Very Necessary but Not Quite Sufficient: A Personal View of Quantitative Analysis in Book History

Eliot, Simon.
Book History, Volume 5, 2002, pp. 283-293 (Article)
Published by Penn State University Press DOI: 10.1353/bh.2002.0006

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Very Necessary but Not Quite Sufficient

A Personal View of Quantitative Analysis in Book History

Simon Eliot

On a huge hill, Cragged, and steep, Truth stands, and hee that will Reach her, about must, and about must goe. John Donne, Satyre III

Accounting for the Material Text

Before one says anything else about book history, one should remind readers and practitioners alike that the subject is rooted in the material world. Textual or iconographic information is produced, processed, transmitted, received, and preserved by a series of physical acts on material objects within the real world. The writers cramp, the aching back of the scribe, the stench from parchment being prepared, the creaking frame of the common press, the weight and yet fragility of type, the roar and racket of newspaper presses, the clatter of Monotype casters, the damp solidity of printed sheets, the glazed garishness of yellowbacks and pulp Wction, the extravagant juxtapositions in encrusted layers of Xy posters on unattended wallsall tell us of one thing above all others: meaning and signiWcance in human affairs is not conveyed with immaculate and abstract precision from writer to reader. What it also tells us is that this material world is characterized in part, and therefore is to be understood in part, by countable quantities: reams of paper, tons of type, print runs, and percentage returns on capital.

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This recognition is not new. Anglophone book history is based solidly on the great Anglo-American tradition of bibliography, and an important part of that is historical and enumerative bibliography. It was the commitment of scholars in the last century to enumerative bibliography that produced the sequence of short title catalogues (STCs)eventually to run from the Incunable Short Title Catalogue (ISTC) to the Nineteenth Century Short Title Catalogue (NSTC)on which some of the most important work on the quantitative history of the book in Britain has been done. Although the nineteenth and twentieth centuries provide overwhelmingly more quantiWable data than any other period, bibliometric work on the STCs have ensured that, for instance, we now have a clear idea of the origins and nature of the printed books imported into England and Scotland in the late Wfteenth and early sixteenth centuries,1 and of annual book production in England, Scotland, and Ireland between 1475 and 1700.2 It is signiWcant that, in the early 1990s, all four postdoctoral fellowships established to support the History of the Book in Britain project and funded by the Leverhulme Trust were in the areas of quantitative book history.3 In book history the case study approach is interesting and important but, on its own, is not enough. We certainly have to look at speciWcs: we need to study particular titles, demanding authors, ingenious publishers, depressive booksellers, and perverse readers. Without such studies we would miss the texture and taste of bookmaking humanity. However, such studies, though necessary, are not sufWcient. Any number of individual studies would not be sufWcient, because you could never be certain that you had assembled a reliable sample that did justice at large to the particular period or area that you were studying. Also, the individual studies need a context to confer on their details a proper signiWcance. Let me give you an example. A few years ago I was working on a now wholly obscure novelist and popular historian called Walter Besant. In the late nineteenth century, however, Besant was a great success, a well-known and feted man of letters who would be approached by popular journalists of the day for his views on such matters as who should be the next poet laureate or the signiWcance of the New Woman. Above all, in terms of his value to posterity, Besant founded and helped run the Wrst successful organization for writers in the United Kingdom, the Society of Authors. I was working on the archives of Chatto & Windus, Besants main publisher, and was pulling out what I thought were interesting details. In the 1880s Besants novels, originally published as three-deckers at the inXated price of 31s. 6d., were being quickly reprinted at 3s. 6d. and then at 2s. I had no idea what this signiWed. Was Besant, as a successful novelist, getting special treatment, or was this standard practice? Besants two-shilling books were frequently ordered in print runs of Wve thousand to ten thousand or more. I had no idea

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whether or not this was exceptional. Besants major novels were commonly issued in book form in October or November: was this standard practice? Besant frequently sold his copyrights quickly, and rarelyif everentered into royalty arrangements. In doing this, was he typical of his time? Did other successful novelists do this? What did less successful novelists do? Was the money he received for his copyrights generous or mean or did it represent fair market value? Finallyand this was the question that would contextualise all the othershow popular was Besant in relation to other contemporary authors such as M. E. Braddon, Mrs. Henry Wood, Wilkie Collins, Margaret Oliphant, or Ouida? I hadnt a clue. It would have been no good, even if I had had the time, investigating two or three other writers because I could not be certain that they were any more representative or typical than Besant. I needed to see the forest, not a host of additional trees. It was this need that forced me, rather unwillingly at Wrst I have to admit, toward quantitative book history. My unwillingness was twofold. First, I was worried about being able to get access to enough primary data that was reliable, consistent, and sufWciently continuous to form the longish time sequence that I needed if I were to understand broad trends in book history. Second, I was worried about the time and effort required. I knew that the collection of large quantities of data, even if they were available, would be a slow and laborious process. I knew that primary evidence, whether it was in manuscript (for example, Stationers Company Entry and Register Books, the British Museum Librarys Copyright Receipt Registers) or in print (for instance, the Publishers Circular, the Bookseller) commonly took the form of large, raw sources that offered no shortcuts. I would have to do a hell of a lot of page turning and a mind-bruising amount of counting. I also knew that, even when the process of accumulation was over, the quantitative historian would only have just begun. He or she must then devise ways of manipulating the data so that, without distorting or exaggerating the information, signiWcant features, particularly changes over time, became visible. Once that had been done, the historian would then have to assess the statistical signiWcance of these phenomena (the chi-square test might be invaluable here). Only after all that might one stand back and attempt to interpret the statistical datas value in terms of book history. Then one could at last return to ones case study and slot the individual Wgure into its proper context for the Wrst time. Despite the obstacles, I decided to have a go. In practice I was able to do only some of this for my Wrst study of Besant. The statistical work took on a life of its own, as it often does, and generated further questions and more intriguing methodological problems. Indeed, my main investigation had to be published separately, as Some Patterns and Trends in British

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Publishing, 18001919.4 The work for that book answered some of my questions, but I was still bafXed on the subject of how one went about establishing Besants popularity vis--vis contemporary novelists. This question led me far away from book production statistics to the records of the burgeoning public library system of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and to the number of copies of novels that those libraries held. My monograph A Measure of Popularity looked at more than eighty public library catalogues published between 1883 and 1912.5 It was not a complete answer but it did tell me much about how public library readers perceived Besant (more popular than Wilkie Collins and Ouida but trailing Miss Braddon and Mrs. Henry Wood). It had taken a long time and a lot of effort, but quantitative book history had given me a sense of where and how my author Wtted into the text industry and the text culture of his time. His works and his life now had a broader signiWcance that they could not have acquired in any other way.

A Just Measure of Caution

All statistical work, however sophisticated, however crude, is inevitably hedged around with caveats and disclaimers, and this is both reasonable and necessary. But we must make sure, as quantitative book historians, that the sum of the qualiWers is not greater than the usefulness of the statistics. However many caveats the data and their interpretations have to carry, they must also have a level of probability and a degree of signiWcance sufWcient to justify all the labor involved. In other words, the statistics have to possess a high level of information content and some explanatory power. Ideally this means that the results of the statistical process reveal something signiWcant that was previously unknown. However, in this sublunary world of ours, a lesser achievement can still be regarded as worth attaining. For instance, statistical work can sometimes concentrate not on producing something new, but on calibrating or quantifying what was already known. For instance, no one doubted that the number of book titles produced per annum increased as the nineteenth century progressed. However, having worked on Patterns and Trends, I can now tell you the rough increase per year and the percentage difference between the production of titles in 1800 and 1900. Furthermore, in calibrating the known, one often reveals features that were previously unknown. In the case of my work, I can now say with conviction that nineteenth-century book title production was not a simple upward curve, that there were accelerations and declines, that there was a peak between 1850 and 1855, a plateau in the 1860s, and an acceleration at the end of the 1870s. I can also identify, with reasonable

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probability, the causes of these changes. After all, quantitative book history carries with it a responsibility to make sense of what it reveals. The principle justiWcation for the application of statistical methods to book history must be its usefulness. Usefulness depends, however, not on just what the statistics tell us, but also how much we can rely on them. And this is where the selection and sampling of sources is critical. History is not an experimental science; we cannot deWne what we want to establish and then set up a series of experiments to test a hypothesis. The past has left us some data, but they were not produced in laboratory conditions; they were not designed to answer our questions; they were not collected as a representative sampleand they rarely used a classiWcation system that we might Wnd at all helpful. However, they are all we have got and we must work with them. Statistics are not about certainty; they are about various levels of probability and about reasonable approximations. It is important, when interpreting book history statistics, that one gives the reader a clear sense of how much reliance one can place upon them. This, of course, will vary from source to source and will be dependent on what questions you ask of that source. I shall be discussing a number of sources and their uses later, but it is safe to say that, for instance, the ledger books of a publisher are likely to give you reliable statistics on that publishers output but that lists of titles published in the Publishers Circular are likely to be a less reliable guide to total U.K. book production. The less secure ones sources, the broader the questions asked, the lower the level of reliability is likely to be. One can compensate for this to an extent, Wrst by using as many and as diverse sources as possible. For instance, when discussing numbers of titles published in the United Kingdom in the nineteenth century, I sought out as many different sources as I could Wnd, sources that were diverse but overlapping. To cover production in the 1850s, I used no fewer than nine separate sets of data. Corroboration is not certain proof, but when two or more sets of data collected by different groups for different purposes indicate similar things, then one has a right, I think, to feel somewhat more conWdent in ones conclusions. Moreover, one can Wnd in this data not exact details but, instead, broad trends and large-scale patterns. For many historical reasons, individual data sets will vary wildly between individual years. However, if you look not at years but at decades, not at individual absolute Wgures but at signiWcant percentage changes, then these diverse sources will often start telling a similar story. The other critical factor is sampling. If the data source is rich enough, it is likely to have so much data that not all of it can be recorded or processed. Random sampling is possible and, rather like initial test pits dug on an archaeological site, is often a good way to get a quick overall idea of the material likely to be available. For most purposes, however, it is probably

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better to use a Wxed pattern of samples. That pattern has to be frequent enough so as not to miss major Xuctuations and regular enough to detect, for instance, seasonal variations. An obvious case in point would be a study of the annual patterns of book production. You would need at least four sample months in the year spread over the four seasons to make sure that seasonal variations were picked up. Currently I am running a major project that is turning the fortnightly lists of new publications printed in the Publishers Circular between the 1840s and 1920s into machine-readable form. I wanted to cover whole years so I could get a complete picture of given years. Unfortunately, keying in each year represents a huge expense of money and time, so one has to be selective. I decided initially on one full year per decade. The obvious choice would have been 1840, 1850, 1860, and so on. However, I wanted to be able to compare my statistics with those produced by, for instance, the NSTC. But the NSTC has a habit of dumping undated imprints into the nearest beginning or middle year of a decade. That meant that, for example, 1850 and 1855 would have inXated Wgures swollen by undatable titles. I chose therefore to go for years ending in 1, thus avoiding the problem. Years ending in 1 have the added advantage in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries of being census years in the United Kingdom, so I would have another useful source that I could correlate with my title data. One year in a decade is by no means ideal, but such a technique does admit of augmentation as soon as additional funds become available. Already I have plans afoot to sample all years ending in 6, thus increasing the per decade sample to two but still avoiding the dump years. Ideally, whatever sampling regime you choose, it should have a capacity to be usefully augmented at a later date in a systematic way. IdentiWcation and quantiWcation of crude trends and large-scale changes over time may not have the appeal of a forensic discussion of subtle changes over short spans of time, but they are much more likely to produce information that is a reasonably accurate reXection of what probably happened in the past. In other words, macro-level analysis is much more likely to deliver worthwhile results than micro-level studies.

The Need to Revisit

Quantitative work in book history, particularly at the macro level of, for instance, broad trends in text production over a century, is likely to be a continuing process. The bibliometrician may have to revisit work in the hope of nudging the information toward better and better approximations of the truth.

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This need to revisit the data may be the result of new relevant data sets becoming available. For example, a few years after I had completed work on Patterns and Trends, a signiWcant part of the early NSTC became available on CD-ROM. I needed to return to the conclusions of Patterns and Trends and test them against the new data to see if they would stand up or needed revision.6 Another reason for revisiting the analysis might be that the original work had thrown up new questions or, more commonly, had reWned the questions that needed to be asked of the data. This is a constructive feedback loop that is likely to result in better corroborated, better substantiated and, one hopes, more reliable interpretations. Nevertheless, creative though this may be, one should always be aware of the dangers of diminishing returns. Eventually, at some point, the amount of labor involved in collecting and processing additional data is simply not justiWed by a signiWcant increase in information content or in reliability. The fortunate thing here is that quantitative book history is so effortful that diminishing returns are very evident very quickly.

The Biography of a Data Source

Rarely can we pick and choose among our sources; we have to use whatever is available and use it as well as we can. If we are to use our sources well (that is, exploit them to the full without asking them to bear a weight of interpretation that they are not strong enough to carry) we need to know our sources well: who compiled them, why they were compiled, and how they were compiled. In other words, we must know the biography of the source. For instance, when using the British Museum Copyright Receipt Registers, one should know that, although each piece of legal deposit legislation speciWed the requirement to deposit a copy at the British Museum Library (BML) or its earlier equivalent (the Royal Library for the Act of 1710), in practice publishers could be very lax about this. Even after the 1842 Copyright Act, the amount of legal deposit material that the BML was receiving from publishers was very small. This sorry state of affairs continued until the mid-1850s when the then principal librarian, Antonio Panizzi, started putting the penalty clauses of the 1842 act into effect by threatening recalcitrant publishers with prosecution. During these years the intake of legal deposit material went up by leaps and bounds. Knowing this, one can see the sudden increase in numbers of printed items deposited during this period not as a dramatic increase in the production of books, but as a guilty response from a threatened trade. Although the need to understand the origin and nature of ones sources is always a duty, it can, just occasionally, also be a pleasure of sorts. A study

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of the Entry and Register Books of the Stationers Company in the nineteenth century revealed that there were titles listed that had not actually been published. It was also obvious, despite the bibliographic ghosts, that the company was registering many fewer books than other contemporary sources. An investigation of the Stationers Court Books and a study of evidence given to the Royal Commission on Copyright in 1878 revealed the entertainingly incompetent duo of George Greenhill and his son Joseph, who were responsible for registering books at Stationers Hall for a goodly part of the nineteenth century. The father seems to have failed time and time again to send lists of legal deposit books to Oxford and Cambridge Universities and, when he did send books, he managed to lose some of them on the way. The son admitted to the Royal Commission that, when accepting a registration, he never checked to see that the title had actually been published. His lack of interest in doing this was explained by the fact that he earned a fee for every book registered. In addition, and quite illegally, he was even charging those registering books for the form on which they registered!7 One might legitimately conclude that data derived from such a source needed very careful handling. If you are lucky enough to be working with statistical data derived from a collection in the charge of a knowledgeable archivist, listen to the archivist on the subject of the biography of the source. Such people can save you from many an embarrassing mistake. I have been working recently on a quantitative history of the publishing Wrm of Macmillan in the nineteenth century.8 I became interested, as many have been before me, in Macmillans Colonial Library series, which, from the late 1880s onward, produced a large number of titles for export to the British Empire. I got very enthusiastic about the print runs of these editions, fondly assuming that they would tell me much about the popularity of English texts in essentially nonEnglish-speaking cultures such as those found in India. The archivist gently pointed out to me that it was very likely that a high percentage of these editions sold in Australia rather than India. I was suitably chastened. In statistical work, as in other forms of research, the rash assumption that remains unquestioned until too late can account for months of fruitless work. Armed with such information, one can judge the relative merits of different sources and adjust interpretations accordingly.

About Must, and About Must Goe

I want to end this brief discussion with one particular exercise in which I am currently engaged. It is an illustration of a feedback loop that, for all

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its irritations and frustrations, convinces me that quantitative work has an honorable and useful place in book history. One of the chapters in Patterns and Trends was devoted to the prices of books between the early nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. By the late 1980s, I had become convinced that pricethough it had been too unstable and uncertain a datum for traditional bibliographywas a critical factor in the history of the book for the simple reason that it determined who had access, and the nature of that access, to texts. I therefore launched into one of my most difWcult data collection exercises. It was difWcult because contemporary sources did not always record the price of books and, even when they did, they rarely went on to use price as a Weld when they were compiling summary statistics. For instance, from 1870 onward the Publishers Circular compiled annual statistics of titles that they had listed in the previous year. These titles would be broken down by months and by genres, but never by price. This meant that every title to be included in the survey had to have its price individually recorded. As the sample had to involve thousands of titles in order to be representative, that meant weeks of the dullest data collection imaginable. In order to make this task more manageable, I had to choose categories in which to collect the data. I decided on a series of eleven price bands as follows: 1d.6d., 7d.11d., 1s.2s., 2s. 1d.3s. 6d., 3s. 7d.5s., 5s. 1d.7s. 6d., 7s. 7d.10s., 10s. 1d.20s., 20s. 1d.30s., 30s. 1d.40s., above 40s. In reporting my Wndings I simpliWed even further and wrote about low-price books (1d.3s. 6d.), midprice books (3s. 7d.10s.), and high-price books (above 10s.). Despite its crudity, this system was capable of revealing some fascinating dynamics in book prices in sample years between 1800 and 1919. Inevitably, using as I was trade journals of the period, most of the books recorded were those of interest to the trade, so texts hawked around the streets and the fairs would not register as strongly as perhaps they should have done. Nevertheless, distinct movements and shifts toward cheaper prices could clearly be mapped. Between 1811 and 1825 the high-price book was predominant (with books actually becoming more expensive between 1815 and 1825). In 1835 and 1845 the high-price book was overtaken by the medium-price book. By 1855 the position of 1811 had been completely reversed: low-price books were the largest category (60 percent) and highprice books the smallest (12 percent). From then on until the end of the period, low-price books were regularly accounting for between 60 and 65 percent of all titles listed in the trade journals. Different genres turned out to have had different price proWles: religion always tended to have more cheap books; literatures price proWle was rather high until the 1870s, and then cheaper compared with most other genres.

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Book History

Much had been gained by this approach, so what was wrong with the survey? As a broad-scale study it was probably adequate, but it could not reveal signiWcant changes in prices unless they crossed the category boundaries. For instance, a book priced at 18s. in the 1850s might have been slashed by a third to 12s. by the 1880s, but it would still fall within the 10s. 1d.-20s. category, and thus its price reduction would not be registered. Even a dramatic reduction from 2s. to 1s. would be missed, as the book would still be in the 1s.-2s. price band. My initial scheme simply did not have a high enough level of resolution to detect signiWcant changes in the price of individual books. And because it used price ranges rather than actual exact prices, it could not tell us which were commonly used real prices and which were not. Were there books priced at 3s. 11d. (as we might expect nowadays, something that sounded much less than 4s.)? Nor could price ranges tell us how common certain prices were: was 4s. more common than 4s. 6d.? How popular a price was 5s.? The inadequacies of this Wrst pass over the data were brought home to me three years ago while I was thinking of the economics of book buying and book borrowing in the nineteenth century. There is a proper and important relationship between quantitative book history and the economic and business history of the book, so I was not surprised that the new questions that pressed in on me were coming from this direction. I was then interested in how much the average reader in mid-nineteenth-century Britain might have had to spend on books. This required me to look at average working- and middle-class incomes of the period but also, and much more important, forced me to think about disposable incomes. How much, after paying for all the necessities of life, would a working-class family on, say, thirty shillings a week have to spend on luxuries (including books)? The answers were striking: for an average working-class family we might be talking at best in terms of two to three shillings. Even for many of the middle classes it was probably not more than Wfteen to sixteen shillings a week. Suddenly a 3s. 6d. book didnt sound at all cheap. It would represent more than the disposable income of a working-class family for a week. Even if you got the maximum discount (3d. in the shilling) reducing the book to 2s. 8d., it still represented nearly 20 percent of a lower-middleclass familys weekly disposable income. In the light of this, the need to know the frequency of particular prices, and the way in which those particular prices became more or less popular over the period, became pressing. A combination of questions raised by the Wrst analysis and questions raised by work in other Welds required a return to the statistical data, not to contradict what had been done but to reWne it and make it more informative. This necessary but highly laborious exercise is under way and has already produced some very interesting results.9

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Statistics used by book historians come from many sources, some more reliable and less ambiguous than others. They are used for many purposes, some more legitimate than others. This article is not an exercise in justifying the use of any Wgures at any time in any context. It is simply an attempt to identify a number of different types of data derived from different sources, which, interpreted cautiously and used intelligently, can illuminate and explain processes within book history that are simply not visible by any other means.

Notes
1. See Margaret Lane Ford, Importation of Printed Books into England and Scotland, in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vol. 3 (14001557), ed. Lotte Hellinga and J. B. Trapp (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 179201. 2. See Maureen Bell and John Barnard, Provisional Count of STC Titles 14751640, Publishing History, no. 31 (1992): 4864; Provisional Count of Wing Titles 16411700, Publishing History, no. 44 (1998): 8997. 3. A description of these can be found in Publishing History, no. 31 (1992): 6570. 4. Simon Eliot, Some Patterns and Trends in British Publishing, 18001919 (London: Bibliographical Society, 1994). 5. Simon Eliot, A Measure of Popularity: The Public Library Holdings of Twenty-Four Popular Authors, 18831912, History of the BookOn Demand Series [HOBODS], no. 2 (Bristol: HOBODS, 1992). 6. Simon Eliot, Patterns and Trends and the NSTC: Some Initial Observations, part 1, Publishing History, no. 42 (Autumn 1997); Simon Eliot, Patterns and Trends and the NSTC: Some Initial Observations, part 2, Publishing History 43 (Spring 1998). 7. Simon Eliot, Mr. Greenhill, Whom You Cannot Get Rid Of: Copyright, Legal Deposit, and the Stationers Company in the Nineteenth Century, in Libraries and the Book Trade, ed. Robin Myers, Michael Harris, and Giles Mandelbrote (Winchester: St. Pauls Bibliographies, 2000). 8. Simon Eliot, To You in Your Vast Business: Some Features of the Quantitative History of Macmillan, 18431891, in Studies in the House of Macmillan, ed. Elizabeth James (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001). 9. Some of this work, along with a discussion of disposable incomes, can be found in Simon Eliot, Never Mind the Value, What About the Price? or, How Much Did Marmion Cost St. John Rivers? in Nineteenth-Century Literature 56 (September 2001): 16097.