E

Edwards (Brendan Frederick R.)

University of Saskatchewan, Canada

An Aboriginal intermediary and the written word : Charles A. Cooke (Thawennensere) and Indian affairs in Canada 1893-1926.

Charles A. Cooke (Thawennensere) (1870-1958) was a Mohawk employee of the Department of Indian Affairs of the Government of Canada between 1893 and 1926. In this era there were few Aboriginal people working as public servants within the Canadian federal government, and if Cooke accomplished nothing else he would be noteworthy for this reason alone. Cooke, who was born on the Oka Reserve in Kanasatake, Québec, worked for more than thirty years as a records clerk within the Department of Indian Affairs. Throughout m ost of his tenure, he labored under the celebrated “Confederation Poet,” Duncan Campbell S cott, who w as also the highly contentious head of Indian Affairs. Although widely celebrated as a poet in his day, Scott has been characterized by contemporary historians as having demonstrated a “narrow vision” in his leadership of the department and as a representative of the Government of Canada to the Indians. Cooke’s involvement with the Department as a records clerk included efforts to organise a library, manage its record s, and effectively collect works relating to Aboriginal people in Canada for the research uses of de partmental employees and Indians themselves. In 1900, Cooke compiled and edited a short-lived Mohawk language newspaper entitled Onkweonwe, which solicited contributions from Mohawk people from throughout the provinces of Québec and Ontario, and New York state. In 1904 Cooke proposed that the department establish an “Indian National L ibrary,” recognising that a great deal of knowledge and records were “in the possession of bands scattered thro ughout the Dominion, and others ... published in book form, issued in small editions, and having a limited circulation, and so are gradually lost to succeeding generations.” In addition to these literary efforts, Cooke worked throughout much of his life to compile an historical dictionary of the Iroquoian language which he completed in the 1950s with the assistance of the influential Canadian anthropologist, Marius Barbeau. To date little atte ntion has been paid to the efforts of Charle s A. Cooke. He stands as only one example of an Aboriginal p erson in the e arly twe ntieth century who articulated the western written word as a means of communicating and interacting with his own people and the larger Euro-Canadian society. Cooke promoted his lite rary ideas and used print as a means of articulating Aboriginal resistance to, and input into, federal policies designed to administer the affairs of Indian people in Canada. The history of writi ng by Aboriginal people in Canada has gone largely untold, particularly within the contexts of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Cooke was following the traditio n of other Aboriginal writers (within a western understanding of “writing”) who emerged in North America, largely i n the early nineteenth century, and ad apted western print culture to suit their own political and cultural purposes.

Brendan Frederick R. Edwards holds a Master of Library and Information Studies degree from McGill University, Montréal, Québec, and a Master of Arts degree from Trent University, Peterborough, Ontario. He is currently a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at the University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. He is the author of Paper Talk: print culture and Aboriginal people in Canada before 1960 (Scarecrow Press, forthcoming), and a short article for volume III of The History of the Book in Canada, entitled “R eading on the Rez: print culture and Aboriginal p eople in the twentie th century” (University o f Toronto Press, forthcoming).

Eggert (Paul)

University of New South Wales at the Australian Defence Force Academy, Canberra, Australia

The author and the production team : anatomy of a Booker-Prize winner.

The paper is an attempt to bring book history into the present. It is about the Booker Prize winner for 2001, Peter Carey's True History of the Kelly Gang. It analyses the relationship between Carey and his editor at Knopf, Gary Fisketjon, as well as the relationship between his Australian and US publishers. The historical background is this: From early in the twentieth century, following the recruitment of the USA to an international system of copyright in the 1890s, a problem emerged for authors and publishers of serious literature: the need for, yet the impossibility that, simultaneous production of first editions in New York and London, not to speak of magazine serialisations scheduled to finish just as the first editions were appearing, would result in the production of identical texts. This problem largely went unnoticed in the general readership, although many publishers, in-house editors and printshop supervisors cannot have been unaware of it. The problem came to light increasingly from the 1980s as large-scale scholarly edition projects, supported by university presses and research funding bodies, began to investigate the production histories of the works of such early twentieth-century masters as D. H. Lawrence and Joseph Conrad.

This paper compares the production of a Booker Prize-winning novel, Peter Carey's True History of the Kelly Gang (2000). It was one of the last significant works of literature to appear in a century that had seen remarkable advances in the technology of book production: from the early-century monotype machines that replaced the setting of type by hand, to photolithographic offset printing from mid-century, to increasingly sophisticated computer typesetting from the 1970s, and then to the remarkable advances in the capacities, versatility and speed of printing presses as computer technologies were harnessed. While the production of Carey's novel inherited these advances and manifests many of them, it also turns out to prove how little has changed. There are two aspects to this. One is the role of the production team in determining a great many details of the packaging, presentation and even the wording of an author's text: that is, achieved texts are collaborative. They present works and they are commodities. The other has to do with the intractable problem of achieving simultaneous production of two identical editions: that is, the texts of a work are never the same.

Paul Eggert is Professor of English and Director of the Australian Scholarly Editions Centre, University of New South Wales at the Australian Defence Force Academy, Canberra. He has edited titles in the Cambridge UP Works of D. H. Lawrence and also in the Academy Editions of Australian Literature series, of which he is general editor. He also co-edited the collection, The Editorial Gaze (1998) and is a fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.

Eliot (Simon)

University of Reading

What price poetry ? Selling Wordsworth, Tennyson and Longfellow in 19th- and early 20th- century Britain.

Unlike fiction, there was no set of standard prices at which poetry was sold in the UK in the nineteenth century. Similarly, unlike the three-decker novel or the railway novel, there was no standard length or format for published poetry. Add these facts to the generally accepted truth that, as the nineteenth century wore on, poetry became progressively more difficult to publish profitably, and you have a situation in which publishers of poetry had constantly to experiment with format, title and price in order to sell in large enough quantities to make a profit. Pricing was a delicate and flexible matter for Victorian publishers, and exactly the same text was commonly offered at two or three different prices at the same time according to binding or the quality of paper used. This paper will take three very different poets, two British and one American (Wordsworth, Tennyson and Longfellow), and look at the ways in which a variety of publishers priced and packaged their work in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As part of the paper will be looking at the way American texts were treated by publishers in the UK, it could be said to contribute to the ‘Crossing Borders’ theme of the conference.

The paper will also describe the various ways in which copyright legislation, or its lack in the case of Longfellow in Britain, affected the way in which the poets were sold into the market. Under the 1842 Copyright Act, Wordsworth’s copyrights began to lapse from 1857, and from 1899 Tennyson’s earlier works began to suffer the same fate. The paper will illustrate the dramatic change in pricing structure and range of issuing publishers that this move into the public domain precipitated.

There was, however, also an up-side to selling poetry in the late nineteenth century. If the poet’s reputation survived relatively intact, then the poetry could later be re-marketed both as canonical literature (in the ‘hundred best books’ tradition) and, trading on that newly-found status, as school text books. Later Victorian publishers loved named series, and the publishing history of all three poets illustrates the way in which series became a major marketing tool after 1900 for both English and American poetry within the British market.

The research is based on a careful survey and analysis of the English Catalogue between 1801 and 1905 and will be illustrated by graphs. For this reason an overhead projector will be required.

Simon Eliot is Professor of Publishing and Printing History at the University of Reading and Director of the University’s Centre for Writing, Publishing and Printing History. He is also Deputy Director of the Centre for Manuscript and Print Studies at the University of London.

Round table: Writing international book history : a Plenary session on International Book History : ‘The international history of popular fiction 1850-1950’, Tuesday 20 July, 15:30-17:00

There have been a number of conferences (in particular the ‘Sherbrooke-Prato’ series), and quite a few discussions, on the matter of how we go about studying the international history of the book. In one sense, of course, the book – being something that has moved across borders almost since it was invented – has always been international. However, a study in which the focus is on the movement of texts and graphics (whether in material form or as copyrights) across nations and continents, and their subsequent adaptations to new environments, is a novel and exciting prospect.

As part of the Sherbrooke-Prato series there is to be a Symposium in London 12-14 July 2004 on the subject of ‘The History of the Book and Literary Cultures’. This is therefore the ideal time to run a 1.5 hour plenary session during the SHARP conference on ‘The International History of the Book’. The aim would be a highly practical one: to sketch out how we move from rather abstract speculations about international book history to a proposal for a real research project. For this reason the invited participants would focus on one aspect of the subject, namely ‘The international history of popular fiction 1850-1950’

The structure would be as follows: there would be six 10-minute presentations by scholars from different countries on the various ways in which this subject is being, or could be, approached. The last half-hour would consist of comments and questions from the floor, the panel of speakers then acting as a ‘Brains Trust’. We hope that out of this meeting would emerge a resolution to move towards the setting up of some form of international research project.

The provisional list of speakers is as follows :

Chair: Simon Eliot

Carol Armbruster, ‘Translating the French for Popular American Consumption. The Late Nineteenth Century.’

Marie-François Cachin, ‘Translating, publishing and promoting British popular fiction in France’.

Robert Fraser, ‘The Reception of Imperial Adventure Fiction in Africa’.

Abhijit Gupta, ‘From Farce to Fiction: Popular Genres in Colonial Bengal’.

Jean-Yves Mollier, ‘Les vecteurs de la diffusion de la littérature populaire : journaux, livres...’[Newspapers, books... the systems that contribute to the spreading of popular fiction.]

Sydney Shep, ‘Buy Local, Read Global: Trafficking in Popular Fiction.’