10 A Risk-bearing Author Maynard Keynes and his publishers1 D. E. Moggridge For historians of economics, the Macmillan archive is a relatively unexploited treasure.It is a treasure because Macmillan published most of the leading English economists writing during the period of the initial archive:Henry Fawcett,William Stanley Jevons,Herbert Somerton Foxwell,Henry Sidgwick, Alfred Marshall, John Neville Keynes, John Shield Nicholson, J. A.Hobson, A.C.Pigou and John Maynard Keynes.2 It is relatively unexploited in that, except forsome studies of Jevons, Marshall and Maynard Keynes, historians of economics havenot used it.3 John Maynard Keynes’s relationship with Macmillan was unusual in several respects, and certainly very different from those of both his pre- decessors and contemporaries. For his own work, he dealt with five English-language publishers during his career: Cambridge University Press, Harcourt Brace, the Hogarth Press, Macmillan, and the New Republic.4 He signed his first contract with Cambridge, but, in the end, published only his last book with them – an edition of An Abstract of a Treatise on Human Nature 1740: a pamphlet hitherto unknown by David Hume (1938), which he edited with Piero Sraffa. He published three pamphlets with the Hogarth Press: The Economic Consequences of Mr Churchill (1925), A Short View of Russia (1925) and The End of Laissez Faire (1926). Only the first of these, whose 10,000 copies at short notice obviously disrupted her life, is recorded in Virginia Woolf’s Diary, but both the first and last received brief mention in her letters.5 The New Republic published a combined American edition of the last two 218 E. James (ed.), Macmillan: A Publishing Tradition © Elizabeth James 2002 A Risk-bearing Author 219 pamphlets under the title Laissez Faire and Communism; otherwise, with the exception of A Treatise on Probability (1921), handled by Macmillan’s American house, Harcourt Brace acted as his American publisher.6 In Britain, except for his 1929 pamphlet (with Hubert Henderson) Can Lloyd George Do It?, Keynes channelled all his remaining publications through Macmillan – who also published the Economic Journal which Keynes edited from 1912 to 1945, and various other publications of the Royal Economic Society of which he was secretary from 1913 to 1945. Keynes’s first contacts with the Macmillans came while he was at Eton, where Daniel Macmillan was in the Election behind Maynard and a close friend (indeed, if we are to believe Keynes’s record of his sexual activity, they were experimental lovers in Keynes’s final year7). They remained friends, regularly exchanging visits, after Keynes left Eton for King’s College, Cambridge, and Dan went on to Balliol College, Oxford. Thus it was not surprising that in August 1910 he began reviewing manuscripts for the firm, nor that Macmillan suggested he try his hand at an economics textbook. Keynes replied somewhat cautiously: Many thanks for your suggestion that I should write some day an economic textbook. Eventually I hope I may:- but an elementary book is almost entirely a matter of exposition, and I feel that I want much more experience in teaching over the whole field of the subject before I can know what the right matter of exposition is. I am delivering some lectures next year, both in Cambridge and London, on Indian Trade and Finance; and I have some thought of making them into a small book, if they turn out well. But they would not be elementary. Perhaps I might write you about them at some future time, if I find them, when they are written, worth publishing.8 There matters rested for the moment. Earlier that year Cambridge University Press had agreed to publish Keynes’s revised fellowship dissertation for King’s College, Cambridge, A Treatise on Probability.9 In September 1912, with a substantial amount of manuscript in hand and a request from Keynes to provide proofs for what existed, the Press realised that the book would be much longer (420 rather than 320 pages) than envisaged. As it anticipated a larger loss (£110 rather than £80) the Press asked the author to advance £30 towards the costs of the book on publication – that £30 being the first charge on any profits. It also asked for the whole copy before sending any of it to the printer.10 Faced with these demands, Keynes wrote to 220 Macmillan: A Publishing Tradition M. R. James, the Provost of King’s and chair of the Syndics, complaining that he was expected ‘to put myself in a position of greater risk than the Press of losing money on the book, but am refused all information by which I can judge of the risk I am asked to run’, and requesting, finally, to be released from his contract with the Press.11 Once freed, he took both Probability and a project tentatively entitled ‘Monetary Affairs of India’ to Macmillan on a half-profits basis.12 Indian Currency and Finance – the title eventually chosen for this, his first book – appeared on 6 June 1913, the day after Keynes’s thirtieth birthday and a month after he had attended his first meeting as a member of the Royal Commission on Indian Finance and Currency.It was followed by the anonymously edited England’s Financial Supremacy (1917), a translation of German articles on British finance prepared jointly with Dudley Ward. However, Keynes’s relationship with the firm changed significantly with the publication in 1919 of the work that made him a household name, The Economic Consequences of the Peace. Keynes had resigned from the Treasury over the Treaty of Versailles on 5 June 1919. At the urging of General Smuts that he write a ‘clear connected account of what the financial and economic clauses of the Treaty actually are and mean and what their probable results will be’,13 Keynes began his book at Vanessa Bell’s and Duncan Grant’s Sussex farmhouse, Charleston, on 23 June. He offered the work on 26 July to Daniel Macmillan, who accepted on the firm’s ‘usual terms’ two days later, also agreeing to ask the New York office how many copies they would take. Macmillan was clearly thinking in terms of a print-run of 1,000 copies, whereas Keynes had a much more substantial figure of 5,000 in mind. It was George Macmillan, standing in for the holidaying Dan, who agreed to obtain an estimate for 5,000, while expressing the opinion that it was still probably not worth printing an American edition, and briskly reminding Keynes that if he didn’t like Macmillan’s American arrangements he could go elsewhere.14 With George Macmillan’s estimate of 18 August to hand, Keynes calculated the available profits on a printing of 5,000 in various bindings and at various prices.15 As a result, the basis of the author–publisher relationship was transformed. Keynes would hereafter publish on commission: he would pay the costs of production; Macmillan would receive a commission of 10 per cent on those costs (printing, paper, binding, advertising and so on), as well as 10 per cent on the net amount received from sales. Keynes would keep any remaining profits.16 Desultory discussions on an American edition continued for a time with William Macmillan,17 but there the position was also transformed through the intervention of Felix A Risk-bearing Author 221 Frankfurter, Professor of Law at Harvard (with whom Keynes dined on 25 August) and the influential American journalist, Walter Lippmann: on 2 October 1919 Harcourt Brace agreed to produce and publish the book in the United States on a royalty basis.18 The rest, as they say, was ‘history’: the book was an outstanding publishing success, selling 60,000 copies in Britain and the United States in its first two months. Furthermore, he also received $6,947.37 from Harcourt Brace in March and $5,025 in September.19 It was just as well, as Keynes needed advances on his profits to help bail himself out of the disastrous consequences of his currency speculations in May 1920.20 Keynes’s post-1919 arrangement with Macmillan meant that he had much more control over all aspects of production, pricing and publicity. For example, in August 1920 he and Harold Macmillan argued over the production costs and possible returns from a cheap edition of Economic Consequences ‘on inferior paper and with paper-board binding’.21 At the same time, he tried on the idea of ‘a definitive, revised library edition’ which would include ‘any corrections which the passage of time has made necessary and also probably a postscript giving my views on what has happened since I wrote’.22 On 15 June 1921, in connection with the forthcoming publication of A Treatise on Probability (1921), he asked for a list of review copies so that ‘he could then make additions & omissions’.23 Three months earlier he had revised the 1912 arrangement with Macmillan covering Probability, partly because he wanted a price lower than the profit maximising one, and partly because he wanted to circulate galley proofs (and correct them without worrying about the allocation of costs), the way other authors circulated typescripts or (later) photocopies.24 In 1936, Keynes’s arrangement with Macmillan meant that his most significant work, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, could appear at a price of five shillings, well below the price of similarly sized books, such as Joan Robinson’s Economics of Imperfect Competition (1933) which appeared at 12s.6d. for 352 pages, or Lionel Robbins’s The Great Depression (1934) which cost 8s. 6d. for 238 pages.