The First John Murray and the Late Eighteenth-Century London Book Trade: With a Checklist of His Publications
Scions of the house of Murray have been born and bred to the publishing trade for more than two centuries. Not so the first John Murray, who served with the Royal Marines in the Seven Years War, retired on half pay and cast about for a livelihood. Newly married and under pressure to find his way, he was reinstated in the navy with a view to a lifetime career, but then, quite by accident, learned that William Sandby's bookselling business was for sale. He seized the opportunity, emboldened by his observation that "Many blockheads in the trade are making fortunes" (24). Murray made a great success of his twenty-five year career (1768-93), but had ample occasion to notice that, at a time of steep increases in the number of booksellers, many were also going bankrupt.
William Zachs has produced a richly detailed, complex portrait of a bookseller who, by the late 1770s, was "a force to be reckoned with in the London trade" (90). The foundation for his study is the intact Murray Archive, a phenomenal trove of documents that he deftly probes to get at "the nature of bookselling, which ran by a logic sometimes obscure, even to highly intelligent individuals" (65). While imparting a clear picture of the day-to-day running of Murray's business, Zachs shades and highlights that picture by drawing upon his thorough understanding of late eighteenth-century publishing practices in general.
Zachs organizes his chapters around topics like "Dealing with Authors," "The London Trade," "Trade Outside London," and "Periodical Publications," as well as devoting sections within to "Advertising," "Book Production," "Co-publication," "Catalogues," and so on. One comes away with a sharp sense of what bookselling involved, from its financial structure and the politics of copyright all the way down to rents and the stocking of such non-literary goods as fever powder in the shop at 32 Fleet Street. Especially intriguing are the chapters about Murray's efforts to gain a foothold in the Irish market, and his several periodical ventures. While the English Review handsomely repaid the heavy demands it placed on Murray's time--for eleven years he "read and corrected every word" (213)--his other failures in this line of publishing are instructive for the insight they provide into an intensely competitive marketplace. Under the stresses and inducements of trade, long-held alliances could unexpectedly disintegrate, or chilly periods of distrust resolve into joint accord. In the long run Murray's business was very profitable, but he suffered periodic setbacks of the sort that were endemic to a capital-intensive trade dependent on sometimes precarious levels of floating credit.
This biography is a splendid complement to Pope and the Early Eighteenth-Century Book Trade (1991), in which David Foxon and James McLaverty showed how Pope influenced the physical appearance of his books, manipulating the conventions of print to gratify the tastes of different market segments. Zachs dissects the author-publisher relationship from the producer's point of view, but provides the same kind of exacting overview of the trade in the latter half of the century. Author and publisher alike hoped for a mutually advantageous arrangement, but in advance of any profits it was far from clear how or whether this happy outcome could be brought about. Murray was cautious in his negotiations with authors, refusing to involve himself in bidding wars with other publishers. He drove a hard bargain, but could also be generous.
This volume is handsomely produced. Its forty-eight plates (and frontispiece), most of them reproduced at full-page length, offer an array of portraits, drawings, title-pages, newspaper clippings, manuscript ledgers, bills, receipts, letters, and diary entries. Zachs's judicious selection gives the reader an excellent overall feel for the publishing concern. Particularly interesting are the ledgers, which reveal at a glance the gamut of book production: paper purchases, printing, illustrating, advertising, stitching, binding, pricing, and distributing.
Some helpful graphs and tables consolidate Murray's publishing record, showing the annual growth or contraction of his business and the variety of genres amongst his titles. Medical books represented nearly a quarter of his publications (over 220 titles), his cultivation of this market niche bringing him a level of credibility that turned his shop into "a centre for important news in the field" (181). A diversity of other genres rounded out his list, from poetry and sermons to history, law, and fiction.
Much credit is due to the British Academy and Oxford University Press for including the meticulous and lengthy feature (255-409) that buttresses the narrative: "A Checklist of Murray Publications 1768-1793." For each of nearly a thousand publications, grouped by year, Zachs details the author, title, imprint, collation, format, price, production costs and print run if known, the ESTC record number and primary location shelfmark, genre classification, and partnership arrangement. To have the career of a significant publisher documented in this manner is invaluable; serious students of the late eighteenth-century book trade will find in it--from any number of different perspectives--a wealth of data unique in its field.
Take, for instance, the matter of imprints: the part of a title-page that usually lists a city, publisher(s), and year. Anyone familiar with the book trade knows that such seemingly straightforward information can be partial, or even deceptive, but the thoroughness and patience of Zachs teaches us more persuasively than ever how much cross-checking is needed to understand who the players were behind any given publication. Corroboration from ledgers, advertisements, catalogues, letters, auction records, and so forth, is needed before one can establish with any certainty who the publishers of a book were. Zachs's treatment and exploration of this question is exemplary. A host of other details as well--from cancels to inscriptions within individual copies--sheds light on how the books were marketed and consumed.
Throughout the book, as Zachs lays open the economic arcana of a burgeoning trade, a vivid portrait emerges of a man unwavering in his decisions, jealous of his own advantage, dependable in joint ventures, forthright (sometimes to brusqueness), convivial (a little wild in drink and sexuality), always energetic, often litigious, but warm and humorous in his personal correspondence. Zachs manages all his material, whether bibliographical or biographical, in notably readable prose.
