A similar word may be given in regard to the forms utilised for certain terms or names which have become familiarised with our English speech. My most captious critic stated, for instance, very flatly that my spelling of “Piræus” was “neither Latin, Greek, nor English.” I can only explain that the name is so spelled in the latest edition of Lippincott’s Gazetteer, and for such casual references as I had occasion to make, I had considered this work a sufficiently trustworthy authority for the spelling of a name which has found place in English narrative.
The same critic saw fit to assume that, because I had used a German editor’s paraphrase in Latin of some saying of Suidas, I had imagined that this author had written in Latin; oblivious of the fact that, a few pages farther on, I had made specific references to the various writings of Suidas in Greek.
I refer to these details not because they are in themselves of any continued importance, but simply as examples of what struck me as disproportioned textual or verbal criticism of a volume which made no claims to textual authority. The text ought of course to have been correct, and it was certainly the case that some inexcusable errors had crept into it. Regrettable as these errors were, however, they did not as a fact affect the main theme of the essay or sketch. It is assuredly in order for a reviewer to call attention to any such oversights, but the reviewer who devotes the substance of the space at his command to a list of typographical errors or oversights, and who has hardly a word to say concerning the purpose of a book, or the extent to which such purpose has been carried out, loses sight, I think, of the real function of reviewing. He may make a good show of infallibility, or of authoritative knowledge, for himself or for his journal, but he certainly fails to give what the reader is entitled to expect, a just and well proportioned impression of the work under consideration.
Since the publication of the first edition, the larger work, as an introduction to which this essay was planned, Books and Their Makers in the Middle Ages, has been brought before the public, and has been received with a very satisfactory measure of appreciation. The readers of this last have occasionally raised question concerning a lack of harmony of design or of uniformity of method between the two books. It is in order therefore again to explain that they were never intended to serve as two sections of a continuous narrative. The record of the making and distribution of books during the centuries after 476, I have attempted to present with a certain degree of comprehensiveness; but for classic times, there are no materials available for any complete or comprehensive record. The sketch presented by me is, as stated, based upon a few references to literary methods which are scattered through the writings of classic authors. A much more comprehensive study of the conditions of literary production among the ancients could very easily, however, be prepared by a student who possessed the requisite familiarity with the literature of the time, and who was sufficiently free from limitations as to eyesight to be able to trace and to verify his quotations for himself, and I trust that some competent scholar may yet interest himself in producing such a treatise.
New York, June 15, 1896.
PREFACE.
The following pages, as originally written, were planned to form a preliminary chapter, or general introduction, to a history of the origin and development of property in literature, a subject in which I have for some time interested myself. The progress of the history has, however, been so seriously hampered by engrossing business cares, and also by an increasing necessity for economizing eyesight, that the date of its completion remains very uncertain. I do not relinquish the hope of being able to place before the public (or at least of that small portion of the public which may be interested in the subject) at some future date, the work as first planned, which shall present a sketch of the development of property in literature from the invention of printing to the present day, but I have decided to publish in a separate volume this preliminary study of the literary conditions which obtained in ancient times.
In the stricter and more modern sense of the term, literary property stands for an ownership in a specific literary form given to certain ideas, for the right to control such particular form of expression of these ideas, and for the right to multiply and to dispose of copies of such form of expression. In this immaterial signification, the term literary property is practically synonymous with la propriété intellectuelle, or das geistige Eigenthum.
It is proper to say at the outset that in this sense of the term, no such thing as literary property can be said to have come into existence in ancient times, or in fact until some considerable period had elapsed after the invention of printing. The books first produced, after 1450, from the presses of Gutenberg and Fust and by their immediate successors, were the Latin versions of the Bible, editions of certain of the writings of Cicero and of other Latin authors, and a few other works which, if not all dating back to Classic periods, were, with hardly an exception, the works of writers who had been dead for many generations.