He affirmed that the publishers made but insignificant profits on the books compared with mine; that up to September, 1764, when the second contract was made, when “City Lights” had been two years out and “Alba Dies” and “Rocks of Offense” had been published, and “Old Miasmas” was about to be published, their net cash profit on the books for these two years had been three hundred dollars. Here they went into the details of the business with a minuteness altogether beyond my power to comprehend or report. The referees and themselves carried on a long discussion about the condition of business in general, and their business in particular, in 1762, 1764, and subsequently. The firm foresaw that they should have to advance the retail price of their books. Everything connected with their business advanced. The price and quality of paper, the size of books, taxes, interest, stereotype plates, pro rata increase, press-work, expenses of business, comparative costs of comparative thinness, if there is any such thing, number of pounds of paper in thin books and thick books, discounts to the trade, were discussed with apparent intelligence. I can give only a few of the mysterious tongues of flames that shot above the level of the luminous, and still more mysterious corona.
[It will be seen that this part of my paper is like Milton's “fatal and perfidious bark,” in “being built in the eclipse” as well as “rigged with curses dark.”]
The stereotype plates of the nine volumes were estimated at three thousand nine hundred and fifty-three dollars, ninety-seven cents.
| Paper, printing, and binding of about 72,000 volumes | $38,422.08 |
| Advertising in outside mediums | 1,500.00 |
| Advertising in their own periodicals | 500.00 |
[The latter embraced only cost of paper and printing.]
| Government manufacturing tax, five per cent. on sales, October 1764 to July 1766 | $1,814.04 |
| Seven per cent. interest on stereotype plates | 991.46 |
| Expenses of doing business, ten per cent. on sales | 7,061.14 |
The latter included rent, insurance, clerk hire, packing, store expenses, business risks and losses, taxes on business-property, except income-tax, etc. Reckoning up the sums expended they proved beyond doubt, if there be truth in figures, that their profits were not quite seven-tenths as large as those of the opulent and insatiable author, who, in spite of all this inequality was clamoring for more. But they admitted that, though their expenses had been out of all proportion to their profits since the rise in prices, their profits had lately “been some larger than before.”
With all due respect to Messrs. Hunt, Parry, & Co., I must still avow that these estimates are entirely valueless. What would have been of value was their cost-book, which would have showed what they actually did pay. This I asked for but it was not produced. They simply made an estimate. They brought forward not a single voucher. They reckon the item of advertising at two thousand dollars, but they produced not a paper to show that they had paid anything. This advertising extended over several years and embraced advertisements of nine books. Whether they counted in the three hundred volumes reserved on each book; whether they counted in the advertisements of every book advertised and issued simultaneously with mine, on what basis they did calculate, or what sums they did pay, I have no means of knowing, except their assertion.
In the same way they make their estimate of the cost of paper and press-work; but that it is anything more than an estimate, that it represents the actual sum which they paid to printers and binders, there is no proof. From the fact that I asked for their cost-book, and that it was not produced, I infer that it does not represent that sum, notwithstanding the laudable accuracy involved in the eight cents.
Again, having set down a certain sum for the cost of the stereotype plates, for the interest of that money, for the paper and press-work, for the advertising and taxes, they bring in a grand finale for the expenses of doing business. That is, having charged once for the items specifically, they lump them together and charge for them all over again abstractly. For what is the advertising and the taxes but a part of the expenses of doing business? Why could not everything except the raw material of the book be classed under the head of doing business? What is there to a book but the book itself and the publication of it? And why again should interest be charged on the sum paid for stereotype plates any more than for that paid to the printer and binder?