What's New at the Library II?

                                              Library News
               Closures are now under review by the government, but it is difficult
               to have confidence in a minister (Andrew Burnham) who says he
               wants libraries of the future to be like 'Facebook 3-D.'
                                                                           - ABA Newsletter May 2009



TO: ALL BRANCHES
FROM: ANDREW BURNHAM, MINISTER OF CULTURE, MEDIA, and SPORT

Despite the dissent of library fuddy-duddy Luddites like Rachel Cook at the Guardian and Tom Roper of The Roper Organization, at 2AM on April 14 we will be making the conversion from the old library paradigm to the new.

• Library patrons will now "log in" when they enter the Library instead of saying hello. This will free staff from unnecessary and awkward physical interaction with the public.

• If they have not done so already, patrons must complete our new Satisfaction Survey which will mine for basic information and details of the individual's life so that we can better serve their needs, size them up for unsolicited solicitations, and match them with other Branch book lovers. At the request of the City Attorney, please be certain that patrons read the Disclaimer at bottom: "Not responsible for bad dates, stalkers, or assault with a deadly sales pitch."

• Staff members may, if they elect, "share" with patrons the special as well as the mundane details of their lives.

• Preferences can be set by individual staff members so that they do not have to listen to patrons reciprocate or unilaterally share the special as well as mundane details of their lives. For Preference Enforcement, call Security.

• To encourage patrons to spend as much time as possible "on-site" and thus maximize exposure to the Library's new revenue enhancement system, we are debuting a new test-game; What Class Are You in the Dewey Decimal System? Once they've taken the test, Library users will be solicited by the Reference Librarian for their sub-set. If, for instance, patrons are "900. History and Geography and Biography. You have a need to know what was, where it was, and who was it. Kind of a busybody, aren't you?" they will be asked to further refine our search efforts by specific filters so that we will know that they are prime targets for, say, detergent advertising, i.e. New, Blue, Unscented Cheer with Scrubbing Bubbles and Free Book Inside! (The inserted paperback book will present an additional revenue opportunity as yet another splice in our continuous loop of product placement from which there is no escape).

• When patrons check-out books, they will automatically be prompted by a suggestion for another book in the same area of interest which if they buy and not borrow will earn bonus-points that can be used for purchases from any of our Associate Rewards Member companies.

• Library patrons, to protect their real identity and maximize their social-library experience, will have the option of choosing a mask of their favorite celebrity or historical personage from the Fictitious ID Dept. I need not point out the danger of identities assigned to more than one person at the same time. Nor, simultaneous multiple identities to the same person. Please be careful.

• As verbal sharing amongst patrons who may or may not actually know one another will likely increase and cause distress to others wishing to hear the proverbial pin drop, use of the free StatusWhisper™ device will be encouraged, which is, essentially, a fashion-forward surgical mask which cost two cents but after selling ad space we earn two bucks apiece on.

• The On-Site Chat feature may be disabled by pointing to the "Quiet, Please" sign. But as disabling currently requires a few tweaks for optimization, Security may instead be called.

• Patrons who are bothered by other patrons who constantly update their status are free to leave the library at any time to return home to their pathetic, shut-in, lonely lives and unread books.

• Library patrons who refuse to cooperate and participate in the new, improved Library may be offered use of the Cone of Silence located in the basement of each branch or shown the door. What do they think we're running around here, a library?
_____________

Originally appeared in Fine Books & Collections on this date.

What's New at the Library?

Library News

                                There has been much in the press recently about
                                libraries - most of it bad - culminating in the case
                                of one where piped muzak has been introduced
                                because 'libraries are not just about reading anymore.'
                                                              - ABA Newsletter, May 2009


[Censored] Library Chief Administrator Kevin Pine-Coffin looked at the screen, re-read his handiwork and sighed with a mixture of relief, pride and horror. "Who ever imagined it would come to this," he thought. "Can't sell books to raise money, can't layoff staff. Damned book bloggers." He put the final period to the end of the upcoming Calendar, then clicked Save before his blood congealed and he died of embarrassment. "Master of Library Science, Huckster, and Fund-Raising Wizard" he bemoaned. "They said 'it shouldn't be done' but what choice did I have? We need money, honey!"

The Moe's Tune-Ups and Transmission Branch
of the [Censored] Library

Schedule of Events for June 2009.

We've turned the economic crisis into an economic opportunity here at the Library with all sorts of fun for the whole family!

June 3. 11AM-12Noon: Book Signing w/Jenna Jamison. The porn star will be signing copies of her new book, I Lost It at the Library. Photo-ops $10. Jenna's cherry-flavored lickable bookmarks will be available for sale.

June 8. 7:30PM-9PM: Books On Ice! Tonight our multi-talented staff debuts their new zero centigrade spectacular. The Main Reading Room will be cleared, a fast sheet of ice will be laid down, and you'll experience the magic of singing librarians skating their hearts out. Nancy and Irma will limn a dramatic reading of Edward Lear's nonsense verse while performing axels with a full twists and spins. Don't miss it! Tickets: $15.

June 12. 2PM-4PM: Immodest members of the local chapter of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America will be on hand to appraise your old books for a modest fee. You will be awed by arcane, pedantic narratives about your books. Proceeds to go to our Tiki  Snack Bar Building Fund

June 14. 7PM-10PM: Bowling For Books! Our new 20-lane bowling alley is now open and our fund-raising tournament begins. The entry fee is only $20 and all money will be used to finish construction of our state-of-the-art movie multiplex which we anticipate will throw off a cool $500,000 in annual profit to be used for adding books to our collection or paying down our massive debt.

June 18. Novelist-poet turned celebrity chef Erica Jong will sign copies of her new book, Fear of Frying, and hawk sets from The Climax Collection, her line of non-stick, water-soluble cookware.
.
June 21. 7PM-9PM: Ultimate Fight Night! It's no-holds barred when staff member Jimmy "Call Me a Wimp and Die" Wilson takes on all comers in the Cage of Maximum Destruction located on the 2d floor adjacent to the Conservation and Preservation department. For only $10 you can take your chance to rip Jimmy from his binding, break his joints, and crack his spine. Disclaimer: Library not responsible for subsequent recasing of unsuccessful contestants.

June 22. Christening Ceremony for the new Saul and Minnie Moskowitz Men's Room and the Sal Hepatica Ladies Room. Cocktails served.* Proceeds from use fees will be budgeted strictly for acquisitions.

*Reminder: Every hour is Happy Hour at The Wishing Well, our fabulous new cocktail lounge located in the Children's Reading Room. Hoist a round of Seven Dwarves of Dynamite, a flight of seven special jiggers of fine single-malt scotches, while enjoying the antics of classic Disney characters at play. Photo ops available for $5.

June 26. Smoot-Hawley Wedding. Open event, all welcome. $35 per person tariff for all you can eat and read at the same time. Time: 5:30 sharp. Late fees will be assessed.

With all the recent talk about Library-Themed Weddings, why not take it to its logical conclusion, hold your ceremony and reception here, and make your nuptials a knockout?

Nancy, our Mistress of the Reference Desk, will assist you with all your planning needs. No matter what your budget - "I do. We're done. Let's go" to a Prince Charles and Diana-like extravaganza - she's sure to put the steak in the ceremony and the sizzle in the reception.

The Library is available for all special events including, but not limited to:

• Sweet Sixteens
• Bar Mitzvahs
• Confirmations
• Circumcisions
• Business conferences
• Pajama Parties
• Gang Rumbles

Announcement: We are helpless to report that the sweet, somnambulant, cascading strings of Mantovani can now be heard throughout the entire library and not just in the elevators. Going down!

Original Manuscript Drafts of Madame Bovary Now Online

Author of the great succès de scandale of 19th century literature, on January 1857 Gustave Flaubert and his publishers were taken to court for "outrage to public morals and religion."

Madame Bovary was the reason for the scandal. But while adultery and earthy language were the reasons why Flaubert was (unsuccessfully) prosecuted, he might just as well have been prosecuted for poor penmanship. Had he been in Mrs. Stallone's third grade cursive writing class in P.S. 2, he'd still be at his desk with her standing over him drilling on flowing curves and fancy loops.

Flaubert was a compulsive-obsessive writer. As Brigid Grauman writes in the Wall Street Journal "The nihilistic, anti-bourgeois Flaubert spent four-and-a-half years writing it, sweating over every word, every sentence, every paragraph...Flaubert's obsession with style is legendary, down to his technique of bellowing his sentences out loud to make sure they worked musically, like poetry. His identification with the bored, highly strung, aspirational Emma Bovary is also widely documented. What is less well known is that he kept every one of the novel's many drafts, going so far as to say that he wanted to be buried with them."

That did not, fortunately, occur. After the novelist's death, his niece, Caroline, donated the manuscript to the Municipal Library of Rouen, the French town where Flaubert wrote the book. Seven years ago, the Library decided, despite a lack of funding, to make every word of Flaubert's various drafts available online.

The entire project can now be viewed at Les Manuscrits de Madame Bovary Edition Integrale sur le Web.

The manuscript must be seen to be believed. Cross-outs, substitutions, and side notes abound. The appearance of the manuscript - all 4500 pages of text all online; yikes! - foreshadows Dada Surrealism. Suffice it to say, as compulsive as he was if Flaubert had used a computer word processing program he'd still be, 152 years later, making changes; the curse of revision made easy.

A final word on Flaubert's penmanship skills: non-existent, like a monkey on meth. The major effort on the project was deciphering Flaubert's handwriting for transcription for, wisely, the project has each page of the original manuscript displayed next to a readable transcription of it.

Since the site's debut last month, it has been deluged by visitors. For a great swim into the world of Flaubert and Madame Bovary, dive into the flood.

The Autobiography of a Horse - And the Woman Who Loved Him

The horse as litterateur is an obvious and ripe subject for serious inquiry. Space limitations, alas, preclude a full exegesis of the roman à clop, so a brisk lap around the track will have to suffice.

Over the course of equine evolution, horses have had to overcome enormous obstacles to verbal and written communication. Verbal skill first manifest itself during the 1940s with the discovery of a talking mule within the U.S. Armed Forces stationed in the Pacific during World War II who acted as aide-de-camp for a hapless Marine lieutenant. The story was broken in a 1950 documentary:



The mule later died of a broken heart because he was only half horse, the lieutenant had standards, and any further relationship was out of the question. With Frances died the only prospect for conversation with a verbally precocious equine.

But a generation later another verbally-gifted horse would be born, anonymously sired and unrelated to the talking mule, thus exciting contemporary evolutionary thought with the idea that considerable modern pressures were bearing down on the survival of the horse that compelled the fittest to speak their mind.



Equine written skills, on the other hoof, appeared much earlier, in the nineteenth century. The most notable example of equine-as-author is the anonymous stallion known by his nom de plume, Black Beauty, whose eponymous autobiography appeared on November 24, 1877, published by Jarrold & Sons (see Wolff, Nineteenth-century Fiction 6250) in the U.K. A smash best seller, by 1890 it had sold 90,000 copies in the U.K. alone.

This was an “as told to” effort, BB (as his friends knew him) hiring a human to take dictation, straight from the horse’s mouth, as it were. Yes, the horse could talk but it only spoke Horse (the first edition bears the subtitle, “Translated From the Equine”). Moreover, he suffered from hoof-in-quill disease, so penmanship was an issue. But worst and most frustrating of all was that - as would be the case with Mr. Ed eighty some-odd years later - he only talked when he felt like it, and he only felt like talking to Anna Sewell.

"Anna Sewell (1820–1878), author, was born on 30 March 1820... her ‘life of constant frustration’ (Mrs Bayly, 71) began when, aged about fourteen, she slipped and fell... injuring both her ankles [that led to] a lameness which, although varying in its severity, was permanent and meant that at times she could not walk outside or stand for very long. She also suffered from a debilitating invalidism which varied in its intensity but remained with her for life characterized at times by pains in her chest, loss of strength in her back, and a ‘weakness’ in her head leading to periods of ‘enforced idleness’ (Mrs Bayly, 245)...

"...Sewell never married or had children and, apart from periods at spas or visiting relatives on a family farm in Norfolk, she always lived with her parents. It was in Norfolk that she learned to ride and drive the horses upon which her lameness made her reliant” (Oxford DNB Onliine).

She couldn’t walk, the Dictaphone had yet to be invented, he couldn’t write. They were the prefect couple.

What was startling about BB’s autobiography was that, while earlier animal first-person narratives had appeared, it was the first to provide social commentary, BB providing criticism of his various owners. In fact, the entire book is about social justice, BB as civil rights activist; this horse had a lot on his mind and a lot to say. It was a book he had to write.

BB’s story is simple: That of a well bred steed from early childhood in a pastoral eden, through numerous owners - some kind and some far from it - until kismet brings him back home. It is also profound.

"Beauty's color is no accident (Sewell's book is clearly modeled on Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, 1852), and the most poignant moments in the narrative occur when Beauty, while recognizing the inevitability of servitude, nevertheless longs wistfully for freedom" (Robert Dingley, in Nineteenth-Century British Women Writers, p. 354). The book's relationship to Uncle Tom's Cabin did not escape notice by its publishers.

Moreover, Black Beauty's continual and lasting value stands as one of the first - and certainly most influential - arguments for the humane treatment of animals. Indeed, the first American edition was published by the president of the American Humane Education Society, George T. Angell, who, at the rear to the first state of this edition, provided diagrammed instruction for the humane killing of horses and dogs that would seem horribly and insensitively out of place were it not for the cruel and usual alternatives then utilized. Black Beauty became a mobilizing force for change.

Curiously, and to the frustration of scientists throughout the world, the verbally adept hoss has disappeared, apparently extinct, the few known examples evidently evolutionary anomalies. Yes, there are horse whisperers but the horses ain’t whispering back. Evolutionary biologists theorize that
1) the small population of talking horses developed terminal laryngitis, or 2) they gave up trying to inculcate a modicum of "horse sense" into humans. Either way, they talked themselves horse and scratched from the evolutionary derby.

"...Sewell's only publication was Black Beauty, written intermittently from 1871 to 1877 at a time when her health further declined, and she was confined to the house and her sofa….The novel was sold to...Jarrold & Sons, for an outright payment of £40 and published…when Anna was fifty-seven. Now a children's classic, the novel was originally written for those who worked with horses, ‘its special aim’, Sewell wrote, ‘being to induce kindness, sympathy, and an understanding treatment of horses’ (Mrs Bayly, 272). It has been seen as instrumental in leading to the abolition of the bearing-rein.

"Anna Sewell has been neglected by history. In ironic contrast, her only book has achieved phenomenal success. Pirated in America in 1890, its sales broke publishing records. It is said to be ‘the sixth best seller in the English language’ (Chitty, in Wells and Grimshaw, The Annotated Black Beauty, p. x).* Sewell lived just long enough to know of her novel's early success. She died…of hepatitis or phthisis on 25 April 1878 just five months after its publication" (Oxford DNB Online).
_______

The first edition, first printing of Black Beauty is exceedingly scarce in the marketplace; it was read to pieces by kids and few copies have survived.

Points to the first American edition, first state:

SEWELL, Anna. Black Beauty: His Grooms and Companions. The "Uncle Tom's Cabin" of the Horse. Boston: George T. Angell, 1890.

•Printed boards with price "12 cents" at top. (Later issued in wrappers, then cloth).
•Preface dated February 12, 1890.
•Front ads dated March 1, 1890.
•One black and white illustration; head- tailpieces; initials.

Image courtesy of David Brass.


*Wikipedia has an amazing, extremely well researched list of the best selling books of all time. At a mere 50 million copies sold, Black Beauty does not even make the top ten bestselling books in the English language – but is tied for the #11 spot with Anne of Green Gables (1908) and Dr. Spock’s The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care (1946).

"Button Up Those Blabber Lips!"

Given the increasing cacophony of loose talk, gossip, opinion, bloviation, monologue, theory, and BS in verbal and written word that has become a constant chorus in American society, it may come as a surprise to learn that at one time the United States government undertook a major campaign to get Americans to stuff a sock in it, lock their lips and throw away the key.

From 1941-1945, the Office for Emergency Management's Office of War Information, Domestic Operations Branch, Bureau of Special Services commissioned a series of posters to mobilize Americans to be mindful that the enemy might be listening, so clam up.

While the circumstances and rationale during World War II were dramatically different, think  how radical it would be if the government were to declare a day of national silence, for no other reason than to give us all a break from the din of crapulous white noise that has become the soundtrack to our daily lives and to instill an appreciation of, and for, the value and virtue of quietude. The enemy may be listening, and the enemy is us.

It'll never happen. But in its stead, please join me in a few moments of silence for the dearly departed, silence:


:

And now for the role of books in fighting the war:

In fin, the War Office's salute to International Womanhood:


_______________

The National Archives has a trove of public domain imagery. You could do worse than to spend a few hours going through its holdings, most of which are available for digital download.

Book 'Em, Dano!

EAST ELMHURST, QUEENS, NEW YORK CITY. March 3, 1964. Detectives from the Major Case Squad of the Queensborough Library report that a copy of The Story of George Gershwin by David Ewen has now been missing for three weeks beyond its due date. They haven't a clue.

Dear Diary:
They're on my trail. I meant to take the book back but now it's three weeks, I owe fines, and I can't ask my DNA donors for help: The female will verbally torture me, and the male will gently toss me in the air with his left hand, then, both hands gripping the Louisville Slugger with my name on it, swing and swat me going, going, gone! out of the ballpark.

I fear I shall never become the success in life that Mom insists upon.

EAST ELMHURST, QUEENS, NEW YORK CITY. September 21, 1965. Stephen J. Gertz, 14, has won the J.H.S. 141 Talent Show with his virtuoso air-clarinet impression of Artie Shaw playing the opening obbligato to George Gershwin's Rhapsody In Blue backwards followed by a sophomoric and shameful impression of "a spaz singing I Got Rhythm."

Dear Diary:
I am consumed by George Gershwin. It must stop. I fear I may accidentally confess under the crushing weight of guilt that I bear. The Fugitive, starring David Janssen, is my new favorite TV show. It's about a kid wrongly accused of library theft who flees in order to find the real book thief and on his odyssey meets interesting people who give him food, clothing and shelter because he doesn't have a job much less a credit card. Or a bank account. Or driver's license, for that matter.

EAST ELMHURST, QUEENS, NEW YORK CITY. June 14, 1966. A teenaged boy was stopped by police this evening when the little pisher was observed on the corner of Ditmars Blvd and 80th Street attempting to sing It Ain't Necessarily So, from George Gershwin's opera, Porgy and Bess, in the style of Cab Calloway, who limned the role of Sportin' Life in the 1953 revival of the classic. When cornered by New York's Finest, the boy maniacally crooned, "Hidey, Hidey, Hidey Ho!" slipped his capturer's grasp and shuffled off to Buffalo.

Dear Diary:
That was a close one! I don't know how much longer my vaudevillian evasive tactics will work. There's a somebody I'm longing to see,  I hope they'll be, someone to watch over me  - but not the screws up in Sing Sing, that's for sure. I think I now owe a hundred dollars. The book only cost $5.95! Our local capo must be getting a rake-off.

EAST ELMHURST, QUEENS, NEW YORK CITY.  January 12, 1967. Detectives on the Queens Library Major Case Squad report progress in their three-year quest to capture the "The Smart-Ass Kid" as frustrated police have taken to calling the bold and crafty thief of The Story of George Gershwin by David Ewen. "He thinks he's so smart," Lt. Einstein said. "Well, he's not half as smart as he thinks he is and one day he'll outsmart himself and we'll nab him, yer darn tootin'."

Dear Diary:
Time to lam-ski. I have arranged for my parents to divorce, my mother to get custody of me, and a job for her in California, where a sunkissed miss says, "Don't be late!" that's why I can hardly wait to open up (open up! open up!) that golden gate. California, Here I Come. I shoulda won the talent show with my Jolson impression, singing Gershwin's Swanee. Right now, I'd give the world to be among the folks in D-I-X-I-E - anyplace but here. The heat is on. I still have the book, in case I can plea bargain for a suspended sentence in exchange for returning it.

SOMEWHERE OVER THE CONTINENTAL UNITED STATES. July 15, 1967.
Dear diary: Love the Boeing 707! I told the stewardess that even though I looked sixteen (only one more month to go!) I was really only six so she'd give me a set of kiddie flight wings and I could flirt with her. I made sure The Story of George Gershwin by David Ewen was packed along with everything else and on the moving truck before we left. With the keen criminal sophistication most often associated with Sherlock Holmes' nemesis, Moriarty, I reason that if I owe $500 buckaroos for the book I might as well keep it; I paid for it, right?

EAST ELMHURST, QUEENS, NEW YORK CITY. August 2, 1967. Stymied in their efforts to capture the criminal mastermind behind the sensational booknapping of The Story of George Gershwin by David Ewen from the Bookmobile back in '64, detectives from the Queens Library Major Case Squad have quietly put the case on ice. "One day, one day," Detective Kramden declared, "pow, zoom, to the moon with this mug."

LOS ANGELES, CA. May 3, 2009. At dawn this morning, members of the L.A.P.D.'s SWAT team descended upon a small, itsy bitsy bungalow in  West L.A. where a man was on his roof, threatening to commit suicide and take the neighborhood with him. The man was reportedly upset that he now owed $1.2 trillion in late fines, interest and penalties for a book he had borrowed from the library forty-five years ago, The Story of George Gershwin by David Ewen, and never returned due to acute irresponsibility secondary to an immature pre-frontal cortex, and he was consumed with guilt and shame. Yet still defiant.

News reporters and cameramen descended upon the scene, along with teams from Entertainment Tonight, Hollywood Insider and the Maury Povitch Show. A circus atmosphere permeated the site with peanut and cotton candy vendors working the crowd.

"J'Accuse!" the SWAT team leader, Lt. Zola, shouted to him.

"I owe $1.2 tril, I'm bigger than Citibank, BofA. I'm bigger than Madoff, whose exploits make Ponzi seem like Fonzi in comparison," the man crowed. "And I don't even have the book; I lost it thirty-five years ago. $1.2 trillion for a book? I thought Heritage Book Shop closed!"

The SWAT team took careful aim.

"Made it, Ma! Top of the world!" were his last words before the fusillade hit home.

LOS ANGELES. May 5, 2009. Funeral services were held today for Stephen J. Gertz aka The Smart-Ass Kid, Peck's Bad Boy, Wisenheimer Jones, and The Bad Seed, who was the subject of an international dragnet involving Interpol, Scotland Yard, and the KGB in connection with the theft, forty-five years ago, of The Story of George Gershwin by David Ewen, from the Queensborough Library Bookmobile. At the request of the deceased, mourners sang Gershwin's tune, Let's Call The Whole Thing Off.

______

The Story of George Gershwin by David Ewen was published in 1943 by Henry Holt & Co. R.I.P.

Rare Book Mythbusters #1

The reason that Charles Dickens's books are so long is because he was paid by the word.

Contrary to popular belief, Dickens was not paid by the word for his books. He was, rather, paid per installment.

All but five of Dickens' novels were originally published in twenty 32-page installments in nineteen issues (the last a double installment) that sold for one shilling each, though some, i.e. Oliver Twist, were issued in ten installments.

This formula allowed Dickens, like a modern-day soap opera writer, to whet his readers' interest in each episode and stoke their hunger to find out what would happen next. He never wrote too far in advance of the next episode, which allowed him to incorporate feedback from his readers as to how the story should unfold, or ignore his rabid fanbase: Despite desperate pleas he allowed the Grim Reaper to prematurely claim Little Nell, from The Old Curiosity Shop, as his own. (Later, Oscar Wilde, who had no patience for sentimentality, would invert it and dryly tell a friend: "It would take a heart of stone not to laugh at the death of Little Nell")

More to the point, at one shilling each, the installments were so inexpensive that just about anyone could afford them: At the time, books cost an average of thirty-one shillings, six pence (£1, 11s, 6p), a lot of money for the average British citizen of the era. The average weekly wage then was one pound; a standard book cost over a week's salary.

Thus Dickens reached a much broader audience than if the novels had been originally issued in book form. Sketches By Boz and Oliver Twist, originally serialized in the weekly magazine, Bentley's Miscellany, were later issued in separate book form yet were subsequently issued in monthly parts: Once again, the cost of books was prohibitive for many of Dickens's readers and by reissuing the books in parts the publishers hoped to increase their financial return through volume sales of installments.

While I have yet to discover how much Dickens was paid later in his career, in 1836 he earned £20 for each monthly episode of The Pickwick Papers, an extremely handsome salary.

Yet it was not enough. For most of his career Dickens also edited and wrote for magazines. He was part owner of Household Words, which he also edited. For this, he received an annual salary of £500; with income from his contributions to the magazine his annual income was £1,163-£1,652, well over $350,000 in today's money.

Yet Dickens enjoyed the fruits of fame to the extent that he was frequently in debt due to his lavish lifestyle. By early winter, 1843, for example, sales of Martin Chuzzlewit, whose first installment had been issued in January 1843, were poor and his publisher, Chapman & Hall, threatened to reduce his salary. He owed money, his wife was pregnant...

Ai caramba! Bestseller needed, pronto, ASAP, PDQ, NOW...

And so Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol, and at warp speed, completing it in six weeks on top of all the other writing and editing he was simultaneously engaged with. Originally issued on December 17, 1843, it sold 6,000 copies within five days. Another 2,000 copies were printed and sold out by January 6, 1844. It was a smash success.

But a financial disaster. Priced at five shillings to stimulate holiday gift sales, the elaborate production that Dickens, with contractual rights, insisted upon - John Leech was commissioned to produce eight illustrations, four to be hand-colored steel engravings, the others as woodcuts; expensive green end- papers were used, and then replaced with others of similar quality but yellow; the titlepage, originally printed in blue and red was re-printed in green and red; all edges gilt -  was such that the book was unable to earn a profit. Dickens blamed Chapman and Hall and broke with them.

Most of the thirty-two page installments were forty-nine lines to the page; total words for each installment approx. 18,800 words; times twenty installments equals 376,320 total words per book. At £20 per installment, Dickens earned £400 per book. Many believe that Dickens earned a penny a word. It was less than that. He earned a farthing per word. A farthing is a quarter of a British penny. But a farthing went a lot farther in those days. That £400 in 1836 equals approximately $238,000 in today's money.

And, remember, that was for his first novel, Pickwick Papers. Nowadays, a first-time novelist needs a super-agent to get a deal like that.

The pay scale for writers has declined dramatically over the last 170 years. A farthing is beginning to look pretty good to me: "Please Sir, may I have some more?"

_____

References

Hatton & Cleaver. Bibliography of the Periodical Works of Charles Dickens.

Smith, Walter. Charles Dickens in the Original Cloth.

Allingham, Philip. A Review of Unequal Partners: Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins & Victorian Authorship.

The Dickens Project, University of California, Santa Cruz

University of Glasgow, Book of the Month, December 1999. Charles Dickens: A Christmas Carol.

The Complete Works of Charles Dickens at dickens-literature.com

Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde. (1988).

A tip o' the hat to David Brass for providing images, and for explaining the mysteries of the British monetary system to me; I couldn't fathom farthings.

__________