Andrew Murphy on the Cost of Books in the 17th and 18th centuries

If the seventeenth century saw the emergence of the playwright as author and the eighteenth century witnessed the public foregrounding of the editor, then we can say that the next century marked the emergence of the reader as a significant figure in the history of the transmission of Shakespeare’s texts. Of course, Shakespeare always had readers—from the ‘private friends’ who Francis Meres, in Palladis Tamia (1598), tells us enjoyed his ‘sugred sonnets’ in manuscript before they appeared in print, so the subscribers who paid in advance for copies of editions such as Pope’s and Johnson’s. But these readers were always limited to a rather select band, largely because of the high price of editions. A copy of the first edition of Pope's text, for example, would have run to about £7, when the cost of binding is taken into account. Up through the eighteenth century the price of books was kept artificially high by a system of copyright which granted legal ownership to publishers in perpetuity. Publishers traded ownership rights (and even fractions of such rights) at auction, and they also bequeathed these rights to their families and associates. In 1774, this situation altered radically when the House of Lord was asked t rule on the precise meaning of the terms of a piece of copyright legislation that had been passed in 1709, the exact provisions of the act having always been in dispute. Against the expectations of the principal London publishers, the Lords ruled that copyright was actually of limited duration only. The ruling had the effect of creating a ‘public domain’ of older canonical text, which were freely available to any publisher who wished to produce a competitively priced edition. (Andrew Murphy, “The transmission of Shakespeare’s Texts” in Margreta de Grazia and Stanley Wells, eds., The New Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare [2d ed.; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010], 61-75, here, pp. 66-67)