A Book for All Readers Part 26

Regarding the right of renewal of the term of copyright, it is a significant fact that it is availed of in comparatively few instances, compared with the whole body of publications. Mult.i.tudes of books are published which not only never reach a second edition, but the sale of which does not exhaust more than a small part of the copies printed of the first. In these cases the right of renewal is waived and suffered to lapse, from defect of commercial value in the work protected. In many other cases the right of renewal expires before the author or his a.s.signs bethink them of the privilege secured to them under the law. It results that more than nine-tenths, probably, of all books published are free to any one to print, without reward or royalty to their authors, after a very few years have elapsed. On the other hand, the exclusive right in some publications of considerable commercial value is kept alive far beyond the forty-two years included in the original and the renewal term, by entry of new editions of the work, and securing copyright on the same.

While this method may not protect any of the original work from republication by others, it enables the publishers of the copyright edition to advertise such unauthorized reprints as imperfect, and without the author's or editor's latest revision or additions.

The whole number of entries of copyright in the United States since we became a nation considerably exceeds a million and a half. It may be of interest to give the aggregate number of t.i.tles of publications entered for copyright in each year since the transfer of the entire records to Was.h.i.+ngton in 1870.

COPYRIGHTS REGISTERED IN THE UNITED STATES, 1870-1899.

1870 5,600 1874 16,283 1878 15,798 1871 12,688 1875 14,364 1879 18,125 1872 14,164 1876 14,882 1880 20,686 1873 15,352 1877 15,758 1881 21,075 1882 22,918 1888 38,225 1894 62,762 1883 25,273 1889 40,777 1895 67,572 1884 26,893 1890 42,758 1896 72,470 1885 28,410 1891 48,908 1897 74,321 1886 31,241 1892 54,735 1898 76,874 1887 35,083 1893 58,936 1899 86,492

Total, 30 years, 1,079,445

It will readily be seen that this great number of copyrights does not represent books alone. Many thousands of entries are daily and weekly periodicals claiming copyright protection, in which case they are required by law to make entry of every separate issue. These include a mult.i.tude of journals, literary, political, scientific, religious, pictorial, technical, commercial, agricultural, sporting, dramatic, etc., among which are a number in foreign languages. These entries also embrace all the leading monthly and quarterly magazines and reviews, with many devoted to specialties--as metaphysics, sociology, law, theology, art, finance, education, and the arts and sciences generally. Another large cla.s.s of copyright entries (and the largest next to books and periodicals) is musical compositions, numbering recently some 20,000 publications yearly. Much of this property is valuable, and it is nearly all protected by entry of copyright, coming from all parts of the Union.

There is also a large and constantly increasing number of works of graphic art, comprising engravings, photographs, photogravures, chromos, lithographs, etchings, prints, and drawings, for which copyright is entered. The steady acc.u.mulation of hundreds of thousands of these various pictorial ill.u.s.trations will enable the government at no distant day, without a dollar of expense, to make an exhibit of the progress of the arts of design in America, which will be highly interesting and instructive. An art gallery of ample dimensions for this purpose is provided in the new National Library building.

It remains to consider briefly the principles and practice of what is known as international copyright.

Perhaps there is no argument for copyright at all in the productions of the intellect which is not good for its extension to all countries. The basis of copyright is that all useful labor is worthy of a recompense; but since all human thought when put into material or merchantable form becomes, in a certain sense, public property, the laws of all countries recognize and protect the original owners, or their a.s.signs to whom they may convey the right, in an exclusive privilege for limited terms only.

Literary property therefore is not a natural right, but a conventional one. The author's right to his ma.n.u.script is, indeed, absolute, and the law will protect him in it as fully as it will guard any other property.

But when once put in type and multiplied through the printing-press, his claim to an exclusive right has to be guarded by a special statute, otherwise it is held to be abandoned (like the articles in a newspaper) to the public. This special protection is furnished in nearly all civilized countries by copyright law.

What we call "copyright" is an exclusive right to multiply copies of any publication for sale. Domestic copyright, which is all we formerly had in this country, is limited to the United States. International copyright, which has now been enacted, extends the right of American authors to foreign countries, and recognizes a parallel right of foreign authors in our own. There is nothing in the const.i.tutional provision which restrains Congress from granting copyright to other than American citizens. Patent right, coming under the same clause of the Const.i.tution, has been extended to foreigners. Out of over 20,000 patents annually issued, about 2,500 (or 12 per cent.) are issued to foreigners, while American patents are similarly protected abroad. If we have international patent right, why not international copyright? The grant of power is the same; both patent right and copyright are for a limited time; both rights during this time are exclusive; and both rest upon the broad ground of the promotion of science and the useful arts. If copyright is justifiable at all, if authors are to be secured a reward for their labors, they claim that all who use them should contribute equally to this result. The principle of copyright once admitted, it cannot logically be confined to State lines or national boundaries. There appears to be no middle ground between the doctrine of common property in all productions of the intellect--which leads us to communism by the shortest road--and the admission that copyright is due, while its limited term lasts, from all who use the works of an author, wherever found.

Accordingly, international copyright has become the policy of nearly all civilized nations. The term of copyright is longer in most countries than in the United States, ranging from the life of the author and seven years beyond, in England, to a life term and fifty years additional in France and Russia. Copyright is thus made a life tenure and something more in all countries except our own, where its utmost limit is forty-two years.

This may perhaps be held to represent a fair average lifetime, reckoned from the age of intellectual maturity. There have not been wanting advocates for a perpetual copyright, to run to the author and his heirs and a.s.signs forever. This was urged before the British Copyright Commission in 1878 by leading British publishers, but the term of copyright is. .h.i.therto, in all nations, limited by law.

Only brief allusion can be made to the most recent (and in some respects most important) advance step which has been taken in copyright legislation in the United States. This act of Congress is aimed at securing reciprocal protection to American and foreign authors in the respective countries which may comply with its provisions. There is here no room to sketch the hitherto vain attempt to secure to authors, here and abroad, an international protection to their writings. Suffice it to say that a union of interests was at last effected, whereby authors, publishers and manufacturers are supposed to have secured some measure of protection to their varied interests. The measure is largely experimental, and the satisfaction felt over its pa.s.sage into law is tempered by doubt in various quarters as to the justice, or liberality, or actual benefit to authors of its provisions. What is to be said of a statute which was denounced by some Senators as a long step backward toward barbarism, and hailed by others as a great landmark in the progress of civilization?

The main features added to the existing law of copyright by this act, which took effect July 1, 1891, are these:

1. All limitation of the privilege of copyright to citizens and residents of the United States is repealed.

2. Foreigners applying for copyright are to pay fees of $1 for record, or $1.50 for certificate of copyright.

3. Importation of books, photographs, chromos or lithographs entered here for copyright is prohibited, except two copies of any book for use and not for sale.

4. The two copies of books, photographs, chromos or lithographs deposited with the Librarian of Congress must be printed from type set, or plates, etc., made in the United States. It follows that all foreign works protected by American copyright must be wholly manufactured in this country.

5. The copyright privilege is restricted to citizens or subjects of nations permitting the benefit of copyright to Americans on substantially the same terms as their own citizens, or of nations who have international agreements providing for reciprocity in the grant of copyright, to which the United States may at its pleasure become a party.

6. The benefit of copyright in the United States is not to take effect as to any foreigner until the actual existence of either of the conditions just recited, in the case of the nation to which he belongs, shall have been made known by a proclamation of the President of the United States.

One very material benefit has been secured through international copyright. Under it, authors are a.s.sured the control of their own text, both as to correctness and completeness. Formerly, republication was conducted on a "scramble" system, by which books were hastened through the press, to secure the earliest market, with little or no regard to a correct re-production. Moreover, it was in the power of the American publisher of an English book, or of a British publisher of an American one, to alter or omit pa.s.sages in any work reprinted, at his pleasure.

This license was formerly exercised, and imperfect, garbled, or truncated editions of an author's writings were issued without his consent, an outrage against which international copyright furnishes the only preventive.

Another benefit of copyright between nations has been to check the relentless flood of cheap, unpaid-for fiction, which formerly poured from the press, submerging the better literature. The Seaside and other libraries, with their miserable type, flimsy paper, and ugly form, were an injury alike to the eyesight, to the taste, and in many cases, to the morals of the community. More than ninety per cent. of these wretched "Libraries" were foreign novels. An avalanche of English and translated French novels of the "bigamy school" of fiction swept over the land, until the cut-throat compet.i.tion of publishers, after exhausting the stock of unwholesome foreign literature, led to the failure of many houses, and piled high the counters of book and other stores with bankrupt stock. Having at last got rid of this unclean brood, (it is hoped forever) we now have better books, produced on good paper and type, and worth preserving, at prices not much above those of the trash formerly offered us.

At the same time, standard works of science and literature are being published in England at prices which tend steadily toward increased popular circulation. Even conservative publishers are reversing the rule of small editions at high prices, for larger editions at low prices. The old three-volume novel is nearly supplanted by the one volume, well-printed and bound book at five or six s.h.i.+llings. Many more reductions would follow in the higher cla.s.s of books, were not the measure of reciprocal copyright thus far secured handicapped by the necessity of re-printing on this side at double cost, if a large American circulation is in view.

The writers of America, with the steady and rapid progress of the art of making books, have come more and more to appreciate the value of their preservation, in complete and unbroken series, in the library of the government, the appropriate conservator of the nation's literature.

Inclusive and not exclusive, as this library is wisely made by law, so far as copyright works are concerned, it preserves with impartial care the ill.u.s.trious and the obscure. In its archives all sciences and all schools of opinion stand on equal ground. In the beautiful and ample repository, now erected and dedicated to literature and art through the liberal action of Congress, the intellectual wealth of the past and the present age will be handed down to the ages that are to follow.

FOOTNOTES:

[2] G. H. Putnam, "Books and their makers in the Middle Ages," N. Y.

1897, vol. 2, p. 447.

CHAPTER 24.

POETRY OF THE LIBRARY.

THE LIBRARIAN'S DREAM.

1.

He sat at night by his lonely bed, With an open book before him; And slowly nodded his weary head, As slumber came stealing o'er him.

2.

And he saw in his dream a mighty host Of the writers gone before, And the shadowy form of many a ghost Glided in at the open door.

3.

Great Homer came first in a snow-white shroud, And Virgil sang sweet by his side; While Cicero thundered in accents loud, And Caesar most gravely replied.

4.

Anacreon, too, from his rhythmical lips The honey of Hybla distilled, And Herodotus suffered a partial eclipse, While Horace with music was filled.

5.

The procession of ancients was brilliant and long, Aristotle and Plato were there, Thucydides, too, and Tacitus strong, And Plutarch, and Sappho the fair.

6.

Aristophanes elbowed gay Ovid's white ghost, And Euripides Xenophon led, While Propertius laughed loud at Juvenal's jokes, And Sophocles rose from the dead.

7.

Then followed a throng to memory dear, Of writers more modern in age, Cervantes and Shakespeare, who died the same year, And Chaucer, and Bacon the sage.

8.

Immortal the laurels that decked the fair throng, And Dante moved by with his lyre, While Montaigne and Pascal stood rapt by his song, And Boccaccio paused to admire.

9.

Sweet Spenser and Calderon moved arm in arm, While Milton and Sidney were there, Pope, Dryden, and Moliere added their charm, And Bunyan, and Marlowe so rare.

10.

Then Gibbon stalked by in cla.s.sical guise, And Hume, and Macaulay, and Froude, While Darwin, and Huxley, and Tyndall looked wise, And Humboldt and Comte near them stood.

11.

Dean Swift looked sardonic on Addison's face, And Johnson tipped Boswell a wink, Walter Scott and Jane Austen hobn.o.bbed o'er a gla.s.s, And Goethe himself deigned to drink.