A Brief History of Printing. Part II: The Economic History of Printing

by Frederick W. Hamilton

The fourth method was the absolute prohibition of the importation of books printed outside the territories of the Republic. This was coupled with the refusal of copyright privileges to all books not printed in Venice. Of course, in this whole discussion we must understand that Venice was not the modern city, but the medieval state, which at times was of considerable extent.

This system had certain rather serious defects in practice. In the first place the Council of Ten which issued all these privileges, although usually an extremely businesslike body, kept no record of its relations with printers. Probably this was not a serious matter for the first few years, but the time soon came when no member of the Council could remember what privileges had been granted either to printers or authors. Consequently privileges were very liable to duplication and the Council finally got out of the difficulty by issuing its copyrights with the proviso “If no previous copyright has been issued.” This was very comfortable for the Council, but rather uncomfortable for the printer, because it threw upon him the burden of finding out facts which were nowhere on record. Again, there was no machinery for the enforcement of the privileges. While it is probable that legal proceedings could be instituted under them, some other machinery ought to have been provided to make them effective. Lastly, and this was, as we shall see, a common difficulty with all early privileges, they were very narrow in application. Privileges applied only to the territory of Venice and were worthless elsewhere. As we have seen in the case of Aldus, the products of the Venetian press were sold throughout the civilized world, but outside of their place of production they were unprotected by any copyright or other defence. In some cases they were excluded by protective laws similar to those by which Venice attempted to secure her printers from foreign competition. At a somewhat later period some difficulty arose because of the claims of the Papal Court to issue privileges outside of the States of the Church. On the whole, however, the Venetian system was about the best and the simplest of the early systems for dealing with the problems of the printing press.

Turning next to Germany, we find that practically all of the books printed from 1450 to 1500 were reprints of old books. The literary pirate made his appearance almost as soon as the printer appeared. We have already seen that Fust himself was the first of the brood. The fact is not surprising, however, when we remember the conditions of the time. The idea of property in a book excepting as one particular object, a piece of furniture so to speak, never occurred to anybody. Throughout the entire period of manuscript books it was everywhere held that any man who had possession of a book, even temporarily, had a right to copy it. That the owner of the book had any right to control its duplication, even though he had been at great expense to make a copy, was not considered worth discussion. If a man could copy a manuscript which had cost a hundred crowns to make, might he not reprint a book which cost less than one tenth of that amount? It was held that ownership of a printed book carried with it the same rights of reproduction which had from time immemorial been attached to ownership of a written book.

Men who wrote books wrote for the love of it. There was no such thing as authorship as a profession and no such thing as the sale of an author’s work, except so far as the books themselves were concerned. It is true that certain writers were helped and perhaps supported by wealthy patrons of literature in the old world or by rich men and politicians who were willing to pay for verses or pamphlets eulogizing their names and praising their exploits. Doubtless, there were writers who lived by their wits in this way, but their case was far different from that of the modern author who either sells his work to a publisher or makes a contract for a royalty. If a man was paid for writing a poem in praise of his patron neither he nor his patron was supposed to control the poem; in a word, there was no conception of any kind of literary property, and the printers soon found that there must be property in books or printing would become impossible.

Germany, like Venice, undertook to deal with the matter by the privilege system, although German privileges seem to have been less varied and more simple than those of the Venetians and to have concerned themselves more exclusively with the printer, to the neglect of the author. As elsewhere, a privilege was the sole right to print a work or a series of works in a given place. The peculiar political condition which existed in Germany made this a rather difficult matter. Germany in the fifteenth century consisted geographically of what is now the Empire of Germany, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. It was composed of a great number of states of very different sizes, from a single city up to a reasonably large country. Each one of these cities had a large degree of self government. They were all supposed to be governed by the emperor. He was called the Holy Roman Emperor and was supposed to be the heir of the old emperors of Rome. He governed largely through assemblages of the princes, called Diets, which were held wherever and whenever the emperor called them. There were also certain imperial courts and governing councils. All this elaborate scheme of government existed largely on paper. It was not generally strong enough to govern effectively, but was generally strong enough to keep things more or less in confusion.

The power of the emperor depended to a considerable extent upon his personal character and his private resources. An emperor who happened to be a strong man, governing a powerful state in the empire from which he could draw money and military support, could hold the states, which were liable to be extremely unruly, in their places and could collect the imperial revenue. A man of weaker personality or without the backing of such private resources could neither keep the turbulent princes in order nor collect the revenue.

The local princes had no sooner begun to issue privileges than the emperor began to do the same thing. A local privilege was not good beyond the limits of the small state which issued it. An imperial privilege was theoretically good throughout the empire, but practically good only in spots. If it conflicted with a local privilege, or the local authority happened to be on bad terms with the emperor it would be worthless. The result of all of this was that at a very early period the printers of Germany got together and made a sort of “gentleman’s agreement,” as we say today, to respect each other’s undertakings. This agreement was practically the best protection of the German book trade until the development of copyright laws at a very much later period. It appears to have been relied upon by the printers more than was the privilege. Privileges were often obtained, partly because it was desirable to keep on good terms with the local authorities and partly because of the relation of privilege to censorship, which we shall discuss later, but it is clear that printing in Germany would have suffered greatly if it had not been for the existence of the “live and let live” agreement of the German printers.

Printers’ privileges covered only old books. New books unless covered by some author’s privilege were not covered at all, presumably on the ground that in those days, before author’s rights to compensation were fully recognized, the expense and risk of producing the classics for a comparatively small market was greater than that of printing new books, especially as many of the new books were controversial and the authors paid the printers. Until about 1800 the printer was a much more important personage in legislation than the author. There was practically very little protection of literary rights of authors excepting what came through privileges, and the printer’s privileges were considered much more important than the author’s rights. Privileges covered:

(a) Public documents, including church books and school books.

(b) The first printing of books from the body of the world’s literature.