The Book to Come: Literary Advertising and the Poetics of the Prospectus

Chapter 11 The Book to Come: Literary Advertising and the Poetics of the Prospectus

David Duff

An important but often overlooked part of the ‘communications circuit’ stud- ied by book historians is the prospectus, a marketing device widely used in the book trade of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.1 A prospectus was a type of printed advertisement for a projected book, book series, periodi- cal, or other publishing venture, circulated prior to publication in order to at- tract readers and obtain advance orders and sometimes prepayment. Prospec- tuses played a key role in subscription publishing, a method of publication used for most periodicals and for certain types of book, especially expensive, illustrated books and multi-volume books or book series such as collected edi- tions, encyclopædias, and anthologies. Typically, a prospectus described both the intellectual content of the work and the physical form of it, explaining the rationale for publication and offering information about format, typeface, paper quality, binding (if used), pricing, where the order could be placed, and how and when it would be delivered, these transactional details often appear- ing in a sub-headed ‘Conditions of Sale’ section. Sometimes one or more specimen pages were included and the prospectus was printed in the same format as the work it announced, making it a physical sample of the work as well as an abstract description of it.2 If an order was placed, the prospectus became in effect a contract of sale and might even be used as a receipt, some prospectuses carrying a blank space where the subscriber’s name could be added alongside a signature from the author to authenticate the order and confirm payment had been taken.3

1 For the ‘communications circuit,’ see Robert Darnton, “What is the History of Books?” Daeda- lus 111.3 (1982): 65–83, 69. 2 See, for example, “Prospectus of a New and Superb Edition of the British Classics … with bio- graphical and critical essays, by Nathan Drake,” (London: John Clarke, 1803), which states: “As the most correct mode of advertisement for the information of the Public, this Prospectus has been thrown as nearly as possible into the form of the proposed work itself, with regard to SIZE, PAPER, TYPE, and ENGRAVINGS.” For specimen pages, see David Duff, “Literary Sampling and the Poetics of the Specimen,” Studies in Romanticism 59.1 (2020): 109–32. 3 An example is the one-page prospectus (entitled “Proposals for printing by subscription”) for Helen Maria Williams’s Poems (London: Thomas Cadell, 1786). The British Library copy has

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A prospectus could come in any format and range from a single page to eight, twelve, or even more pages; but a typical length was four pages, and a typical format, octavo. Prospectuses were free-standing pamphlets, distinct from other forms of advertising such as newspaper advertisements, publishers’ catalogues, and end-page advertisements, all of which were used in this peri- od.4 Prospectuses would be sent to booksellers, librarians, and individuals, and distributed – usually gratis – at public places such as coffee houses and booksellers’ shops (the same channels used since the late seventeenth century for Term Catalogues and sales catalogues for art auctions).5 They were also inserted into newspapers and journals, either loose-leaf or stitched in. Issues of journals such as the Quarterly Review contained many pages of inserted prospectuses and other advertising announcements (in a variety of paper formats) next to the text proper, and a London magazine article from 1821 notes how “new prospectuses, teeming with great things, are dropping every morning from the newspapers.”6 Alternatively, the text of a prospectus (or an abbrevi- ated version of it) could be reproduced in the classified columns of a newspaper. Some publishers and booksellers had national networks of agents who toured the country distributing catalogues and prospectuses. Often, though, it was authors themselves who distributed the prospectuses and received the orders; and authors who frequently wrote the prospectuses, as writers today often draft their own jacket ‘blurb’ (a genre partly descended from the prospectus).7

Williams’s autograph signature and a blank space for the subscriber’s name; two otherwise identical copies in the Pforzheimer Collection in the New York Public Library carry the names of subscribers (respectively “Miss Rashleigh” and “Rich.d Richards Esq.r”) in Wil- liams’s hand, in addition to her own signature. The names duly appear in the list of subscribers prefixed to the first volume of the 1786 publication. 4 James Raven, The Business of Books: Booksellers and the English Book Trade 1450–1850 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007) 283. 5 See Raven, Business of Books 157–58; Brian Cowan, “Arenas of Connoisseurship: Auctioning Art in Later Stuart England,” Art Markets in Europe, 1400–1800, ed. Michael North and David Ormrod (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998) 153–66, 158); Brian Cowan, The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the British Coffeehouse (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005) 135–37. 6 William Frederick Deacon, Gold’s London Magazine (Jan. 1821) 51, quoted by David Stewart, Romantic Magazines and Metropolitan Literary Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2010) 1. 7 Alan Powers, “From Protection to Promotion: The Uses of the Book Jacket,” Books for Sale: The Advertising and Promotion of Print since the Fifteenth Century, ed. Robin Myers, Michael Har- ris, and Giles Mandelbrote (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press; London: British Library, 2009) 123–44, 135. See also G. Thomas Tanselle, Book-Jackets: Their History, Forms, and Use (Charlot- tesville: Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia, 2011); and Abigail Williams, “Blurbs,” Book Parts, ed. Dennis Duncan and Adam Smyth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019) 287–99.