SOURCE: Walker, Keith. “Jacob Tonson, Bookseller.” The American Scholar 61, no. 3 (Summer 1992): 424-30.

[In the following essay, Walker discusses Tonson's career as a publisher and notes his influence during his own time and on the publishing world to this day.]

“Before the eighteenth century it was indecorous to make a living out of poetry; afterwards it became almost impossible,” Pat Rogers begins a recent review in the Times Literary Supplement (April 26, 1991), with some sacrifice of accuracy to elegance. The responsibility for writers being able, for however short a time, to make money out of poetry rests largely with the bookseller Jacob Tonson.

Details about a man's life in the seventeenth century, unless they have survived by some happy accident, are rare and sketchy at best. In this essay I want to flesh out the life and career of Jacob Tonson (1655-1736), the founder of literary publishing in English, and the arranger, possibly the inventor, of the accepted canon of English literature until very recently, and to suggest something of his importance in the history of publishing.

Tonson was not memorialized by the antiquarian and gossip John Aubrey to whom we owe so many vivid details of life in the seventeenth century. He came too late to the Restoration scene to have been mentioned by Pepys in his Diary. He was, though, known to the choleric Oxford diarist and historian and Aubrey's friend, Narcissus Luttrell (for whom he compiled newsletters), and through friendship with the leading writers Tonson survives in certain of their letters, poems, and in other documents.

There is one odd circumstance: a portrait of Tonson by Godfrey Kneller is present today in London's National Portrait Gallery. This portrait—a “document” of the first importance—is one of Kneller's finest, striking and arrestingly different from those of the pudding-faced ennobled nonentities he habitually painted. It shows a plump, well-formed, middle-aged man, with jutting jaw (a mark of independence, even pugnaciousness?), wearing informal morning dress. A red turban covers his head. He disdains to wear a wig, almost a necessity for people displaying themselves on semi-official occasions. Tonson's neck cloth is easy, negligently flowing, as is his green robe. He has every right to present himself as proudly independent. In his right hand he holds a finely bound folio of Milton's Paradise Lost, the poem he published in the full recognition that it was a masterpiece, the poem he propagated, and the poem that, more even than any poem by Dryden, brought him wealth and fame.

The most surprising thing about this portrait is that it was done in the first place. Booksellers were not among the class of people to have their portraits painted in the late seventeenth century by an expensive foreign court painter like Godfrey Kneller. Yet here was Jacob Tonson, son of a shoemaker, painted in a series that he himself commissioned (as one version has it) and which numbered nine dukes (Dorset, Manchester, Montagu, Newcastle, Richmond, Grafton, Devonshire, Kingston, and Somerset), and assorted earls, marquesses, viscounts, and barons. A few knights (Richard Steele, the journalist; Samuel Garth, the physician and poet; John Vanbrugh, the architect and playwright) together with a smattering of men without any title at all (including William Congreve and Joseph Addison) made up the thirty-five or so of Kneller's other subjects.

The paintings are of members of the Kit-Cat Club, of which Tonson was the guiding spirit, host, and secretary—a convivial gathering of some thirty-five Whig grandees and men of culture of the day whose name derives from that of Christopher Cat, a landlord who apparently made delicious mutton pies.

The publication and popularization of Milton's works were to be the making of Tonson's reputation and fortune as a bookseller (the word then connoted approximately what we understand today by the modern word “publisher,” and our sense of the modern word is, in great part, determined by Tonson's practice).

Tonson was born into the world of bookselling. He came from a puritan background. His grandfather Matthew Walbanke, successful publisher of strong parliamentary sympathies, produced a paper supporting the parliamentary side during the civil war—and we may suppose the Tonsons to have been of the same inclinations, especially in view of Jacob's fervent Whiggish activities later in life. (These details come from Kathleen M. Lynch's Jacob Tonson, Kit-Cat Publisher, 1971. I am also indebted to Harry M. Geduld's Prince of Publishers: A Study of the Work and Career of Jacob Tonson, 1969.)

Tonson had a good education. Kathleen Lynch conjectures that he might have been a pupil at Charterhouse where he would have learned Latin. Certainly Latin was a subject he knew well later in life, when he published an edition of the complete works of many of the classical Roman poets in conjunction with Cambridge University Press. M. H. Black says in his history of Cambridge University Press: “Jacob Tonson … saw a market for elegant and correct editions of the major classics which ought to be in every gentleman's library … and which could be reprinted in a smaller format and in larger numbers for student use.”

Tonson was apprenticed to Thomas Basset, a well-known publisher, in 1670, at the age of fourteen. Basset released him in 1678. It was a good time to begin in the trade. Government control of the press had necessarily been weakened by the turmoil of the late cataclysm of the civil war. The restored Stuarts passed a Printing Act, sometimes called the Licensing Act, in 1662 that limited to twenty the number of master printers, and to four the number of master type founders (presumably these were all known and easy to check up on), permitted printing only in London, Oxford, Cambridge, and York, and created a surveyor of the press. Censorship was enthusiastically enforced by Sir Roger L'Estrange.

But after the civil war, with its relative freedom of expression, nothing could be the same as it had been, however much the Church of England (the principal beneficiary of the Restoration settlement) wished it to be so. And a court where the “blaspheming,” “atheistical,” philosopher Thomas Hobbes was honored, and protected by the king, wasn't likely to enforce orthodoxy in thinking too rigorously.

The publishing world had been severely shaken some five years before Tonson was apprenticed, first by the plague (1665), which raged fiercest in the tightly packed streets of the City of London, where most booksellers had their shops and where Tonson lived, and a year later by the Great Fire of London of 1666, which destroyed many publishers' shops, including their highly expensive stocks of paper. Thousands of books were stored for safety in the crypt of St. Paul's and in adjoining buildings. All these were destroyed. Entire editions perished.

Money in publishing then, as now, was in the production of law, medical, and (perhaps not like today) theological books, which formed the great mass of what was published at that time: the production of works of literature was relatively unprofitable. “Literary” publishing bulks large in our consciousness, for works of literature are almost the only books of this period that we still care about, but their relative insignificance at the time in publishing terms should not be forgotten. Tonson was undoubtedly interested in works of literature, but since he began with little capital, we must suppose Tonson was forced to enter this other side of the publishing market. But he continued to produce works of literature and history almost exclusively after he was a rich and successful merchant. At first, he specialized in printing play scripts, which were ephemeral octavos, and relatively easy to print.

It was Tonson's long and close association with Dryden that began and determined his role. They must have first come into contact about 1678, when Dryden had been poet laureate for more than ten years, and, since the death of Milton, in neglect and obscurity (1674), was indisputably the leading poet in England. At all events, in 1679, Tonson, then a young man of twenty-four, with very little capital, won the writer Dryden from his previous publisher, Henry Herringman. It would be interesting to know the reason for Dryden's split from Herringman. In a satire on Dryden, “The Medal of John Bayes,” Thomas Shadwell said that Dryden was “a Journeyman [hireling, drudge] t'a Bookseller.” A note specifies that the bookseller “kept [lodged] him in his House for that purpose.” Dryden had been on friendly terms with Herringman, at one time, as we have seen, staying in his house. But there is no evidence that Herringman ever pushed his books very hard, and we may suppose Dryden to have been resentful of this, judging by the apparent readiness with which he threw his lot in with Tonson, this new, inexperienced bookseller with little capital of his own.

Certainly the new arrangement is a testimony to Tonson's business acumen and forceful personality. The association was to last until Dryden's death in 1700 and beyond. Through Dryden, Tonson would meet and become friends with most of the leading writers of the day. One of Tonson's most amiable traits is that he seems to have been tenacious of his friendships, never falling out seriously with anybody (with the exception of the secretive and furtive Joseph Addison), but yet always telling his friends what he thought of them. The bookseller John Dunton wrote: “To do Mr. Tonson justice, he speaks his mind upon all occasions, and will flatter nobody.”

Tonson's association with Dryden came through Tonson's friendship with William Davenant, son of Sir William Davenant, poet and playwright and manager of the Duke's House, one of the two playhouses in London. Tonson published Dryden's adaptation of Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida. In the seventeenth century poets did not expect to be paid for their works, and it was felt that to publish at all (by way of print) might not perhaps be quite the proper thing to do. Many poets did not even have their work published in printed form, preferring to have it circulated as a written book of leaves containing pages copied out by a scribe and produced by a scriptorium. Scriptoria thrived in the period of the Restoration. They have not been much studied because until recently it has been assumed (wrongly, it seems) that, given the choice, a reader would prefer to have the text of the poems he read in printed rather than handwritten form. Handwritten publications evaded censorship more easily, and there may have been an element of snobbery in possessing a unique copy of anything, which would add to the attraction.

The popularizing activities of Tonson did much to remove what J. W. Saunders has called (in Essays in Criticism, 1951) “the stigma of print.” Early in the century poets mostly wrote for rich and aristocratic patrons who would reward them appropriately for their work. By their collaboration, the forty-eight-year-old Dryden and the twenty-four-year-old Tonson established a new model for the poet to reach out directly to his readers, and to be supported by them. Not much money could be made by writing for the playhouse after 1679. (The two companies were originally set up in 1660, and between them, they held a monopoly; in 1682, they had to join forces.) In 1680 Tonson and Dryden edited a work for which Dryden wrote a preface, notable for its disquisition on the principles of translation and division of verse translation under three heads: “metaphrase” (line-by-line rendering); “paraphrase” (loosely close rendering); and “imitation” (conveying a general notion). The preface for a collection of verse translations “by several hands” of Ovid's Heroides (laments of mythical women to their absent lovers) was entitled Ovid's Epistles. This proved to be an enormously popular work, being reprinted in 1681, 1683, 1688, 1701 (the “sixth edition”—the existence of a fifth isn't recorded), 1705, 1712, 1716, 1720, 1725, 1727, 1729, and 1748, and, perhaps more important, served as a model by which the partnership (we must call it that) was to work for the next twenty-one years. Dryden made suggestions for work to be published, solicited contributors, wrote prefaces, translated—in short, “edited,” in our modern sense. It is hard to find earlier examples of anything like this happening.

In 1684 the two men initiated the first of what were to be annual miscellanies of short poems by various authors. For David Wykes, author of A Preface to Dryden (1977), the “importance of these volumes is manifold”:

They provided a place of publication for short poems which might otherwise have circulated only in manuscript and have been lost in time; they permitted new, young poets to get into print early in their careers and in the company of their elders; they allowed a poet to provide an authoritative text of a poem earlier printed in corrupt form … and, most important of all, they tested further the public taste for translations.

A second and allied feature of the partnership between Dryden and Tonson was the exploitation of the possibilities of publication by subscription, a practice that had been earlier used by publishers of expensive law books and works of learning but seldom applied to works of literature. (John Ogilby's translation of Virgil's Aeneid (1654) seems to have been the first.) Dryden's translation of The Works of Virgil was published in this way in 1697, the publication being something of a national event, besides profiting for Dryden some fourteen hundred pounds and demonstrating to the young Alexander Pope the way later to make a fortune with his translation of Homer's Iliad.

That the association between Dryden and Tonson was close is testified to by their frequent disagreements, usually about money. These were always hastily patched up. Their relationship is usually affectionate:

I am ashamd of my self, [Dryden writes] that I am so much behind hand with you in kindness. above all things I am sensible of your good nature, in bearing [me] company to this place [Clapton in Northamptonshire]. …

This letter from Dryden to Tonson suggests the degree of their intimacy. Samuel Johnson may have been drawing on experiences of his bookseller father when, in The Lives of the Poets, he wrote of the Dryden-Tonson relationship:

Dryden had probably had no recourse in his exigencies but to his bookseller. The particular character of Tonson I do not know: but the general conduct of the traders was much less liberal in those times than in our own; their views were narrower, and their manners grosser. To the mercantile ruggedness of that race, the delicacy of the poet was sometimes exposed.

At all events it is generally agreed that here Johnson is less than fair to Tonson.

Through Dryden, Tonson would have met William Congreve, Nahum Tate (infamous for rewriting King Lear with an upbeat ending), the critic Thomas Rymer, Thomas Otway, Samuel Garth, the poet and diplomat Matthew Prior, and Joseph Addison, all of whom he would later publish.

For Tonson, Dryden produced the vast bulk of his poetic output: about forty thousand verses, mostly of translations. That the relationship endured is a testimony to how necessary it was for both men. Dryden was soon to follow his master James II into the Church of Rome, and he always remained a staunch Tory and upholder of what he saw as the legitimate Stuart line of succession to the throne, in contrast to the Protestant Tonson. In a moment of exasperation with what he perceived as Tonson's meanness, Dryden wrote the terrible beginning of a satire:

With leering Looks, Bullfac'd, and Freckled fair,
With two left Legs, and Judas-colour'd Hair,
With Frowzy Pores, that taint the ambient Air …

Dryden sent these verses to Tonson with a threat to continue if Tonson did not make him a satisfactory offer. At other times Dryden was worried, not about being paid, but being paid in the right coinage:

You know money is now very scrupulously received: in the last wch you did me the favour to change for my wife, besides the clipd money, there were at least forty shillings brass.

“The coinage at this time was in a deplorable state,” unhelpfully comments Charles Ward, the editor of the Dryden letters. In another letter to Tonson, Dryden wrote:

I shall loose enough by your bill … for after haveing taken it all in silver & not in half Crowns neither, but shilling and sixpences, none of the money will go; for which reason I have sent it all back again, & as the less loss will receive it in guinneys at 29 shillings each. Tis troublesome to be a looser. …

The correspondence is not all about money, however, and some details are irresistible. Dryden thanks Tonson for “the two Melons you sent I receivd before your letter, which came foure houres after: I tasted one of them, which was too good to need an excuse.” Again: “I thank you heartily for the sherry; it was as you sayd, the best of the kind I ever dranke.”

A writer whom Tonson may have met independently of Dryden was the playwright Aphra Behn, celebrated as the first woman to have made a living (however small) as a writer in England. Tonson's grandmother had taken over the family business on the death of her husband, and so Tonson would see nothing odd in a woman's working for her living. At all events, he published in 1681 the sequel to Mrs. Behn's popular play The Rover, a volume of her Poems on Several Occasions (1684), and various other works; he stood surety for her for a loan of six pounds from a certain “Mr. Bags,” and anonymously wrote and published commendatory verses “To the Lovely Witty Astraea, on her Excellent Poems.”

Tonson certainly knew of Milton before Milton's death in 1674, and he tried to obtain some memento of him. At least they lived in the same area of London, came from the same social class, and shared something of the same political outlook. Tonson's attitude toward Milton is one of enthusiasm for his verse, veneration for his memory, and a common approach to his political attitude.

Tonson's involvement with Milton's work is long and complicated, and so a degree of brisk summary is in order. Paradise Lost was first published in 1667. For this Milton was paid five pounds by the printer Samuel Simmons. The work did not become immediately famous or even well known. These facts caused much outraged comment—indeed, consternation—in the eighteenth century when they were constantly rehearsed. (A further sum of five pounds was paid in 1669 when the first edition of about thirteen hundred copies was exhausted.) Simmons did nothing for five years and then, perhaps spurred into action by the announcement of John Dryden's “Heroick Opera” based on Paradise Lost, The State of Innocence and the Fall of Man—it is in heroic couplets, very absurd to us today and a byword for Restoration bad taste—Simmons published a second edition in 1674, the year Milton died.

A third edition of Paradise Lost was published in 1678, the year Tonson began publishing on his own. Tonson gradually began to buy up all Milton's copyrights, not simply those of Paradise Lost. According to R. G. Moyles, the most recent scholar to have concerned himself with the text of Paradise Lost, “There is no evidence that Milton … paid close attention to its printing.”

The first three editions had been quartos or octavos. Tonson decisively changed that. When he came to publish the fourth edition in 1688, it was to be in a large folio, with high-quality paper, wide margins, and clear type, and with twelve “sculptures” [illustrations]—the first edition of Milton to be so accompanied.

Tonson's edition was published by subscription and was altogether worthy of the great poem it bore. Because of Tonson's known Whiggish sympathies, it is sometimes assumed that the publication of the fourth edition of Paradise Lost is connected in some way with the Whig triumph at William of Orange's accession to the throne in 1688, known as The Glorious Revolution. Even Milton's normally unexcitable biographer, W. R. Parker, writes, “The 1688 edition was an event of both social and patriotic, as well as literary, significance; it was, of course, the year of the Revolution, and some of Milton's unpoetical causes seemed at last on the verge of triumph.” There is no evidence for these connections. Indeed, Tonson was soliciting subscriptions in 1687.

For the 1688 edition, Tonson commissioned an epigram from Dryden to be engraved below Milton's portrait:

Three Poets, in three distant Ages born,
Greece, Italy and England did adorn.
The First [Homer] in loftiness of thought Surpass'd;
The Next [Virgil] in Majesty; in both the Last.
The force of Nature cou'd no farther goe:
To make a Third [Milton] she joynd the former two.

The epigram is dominated by Dryden's obsessive concern with poetic succession, and Tonson need not have shared this concern but would have agreed with the high valuation implied.

In 1695 Tonson's third edition was bound up alongside Milton's Poetical Works. This edition had Patrick Hume's influential Annotations on Milton's Paradise Lost. Later, other commentaries would be added, including (most important among them) Addison's Spectator papers on Paradise Lost, which, it would seem, did much to give Milton's work the extraordinary “classic” status—almost synonymous with poetry itself—it enjoyed in the early eighteenth century.

Of course publication in a lavish, sumptuously bound and illustrated edition (such as is shown in the Tonson portrait referred to earlier) produced a book to be read in a gentleman's library (such libraries were starting about this period) rather than what we would think of as a user-friendly book today—a deficiency Tonson made good with three cheaper and smaller editions of Paradise Lost in the years following 1705.

In 1691, the year he published the fifth edition of Paradise Lost, Tonson published a collection of Rochester's Poems with such assurance that, until quite recently, scholars have been convinced that his collection must have been authorized by Rochester's family. (It may have been so, but there is no evidence for the assumption.) There were several grave problems in the way of producing an edition of Rochester's poems, especially for a respectable publisher such as Tonson aspired to be. The first problem was that Rochester was renowned for having been a spectacularly obscene poet and for leading a life of exemplary depravity. The only earlier collection of his poems, the various editions of Poems on Several Occasions … By the … E. of R—(1680), was a collection of obscene poems by Rochester and by some ten other writers, without a publisher's name.

The imprint of the 1680 (non-Tonson) collection of Rochester's poems claims, falsely, that the book was printed in Antwerp. The printing is hasty, the presswork poor; it is altogether a tacky performance. Tonson's collection was largely based upon this work, but he covers his tracks well. He adds several poems previously published elsewhere. He boasts in the introduction (written by the noted critic Thomas Rymer) that his edition is expurgated (the older, and more robust, term for it was castrated or gelded):

The Publisher assures us, he has been diligent out of Measure … that every Block of Offence shou'd be removed. So that this book is a Collection of such Pieces only, as may be received in a vertuous Court, and not unbecome the Cabinet of the Severest Matron.

Paradoxically, as has been pointed out to me by Mr. Jim McGhee, Tonson actually succeeded in some cases in making poems more obscene rather than less by the method. (In “Fair Cloris in a Piggsty lay,” the excision of the final stanza in order to remove a reference to female masturbation, converts a dream of rape, which is offensive enough in all consequence, into an actual rape.) But on the whole the tendency of Tonson's volume of Rochester's poems was toward “decency.” Tonson also drastically rearranges the poems in the 1680 collection, adds works already published, and (the details of why this is so are still obscure) prints for the first time several poems from manuscript. In other respects Tonson's 1691 volume has the look and feel of a collected edition: it contains elegies to Rochester's memory, is handsomely printed with heavy leading between the lines, and contains a prose work and a play by Rochester.

Despite his efforts at cleaning up Rochester, Tonson came under attack by implication for publishing filth in Jeremy Collier's bizarre and celebrated onslaught on the depravity of the Restoration stage, A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage (1698), which attacked the bawdiness of the plays (many printed by Tonson), their blasphemy, and (perhaps this was the real matter of offense for Collier) their satires on the clergy. Collier's attack is best understood, perhaps, as a manifestation of “the British public in one of its periodic fits of morality,” which is Macaulay's celebrated phrase from his review of Thomas Moore's Letters and Journals of Lord Byron in the Edinburgh Review. Jeremy Collier, a “non-juring” clergyman (a clergyman who refused to take an oath of allegiance to William and Mary after their accession to the throne in 1689) and a Tory, may have had political motives in his absurd attack: most of the playwrights he attacks, with the exception of Dryden, were Whigs and soon to be members of the Kit-Cat Club. Collier's book had its desired effect. Narcissus Luttrell records in A Brief Historical Relation of State Affairs: “The justices of Middlesex did not only present [lay evidence before a grand jury against] the playhouses, but also Mr Congreve, for writing the Double Dealer; Durfey, for Don Quixot; and Tonson and Brisco, booksellers, for printing them.” Other justices took the matter further, but as is often the case, it seems that this particular inquiry came to nothing, but it seems to have had the effect of frightening Tonson: his fifth and sixth Miscellanies (1704, 1709) are notably less coarse than the fourth (1694).

The times seem to have changed, too. By about 1700, when the Kit-Cat Club was in its infancy, Tonson was rich and at the head of his profession. He remained in charge of the publishing house until about 1720, when he handed over control to his nephew, Jacob Tonson II.

I shall briefly summarize the more interesting publishing projects undertaken by Jacob Tonson.

With Congreve, whose verse was published in the Dryden and Tonson Miscellanies, Tonson achieved perhaps his closest personal association with any writer. Tonson published Congreve's plays, both individually and in collected editions. Congreve stayed in Tonson's house in 1695 and possibly earlier. The closeness was to lead into new areas in the author-publisher relationship: they seem to have collaborated on such matters as the format, appearance, type, layout, and so forth of the book, in the three volumes of the collected Works of Mr. William Congreve, which followed Ben Jonson's example of a writer defying the “stigma” of print and presenting his collected works to the world.

During the period of their relationship, Tonson and Dryden must have discussed one of Dryden's great preoccupations, the terrible fissure in the fabric of English life and society brought about by the events of the civil war. Again and again in his writings Dryden implicitly sees the years 1640-1660 as a time separating and defining society into two parts, before and after. Dryden sees that the writers that have gone before are quite different from writers of his day: they are writers of “the great age before the Flood.” A new attitude was called for, a new start, and Tonson may have felt this, too, in that he strives to present earlier writers and writers of his own time in the timeless guise of a “definitive” edition. Of English dramatists: Shakespeare in ten volumes (the first ever edition), Beaumont and Fletcher in seven volumes (1712), Otway (1712), Ben Jonson in six volumes (1716), Dryden (he had written to Congreve in a commendatory poem printed in Congreve's Double Dealer (1694), “Be kind to my remains”) in six volumes edited by Congreve (1712), Vanbrugh (1719), and Shadwell (1720). Along with all these dramatists, most of them still familiar today, there is an equally astonishing series of poets: besides Dryden, Rochester, and Milton, there are Prior, Spenser, and Gay. Tonson began with the young Pope, publishing his Pastoral in Poetic Miscellanies, 1709. Later, Pope left him for the publisher Lintot, who he thought would pay him better (it's a testimony of sorts to both Pope and Tonson).

During the first two decades of the eighteenth century, Tonson made frequent trips to Paris and Amsterdam, partly to buy paper and type for his business. As a staunch supporter of the Whig government, he was at the same time the official government printer and (as it were) unofficial agent employed to report on foreign thinking, doings, and attitudes—the sort of thing that would be called “spying” today, though I doubt if there was anything of the sinister notion which that word suggests, or of its glamour. At the same time as he was printer to the government, as has recently come to light, Tonson indulged in some technically illegal “black” propaganda on behalf of the Whigs, printing and possibly writing a pamphlet that exploited the attempted Jacobite invasion early in 1708.

By this time an established bookseller and publisher, Tonson knew most of those people who were in positions of power and influence in the political and literary worlds and was himself regarded as a “character” and as a man of consequence in his own right. His properties were intellectual, rather than vast areas of land. Pope, who called him “genial [nourishing, life-giving] Jacob” in The Dunciad, described Tonson in his old age in a letter to Lord Oxford as “a Phaenomenon worth seeing & hearing … the perfect Image & Likeness of Bayle's Dictionary; so full of Matter, Secret History, & Wit & Spirit.”

The culmination of Tonson's publishing career, and also the culmination of his orchestration of men of letters in a single endeavor, was the great Garth-Tonson composite verse translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses in 1717. This was based firmly on the solid chunks that Dryden had translated between 1693 and 1700, amounting to about a third of the poem. There are indications that it had been discussed between Dryden and Tonson in the 1690s. The finished translation combined work by Addison, Congreve, Pope, Gay, and some ten others.

Tonson's achievement was to have altered the relationship between writer and publisher, and to have altered our perceptions about how works of literature should be presented, and to have some share in determining what these works should be, which has in essence remained the modern publisher's task.