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...