244“profits after expenses”: Marianne Tidcombe, The Doves Press (London: The British Library, 2002), 28.
245personal touch to the numerals: Ibid., 23.
245way for scribes to write faster: Shailor, Medieval Book, 28.
246“signify the classicist’s contempt”: E. P. Goldschmidt, The Printed Book of the Renaissance: Three Lectures on Type, Illustration and Ornament (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 2.
246Renaissance-era insult: In a lovely bit of irony, the Renaissance authors who dismissed nonclassical Gothic scripts weren’t aware that the scripts they themselves most revered, and which they believed dated to antiquity, were in fact Carolingian, that is, smack in the middle of the Middle Ages.
246“be German, even in your script”: Quoted in Garfield, Type, 191.
246“Jewish owners”: Ibid.
246shortage of type in Gothic fonts: Quoted in ibid., 192.
247“full of wine”: Charles Ricketts, A Defence of the Revival of Printing (London: Vale Press, 1899), 19.
247“alienation effect”: McGann, Textual, 85.
247Sotheby’s auction: Tidcombe, Doves Press, 13.
247“absolutely perfect”: Quoted in ibid., 22.
248“over-inked”: Ibid., 14–15.
249“death’s door”: Unsent letter from Cobden-Sanderson to Emery Walker, August 2, 1902. Part of Cobden-Sanderson’s Pro Iracundia sua Apologia, his extended defense of his destruction of the Doves Type, recorded in full in Tidcombe, Doves Press, 103–4.
250“said it was ‘hateful’”: Ibid.
251“watch plants and insect forms”: Franklin, Private, 115.
251“cut it, and cut it, and slashed it”: Quoted in ibid., 117.
251fine press blasphemy: According to John Mason, a compositor at the Doves Press, Cobden-Sanderson “regarded [the type] as a consecrated instrument, and shrank away from what he regarded as desecration,” especially the possible use of the type for commercial purposes. Quoted in Leslie T. Owens, J. H. Mason 1875–1951, Scholar-Printer (London: Frederick Muller Limited, 1976), 37.
252“a Visionary and a Fanatic”: Letter from Cobden-Sanderson to Sidney Cockerell, June 14, 1909, quoted in Tidcombe, Doves Press, 127.
253worth less than its original investment: Ibid., 59.
253upon the advice of friends: Ibid.
253“hand and arm of man or woman”: February 9, 1909, diary entry in Cobden-Sanderson, Journals, 2:138.
253“Bed of the River Thames”: June 11, 1911, diary entry in ibid., 2:181–82. Fount is the technical term for the physically cast type itself.
253cast into the English Channel: See Cave, Private, 324.
253“stale by unthinking use”: Charles Ricketts, A Bibliography of Books Issued by Hacon and Ricketts (London: Charles Ricketts, 1904).
254destruction of the Doves Type: See Tidcombe, Doves Press, 76.
254“My folly is of a light kind”: October 28, 1916, diary entry in Cobden-Sanderson, Journals, 2:301.
254“destroyed the whole of it”: August 12, 1916 (midnight), diary entry in ibid., 2:296.
2552,600 pounds of metal type: Tidcombe, Doves Press, 78.
255170 individual trips: Ibid.
255“perils and panics”: November 5, 1916, diary entry in Cobden-Sanderson, Journals, 2:303–4.
255“lurking in dark corners”: Ibid.
256“the books themselves”: December 21, 1917, diary entry in ibid., 2:341.
256upward of twelve hundred pounds: We don’t know the exact cost. Annie was ordered to pay seven hundred pounds to Walker, but that would not have included lawyers’ fees. See Tidcombe, Doves Press, 84–85, for a discussion of estimates.
256entombed in its waters: Ibid., 82.
257release it as a digital download: “New Digital ‘Facsimile’ of Legendary Doves Type: Doves Press Font Revived by Robert Green,” TypeSpec (blog), http://www.typespec.co.uk/doves-type/.
257exhuming 150 individual pieces: “Recovering the Doves Type,” TypeSpec (blog), http://www.typespec.co.uk/recovering-the-doves-type/.
257digital re-creation of the complete font: Available at http://www.typespec .co.uk/doves-type/. Buy it. Use it. Love it.
257Emery Walker Trust: Justin Quirk, “X Marks the Spot,” Sunday Times, January 11, 2015. In correspondence with the authors, Green added, “The other half will go to my children when I die. It’s not for sale . . . its sacred.”
258reexamination of every aspect: Franklin, Private, 14.
258twentieth-century book design: Daniel Berkeley Updike, Printing Types: Their History, Forms, and Use (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 2001), 208. In correspondence with the authors, Robert Green pointed out that Tschichold’s iconic Penguin cover designs, for instance, owe a great deal to the Doves aesthetic philosophy.
258few could have predicted: First there was the influence and dominance (in England, at least) of the Monotype Corporation, and then of course photographic and especially digital printing methods enormously expanded the possibilities of typefaces.
Chapter 11: Blifter!
259“MURDER?”: John Tebbel, History of Book Publishing in the United States, vol. 3: The Golden Age Between the Two Wars (1920–1940) (New York: Bowker, 1978), 334–35.
259“Era of Wonderful Opportunity”: Ibid., 32.
259“sandwich men”: Ibid., 332.
260“needed to be learned”: Ted Striphas, The Late Age of Print: Everyday Book Culture from Consumerism to Control (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 27.
260owned no books whatsoever: Benton, Beauty, 14.
2604 percent of Americans visited a bookstore: Ibid., 15.
260“like furniture”: Ibid., 14.
261“lost touch with supply and demand”: Striphas, Late, 84.
261“greatest idea that America has given the world”: Christine Frederick, Selling Mrs. Consumer (New York: The Business Bourse, 1929), 4–5; quoted in Stuart Ewen, Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture, 25th Anniversary Edition (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 22.
262books you don’t really want to read with your dad: Striphas, Late, 29.
262Illiteracy . . . and urbanization: Tebbel, History, 4–5.
262“[The] sign ‘Books Wanted’”: Ibid., 30.
262“come into its own”: Letter, “To Our Friends in the Trade,” printed in Publishers Weekly, April 26, 1919, 1168.
263“very stupid lot”: Letter of J. C. Dana, “To the Editor of The Literary Review,” printed in Publishers Weekly, November 27, 1920, 1707–8.
263“$11.00 for candy”: Tebbel, History, 65.
263“soap manufacturer might invest in soap”: Quoted in ibid., 315–16; and Business Digest and Investment Weekly, May 25, 1920, 681.
263tailored specifically to the book industry: Tebbel, History, 321.
263devoted to the author himself: See ibid., 48–49 and 327.
263hyperbolic ascent: Ibid., 327.
263printed the first chapter of the next: Ibid., 320.
263“by Billy Sunday”: Quoted in ibid., 28.
264“throw the jacket away”: Quoted in ibid., 327. Tebbel remarks that “Phelps’ statement was put down to critical petulance and ignored.”
264reissued the book . . . A Prostitute’s Sacrifice: Ibid., 207.
264“100 best novels”: Bernays references this with approval: “The release provoked heated discussion and probably stimulated some people to buy the books he mentioned.” Edward L. Bernays, Biography of an Idea (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1965), 487.
265Enter the bookshelf: Striphas has an excellent extended section on the bookshelf in this era, upon which this section relies. See “Shelf Life,” in Late, 26–31.
265“effect will be pleasing”: Quoted in ibid., 27.
265“devoid of anything within”: Quoted in ibid.
265“perceived changes in the status”: Janice A. Radway, A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 145.
265“fetishism of commodities”: Ibid., 148. This concept’s roots come from the nineteenth-century and the writings of Karl Marx. With thanks to Loren Glass for emphasizing this.
265“CULTURE, WEALTH, BEHAVIOR, POWER”: Joan Shelley Rubin, The Making of Middlebrow Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 30.
266“buyers were hooked into returning”: Ibid., 95.
266well-respected literary judges: Among them was Christopher Morley, the founder of the famous Sherlock Holmes society known as the Baker Street Irregulars and the author of some of the most beloved books on books, such as Parnassus on Wheels (1917) and The Haunted Bookshop (1919).
266cheap prices as its main selling point: Tebbel, History, 295.
267book prices had gone up only 50–60 percent: Ibid., 66.
267selling price-slashed books: Ibid., 312.
268“development of its rural areas”: Larry Tye, The Father of Spin: Edward L. Bernays and the Birth of Public Relations (New York: Macmillan, 2002), 118.
268“pull the wires”: Edward L. Bernays, Propaganda (New York: Horace Liveright, 1928), 10.
268raking in more than $98,000: Tye, Spin, 60. The $1.5 million number comes from the inflation calculator of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Department of Labor, http://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm.
269“I prefer chocolate”: Ibid., 27, quoting from a February 2, 1984, interview with the St. Petersburg Times.
269“crystallizing the obscure tendencies”: Edward L. Bernays, Crystallizing Public Opinion (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1923), 173.
269more important than legal advice: Tye, Spin, 60–61, quoting from a 1985 interview with Forbes.
269“point of view”: Bernays, Crystallizing, 212.
270“damn near double our female market” . . .“psychological basis”: Bernays, Biography, 386.
270“torches of freedom” . . .“network of media”: Ibid., 386–87.
271“dollar books were not in the public interest”: Bernays, Biography, 485.
271“wretch who raised hell with book sales”: Ibid., 488.
271“gain more attention . . . lethal epithet”: Ibid., 486, 488.
272“death of six thousand book retailers”: Ibid., 485.
272“sad figure”: Ibid.
273“Benjamin Franklin . . . the career woman, a relatively new phenomenon”: Ibid., 487.
273first instance of modern American book advertising: Tebbel, History, 27, also referencing a Post article from 1919. Whitman did this without Emerson’s permission; the famed Transcendentalist was not pleased.
274“could not run successfully on this price structure”: Bernays, Biography, 489.
274blamed on readers:Comment made by Alfred Knopf, excerpted in Richard Layman, Discovering the Maltese Falcon and Sam Spade: The Evolution of Dashiell Hammett’s Masterpiece (San Francisco: Vince Emery, 2005), 166.
275“left shivering on the doorstep”: Bernays, Biography, 489.
275declared unconstitutional: Tebbel, History, 459.
275“bomb”: Ibid., 439.
276“disparaged publishers and editors”: Striphas, Late, 87–88.
276revolutionary ISBN system: Ibid., 83.
276“reading can be”: Earnest Elmo Calkins, 1922, quoted in Tebbel, History, 319.
278“deliberate, planned campaign”: All quotes in this anecdote are taken directly from Bernays’s own retelling in Biography, 652.
Conclusion: Nothing More Deceptive than an Obvious Fact
279“books they need are in existence”: Christopher Morley, Haunted Bookshop (New York: Melville House), 18.
280painting of Thomas More: Jonathan Jones, “Wolf Hall Is Wrong: Thomas More Was a Funny, Feminist Renaissance Man,” The Guardian, January 29, 2015.
280great portraitists of the Renaissance: So great a portraitist, in fact, that Henry VIII agreed to marry his fourth wife, Anne of Cleves, on the strength of a portrait executed by Holbein. After Henry met her, he refused to consummate the marriage, claiming he had been misled by the beauty of the portrait.
280“more deceptive than an obvious fact”: Doyle, “Boscombe Valley Mystery,” in Complete Works of Sherlock Holmes, 1:108.
281“integral to More’s purpose”: Duffy, “Defence of Christendom,” 200; More, Dialogue, 207.
283primed for the doubt: Wilding, Faussaire, 56.
284“live in an expanding culture”: Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, 1780–1950 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), viii.
284“rewrite history for itself”: Quoted in Lawrence C. Wroth, Notes for Bibliophiles in the New-York Herald Tribune, 1937–1947, ed. Richard J. Ring (South Freeport, ME: Ascensius Press, 2016), 128.
284“felt the case to be a hopeless one”: Quoted in Meckier, Innocent, 68.
INDEX
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Entries in italics refer to illustrations.
“A.D. 5868” (Twain), 27
Adams, Abigail, 273
Adams, John, 273
Adams, John Quincy, 273
Adams, Randolph G., 284
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The (Twain), xii-xiv, xiii, 8
advertising, xvi-xvii
Blake and, 158
book buying and, 262–78
Franklin and, 154–55
Africa, map of, 95, 105
Age of Discovery, 84–85, 87, 89, 94
Age of Innocence, The (Wharton), 276
aging techniques, 10
Aitken, Robert, 149
Alaska, map of, 103
Alice in Wonderland (Carroll), xvii
alienation effect, 247
Alien (film), 11
Allen, James, 16
All Saints’ Church (Wittenberg), 53–54
almanacs, 156
Almeida, Manoel de, 105
alphabetization, 90
Altick, Richard, xvii
Amazon, 35–36
American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, 263
American colonies, 135–62
printers’ network, 159–62
printing supplies and, 148–50, 152, 155–56
American Copyright Club, 227
American Dream, 214
American Home, 265
American Notes for General Circulation (Dickens), 228, 232
American publishers
book advertising and, 262–78
copyright and, 217–34
government and, 140
American Revolution, 149, 162, 206
American Tobacco, 269–70
American Traveller, 217, 221–22
American Weekly Mercury, 151–53
anatomy books, 118–19
“Ancient of Days, The” (Blake), 185–86, 185
Animal Farm (Orwell), 36
Annals of Hirsau (Trithemius), 32
Anne Boleyn, 71–72, 74, 76
Anne of the Iron Door, 27
Antarctica, map of, 103
Antipalus maleficiorum (Trithemius), 48
Antwerp, 69–70, 76–77, 96
apprenticeships, 138–39
aqua fortis, 163–65, 179
Arab science, 86
Arctic, xv
Mercator Map of, 81–84, 82, 104–6
Areopagitica (Milton), xi
Argentina, 6, 12
Aristotle, 88–89, 99, 130
Arthur, King, 83–84
Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, 240
Arundel, Thomas, Archbishop of Canterbury, 59
As I Lay Dying (Faulkner), 112, 277
Assertio septem sacramentorum (Henry VIII), 67
atlas, term coined, xv
Austen, Jane, 5, 200–201
Australia, map of, 103
authors
advertising of, 263
/> copyright and, 215–27
as profession, 195–96, 198–99, 211
women as, 200–201, 205–12, 283
Badby, John, 61
“bad” quartos. See Pavier or “bad” Quartos
Barker, Robert, xi-xii
Barnes, James, 225
Basire, James, 179, 180
bast fibers, 9
BBC History Magazine, 59
Benedictine monks, 33–34, 46
Benet, Robert, 57–58
Bentley, G.E., 176
Berkeley, William, 140
Bernays, Edward L., 259–60, 267–75, 277–78, 283
Berne Convention (1886), 234
Beste, George, 85
bestseller lists, 264
Bible, 75
Aitken English (1781, Philadelphia), 149
American colonial vs. European, 148–49
B36 Latin, 40–41
B42 Latin (Gutenberg Bible, 1455), 39–45
Coverdale “Thomas Matthew” (1537), 78–79
Doves Press, 1903–05, 243, 243–44, 249, 250
dust jackets and, 263
English, xv, 51–80, 119
English New Testament, 58–59, 61, 64, 68
English “Sinner’s” (1631), xi, xii, 57, 62
Geneva, 76
Greek (Erasmus edition), 62
Gutenberg typeface, 246
King James (1611), xi, 68, 79
Latin Vulgate, 33, 62
Mercator and, 87–89, 93–94
Tyndale English, 56, 59–64, 68, 75–76, 79–80
Tyndale English (1526), 64
Tyndale English (1534), 71, 75–76
Tyndale Old Testament, 64
Tyndale Pentateuch, 64
vernacular, 56–59
Wycliff English, 59–60
Biblioteca Girolamini (Naples), 5
biographies, 201
Blackfriars theater, 120
Blair, Ann, 85
Blake, Robert, 163–65, 180, 181
Blake, William, xvi, 158, 163–94, 282
“Ancient of Days,” 185–86, 185
“Circle of the Lustful, Paolo and Francesca”, 193
Dante’s Inferno, 193, 194
Europe a Prophecy, 186–87, 186
“Ghost of a Flea,” 190, 191
Leonora, 171–76, 174
“London,” 183–84, 183
“Tyger,” 189
Blood, Caroline, 197
Blood, Frances “Fanny”, 197–98
Blood, Matthew, 197
bloodletting calendar, 45
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