The history of the book war : fair book prices versus Publishers' Trust prices / [Times Book Club].

  • Times Book Club
Date:
1907
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The history of the book war : fair book prices versus Publishers' Trust prices / [Times Book Club]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    resistance, though they had so carefully prepared the attack. They had so high an idea of their own im- portance, and of the might before which authors tremble, that they anticipated quite an easy capture of an unusually rich booty. At the end of the autumn holidays the publishers put their coercive machinery in motion. That is to say, they proclaimed a general boycott of the Book Club, and withdrew their advertisements from The Times. By the second measure they acquired for a time a good many vociferous defenders in the press, who, however, soon wearied of their disinterested efforts, when the new allocation of advertisement favours wras settled. The boycott meant that the publishers refused to sell their books to the Book Club at trade prices, refused to sell to wholesale agents whom they suspected of supplying the Book Club, and finally, with the aid of the booksellers, endeavoured to prevent the Book Club from buying books at all, even at full retail prices. These quaint mediaeval proceedings produced a con- siderable effect for a time. They made it difficult for the Book Club to get the books it wanted, but there was the incidental disadvantage that they made it equally difficult for the publishers to get the money of which they were equally in need. The orders from the Book Club which the publishers refused were somehow not replaced, as they probably expected, by equivalent orders from other quarters. No great stimulus appears to have been given to the general book trade by the closure of the market to one large buyer. In fact, if one may judge from the windows of some dignified booksellers in town, they have had to put much of their dignity into their pockets, and to resort to
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