Cambridge History of American Literature: volume 3
Trent, William Peterfield, 1862-1939., Erskine, John, 1879-1951., Sherman, Stuart Pratt, 1881-1926., Van Doren, Carl, 1885-1950., Ed.

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[551] Novels in brown paper covers began in 1842, reaching 615 volumes, all of them save some half dozen being foreign authors, in part contemporary ones. This is but a type of what publishers were doing, or trying to do, all over the country. After the Civil War, when trade courtesy died, this deluge of cheap literature began again, the Seaside Library being especially noteworthy, though scarcely less so than the Lakeside Series from Chicago, both selling as low as ten cents. Both were births of the end of the seventies. Meanwhile, if the European author was being robbed directly and the American author indirectly in this country, the latter was receiving little from Europe. As early as 1793 Germany was pirating our authors; and Cooper was but a type when he remarked after his residence in France that the return to him from the sales of his books in France did not pay his French taxes; and he was highly popular there at that time, too. The British pirate was not handicapped by the necessity of translation.

A few words must yet be said upon the concentration of American publishing. In 1858 Simms wrote: ‘We have not a single publisher in the whole South, from the Chesapeake to the Rio Grande. We have book sellers and printers, who occasionally issue books originally from the press but who . . . rarely succeed in selling them.’¹ Concentration of population and facility of communication, both largely lacking, were, he thought, the two secrets of success. The Southern city which came nearest being a publishing centre at this period was Richmond, while Mobile had one firm of some local prominence; but the favourite publishers of Southern writers for a generation before the war were the Harpers, the Appletons, Jewett & Company, Derby & Jackson, and the Lippincotts. But if the South was not active in publication, the evidence is overwhelming that it was an unusually large buyer of fine books.²

In the Middle West, to an eminent degree Cincinnati had facility of communication through her strategic position on the Ohio in days of slow overland communication; and for two decades or more before the war it was a great publishing