Volume 2 — CHAPTER VI. (continued 2)

In order to find an instance of the payment of “copy money” for an original work, we must look forward sixty years later than the death of Shakespeare. The oft cited agreement between Milton and the printer Samuel Simmons, which was executed in April, 1667, is possibly the earliest of the kind in the history of publishing in England. Under this agreement, the copyright of Paradise Lost was assigned for a present payment of five pounds, with the obligation for a further payment of the same amount when 1300 copies had been sold. The agreement authorised the printing of a second and a third edition (no limit being fixed for the number of copies in either) on the payment, at the time of each printing, of the further sum of five pounds. The author received before his death ten pounds in all, and his widow later relinquished for the sum of eight pounds all further right in the “copy.” The first impression of the poem had not been sold at the expiration of seven years, and trivial as the honorarium to the author certainly was, it is probable, as Sir Walter Scott remarks, that the publisher did not make much by his bargain.

As an example of a more remunerative transaction, may be cited, among others, the arrangement between Dryden and the publisher Tonson for the poet’s translation of Virgil, an undertaking from which Dryden received nearly £1300. The date of the agreement was 1695, less than thirty years later than the date of the sale of Paradise Lost. We are now, however, approaching the period of copyright law, while it was the case that during the last years of the seventeenth century, the printer-publishers of the Stationers’ Company appear to have been sufficiently powerful, in advance of copyright statutes, to secure for their “copies” a substantial measure of protection, and thus to maintain the common-law property rights assigned to them by their authors.

The earliest catalogue of books published in England contains a list “of all books printed in England since the dreadful fire, 1666, to the end of Trinity term, 1680.” The statistical results of this catalogue of the productions of the press for fourteen years have been ascertained. The whole number of books printed was 3550; of which 947 belonged to divinity, 420 to law, 153 to physic; 397 were school-books. About one-half of these works were single sermons and tracts. Deducting the reprints, pamphlets, single sermons, and maps, it is estimated that, upon an average, 100 new books were produced in each year.[72] This average, which is based upon the estimate of Knight, does not, however, give an accurate impression of the actual production of each year,—the output of the later years of the series being much more considerable than of those immediately succeeding the fire.