Shafquat Towheed

Reading in the digital archive

This article provides an overview of recent developments in digitizing nineteenth-century printed and archived material, and argues that while mass digitisation offers incredible opportunities for research and scholarship, it also increases the considerable distance between nineteenth-century reading practices and our own. Digitized content implicitly privileges certain types of reading practice and use which the extant printed material does not.

South Asian writing between the wars: publishers, reviewers, readers

This editorial review essay looks at the culture of publishing and reviewing books about South Asia in Britain in the interwar period.

Negotiating the List: Launching Macmillan’s Colonial Library and Author Contracts

Announced with considerable fanfare in the periodical and trade press, the Macmillan Colonial Library was formally launched on 1 March 1886; Charles Morgan, the firm’s first house historian, noted that the project was apparently launched at the personal instigation of Maurice Macmillan following his honeymoon tour of India, Australia and New Zealand in 1884–5.1 The list issued a relatively modest thirty-four titles in its first twelve months, with fiction comprising the overwhelming majority of titles; as Simon Eliot has observed, this represented a small, but significant proportion of the new titles (156) issued by Macmillan in 1886.2 The firm claimed that the venture was a bold experiment in publishing by providing quality books at low prices for the prime colonial markets, but it is equally evident that Macmillan was intent on capitalising on the weakness of the lending library system in the colonies, and the prospective expansion of both the domain and effectiveness of international copyright law. This expectation was partially satisfied by the passage and ratification of the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works, which was signed on 9 September 1886, and ratified on 5 September 1887. While the extension of a mutually enforceable international copyright law among the signatory nations (including Britain’s colonial possessions) was not a panacea against unauthorised publication, it did substantially decrease the potential loss of revenue from piracy for British authors and publishers.3

Two Paradigms of Literary Production: The Production, Circulation and Legal Status of Rudyard Kipling’s Departmental Ditties and Indian Railway Library Texts

Rudyard Kipling, one of several authors commissioned by the Canadian editor Robert Barr to help launch his new magazine The Idler, gives us his account of how he came to produce his first piece of published writing in ‘My First Book’: So there was built a sort of book, a lean oblong docket, wire-stitched, to imitate a D. O. Government envelope, printed on one side only, bound in brown paper, and secured with red tape. It was addressed to all heads of departments and all Government officials, and among a pile of papers would have deceived a clerk of twenty years’ service. Of these ‘books’ we made some hundreds, and as there was no necessity for advertising, my public being close to my hand, I took reply- postcards, printed the news of the birth of the book on one side, the blank order-form on the other, and posted them up and down the Empire from Aden to Singapore, and from Quetta to Colombo. There was no trade discount, no reckoning twelves as thirteens, no commission, and no credit of any kind whatever. The money came back in poor but honest rupees, and was transferred from the publisher, the left-hand pocket, direct to the author, the right-hand pocket. Every copy sold in a few weeks, and the ratio of expenses to profits, as I remember it, has since prevented my injuring my health by sympathising with publishers who talk of their risks and advertisements.