James Russell Lowell and His Friends

by Edward Everett Hale

But they did not want to publish them. They did not expect to make money by publishing them. They did not know anything about them. Alexander Everett used to say that a bookseller was the only tradesman who knew nothing about the wares he sold. Of the Boston trade in those prehistoric days this was substantially true. But, in truth, there was not much publishing, excepting the issue of some law books and a few medical books. Hilliard & Gray, and Crocker & Brewster, attended to these affairs and cared little for any others.

Any one of the old firms regarded an author with a manuscript much as a dealer in Russian sail-cloth might regard a lady who should come into his counting-room and ask him to make her a linen handkerchief.

All of a sudden, as a wave of water might sweep over a thick, rotten ice-floe in one of Nansen’s summers, a marvelous inundation swept over this decorous imbecility. That is to say, two young men formed a “publishing firm.” They did not want to import books. They wanted to make them and to sell them.

More simply speaking, “Phillips & Sampson” appeared about the year 1843. Charles Sampson (a young man when he died in 1858) used to say that he had peddled molasses candy from a tin waiter on holidays, when he was a boy. Moses Dresser Phillips had been brought up to the retail book trade in Worcester, in the shop of Clarendon Harris, who succeeded Isaiah Thomas, the publisher of the first American Bible. I do not know how these young fellows first met each other. But it was they who taught the drowsy chiefs of the little Boston book-shops the great lesson that in a nation which had taught thirty million people how to read, there were more than five hundred people who wanted to read Emerson’s essays or Macaulay’s history.

Emerson, as has been said, had never received one cent from the publication of his essays, when Phillips & Sampson, about 1850, published “English Traits” for him. Mr. Phillips was by marriage connected with Emerson’s family, and had persuaded him to leave James Monroe and give the new book to the younger firm, now well established in business.

MOSES DRESSER PHILLIPS

But this new firm meant to make books which everybody must buy, and to sell them where anybody could read. They did not pretend to retail books, any more than the Pacific Mills pretend to sell to a good housewife the material for a shirt or a sheet. They did mean to make them and to sell them to the retailers. So far as the nation at large went, or a wholesale trade with dealers anywhere, they had hardly any rivals in Boston. Opposite them was the shop of Ticknor & Fields. The young, wide-awake James T. Fields, now so well known by his charming reminiscences and other essays, had entered that shop, as “youngest boy,” in the later thirties. His broad and intelligent foresight was beginning to bear fruit. But Allen & Ticknor can hardly be numbered among publishers, and Ticknor & Fields did not exist as a firm until Cummings & Hilliard had become Hilliard & Gray. This firm published law books and medical books. Crocker & Brewster, successors to Governor Armstrong, imported and sold theological books. I bought my Hebrew Bible and my Gesenius’s Lexicon from them in 1839. But, if a man wanted one of these firms to publish a book for him, why, they would have told him that he must pay for his plates and his printing. Thus Mr. Bancroft, fortunately for himself, owned the plates and the printed copies of his own History from 1833 until he died.

Charles Sampson and Moses Dresser Phillips made an admirable combination, and the early death of both of them made a break in the book business of Boston which it did not easily recover from. These young men were not satisfied with the gilt-edged retail “trade” of Boston and Cambridge. They went far afield with their wares. Mr. Phillips used to tell with glee the story of their first orders from San Francisco in the ’49 days. “So many hundred packs of ‘Highland’ cards, so many of the ‘True Thomas’ cards, and so on till the box was nearly full, and then ‘one dozen Bibles.’”

This was seed-corn, he said. And then, in 1852 or 1853, he would read you their last invoices, as they answered immense orders from California. “Four hundred Byron’s Poems, four hundred Scott’s Poems, one hundred Cowper’s Poems,” and so on, in large shipments. And he would say, “That is the crop that comes from the twelve Bibles. Such editions of the poets,” he would say, “as you would not have seen in your house,—but, after all, Cowper is Cowper, and Scott is Scott.”