14 - Pope and the book trade

Summary

Introduction

Pope's absorption in the book trade is remarkable. Always fascinated by typography, he was commenting on trade practices and condemning some of them by the time he was thirty. But paradoxically the tricks he observed, particularly author and bookseller anonymity, serialization, reissues, and manipulation of formats, all fed positively into the second half of his career, in which he was, in the modern sense, his own publisher, financing and designing his own books, and supervising their distribution. Pope made a lot of money from the publication of his own work - around £10,000.00 from his translations of Homer alone - but he also made the book trade his subject and its resources a means of self-expression. In ways that are characteristic of him, he seems at times the most unequivocal of insiders, with a detailed knowledge of contracting, designing, advertising, and distribution, while at other times, he is merely the bibliographer or book historian, wryly recording curious practices and displaying them for our disapproval. Complex social pressures lie behind these stances - a growing public sphere in which reputations were to be earned and maintained, the possibilities of large financial rewards for writing, the slow replacement of patronage by the market - and Pope undoubtedly regarded his own times and their changes as hostile to his success. Ironically, this very awareness became integral to his achievement.