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Chapter 5 ("Book Production: Manufacture and Bookkeeping"), part 5, of the author's Pegasus in Harness: Victorian Publishing and W. M. Thackeray, which University Press of Virginia published in 1992. It has been included in the Victorian Web with the kind permission of the author, who of course retains copyright.
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[Decorated initial based the butler in "Sir Pitt's Study Chair" --one of W. M. Thackeray's illustrations for Vanity Fair]
efore discussing the production and cost-sharing arrangement for Henry Esmond, it would be good to review what is meant by the terms impression, edition, and issue. In modern bibliographical parlance, edition refers to all copies of a book printed from a single setting of type; impression refers to all copies of a book consisting of sheets printed in a single pressrun; and [193/194] issue means all copies of a book marketed as part of a single publishing or marketing drive and (usually) bearing some distinguishing mark of that publishing drive, such as tipped-in title pages, different covers, or significantly different advertisements bound into the book itself. The terms were much more fluid in the nineteenth century. "Edition" was used sometimes to denote a new impression from the same typesetting, sometimes to mean a new impression from reset type, and sometimes to mean part of an old impression reissued with a new title page. "Impression" was used sometimes to mean the total number of copies specified in a contract, regardless of how many printings were required to produce them, and sometimes to mean any of the three things mentioned above as the meanings for edition, impression, and issue.
The Esmond contract specifies that the proceeds from the entire "first impression" of 2,500 or 2,750 copies (at George Smith's option) of the three-volume work were to belong to Smith, Elder and that "such impression may be published in one edition or divided into two or three editions as he may consider expedient" (NLS; see Appendix A). Confident but not knowing in advance how well the book would do, Smith was hedging his bets. By specifying the number of copies he could print and call his own, he seemed to commit himself to print at least 2,500 copies, but he left himself with a little cushion in case the sales went well. By allowing himself up to three "editions" in which to dispose of the "first impression," he allowed for the possibility that it would take years and several marketing efforts to dispose of the first printing.
The publication records for Esmond are sketchier than for any other of Thackeray's major works. The ledgers in which Smith, Elder kept accounts up until December 1852 have been misplaced or lost. The first entry for Esmond in the new ledger is for May 1853. Fortunately, one of the few surviving financial reports from Smith, Elder to Thackeray is for Esmond, but, of course, it begins with the "second edition " because Thackeray had parted with all rights to the "first impression." (Smith called it a second edition, and in this case it seems, in fact, to have been a true second edition, entirely reset, though at least 500 copies of it seem to have been issued with title pages identical to the first edition.)
Although there is no surviving ledger record for the first printing of Henry Esmond, the contract agreement indicates that Smith, Elder paid Thackeray £1,200 in three installments. The contract further specifies that Smith, Elder and Company was to have the total income on a "first impression" of 2,500 or 2,750 copies according to the publisher's discretion. If the first impression was of 2,750 and sold out within eighteen [194/195] months, Smith was, by contract, to pay Thackeray an additional £100. The first impression, published in October 1852, just as Thackeray was headed to America on his first lecture tour, was completely sold out within six weeks. Thackeray wrote to James Field on 29 November, "Smith writes to me from London that the whole of the first edition of Esmond is disposed of, an edition of 3000 at a guinea & a half!" [Huntington] Thackeray wrote at the same time to friends in England that Smith had indicated a second edition was being undertaken [Letters 3:135]. There was no need for a special agreement about the new edition because the original contract specified a straight profit-sharing system for subsequent editions. Since there are no extant records of the first-edition production or of any of the payments to Thackeray for the first edition, there is no way to determine whether Smith printed 2,500 or 2,750 or whether Thackeray got the extra £100. Whatever the case may be, if Smith sold 2,250 copies of the first impression (leaving 250-500 as gratis, promotion and review, and discounted copies) at 22s, 6d. each (the price commanded by the first 600 copies of the second edition), he would have grossed about £2,500. Mrs. Proctor wrote to Thackeray on 23 November that "Mudie says. 400 Copies of Esmond not being sufficient 100 more are added." [Letters 3: 216] It is likely that Mudie's Circulating Library did not pay 22s. 6d. per copy; hence, the generous allowance for discounts in my calculations. According to the terms of the contract, £1,200 and possibly £1,300 of that £2,500 went to Thackeray; at least £700 went into production costs (judging from the cost of the second edition, which involved a resetting of all the type, and by a rough comparison with the production costs of Charles Dickens's comparable Great Expectations in three volumes). John Sutherland, remarking on the frequency and prominence of contemporary advertisements and notice of Esmond, suggested that an expensive promotional effort was mounted for the book [Sutherland, Novelists, p. 113]. The relevant ledger evidence is not available. No special advertising effort is evident in the ledger accounts for the second edition. Smith, Elder could easily have made a profit of about £500 on the [195/196] first edition - perhaps more if a greater number of the 250-500 other copies were actually sold.
Smith's financial statement to Thackeray begins in December 1852 with production and promotion costs for the "second edition," which consisted of 1,000 copies. Production costs included composing type, paper, pressing, and a charge for 250 "third edition" title pages, all coming to £379.2.6. A note by the entry for the third-edition title pages says "not used," and in May 1853 the production of 250 "second edition" title pages is recorded. No other record of title-page production or reprinting of this edition exists in the ledgers; however, copies of the book with second edition sheets have been noted with first-edition titles, second-edition titles, and third-edition titles. In addition, a few copies with second-edition titles have first-edition sheets - which indicates that Smith may have projected the sellout of the "first edition" before all copies were out of the bindery and that "second edition" titles were produced before all "first edition" sheets were bound. In any case, it seems clear that of the 3, 500-3,750 copies of Esmond in three volumes that were produced, no more than 250 have "second edition" title pages, and no more than 250 others have "third edition" titles.
Be that as it may, by 30 June 1853, 668 copies of the new edition were reported sold for £662.5, from which Smith deducted £33.2.3 as his 5 percent commission on gross income. That left a credit balance of £250.0.3, from which £46.18 was spent in September 1853 to purchase back 67 copies "returned from America" in order "to protect stock in this country" (100 es had been sold to Appleton in New York, but Harper had produced a much cheaper authorized edition for which it had paid Thackeray $1,000). At this point, September 1853, Smith divided the remaining balance of £203.2.3 with Thackeray, the author getting the odd penny. In 1854, 53 more copies were sold for £57.7.6; Smith deducted the firm's 5 percent commission (£2.17. 4) and £10. 16 for promotion costs, etc., and divided the remaining £43.14.2 evenly with Thackeray. In February 1855 author and publisher cheerfully (or solemnly) divided the proceeds from the sale of two more copies, each receiving 8s. 9d. after Smith had deducted the company's 2s. 3d. commission. And so the story goes, until by 1864 only 124 copies were left and the selling price had fallen to 10s. 6d.
From the approximately 3,750 copies printed of Esmond in three volumes, Thackeray made about £1,360, Smith made an estimated £640, and production costs equaled around £1,100. Gross sales brought in, then, about £3,100. By comparison, ten years later Charles Dickens's Great Expectations in three volumes cost just over £1,000 to produce the same [196/197] number of copies (3,750), grossed £3,250, of which about £1,960 went to Dickens and about £250, including a commission of 7.5 percent and profits, went to the publisher, Chapman and Hall [Patten, p. 385].
Most of Thackeray's books fell off in sales relatively quickly after the first year of publication; sales of Esmond in three volumes dipped to an average of ten copies a year from 1855 to 1863. Smith had gambled safely on the first printing, knowing that he could rely on the circulating libraries, and he no doubt banked on Thackeray's newly established reputation as author of Vanity Fair and Pendennis [see Sutherland, Novelists, pp. 12-30, esp. 15-17, for an account of the stabilizing influence of circulating libraries]. When the first edition sold out in one and a half months, Esmond proved to be a best-seller, but a second printing of 1,000 copies was still a shrewd decision by Smith. True, he had not anticipated a second printing and, therefore, had not asked the printer, Bradbury and Evans, to prepare stereotyped plates; consequently, he had to pay for recomposition for the second edition. Because the ledgers show that stereotyping cost nearly as much as composition, however, it is clear that except for the savings resulting from smaller print runs, stereotyping did not become economical until a third printing was required. No third printing was at all likely for a novel in three volumes, selling at a guinea and a half and readily available from the circulating libraries - and none was required for Esmond. (Copies of the book with title pages indicating a third edition are merely new title pages attached to second-edition sheets.) Smith might have done better to order a second edition of 750 copies (many three-deckers had first printings no larger), but that could have been too conservative a figure. Within two months 600 copies of the new edition were sold, and already there was a small profit to share between author and publisher. Renewed sales, spurred by the news of Thackeray's death in December 1863, nearly carried off the remaining copies in 1864.
Although Thackeray complained several years after the publication of Esmond that a review by Samuel Phillips in the Times in 1853 had stopped its sales (Letters 4: 125), the three-volume edition had been a very good venture, exceeding Smith's original expectations and far outstripping the sales and profits of most three-decker novels. The few hundred copies remaining and slow sales match the residual sales of all Thackeray's [197/198] first editions and is remarkably like the sales record of Charles Dickens's Great Expectations in three volumes, which sold 3,461 copies in the first year, 39 the next, and then stopped dead with 247 copies remaindered at 2s. 3d. apiece three years later [Patten; p. 385].
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Last modified: 8 April 2001