What then remains? It has been proposed that authors combine and form a publishing-house by themselves, publishing their own books and receiving their own profits. This plan looks simple enough, but I must confess it seems to me chimerical in the last degree. Excepting the temptations of their trade, doubtless a hundred publishers are as honest as a hundred authors, and surely they have a great deal more business sagacity. But as soon as authors turn publishers they fall into all the publisher's temptations without acquiring his business power; so that when you have chemically combined author and publisher you have an amalgam wholly and disastrously different from either of the original simples, namely, a publisher minus his common sense.
No, the publisher is not an artificial member of society. Like all other middle-men he meets a real want. He exists because in the long run it is cheaper and better for writers to employ him than to do his work themselves. Of course, the wiser and more righteous he is, the better he answers the end of his creation; but with all his imperfections on his head, he is better than nobody. A man may as well undertake to build his house with his own hands to save himself from the short-comings and extortions of carpenters, as to manufacture and distribute his own books to save himself from the extortions of publishers. We may send missionaries among them, we may gather them in to our Sunday-schools, but we need not think to exterminate them.
Authors may form publishing houses, and those houses may be successful, but if so it will be simply by adopting substantially the methods of successful publishing-houses already established. It seems to me easier and more economical to let such institutions spring from the soil, rather than attempt to construct them out of material which has already been organized into another form of life.
Shall we then take the publishers cum grano salis, and try to guard our interests by keeping a strict look-out? We must turn publishers ourselves to make it of any account. A detective, to be worth anything, ought to be at least as wily as the rogue he watches, and to be so he must give his mind to it, and if he give his mind to that, where-withal shall he set up any other business? An author need not rush in among publishers as Cincinnati swine are said to invade the streets with whetted knives, crying “come and eat me”; but if he on the contrary objects, steadfastly and stoutly, to being devoured, he does not know where his vulnerable point is, and cannot therefore arm himself against attack. He is not and cannot become, consistently with the proper pursuit of his own profession, sufficiently acquainted with the details of publishing to know whether a measure proposed by a publisher be or be not fair. For instance, the publisher contracts to pay ten per cent. on the retail price of a sixty-two cent book. A war comes, bringing high prices, and the book goes up to a dollar and a quarter. The publisher continues to pay the author ten per cent. of sixty-two cents, making no reference to the increased price. The author presently chances to discover it, and remonstrates. The publishers say curtly, “You will make the price of the book so large that it will have no sale,” oblivious of the fact that it is not the author but themselves who have raised the price of the book. He replies that the price is not his affair; he must insist upon the contract. The publishers yield, and the author is apparently victorious. But when a second author brings up this case as a reason why he should receive his percentage, the publishers reply, “True, we did continue percentage because he insisted, but, as a warning, the book had a very poor sale.” But what effect on the sale can the author's twelve and a half, instead of six and a half cents have if the price to the buyer is the same? Until some better answer is given I shall believe that the sale diminishes because the publisher chooses it; because he prefers to sacrifice a small sum on a single volume as a warning to contumacious authors, rather than encourage rebellion by continuing to receive profits of which he must divert a larger share to the author. If he can, by one or two examples, show restive writers that the question is not between six and a half cents and twelve and a half cents on a thousand books, but between six and a half on a thousand, and twelve and a half on a hundred, the sum he sacrifices in showing it is not a bad investment.
Since, then, the publisher has matters within his own grasp so entirely that what he is forced to pay with one hand he can easily pluck with the other, I do not clearly see the advantage to be gained by insisting on any special bargain with him. Perhaps I do not quite know what I am talking about. I suspect, on the whole, I do not. But my remarks are all the more valuable for that. If, after two years of clapper-clawing among a quartette of cats, a mouse is still unskilled in feline ways, in what state of helplessness must be those unadventurous little things who have never left their holes?
But there are the books of the firm which the suspected publisher opens to you with a frankness of innocence that ought to disarm and convince the most hardened unbeliever. Any demur is met by an invitation to come and look at “the books.” The trail of the Serpent is over all the rest of the world, but “the books” have escaped the contamination of original sin and shine with the purity of Paradise. Burglars blow open safes, banks and directors and cashiers and tellers come to grief, but “the books” always tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Nowithstanding which I, from the beginning, instinctively gave those “books” a wide berth. They were to me like the “magick bookes” of Spenser's hermite. “Let none them read.” That “the books” are not always “reliable gentlemen” will have been inferred from the account which they professed to have sent me, and which was—lost in the mail. That “the books” are not always intelligible witnesses would appear, could we know how many unwary persons have gone to them in pursuit of knowledge, and found the difficulty insurmountable. “We had the books here,” said one benighted author of no mean repute, “and I examined them, and Kate examined them, and Frank examined them, and the Major examined them, and we could make nothing of them.” That the books have been made to do yeoman's service in this battle has already been seen, and by various tokens it would seem that they have not yet been dismissed the service. Only to-day a letter says, “But the account of the sales of your book and the sums paid you for them, as I derived them from the books of Mr. Hunt, convinced me that whatever the bargain might be you had a better one than I had. I have half profits—you have had more.”
That is what “the books” say unquestionably; but what a stiff-necked and perverse author refuses to believe without further proof. When a publisher shows me receipted bills for the sums he has actually paid in manufacturing and publishing my books, and for the sums he has received from their sale, I will—take them to an expert for examination; but when he proposes to set me down before a mighty maze of figures, which for aught that appears, may all have been conjured up by his imagination, and begs me to deduce from them any conclusion whatever, I decline with thanks. That contention I leave off before it be meddled with. It is not necessary to be a Solomon in order to know enough to keep away from figures which it is necessary to be a Solomon to understand, and which when understood are much like the “litle flyes cal'd out of deepe darknes dredd” by the hermite before referred to, and which,—
“Fluttring about his ever-damned hedd,
Awaite whereto their service he applyes,
To aide his friendes, or fray his enemies.”