The Book-Hunter, John Hill Burton [essential reading TXT] 📗

one leading peculiarity was the powerful influence they exercised on the condition of their times. A certain club there was with a simple unassuming name,—differing, by the way, only in three letters from that which would have commemorated the virtues of Bishop Jolly. The club in question, though nothing in the eye of the country but an easy knot of gentlemen who assembled for their amusement, cast defiance at a sovereign prince, and shook the throne and institutions of the greatest of modern states. But if we want to see the club culminating to its highest pitch of power, we must go across the water and saturate ourselves with the horrors of the Jacobin clubs, the Breton, and the Feuillans. The scenes we will there find stand forth in eternal protest against Johnson's genial definition in his Dictionary, where he calls a club "an assembly of good fellows, meeting under certain conditions." The Structure of the Book Clubs.

There has been an addition, by no means contemptible, to the influence exercised by these institutions on the course of events, in the Book Clubs, or Printing Clubs as they are otherwise termed, of the present day. They have within a few years added a department to literature. The collector who has been a member of several may count their fruit by the thousand, all ranging in symmetrical and portly volumes. Without interfering either with the author who seeks in his copyrights the reward of his genius and labour, or with the publisher who calculates on a return for his capital, skill, and industry, the book clubs have ministered to literary wants, which these legitimate sources of supply have been unable to meet.

I hope no one is capable of reading so far through this book who is so grossly ignorant as not to know that the Book Clubs are a set of associations for the purpose of printing and distributing among their members certain books, calculated to gratify the peculiar taste which has brought them together and united them into a club. An opportunity may perhaps be presently taken for indulging in some characteristic notices of the several clubs, their members, and their acts and monuments: in the mean time let me say a word on the utilitarian efficiency of this arrangement—on the blank in the order of terrestrial things which the Book Club was required to fill, and the manner in which it has accomplished its function.

There is a class of books of which the production has in this country always been uphill work;—large solid books, more fitted for authors and students than for those termed the reading public at large—books which may hence, in some measure, be termed the raw materials of literature, rather than literature itself. They are eminently valuable; but, since it is to the intellectual manufacturer who is to produce an article of saleable literature that they are valuable, rather than to the general consumer, they do not secure an extensive sale. Of this kind of literature the staple materials are old state papers and letters—old chronicles—specimens of poetic, dramatic, and other literature, more valuable as vestiges of the style and customs of their age than for their absolute worth as works of genius—massive volumes of old divinity—disquisitions on obsolete science, and the like.

It is curious, by the way, that costly books of this sort seem to succeed better with the French than with us, though we do not generally give that people credit for excelling us in the outlay of money. Perhaps it is because they enjoy the British market as well as their own that they are enabled to excel us; but they certainly do so in the publication, through private enterprise, of great costly works, having a sort of national character. The efforts to rival them in this country have been considerable and meritorious, but in many instances signally unfortunate. Take, for instance, the noble edition of Hollingshed and the other chroniclers, published in quarto volumes by the London trade; the Parliamentary History, in thirty-six volumes, each containing about as much reading as Gibbon's Decline and Fall; the State Trials; Sadler's and Thurlow's State Papers; the Harleian Miscellany, and several other ponderous publications of the same kind. All of them are to be had cheap, some at just a percentage above the price of waste paper. When an attempt was made to publish in the English language a really thorough Biographical Dictionary, an improvement on the French Biographie Universelle, it stuck in letter A, after the completion of seven dense octavo volumes—an abortive fragment bearing melancholy testimony to what such a work ought to be. Publications of this kind have, in several instances, caused great losses to some, while they have brought satisfaction to no one concerned in them. A publisher has just the same distaste as any other ordinary member of the human family to the loss of five or ten thousand pounds in hard cash. Then, as touching the purchasers,—no doubt the throwing of a "remnant" on the market may sometimes bring the book into the possession of one who can put it to good use, and would have been unable to purchase it at the original price. But the rich deserve some consideration as well as the poor. It will be hard to find the man so liberal and benevolent that he will joyfully see his neighbour obtain for thirty shillings the precise article for which he has himself paid thirty pounds; nor does there exist the descendant of Adam who, whatever he may say or pretend, will take such an antithesis with perfect equanimity. Even the fortunate purchasers of portions of "the remnant," or "the broken book," as another pleasant technicality of the trade has it, are not always absolutely happy in their lot. They have been tempted by sheer cheapness to admit some bulky and unwieldy articles into their abodes, and they look askance at the commodity as being rather a sacrifice to mammon than a monument of good taste.

It has been the object of the machinery here referred to, to limit the impressions of such works to those who want and can pay for them—an extremely simple object, as all great ones are. There is, however, a minute nicety in the adjustment of the machinery, which was not obvious until it came forth in practice—a nicety without which the whole system falls to pieces. It was to accomplish this nicety that the principle of the club was found to be so well adapted. A club is essentially a body to which more people want admission than can gain it; if it do not manage to preserve this characteristic, it falls to pieces for want of pressure from without, like a cask divested of its hoops. To make the books retain their value, and be an object of desire, it was necessary that the impressions should be slightly within the natural circulation—that there should be rather a larger number desirous of obtaining each volume than the number that could be supplied with it. The club effected this by its own natural action. So long as there were candidates for vacancies and the ballot-box went round, so long were the books printed in demand and valuable to their possessors. If there were 110 or 120 people willing to possess and pay for a certain class of books, the secret of keeping up the pressure from without and the value of the books, was to limit the number of members and participators to 100. There is nothing noble or disinterested in this. The arrangement has no pretension to either of these qualities; nor, when we come to the great forces which influence the supply and demand of human wants, whether in the higher or the humbler departments, will we find these qualities in force, or indeed any other motive than common selfishness. It is a sufficient vindication of the arrangement that it produced its effect. If there were ten or twenty disappointed candidates, the hundred were possessed of the treasures which none could have obtained but for the restrictive arrangements. Scott used to say that the Bannatyne Club was the only successful joint-stock company he ever invested in—and the remark is the key-note of the motives which kept alive the system that has done so much good to literature.

To understand the nature and services of these valuable institutions, it is necessary to keep in view the limits within which alone they can be legitimately worked. They will not serve for the propagation of standard literature—of the books of established reputation, which are always selling. These are merchandise, and must follow the law of trade like other commodities, whether they exist in the form of copyright monopolies, or are open to all speculators. No kind of co-operation will bring the volumes into existence so cheaply as the outlay of trade capital, which is expected to replace itself with a moderate profit after a quick sale. The perfection of this process is seen in the production and sale of that book which is ever the surest of a market—the Bible; and when a printer requires the certain and instantaneous return of his outlay, that is the shape in which he is most secure of obtaining it.

On the other hand, the clubs will not avail for ushering into the world the books of fresh ambitious authors. That paradise of the geniuses, in which their progeny are to be launched full sail, where they are to encounter no risks, and draw all the profits without discount or percentage, as yet exists only in the imagination. It would not work very satisfactorily to have a committee decreeing the issues, and the remuneration to be paid to each aspirant—ten thousand copies of Poppleton's Epic, and a cheque for a thousand pounds handed over out of the common stock, to begin with—half the issue, and half the remuneration for the Lyrics of Astyagus, as a less robust and manful production, but still a pleasant, murmuring, meandering, earnest little dream-book, fresh with the solemn purpose of solitude and silence. No, it must be confessed our authors and men of letters would make sad work of it, if they had the bestowal of the honours and pecuniary rewards of literature in their hands, whether these were administered by an intellectual hierarchy or by a collective democracy. Hence the clubs have wisely confined their operations to books which are not the works of their members; and to keep clear of all risk of literary rivalries, they have been almost exclusively devoted to the promulgation of the works of authors long since dead, whether by printing from original manuscripts or from rare printed volumes.

It has been pleaded that this machinery might have been rendered influential for the encouragement of living authorship. It has been, for instance, observed, with some plausibility, that he who has the divine fervour of the author in him, will sacrifice all he has to sacrifice—time, toil, and health—so that he can but secure a hearing by the world; and institutions of the nature of the book clubs might afford him this at all events, leaving him to find his way to wealth and honours, if the sources of these are in him. No doubt the history of book-publishing shows how small are the immediate inducements and the well-founded hopes that will set authors in motion, and, indeed, a very large percentage of valueless literature proves that the barriers between the author and the world are not very formidable, or become somehow easily removable. This, in fact, furnishes the answer to the pleading here alluded to; and it may further be safely said, where the book demanding an introduction professes to be a work of genius, addressing itself to all mankind, that if it really be what it professes, the market will get it.