Furious Booksellers: The "American Copy" of the Waverley Novels and the Language of the Book Trade

This essay explores the trans-Atlantic book trade through a case study on the publication of Walter Scott's Waverley novels. The Waverley novels were printed in Edinburgh but distributed mostly in London, where publishers from Philadelphia initially acquired them for reprinting and sale in the...

Full description

Saved in:

Bibliographic Details
Published in:	Early American studies 2013-10, Vol.11 (3), p.557-582, Article 557-582
Main Author:	REZEK, JOSEPH
Format:	Article
Language:	eng
Subjects:	1760-1839 1800-1899 19th century Advance sheets Alliances American literature American studies Book publishing Booksellers and bookselling Bookstores British & Irish literature British literature Carey, Mathew Drama editions Grammatical agreement Great Britain History Language Literary criticism Literary history Literature publishing novel Novels Philadelphia Printing publishing Publishing industry Rhetoric Scott, Sir Walter Scott, Walter Scott, Walter (1771-1832) Scottish literature United States Waverley novels
Online Access:	Get full text
Tags:	Add Tag No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!

Description
Summary:	This essay explores the trans-Atlantic book trade through a case study on the publication of Walter Scott's Waverley novels. The Waverley novels were printed in Edinburgh but distributed mostly in London, where publishers from Philadelphia initially acquired them for reprinting and sale in the United States. Mathew Carey and his son Henry became Scott's most important American publishers by establishing a direct agreement with his Edinburgh publisher, Archibald Constable. Their agreement involved purchasing advance sheets of the novels before official publication. This essay demonstrates that the power and pressures of the London marketplace for books affected the transmission of the "American Copy" of the Waverley novels, and that the trans-Atlantic publication of Scott was a heated emotional business full of volatile misunderstandings between booksellers and startling anomalies in the printing process itself. This essay reconstructs this story, and it argues that the language of the book trade—as employed in written correspondence, public prints, and the Waverley novels themselves—must be closely analyzed to understand the challenges of provincial publishing in the period.
ISSN:	1543-4273 1559-0895 1559-0895