 Section 15 of A Battle of the Books. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Amelia Chesley. A Battle of the Books by Gail Hamilton. Sober 2nd and 3rd Thoughts, Part 2. Unhappily, a dense ignorance upon this subject broods over the community, and there should be added to our literature and authors' catechism. 1. Question. Can you tell me, child, who made you? Answer. The Great House of Hunt Perry & Company, which made Heaven and Earth. In controversies with publishers, the author is at a signal disadvantage by reason of the connection of publishers with the press. Publishers have the entree of the newspapers by their advertising. And all in the way of business, it is the easiest thing in the world to give public opinion a tilt in the desired direction without the least suspicion on the part of the reader, or any more collusion on the part of the editor, than is implied in a good-natured relinquishment of a few lines of editorial space. Here, we will say, is a house which advertises to the extent of hundreds, perhaps thousands of dollars in a single paper. In connection with an extraordinary advertisement, it hands to the editor an extraordinary paragraph celebrating its more extraordinary virtues. The advertisement goes in among the advertisements, and the eulogy goes in among the editorials and becomes the voice of the paper. Nobody is hurt, and the firm is greatly helped in building up for itself name and fame. When the Athenian newspapers glow with reflections upon the inability of authors to understand the details of publishing, and the unimpeached and unimpeachable honour of the House of Hunt Perry & Company, not half a dozen readers suspect that those reflections are anything but the spontaneous tribute of a grateful people to the eminent firm in question. Nobody suspects that behind all the glitter and glory, some pestiferous little author is poking an inquisitive finger in among those details, is indeed questioning that unimpeached and unimpeachable honour, and that this beating of gongs is but the Chinese strategy on the part of the attempt to scare away the impertinent foe. I can make no avowal on this head, having nothing but internal evidence to go upon. But applying the rules of scriptural exegesis, it seems to mean that we attribute to the Four Gospels a divine origin on less evidence than we may attribute to these eulogies a common origin. For instance, during that portion of the sidereal year known throughout the solar system as Jubilee Week, the press of Athens burned with enthusiasm for the House of Hunt Perry & Company. The broadside advertisement says one, with which the renowned publishing house of Messier's Hunt Perry & Company salute the country in this Jubilee time on another page of this morning's post, will excite universal attention and remark. It details the literary achievements of this enterprising firm during the last year and a half in a form that is both novel and impressive. Where are the publishers on this continent who within that term have presented to the reading public works from how many different authors, nearly all of whom are living celebrities? It would be glory enough for any firm to have announced original works from less than one fourth that number of well-known authors. Read the glittering roll of names as they are presented in poetry, L, T, L, B, and W. Of novelists, D, T, S, H, H, R, and G. And of essayists, travelers, writers on natural history and science, such a shining company of men and women of genius as will make bookshelves brilliant for all time to come. But these publishers have not compromised quality with quantity. They hold up to their high standard in every essay which they engage. Nor are they in any sense such devotees of mamon as to think it possible to build a lasting reputation on anything less substantial than true honour in dealing as well as indisputable worth in selection. Their shelves and counters are an embarrassment of literary riches. Such a display of the ripest fruits of culture, taste, judgment, enterprise, and business sagacity cannot be surpassed. Their wonderful march to their imminent and leading position as publishers has given an excellent example to the country in refining and solidifying the common roles of business in their own field and elevating and dignifying a branch of trade than which not one is clothed with nobler and pure associations. From this house also go forth a quarterly, two monthlies, and a weekly magazine, any one of which would add luster to the repute of the publishers. None but sound and sweet literature comes from hence. It is the aim of the firm to keep the fountain clear from which such incessant streams of influence are to flow. American authors contribute in large store to the rich treasury of its productions, while foreign and especially British writers supply in large degree the stores of reading, which are the recreation and delight of cultivated people everywhere. And thus another paper takes up the parable. Our first page today is entirely devoted to a remarkable advertisement which tells the story of rare business enterprise and is filled to overflowing with attractive announcements. But it is for characteristics other than these that it will command attention and really deserve study. Within a year and a half, Hunt, Perry and Company have given to the public works from the pens of two score of authors, American and English, almost all of them living and of widest popularity. To represent in print a half dozen of the most prominent on the list might be the making of any firm. To take care of the whole of them would seem to be an embarrassment of riches. But the establishment has done and is doing this with unremitting energy and in good style. We need not take room to run over the long and brilliant catalogue. A glance at the eight columns will reveal a galaxy of shining names. Observe the poets. T, B, L and L, W and the rest. Count up the novelists. S, T, D, R, G, H and others of the tribe. Consider the array of essayists, travelers and naturalists, men and women of Mark. And then ask whether Hunt, Perry and Company are surpassed by any of their contemporaries in their numerous issues, taking quantity, quality and variety into the account. In offering this broadside program of their performances as bookmakers and booksellers to the crowds of Jubilee week, they put forth a statement of indisputable facts. Give a transcript of the record of the volumes they have issued and their relations to eminent writers. Their achievements imply something more than an immediate and exclusive eye to the main chance. It is evident that the honorable pursuit of profit is not with them the sole consideration. Oh, that it were. They desire to connect their names with good literature, advanced thought and intellectual progress of the age. They would be known for their taste and liberal policy, as well as for their mercantile success. Acting upon the principle that character as well as money is worth earning in the pursuits of trade and commerce. Without entering into comparisons, less much is fairly to be inferred from their extended advertisement. It tells of results which imply the existence of the qualities we have attributed to them. For without such qualities, such results could not have been attained. The evidence of culture, judgment, sagacity, energy, boldness, tact, skill and whatever else goes to the building up of a publishing house known at home and abroad for its magnitude and the extent and variety of its ventures is literally such that he who runs may read and see that it is beyond controversy. This is not extravagant praise or mere compliment, but simply the statement of the truth as made manifest by the facts. In this general reference to Messier's Hunt, Perry and Company, we must not in passing omit an allusion to their periodicals. To them the public are indebted for the maintenance of the oldest Greek quarterly, the agreeable and fresh weekly selections of Every Tuesday, the wide circulation and high character for ability, diversity and independence of the Adriatic Monthly and that leading magazine of its class, The Buddhist. In thus calling attention to the publishing house whose imprint is known wherever the Greek language is spoken or read, we are pointing to what is one of the leading concerns in a most important branch of the business of the city, of which others besides its proprietors may well be proud. Not only has it grown with the growing culture of the country, but it has encouraged home authors and spread far and wide the best productions of the best writers on the other side of the Atlantic, thus giving it a claim to honourable consideration as holding a high place among the beneficent agencies of the advancing civilisation of the world. And a third time in. The firm of Hunt, Perry and Company, now almost as familiar to the public under the new name as under the old colours with which it sailed so long, has been a bulwark and a rallying point for our literature, on which book buyers as well as book writers depended for many years. It has always been active, but never so active as now. In another part of this paper, this house advertised their principal publications for the past 18 months. With little more amplification than a catalogue, the list fills a very considerable space, but it is when we come to appreciate quality as well as quantity that its full importance is realised. No other Athenian house could bulletin such a list of authors beginning with L and ranging along the varied types of our literature from W, S, H, H and L to P, H and A. Nor can any house exhibit such a list of English writers with the added merit of the author's sanction as T, B, H, E, D and R. Periodicals have come to be recognised as necessary tenders to the business of every book firm, but the monthlys and the quarterly etc etc etc. Whatever may be the differing opinions after the experiences of this week, upon the commercial position and prospects of Athens and the success of her musical experiments, there can be no dispute as to our preeminence among Greek cities as a literary centre. Even Corinthians, bitterly as they may sneer at our jubilee, are forced to read the works of Athenian authors and to supply their libraries with Athenian books. It would be impossible to estimate approximately the influence in producing the literary character of the city, its clustering of authors, its tone of society, of one great publishing house, but unquestionably that influence is very great. An ill-timed modesty on the part of the firm of Hunt, Perry and Company has apparently prevented the publication of the fact, but it is well known in Athenian social circles that the eclipse, which made the last summer famous and which elicited so much interest throughout the scientific world, was not owing to the interposition of the moon between our planet and the sun, but was chiefly due to the temporary disappearance from this continent of the senior partner of the house of Hunt, Perry and Company. I do not say that the extracts which I have quoted and others which I might quote emanated from the same pen, or that the pen was held in the interest of Hunt, Perry and Company, but I do say that on any other theory the correspondence of thought, of illustration and even of language is not a little remarkable. And if this theory be correct, if the house which has perhaps the reputation of being the most liberal, the most generous and the most refined publishing house in this country has attained that reputation by assiduously blowing its own trumpet while assiduously strangling its own authors, of what value is reputation? A novel and striking illustration of my theme has just come to hand in the publication of Miss Mythbridge's Letters. In 1754 she writes of Mr. Hunt. He is a partner in the greatest publishing house of Greece and the special patron of Blank, whom he found starving and has made a fluent by his encouragement and liberality. For the great romancer is so nervous that he wants as much kindness of management, as much mental nursing as a sick child. I have never known a more charming person than Mr. Hunt. The author to whom Miss Mythbridge refers is the author of whose real or supposed wrongs I have spoken before. If these publishers were indeed so liberal towards him, the unanimity with which that author's family and friends agree in attributing to them the contrary policy is a singular proof of ingratitude to benefactors. And Mr. Hunt may well exclaim with the prophet of old, I have nourished and brought up children and they have rebelled against me. I do not know what force these adulatory remarks may have upon the minds of others, but my experience and my information are such that whenever I see in the newspapers a fresh description of praise to the liberality of this house, I immediately infer that the screw has been given another turn on some unlucky author. The firm appears to me in the similitude of evil-minded hens, cackling their noisy cuckuckuckuckuckuckuckuck. Over each new laid egg, designing to conceal from an unenquiring public that like those laymen denounced by Isaiah, they hatch cockatrice's eggs, he that eateth of their eggs dyeth, and that which is crushed breaketh out into a viper. At a later period, these general paragraphs began to converge around a particular point and snugly nestled in among the literary items of religious newspapers may be found such announcements as this. The public is threatened with a new book by the once-redoubtable M.N. in which she is to narrate her tribulations real or imaginary with the eminent publishers Hunt, Perry and Company. Authors are very apt to have extravagant ideas of the popularity and profits of their books, unmindful of the fact that generally they are indebted to their publishers for a large proportion of their fame, and it will take several books to convince the public that H.P. and Co. deal unfairly with their authors. Thus far, H.P. and Co. have kept quiet during M.N.'s attacks, but we hope the time will come when they will vindicate themselves. And almost simultaneously in another quarter of the heavens appears a similar turtle dove, its pin feathers developed into well-defined plumage, but unquestionably a bird of the same brood. M.N., once more famous than now, had a little unpleasantness with her publishers Hunt, Perry and Company. In plain words, she accused them of cheating her out of some thousands of dollars by making false returns of sales of her books. Like many authors, she had become inordinately vain and had extravagant ideas of the popularity of her books, and was, as is too often the case, unmindful of the fact that a large portion of what fame she had then, but has now lost, was made for her by these self-same publishers. She had a quarrel with them of 18 months standing, but they would not even appear in self-defense. What man would want to have an open quarrel with a woman? To anyone acquainted with the details of book publishing, the charge she brings against H.P. and Co. is simply absurd. And besides, no businessman would ever dare to suspect this publishing house to attempt such a system of petty cheating, and which, if attempted, would involve an amount of detail inconsistent with the end to be reached. H.P. and Co. are above the taint of suspicion. The truth is, M.N.'s books did not sell so well as she expected, and her pride, and her pocket, had a fall. It is known to us that an enormous outlay in advertising failed to make a remunerative sale on her last book. It failed dead on the market. It is now very quietly rumoured that she has written a little volume which she proposes to call Little Men, in which she describes her tribulations with the house of H.P. and Co. M.N., you had better not. The public will not believe you. The public will at least believe that though a once redoubtable author like Giant Pope in the Pilgrim's Progress, by reason of age, and also of the many shrewd brushes that he met with in his younger days, be grown crazy and stiff in his joints, he can at least sit in his cave's mouth, grinning at publishers as they go by, and biting his nails because he cannot come at them. It is not probable that these later paragraphs were actually written by the Rose, but by someone who lives near the Rose, and who takes Rose 8 views of the situation. When one has been introduced behind the scenes, these little touches go for what they are worth, but outside they unquestionably, if imperceptibly, affect public opinion. And like an army of moral polyps build high the walls of lofty Rome, a new species of polyps the naturalist will say, but it answers my purpose. But while recognizing to its fullest extent the great power and prestige of a flourishing publishing house, and the great risk a writer runs in opposing it, I cannot bring myself to accept its invincibility, or its infallibility, or its indispensability. Of course a good reputation is, or ought to be, the sign of a good character, but a thing which is wrong is wrong, whatever be the reputation of him who does it. A charge of wrong is to be met by denial. It is not to be dazzled out of sight in a general brilliancy. When the course of our true love ceased to run smooth, I supposed my pebble was the only obstacle which my publisher's rivulet had ever known, and I was dismayed accordingly. But if all the rocks I have since discovered could be cast into one heap, we should have a bigger monument than Joshua made to mark the passage of Jordan. But the monumenteers suffer in silence, or speak with a baited breath that cannot be heard outside their own circle. While the flourishing firm keeps up such a continuous tooting with its ram's horns, as would have flung flat the walls of Jericho, had they been twice as stout as they were. Undoubtedly it is not wise always to make an outcry over your follies or misfortunes. Neither is it wise always to go through the world with a chip on your shoulder, challenging people to fill a bit off. We all admit that there are times when short, sharp, and decisive resistance to aggression is the wisest plan. So also is there a time to speak as well as a time to refrain from speaking. There may be dignity, there may be generosity, there may be prudence, or pusillanimity, or selfishness in silence. There may be all in speech. Of this I am certain if any of those writers who have escaped harm by their own skill, or any of those who have thought to escape further harm by silence, had but given warning of the existence of rocks, some of us with less skill would have avoided that viscinage and might have had smooth sailing through the whole voyage. By their silence, they have not only indirectly contributed to our disaster, but they have actually strengthened against us the hands of our natural foes, the publishers. They make it possible for the newspaper to say in reference to the present difficulty, as the House of H. P. & Co. has been thriving in existence for more than a quarter of a century and has never before quarreled with an author, or more correctly speaking, never had an author quarrel with it. There will be a general disposition, and so forth. They thus directly increase the resistance which any succeeding author must overcome. Nothing says the nation newspaper of January 13, 1770 in harsher language than I care to use, but we must take language as we find it. Nothing so promotes swindle as the readiness of the victims to pocket their losses, go their way with a sickly smile and let the rogues begin again. But of course this must be left for each person to decide for himself. It is only that if one feels moved in the spirit to bear witness against wrong in any of the relations of life, there is nothing in the height or depth or breadth or brilliancy of any reputation to overall him. Nothing is real but the right. There is no life but in truth. When faith is lost, when honor dies, the man is dead. Dead? He never was born. There never was any such person. He was a mirage and apparition. A star's dim twinkle through his form. As to the harm that may accrue to an author from adopting the course which he counts wise, it seems to me entirely insignificant. Nobody expects to go through the world intact, but we all expect to do that which presents itself to be done. If a writer has life in himself, he will not easily die. If he has not life in himself, the sooner he dies, the better. If there is no life outside in his own charmed circle, then am I dead to all the globe and all the globe is dead to me? Nothing is indispensable but a mind at peace with itself. It is pleasant to celebrate the glory of those you love, but better trudge comfortably across country on foot and alone with all your worldly goods knotted up in a yellow bandana than ride unwillingly behind anybody's triumphal car. So then, while it is undoubtedly best as a general thing for an author to live at peace with publishers and sinners, there is also no reason why he should not make war if it is borne in upon him to do so. But the only royal road to justice is for authors in the beginning to be intelligent, prompt, exact, and exacting on all business matters which come within our scope. This seems a little thing, but it would work a revolution in the literary world. Let writers deal with publishers not like women and idiots but as businessmen with businessmen. If an author chooses to relinquish all pecuniary rewards from his books and to make an outright gift of the profits to his publishers, he may leave the whole matter in their hands. But if he condescends to take any part in the spoils, he thereby becomes a business partner and the only question is whether he shall be a good businessman or a poor one. By not being prompt and intelligent, by neglecting to secure or to examine his accounts or to correct them when they are wrong or to understand them when they are obscure, he does not approve himself an unmercinary person. He simply shows himself to be shambling and shiftless and puts a direct temptation in his publisher's path. Many a servant would be honest if her careless mistress would not leave money lying about. Had I but used the ordinary care and caution which a lawyer or a merchant or a marketman brings to his business, this troubled doubtless would never have happened and we should all have been the happier for it. The simple consciousness on the part of a publisher that an author is observant of what is visible will have a tendency to make him exact and upright concerning what is invisible. An author should so order his affairs that a publisher must make an effort to be dishonest. On the contrary, he so neglects them that a publisher must make an effort to be honest. Confidence and trust are excellent things and never more excellent than when they have a solid basis of paper and ink. Do the best you can, there will still be points enough for the author to exercise his trust on, but to do business wholly on the trust system is utterly childish. No confidence can be more complete than was mine and none apparently can be founded on a more honourable reputation. The confidential, friendly way of conducting affairs is petty and sentimental, grateful to one's indolence and vanity and over-festiviousness and confirmatory of one's conviction that he is too dainty and delicate to touch a bargain with the tips of his fingers. But in fact we all do take money for our work when we can get it. We want just as much money and money just as much as other people. And in sober truth the friction, the sacrifice of delicacy in keeping your money affairs straight from day to day is not for a moment to be compared to the delicacy which may be sacrificed by leaving them at the mercy of others. You run well for a while but a day of reckoning is almost sure to come. The thriftless haphazard way of bargaining or not bargaining, common among literary people, is the fruitful parent of uneasiness, vanity, disappointment, and bitterness before which delicacy must be rudely and ruthlessly brushed. It is the same with women as with men, for in literature as in the Gospel there is neither male nor female. When a woman does any work for which she receives money she becomes so far a man and passes immediately and inevitably under the yoke of trade. She has no right to demand a favorable judgment of her work because she is a woman nor has she the least right to require that chivalry shall come in to help fix or secure her compensation. Trade laws know no more of gallantry than trade winds and it is well they do not. Individuals and societies wedle and flutter and threaten and torture according to the fashion or passion or panic of the hour but under it all the great pitiless, unseen inexorable law of the world holds from age to age never relaxing its grasp never revoking its decree deaf to the wail of weakness dumb to the cry of despair forever and forever teaching with unrelenting persistency by unrelenting persistency the good and wholesome lesson that will be taught no other way under this law there is no sex no chivalry, no deference no mercy, there is nothing but supply and demand nothing but buy and sell to him who understands it and guides himself by it it is a chariot of state bearing him on to fame and fortune to him who does not comprehend it and flings himself against it it is a car of juggernaut crushing him beneath its wheels without passion but without pity End of section 15 End of a battle of the books by Gale Hamilton