Kinds of Patronage 2:
The Paying Public, the Birth of
the
Author
Andrea Shephard, Sarah Samudre,
Vasant Samudre, Leslie Kraft, &
William O’Donnell
Overview
• Dangers and Rewards
– For Author
– For Public
• Paying Public
• Author as Celebrity
• Ownership/Marketing
– Birth of the Copyright
• Contemporary Situation
– Death of the Author
Author
Dangers
• Divine Art or Mercenary
Métier?
• Limitations on What They
Could Write
• Reliance on Other People
(Public and Printers)
• Plagiarism
• Prone to Alienation or
Narcissism
• Moralizers
Author
Rewards
•
•
•
•
Francis Bacon
Rank
Fame
New Careers
Writer Gentility
Public
Dangers
• Advertising
• Superstitions
• Pseudoscience vs. Real
Science
Public
Rewards
• Enrichment
• Showing off Literary
Taste
• Travelers’ and Discovers’
Reports
The Reading Public
• It’s hard to say
– Teachers and preachers never dethroned
– Different groups affected
– The beginnings of the “global village”
• Marshall McLuhan
– The decisive moment
What the Public Wanted
• Entertainment
– Poetry
• Ben Jonson, William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe
– Books, novels, newspapers, gazettes, pornography
• Information
– Sciences, math, language, history, criticism
– Town events, local and foreign affairs, real estate
transactions, etc
– Gossip
Changes in the Culture
• Displacement of the pulpit
• Drawing people together while keeping
them apart
Celebrity
•
•
•
•
Print and publicity
Personal celebrity
Personal recognition
“Drive for fame”
Celebrity
• Men of letters
• Writers as celebrities
• Recognition, status, and fame
The Rise of Ownership and Marketing
• The rise of the professional author couldn’t have happened
without the rise of the concept of intellectual and creative
ownership. Specifically, that a literary work is created by a person
who is given credit for creation and ownership of that work and
sells its rights to others to reproduce it.
• Before copyright law was introduced in 1710, ownership was
enforced by the Stationers’ Company, and mostly benefitted the
printing industry, not the authors.
• Once a work could be distinguished legally by authorial
ownership, competition between printing companies was
introduced into the industry. This lead to the marketing not only
of books, but also of the personalities that claimed them, that
made those works uniquely different and, as alluded to in
marketing, better than their competitors’ products.
The Worshipful Company of Stationer’s
•
•
•
•
•
•
Originated as a guild of stationers (bookbinders, illuminators, and book merchants) in
1403. In 1557, it was given a royal charter and is still in effect today, although mainly
for ceremonial duties.
By the advent of print, around the time when it was given a royal charter, it was no
longer a guild for copiers and illuminators, but a full fledged printing guild that created
the necessary protections for the growth of the printing industry as a successful
commercial business.
Established the concept of literary origination and invention to systematize a way of
regulating competition between companies who were competing to publish a given
book.
Also acted as a moral censorship board, suppressing any materials that were offensive
to the Church or the Crown.
When an author wrote a manuscript, he could sell it to a printing company who would
register it with the Stationers’ Register. The author made money from the sale of the
manuscript, but the printing company retained all the rights to the financial success of
the book after the sale had been made. The author’s identity in this era was mainly
used as a marketing tool for the printing companies to distinguish one work as unique
and better than another sold by a competing company.
It is in this setting that the term “copy right” was first introduced, although it wouldn’t
be enacted into law until the Statute of Anne in 1709.
The Birth of the Copyright Also
Cemented the Rise of the Author
• The Statue of Anne occurred in 1709 and cemented the occupation of author
as a legitimate paying profession, as they could now gain royalties from their
works even after they had sold them to the publishing companies.
• The most important change that the Statute of
Anne brought was placing the importance of
origination on the AUTHOR not the
PUBLISHER. It also gave definitive terms to
how long a copyright could be held.
What Does Copyright Have to Do With
Marketing?
• Up until the advent of copyright, the image of
the author as creator largely benefited the
publishing companies. But after the Statute of
Anne, the importance of ownership was placed
on the author instead of the company that
registered the work, which meant that authors
now joined in with the publishers to market
their books and their own images as authors.
Ownership = Money = Marketing =
SUPERSTAR
•
•
•
•
•
As authors began to benefit from the royalties they received, they looked for ways to
increase their marketability.
Before the definition of legal copyright, when the Stationers’ Company placed the
ownership on publishing companies rather than authors, books were promoted
through distribution to the learned men of cities and towns who would often read
these books aloud and promote them for publishing companies.
With the advent of print journalism around the same time as the Statute of Anne in
the early 18th century, authors could self promote, writing articles and blurbs and
engage in the “art of puffery”, as Eisenstein says.
Being able to claim a work not only allowed a company to market it as a unique
product, but further definitions of ownership allowed an author to represent
themselves and market themselves by lecturing on the road, giving performances and
public readings, as well as writing for different daily, monthly or quarterly publications.
This marketing, as the role of ownership became more and more centered on the
author and not the publishing company, allowed the role of author to become a valid
profession, moving it away from merely being a royally patronized member of the
court, and giving freedom to the individual to support himself and his art.
Contemporary Printing:
From Scarcity to Surplus
• Permanence/Preservative Powers of Print
• Massive Accumulation
• Increased Weight on Distinction/Authorship
Personal “Printing Presses”
Physical
• Copy machines (with
typewriters)
• Desktop printers (with
computers)
Virtual
• Blogs
• Personal Websites
• Twitter
Spread of the Internet:
Internet Users as Percentage
of the Population
• Everyone can be an author!
• Thus, even more important to distinguish oneself from
another.
Contemporary Marketing:
Visual Individuality
Contemporary Marketing:
Multimedia Approach
•
•
•
•
Print
Radio
Television
Internet
Contemporary Situation:
Death of the Author
•
•
Roland Barthes
Attack against Supremacy of the
Individual Author
–
–
–
Author is a social construct
Author is not the authority on a
text; the text itself is
Author is not the father of text
•
–
•
Author vs. Writer
Writer can never be truly original
Prescription for the Death of the
Author (and the Birth of the
Reader)
Though some advocate the Death of the Author, and
others believe print to be a thing of the past, we all know
that, in actuality…
Printing's Alive!
Bibliography
• Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author.” Aspen. 5-6 (1967). 16 Nov.
2009 <http://www.ubu.com/aspen/aspen5and6/threeEssays.html#barthes>
• Eisenstein, Elizabeth L. The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe. 2nd
ed. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
• Patterson, Lyman Ray. Copyrights in Historical Perspective. Vanderbilt
University Press, 1968.
• Rose, Mark. Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright. Vanderbilt
University Press, 1995.
• Saunders, J.W, ed. The Literary Profession in the Elizabethan Age. 2nd ed.
New York: Barnes & Noble, Inc., 1967.
Picture Credits
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
http://blog.mpl.org/nowatmpl/books1.jpg
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8b/Dan_Brown_bookjacke
t_cropped.jpg
http://www.wga.hu/art/b/baldung/4/41luther.jpg
http://artsweb.uwaterloo.ca/~j4rodger/moreTOPIA/erasmus.jpeg
http://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/images/sir_francis_bacon.jpg
http://z.hubpages.com/u/29163_f520.jpg
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/08/11/science/12magic_600.jpg
http://etc.usf.edu/clipart/44800/44880/44880_guten_press_md.gif
http://www.episcopalcafe.com/art/caravaggio_st_jerome_500x363.jpg
http://copymachinesforsale.com/images/copymachinesforsale.jpg
http://www.sb.fsu.edu/~xray/Images/DellComputer.jpg