The Author's Due : Printing and the Prehistory of Copyright

I am grateful for occasions to present early versions of portions of this book to The English Institute; to the English Departments at Brown University, the University of Alabama (where I enjoyed the special intellectual hospitality of David Miller), and the University of California at Irvine; and to the participants at Martha Woodmansee and Peter Jaszi's seminal 1991 conference on intellectual property at Case Western Reserve (where discussions with Mark Rose, Margreta de Grazia, and Jeff Masten proved especially helpful) and to Erica Sheen and Lorna Hutson's conference on early modern law and literature at Cambridge University. Valuable as these occasions were, presentations at one's home institution put a scholar's work under more strenuous pressure, so I'm especially grateful to Washington University, where colleagues in the intellectual property group of the Economics Department, in the History Department, in my own English Department, and in the early modern dissertation seminar have offered warm audiences and vigorous challenges. I should single out Steven Zwicker, Derek Hirst, George Pepe, Wayne Fields, and Mary Bly: they asked the hardest questions. Several students have ix x acknowledgments helped me with this book, and their questions were challenging, too: Theresa Everline, Lisa Pon, and Christiane Auston in the early stages; and, later, crucially, Kevin J. Kalish and Chris D'Addario. I wonder if it's not the case that the longer the book, the more unfinished it feels. It becomes a report on continuing meditations and, best, ongoing conversations. (In my own case, the most important ongoing conversations are with Richard Halpern, Jon Haynes, Rosemary Kegl, Chris Kendrick, and, above all, Lynne Tatlock. The Author's Due offers an institutional and cultural history of books, the book trade, and the bibliographic ego. Joseph Loewenstein traces the emergence of possessive authorship from the establishment of a printing industry in England to the passage of the 1710 Statute of Anne, which provided the legal underpinnings for modern copyright. Along the way he demonstrates that the culture of books, including the idea of the author, is intimately tied to the practical trade of publishing those books. As Loewenstein shows, copyright is a form of monopoly that developed alongside a range of related protections such as commercial trusts, manufacturing patents, and censorship, and cannot be understood apart from them. The regulation of the press pitted competing interests and rival monopolistic structures against one another—guildmembers and nonprofessionals, printers and booksellers, authors and publishers. These struggles, in turn, crucially shaped the literary and intellectual practices of early modern authors, as well as early capitalist economic organization. With its probing look at the origins of modern copyright, The Author's Due will prove to be a watershed for historians, literary critics, and legal scholars alike. An introduction to bibliographical politics The reformation of the press : patent, copyright, piracy Monopolies commercial and doctrinal Ingenuity and the mercantile muse Monopolizing culture : two case studies Personality and print : the genetics of intellectual property Milton's talent : the emergence of authorial copyright Authentic reproductions. This work offers an institutional and cultural history of books, the book trade, and the bibliographic ego. With a probing look at the origins of modern copyright, Loewenstein also demonstrates that the culture of books is intimately tied to the practical trade of publishing.