Balzac and the Rise of Modern Publishing

In discussing Balzac's depiction of publishing in Lost Illusions I remarked how, in contrast with so many who light-mindedly tell people that "publishing is a business" (mostly, just in the course of excusing it for the brutal way it treats writers), Balzac actually shows what that means--the essential crassness of those in control, the extreme conflict this sets up with any artistic imperative, the problems of publicity and the way they make it more important to have a "distinguished name" on the cover of a book than that the book be good, the expenses of promotion and the corruption of book reviewing, the nearly insuperable obstacles that any new arrival of whatever talent must overcome just to get their work looked at, and the rest.

Still, if all this is as true of the business today as it ever was (and set by Balzac with infinitely greater forthrightness than any contemporary person discussing the industry dares to do), it can seem the case that the entrepreneurs of the "Wooden Galleries" Balzac describes are remote from the realities of a corporatized, bureaucratized world we have long taken for granted--just as is generally the case when we consider business as it stood two centuries ago. Still, as is also the case with much we see when we look at the world of two centuries ago, and the books of Balzac, we can see that later world emergent, in a quip of the vile Dauriat's. As he remarks when, with gleeful cruelty, crushing Lucien du Rubempre's hopes, "I have eleven hundred manuscripts on hand . . . eleven hundred manuscripts submitted to me at this moment," a testament to the scale of the submissions with which a major publisher must deal. Moreover, Dauriat, quite clear on what managing such quantities of manuscripts requires, observes that he "shall soon be obliged to start a department to keep account of the stock of manuscripts, and a special office for reading them, and a committee to vote on their merits."

So did it go, the processing of manuscripts becoming increasingly bureaucratized, with the result that Jack London described so well in Martin Eden--until the Dauriats of the world decided they would not bother with such things at all, dumping the burden of running such departments and offices on literary agents and telling anyone who came to them with such a manuscript in spite of their declaration everywhere they could possibly make it that they "do not accept unsolicited manuscripts" to "get an agent," three little words that are the "Let them eat cake" of the Dauriats of Park Avenue.