SOURCE: Bonham-Carter, Victor. “Chapter Four.” In Authors By Profession, Vol. 1, pp. 71-89. Los Altos, Calif.: William Kaufmann Inc., 1978.

In the following excerpt, Bonham-Carter discusses developments in international copyright law in the mid-nineteenth century and the founding of the Society of British Authors.

It has been shown how, after about 1830, periodicals and part publication provided authors with the main means of communicating new works to the public en masse. Such means did not inhibit publication in volume form, indeed serialisation usually preceded it, by which time a work could be issued as a relatively cheap reprint. But to launch a new book in volume form tended to restrict sales owing to cost—a ‘three-decker’ novel being commonly priced at 31s 6d the set.

In 1823 there were only a handful of guinea-and-a-half novels, but by 1840 fifty-one out of fifty-eight new novels bore this price … The result was that fiction-lovers flocked...