Tenores novelli, a significant milestone in UK publishing history. Since then, anglophone legal publishing has grown into one of the most important and profitable sectors.¹

The multi-tasking Caxton (translator, printer-publisher, bookseller), with his assistant Wynkyn de Worde, prepared, printed and sold books from a base near Westminster Abbey. Caxton published 80% of his books in English, among them the works of Geoffrey Chaucer (1343–1400). After Caxton’s death in 1493, De Worde moved their printing establishment to Fleet Street, beginning the long tradition of the print trade in the area around St Paul’s Cathedral.

The early English book trade was given significant Crown support from one of the most reviled figures in English history, Richard III. In his short but influential reign (1483–1485), Richard III promoted the trade by exempting books, publishing skills and printing paraphernalia from the anti-alien trade statute of the time. Trade from larger and much more economically active European nations, such as Italy, were always threatening to swamp England, and the Crown’s exemption of books from import sanctions was important not only for printers and book traders at the time, but also gave a strategic boost to English letters, language and culture.

Authorial rights in England took a different route to the developing trade in continental Europe. The first recorded issue of authorial rights in the world was the Senate of Venice’s grant of rights in perpetuity in 1486 to Antonio Sabellico, for his Decades Rerum Venetiarum. By contrast, power in the English book trade was firmly vested in the printer and bookseller, not the author. English authors had to wait nearly 250 years before their rights were recognised in English law.

1533–1694: THE AGE OF CONTROL

Due to his own private, religious and political concerns, in 1533 Henry VIII reversed Richard III’s trade exemption for books. This brought to an end the early free trade era. Henry VIII instituted a system of Privy Council oversight of books throughout England. When it became clear that the task was too onerous for the Council, members of the Stationers’ Company, a scrivener guild in existence since 1403, put themselves forward as possible managers of the process. In 1542 the Company petitioned Henry for the right to oversee the trade. Henry refused the request. The Stationers must have been a little aggrieved by this rebuff as Henry had already granted a Royal Charter for printing to the University of Cambridge in 1534.

After Henry’s death, his daughter and successor to the throne, Mary, concerned with creating robust Roman Catholic controls over printed materials, gave in to the Stationers’ relentless lobbying. In 1557 Mary granted the Stationers’ Company a sweeping Royal Charter over commercial printing throughout England. The Stationers were granted industrial privileges and a trade-wide monopoly that they guarded jealously for 150 years. In effect, Mary provided the Stationers with a sixteenth-century royal edict to print money.

The Stationers’ Company shaped the early English book trade like no other force in history. Members held rights throughout the land described as rights in copy – tangible ownership equal to perpetual property rights under English common law. Apart from the scholarly and religious publishing rights granted by charter to the University of Cambridge (and later the University of Oxford in 1586),² the Stationers’ position was virtually unchallengeable. The hold over the trade was absolute and except for a few isolated events of piracy, and the mid-seventeenth-century revolutionary confusion when Stationer power lapsed, the Company’s control over printing ran more or less uninterrupted from 1557 to 1694.

The enduring legacy of the Stationers’ Company is embedded in the UK’s publishing traditions and practices – the idea that publishers have the final say, not the original authors of literary works. This differs from most continental traditions, where authors in some countries can withdraw their works, even after publication, if they so choose.

During the reign of Charles I (1625–1649) Crown monopolies and edicts grew very unpopular. Along with other traditions and practices, the Stationers’ Company’s monopolistic printing powers were challenged by the Long Parliament in the early 1640s. The loathed Star Chamber was abolished and, by inference, all its decrees. A tumultuous decade saw civil war, the execution of a king and, in publishing, wild, chaotic pamphleteering. Private or self-publishing exploded on to the scene. Throughout this revolutionary period, the Stationers’ Company stood quietly aside, maintaining its position, if not its entire powers.

With the conviction for treason and beheading of Charles I in 1649, Oliver Cromwell became Lord Protector (king in all but name). New printing continued to flourish, but still the Company was not abolished, its ‘suspended’ powers remaining intact. With Cromwell’s death in 1658, the Commonwealth faltered. Cromwell’s son was unable to establish his authority and the Stuarts regained the throne in 1660. The Licensing Act of 1662 returned all its prior publishing status, power and functions to the Stationers’ Company.

The seeds of liberalism and desire for fundamental democratic and systemic changes in English society, however, did not die with the revolution. The Jacobeans were swept again from power in 1688. John Locke and other liberals seized the moment, soliciting support for printing and other reforms from the new Dutch-born King, William of Orange. In 1694, the English Parliament refused to renew the Licensing Act. The Stationers’ monopoly was suspended again, this time, it seemed, for good. The Stationers, however, were not a spent force.

1694–1774: THE RISE OF ‘THE PUBLISHER’

The world’s first copyright act grew out of the continuing chaos in the book trade. On 10 April 1710 The Statute of Anne was passed by Parliament, introducing the concept of copyright terms for authors for the first time. The Statute provided 14-year terms for new works, renewable for another 14 years upon application, and a one-time term of 21 years for works under existing terms of ownership, or for those categorised as ‘orphan’ works (written by authors who could not be identified or who were dead).

The Act seems to us now as if it was a revolutionary political move made by the early eighteenth-century English Parliament to establish authorial rights. The main intention of the statute, however, was to bring control to an unruly trade. The 1710 Act was not introduced as a system for advancing authorial rights, even if many liberals of the day championed the idea. Authorial rights came about almost to the trade’s surprise.

A new player, the publisher, was now needed to run the trade, a metamorphosis of the printer-bookseller figure. The publisher was the new ‘middle-man’, buying works from authors, managing the preparation of books for publication and finding ways of getting books to the reading public. Initially, members of the Stationers’ Company ceded this main central part of their power, but they still did not believe history had abandoned them. Wealthy stationers had political support and they were still the printers and booksellers.

The 1710 law established a registration process of copyright for published works, a service the Stationers oversaw and for which they charged a fee. Significantly, though, the Company could not refuse registration. If for some reason they did, copyright could be established by a direct announcement by the author in the general press. Monopoly conditions in the trade were now legally, if not wholly, over.

The unhappy Stationers fought on for the reinstatement of their powers by other means. Company members began to challenge the new copyright law in the courts, setting out to establish a common law property rights precedent over statute law. Initially the courts supported the Stationers. The issue was finally settled in a dramatic 1774 House of Lords’ ruling in Donaldson v. Becket. Eleven law lords, in a majority vote of one, supported statutory superiority in published works. Common law rights remained for unpublished manuscripts. In a rousing speech that had his fellow lords on the edge of their seats, Lord Camden denounced ‘the patents privileges, Star-chamber decrees, and the bye-laws of the Stationers’ Company: all of them the effects of grossest tyranny and usurpation’.³ This decision by the House of Lords cemented statute control over copyright law. The age of direct Stationers’ Company control over the trade was now truly gone for ever.

THE HOUSE OF LONGMAN

An early example of a modern British publishe...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• About the Author
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 A History of Books
• 2 The Publishing Process
• 3 Sectors in the Anglophone Model
• 4 Craft to Corporation
• 5 Copyright and Publishing Law
• 6 Rights and Contracts
• 7 Marketing, Promotion and Bookselling
• 8 The Era of Digital Publishing
• Index