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Nesta (Frederick N.)

University of Wales, Aberystwyth

The commerce of literature : Gissing and international copyright.

George Gissing (1857-1903), famously remembered as the author of New Grub Street and The Odd Women, published his major novels between 1880 and 1903, a period that saw a time of sweeping change in the commerce of literature. The Education Act of 1870 in England, the Berne Convention of 1886, the American copyright act of 1891, the end of the three-volume novel in England, the growth of public libraries in England, the rise of the literary agent, and developments in communications and commerce all contributed to changes in publishing that are well illustrated in the correspondence and records Gissing left behind. The proposed session will look at some of the changes that occurred during the period of George Gissing’s publishing career. There will be three papers, all of which fit into the conference theme of ‘Crossing Borders’. Two of the papers will deal with international borders and the effect of copyright and translations. The paper on libraries will deal with the crossing of the border between author and reader.

There was a large market for English authors in the English-speaking world that comprised Great Britain, Ireland, Canada, the United States, Australia, India, and the British colonies in Africa and the West Indies. The rights for reprints of English books on the Continent were respected through contractual agreements and the International Copyright Act 1886 and the Berne Convention. After 1886 contracts began to carefully indicate that an author’s sale of his rights would or would not include sales abroad, reflecting not only the new copyright law but also the growing international publishing market. The piracy of English books in the United States was common, as it was not until 1891 that the American Chace Act gave foreign authors copyright protection for any work they published in America. Prior to the Chace Act, rights to sell or publish Gissing’s novels in the United States were sold for token amounts. In 1888 Smith, Elder, Gissing’s publishers sold the rights of Gissing’s A Life’s Morning along with early sheets and stereotypes to Lippincott in Philadelphia for £60. In 1889 Smith, Elder sold the rights to The Nether World to Harpers for £15. With the passage of the copyright act, Gissing’s works not only had a ten-fold increase in value but also necessitated the hiring of literary agents to negotiate American sales that had become as profitable to the author as his domestic sales.

Frederick Nesta is a postgraduate student at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, and Director of Saint Peter’s College Libraries, Jersey City, New Jersey, USA. His PhD thesis, The Commerce of Literature: George Gissing and Victorian Publishing, 1880-1903, examines the economic aspects of late Victorian publishing. Mr Nesta has published articles on the future of libraries, wrote for WebNet Journal on libraries and technology, and most recently contributed a chapter to Musings, Meanderings, and Monsters, too: Essays on Academic Librarianship.

Nichols (Caroline)

College of William & Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia

Objects of affection : antebellum gift books and the emergence of the modern Christmas holiday.

The only gift is a portion of thyself. Thou must bleed for me. Therefore the poet brings his poem; the shepherd, his lamb; the farmer, corn; the miner, a gem; the sailor, coral and shells; the painter, his picture; the girl, a handkerchief of her own sewing. This is right and pleasing, for it restores society in so far to its primary basis, when a man's biography is conveyed in his gift, and every man's wealth is an index of his merit. But it is a cold, lifeless business when you go to the shops to buy me something, which does not represent your life and talent, but a goldsmith's. (Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Gifts” )

In a society both “committed to laissez-faire capitalism and disturbed by its consequences,” middle-class Americans in the early nineteenth century often articulated their ambivalence about capitalism’s expansion in terms of the family. The discourse of separate spheres, which gave voice to much of this anxiety, built a rhetorical fence around the conjugal family in an effort to protect it against the intrusion of pecuniary values. Emerson’s ideal, a gift of self free from the taint of the market, fit perfectly with this compartmentalized view of the world. Yet, while many contemporary readers would have shared Emerson’s sentiments, fewer would follow his advice when it came time to exchange their own tokens of affection. Over the course of the antebellum period, the bourgeoisie became increasingly enmeshed in the expanding consumer culture and gradually came to accept store-bought gifts as appropriate expressions of intimate relationships.

One critical component of this process is the otherwise unassuming gift book. These luxurious volumes filled with poetry, prose and highly fashionable steel engravings known as “embellishments,” became a hallmark of the antebellum Christmas season. At the height of the craze (1846-1852), holiday shoppers could choose from 60 different titles on average. The genre was so successful that more than 250 firms entered the trade, resulting in over 1,000 editions. What was so appealing about this formula that antebellum readers not only purchased gift books by the thousands, but also deemed them ideal gifts for family members and close friends?

While a number of trends contributed to the gift book fad, which my paper addresses briefly, its rise can only be fully understood in relation to the modern Christmas holiday. The generation that refashioned Christmas into a domestic holiday celebrating the distinctive values of the family embraced the gift book because it promised to combat, or at least camouflage, the market’s intrusion into the private sphere. Instead, the holiday’s increasing emphasis on gift giving embedded commodity consumption into the process of constituting familial subjects. Because the same set of concerns fueled both the new Christmas and the gift book craze, my paper positions the gift book at the nexus of these seemingly contradictory trends—bourgeois fears about the home’s corruption by the market and the simultaneous increase in consumption among the same group—to reveal a tangled web of accommodation and resistance characteristic of a capitalistic culture in flux.

Caroline C. Nichols is a doctoral candidate in the American Studies Program at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia

Niles-Maack (Mary)

University of California at Los Angeles Graduate School of Education and Information Studies

American books in France : cultural exchange and Cold War politics.

Large numbers of American books were first imported into France by the Library War Service of American Library Association (ALA) whose goal was to provide reading materials for U.S. troops during World War I. In 1919 when ALA offered to give its 25,000 volume library in Paris to a local board if funds could be raised for its support, both French and American donors responded enthusiastically to the appeal. Set up in 1920 under a bi-national board, the American Library in Paris soon became a mecca for French students, journalists and scholars as well as the American expatriate community that included writers such as Gertrude Stein and Edith Wharton. Despite considerable hardships, the library managed to remain open through the German occupation and after the liberation, it once again became an active literary center. The post-war period also witnessed a renaissance of French interest in the U.S., and brought new readers eager to find works on American science and technology as well as literature and culture. To meet these needs, the library’s nonfiction collections were greatly expanded through a unique partnership with the U.S. government--first with the European Co-operation Administration, and after 1953, with the United States Information Agency (USIA). In addition, USIA set up its own library in Paris, subsidized branch libraries in the provinces, established a book translation program, and made numerous gifts of books to individuals and institutions.

The goal of this study is to analyze the changing role of American books in France from the 1920s through 1960s – when massive budget cuts at USIA curtailed activities and forced the closing of most of the branches set up outside Paris. During the height of the Cold War, when anti-American sentiments were frequently expressed by Parisian intellectuals, there were also numerous French students, scholars, and scientists who were vitally interested in the United States. Drawing on oral interviews as well as archival research in France and the U. S., this study will contribute to understanding American cultural relationships with France, and will offer an assessment of role of books in cultural exchange between the two countries.

Mary Niles Maack is a Professor of Information Studies at the University of California in Los Angeles. She earned her BA degree in history from the University of Illinois in Urbana and her doctorate from Columbia University. In 1982-83 she served as a Fulbright lecturer at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Bibliothèques in France. Since then she has continued her research in comparative studies and is now working on a history of American books in France. Dr. Maack has published two books as well as numerous articles in journals such as Libraries & Culture, Library Trends, Library Quarterly, the Journal of Library and Information Science Education and IFLA Journal. She has lectured in France, Germany, Canada, Algeria, Benin, the Cameroon, Liberia, Nigeria, Tunisia, Senegal and Zambia.

Nuovo (Angela)

Université d’Udine, Italie

The booktrade in 16th-century Italy and Gabriele Giolito's branch system.

The booktrade in sixteenth-century Italy and Gabriele Giolito's branch system

Abstract

The book trade in sixteenth-century Italy was based on a system of branch operations, not fairs as in Germany or in France. Large inter-regional fairs were rare in Italy because shops with all kinds of goods were available in many cities. In fact, the city of Venice could be called 'permanent fair'. Therefore, the most important Italian publishers soon developed a branch system for the distribution and sale of books in the largest cities, which was based on the experience of medieval Italian banks (such as the Medici) whose branch system extended throughout Europe.

This study analyses the main features of the branch system set up by Gabriele Giolito, which began in the 1540s in Naples, Ferrara, Bologna and Padua, where shops were operated for decades as branches of the parent firm in Venice.

Il commercio librario nell'Italia del Cinquecento e il sistema delle filiali di Gabriele Giolito

Il commercio librario nell'Italia del Cinquecento era basato, a livello nazionale, non sul sistema delle fiere, come in Germania o Francia, ma sul sistema delle filiali. Infatti in Italia esistevano poche grosse fiere interregionali, a causa al precoce assestarsi di un sistema urbano di commercio al dettaglio così diffuso che alcune città, come Venezia, poterono essere chiamate 'fiere permanenti'. I maggiori editori italiani svilupparono perciò assai presto un sistema di filiali nella penisola per la distribuzione e vendita dei loro libri nelle città più importanti, seguendo l'esperienza dei banchi medievali (come il Banco Medici) che avevano disseminato loro filiali in tutta Europa.

Gli aspetti salienti del sistema delle filiali nel commercio librario saranno esposti e analizzati attraverso l'esempio della rete dell'editore Gabriele Giolito de' Ferrari, che dagli anni Quaranta include città come Napoli, Ferrara, Bologna e Padova, con l'apertura di durature botteghe tutte soggette alla casa madre di Venezia.

Angela Nuovo teaches Library Science at the University of Udine. She is author of several books on publishing and the booktrade in sixteenth-century Italy, including Alessandro Paganino (1509-1538) (Padua, 1990); Il commercio librario a Ferrara tra XV e XVI secolo. La bottega di Domenico Sivieri (Florence, 1998); Il commercio librario nell’Italia del Rinascimento (Milan, 2003). She set up and maintains a website Il libro antico (http://www.uniud.it/libroantico/).