Although the firm lost money on “Holidays,” this paper shows that they were ready to accept another juvenile book as soon as I told them of its existence. I suppose there is some occult reason for it, known only to publishers; but the carnal mind would naturally infer that having lost money on one, they would be shy of a second venture.
Mr. Parry repeated Mr. Hunt's assertion, that he replied with his own hand to my first letter of inquiry. Mr. Hunt, in speaking of it to me, could not recall the exact time of his writing it, but Mr. Parry said that Mr. Hunt told him that morning, that it was written directly after the reception of my letter. But in a letter written two or three weeks after mine was sent, Mr. Hunt says by his amanuensis, “I have not answered your last letter touching the terms expressed in the contracts.” Mr. Hunt apparently labors under the curious psychological infelicity of remembering the letters he does not write, and forgetting the letters he does write.
After Mr. Parry had told me that my books had not been selling well for a year or two, and that they had lost money on them, I hunted up old letters of Mr. Hunt's to see if they would not show that he had urged me to write in the form of books. In doing so I found a letter dated September 23, 1764, from which I make the following extract: “The contract has been delayed for a sufficient cause.” (He then gives as a reason Mr. Brummell's absence.) “The percentage will read fifteen cents per copy, as the business times are fluctuating the prices of manufacture so there is no telling to-morrow or for a new edition what may be the expenses of publication, so we reckon your percentage in every and any event as fixed at fifteen cents per volume on all your works. If it should cost $1.50 to make the volumes you are sure of your author profit of fifteen cents. The price at retail may be $1.50, $2.00, or $3.00, as the high or low rates of paper, binding, etc., may be, but you are all right. This arrangement we make now with all our authors.”
If I had discovered this letter sooner it would have simplified matters greatly; but I did not find it till this statement had been, as I supposed, finished. I therefore thought best to put it in here, in a sort of chronological order. What I had previously said touching its substance, I said from memory solely. I could not even have declared whether its assertions had been made by pen or lips. But I think it not only fully bears out all that I have alleged, but shows more than my memory had retained or my perception divined. The letter before its close says, “As I write the contracts are reported ready, so I enclose them. Sign both and send back the one marked with red X. You keep one and we the other.”
I see now that in case the books had gone up to $3.00, I should have been sure of my author profits of fifteen cents and “all right,” even if I had continued on the old terms of ten per cent; but I did not see it then, nor anything else, for that matter. The reasoning of this process is not a little remarkable. Prices of all kinds are changing, therefore your price shall not change. And what kind of percentage is that which is no percentage at all but an unchangeable quantity?
I made direct inquiries of all the authors accessible to me, whose works were in the hands of Messrs. Brummell & Hunt, at or about that time. I received information from some fifteen different persons. With no one of them did Messrs. Brummell & Hunt make the arrangement they made with me. Nine reported receiving ten per cent. Some received half profits. One received twelve cents on a book that retailed at a dollar and a quarter. One said that he received twelve cents on a dollar and a half book and ten cents on a dollar and a quarter. Another that he receives ten per cent. sometimes but not always.
Mr. Hunt often urged upon me the advantage and importance of my writing only for them; so that, with the exception of the “Segregationalissuemost,” for which I was writing when I began with Messrs. Brummell & Hunt, I have neither in periodical or book, written for any other house than theirs. It might seem as if this injunction of his, all friendly and judicious as it may have been, did put them under something like an obligation to do as well by me as any other house would do.
When “City Lights” was published, its retail price was a dollar and a quarter, and the first account allows me twelve and a quarter cents a volume. Mr. Parry said that the retail price of the books was changed five or six times after my percentage was changed to a fixed sum. The latter change was made in the autumn of 1764. In a copy of “Rocks of Offense,” date 1764, the advertised retail price of all the books is one dollar and a half. “Old Miasmas” was published in the autumn of 1764, and was, from the beginning, sold at two dollars. These are the only prices that I have seen or heard of since the first. Mr. Parry, however, says they have at two different times been held at one dollar and seventy-five cents. I think those times must have been of very short duration, as I never saw those prices advertised, and never knew of their existence. I have inquired incognito of the principal booksellers in Athens and not one of them was aware that the price had ever been put down since it was put up. But, with all the changes, the difficulties of computing percentage can hardly have been insurmountable.
Mr. Parry at this time told me what I did not know before,—that the publishers reserved to themselves in the first contract for “City Lights” fifteen hundred books. The contract specifies only the first edition. I suppose an edition has no prescribed size; but I have never in any other case known more than the first thousand being reserved to the publishers.
“City Lights” was published September, 1762. On the first of December of the same year Mr. Hunt reported that before January it would have gone to a fourth edition. I should like to know if each of those four editions numbered fifteen hundred volumes. What, for instance, was the size of the second edition, or the third?