Loewenstein 2002

An Introduction to Bibliographical Politics

Statute of Anne: first English copyright law; however, case law interpreting it transforms it into a clarification of the nature of common law (13); concerned with manufacturers, not authors, of books

1557, London Stationers' Company has crown-sanctioned monopoly over all printing, sustained through series of Licensing Acts in c17

1694, monopoly allowed to lapse; Commons ignored petitions from printers/publishers (had anti-monopolist stance); publishers began casting their appeal as being on behalf of authors

1710, bill says "the Author of any Book or Books and his Assignee or Assigns, shall have the sole Liberty of printing and reprinting such Book or Books for the Term of 14 yrs" from the date of 1st publication ; success in claims of infringement depended on registration; after 14 years, right returns to author for another 14 if he/she is still alive (14)

real property vs. literary property, values shifting (16)

Donaldson v. Becket; Statute of Anne "was found to be the preeminent source of authorial protection: even if it were granted that an author had property rights at cmomon law in his or her published work, the Statute of Anne was found to have taken away those common law rights once and for all" (17); "the idea of 'natural' property was checked by an idea of property as artificial, as the product of deliberate social will" (17)

• what are ideas? and who can own them? we still don't have an answer to this
• "the proceedings yielded a communal concession that property -- all property -- is a social institution, not one of the visibilia of the created universe" (21)

law of intellectual property not necessarily an index of cultural experience of intellectual property (21); "at any given cultural moment the institutions regulating intellectual property may conflict; they suggest, that is, that rival reifications of the cultural status of intellectual property may coexist" (21)

"my purpose is to reproduced not the image of literary property but the imagery of literary property, the political economy of the book as it is traced in law, in commerce, in the behavior of writers and booksellers, and in the rhetoric of books themselves" (22)

"trying to find out what book culture has to do with the book trade" (22); "the book trade is both a significant instance and a significant agent in the transition from feudalism to capitalism" (22) -- modern commodity of capitalist consumers

"more often than not, criticism has (perhaps inevitably) continued to favor the study of literature as a product, and not a producer, of history. The instrumentality of literature stlil remains more asserted than described" (23)

return to New Bibliography -- not "the vestigial bardolatry that permeated their enterprise," but the spirit of their criticism

careful with history -- "inquiry into sequence, cause, and change within literary culture, and it yields multiple origins; my narrative traces an uneven development and a revolution" (25)

The Reformation of the Press: Patent, Copyright, Piracy

three institutions for regulating Elizabethan press:

• "statutory and censorious, the required royal licensing"
• entrance to Stationers' Company
• registration

"Licensing served the Crown as a mechanism of ideological control, safeguarding England from sedition or heresy; entry served the guild as a mechanism of economic control, safeguarding the stationers from internal hostility and profit-shrinking competition." (29)

case of John Wolfe, recklessly pirating materials outside SR

trajectories that came out of mid-16c piracy:

• at end of 16c, "a shift in power from producer to trader" (38);
• "the unrest of these years brought about a new regulatory drive within the book trade" (38)
• proprietary instability

in sum: "accelerated stratification of the book trade, a concomitant rejuvenation of internal indusrial regulation, and new forms of proprietary instability (provoked by and provoking the regulatory drive)" (42)

"Here, then, is the major institutional effect of the revolt against the printing patent: the rights conferred by entry were consolidated, while the risks of failing to register also increased. The status of guild membership was also bolstered: restrictions on alien printing, and on printing and publishing by nonstationers, were suddenly much more rigorously enforced. At the same time we find the alliance of guild interests with those of the Crown growing stronger, a trend that George Unwin finds among many other Elizabethan guilds, often mediated by a steadily strengthened municipal jurisdiction over guild affairs." (39)

1643 Licensing Act has some recognition of authorial rights (39)

"As assaults on the patent modulate into transgressions of stationer's copyright, modern notions of literary property begin to surface within industrial disputes: the assent of the author becomes one of the anchors of disputed entrance. Author's rights will thus appear as back-formations within the development of industrial copyright." (44)

identifying particular authors with particular publishers (authors as "brands" publisher puts out) is staple of contemporary literary culture; "Print is the enabling condition of this sort of literary identity. The various literary cursus transmitted by manuscript culture to early modern Europe, the conventions that unite several literary products behind a single auctoritas, receive powerful reinforcement by print culture, for individual works look a great deal like one another under the homogenizing influence of typography. when the identity, the singularity, of an author like Sidney is given the visual support of a printer's house style across a range of distinct authorial products, the nature of the literary cursus is massively transformed." (48) -- "bibliography underwrites the unity of the writing" (48)

"This consolidation of the authorship in a typographically and commercially 7unified object -- one of the distinguishing features of what is someetiems called, not too carefully, the commodification of authorship -- is not, of course, the singular achievement of Ponsonby. When, in the 1580s, Wolfe made himself Alberico and Scipio Gentili's regular publisher and printer, he was not only cultivating a particular and distinguishing 'line' of books, he was conferring on both brothers typographic and commercial identities peculiarly public and peculiarly stabilizing. Even this is not entirely an innovation. Printers had long cultivated stable relationships with particular scholars, employing them as editors or press correctors -- one thinks of Aldus's relations with Erasmus, or Wolfe's relations with Petruccio Ubaldini, his proofreader for Italian books and the author of several histories issued by Wolfe in Italian -- and although it is a small step from resident editor to house author in temrs of the organization of a working print shop, this small step helped produce one of the most important of modern transformations in the sociology of authorship." (48)

Ingenuity and the Mercantile Muse: Authorship and the History of the Patent

"The narrative of Jonson's career in England's public and published sphere is a constant scramble for vantage, from theater to press, from theater to banqueting house, from banqueting house to press, from quarto to folio -- all of which can be described as a constant flight from publicity to privacy." (93)