An engrossing examination of.classical American and British authors and their contentious relationships between publishers, governments and church policies. They ran afoul of these entities who charged them with blasphemy, libel, and immorality. They championed political causes and created revolutions. Publishers manipulated contracts so that they were mostly in debt. To get books printed they had to resort to financing or manipulating the publication of books and journals. The author delves into the suspicious deaths of many of these radical authors. I recommend this as a must read. ( )

I received this book as an advanced reader copy and found that I could not read it. I expected a bit of a history of Author-Publishers in America and Britain, but I got a strange twisted conspiracy theory. To be honest I only read about 30 pages of this book, so it might change drastically after the opening insanity. I don't know, and I applaud any who was able to make it.

Perhaps this was meant as satire or a comedy-fiction novel, but I'm truly not sure. I don't have time to read gibberish for no good reason.

~TheBibliothecary

P.S.
I feel like a grump leaving such an unhappy review, but they are my honest feelings. ( )

Through my tenure as an Early Reviewer for LibraryThing, there is only one book that I have failed to read through to the end ... but, there have been a few where I came close, where I persevered and completed my read, cover to cover, even though there were moments I considered calling it quits.

To this small - really, very small group - I am adding Ana Faktorovich’s “The History of British-American Author-Publishers,” published by Anaphora Literary Press.

I read the book through to the end, and I’m glad I did. Faktorovich’s biographical research into the selected author-publishers was exhaustive, and from it I gleaned more that few added glimpses into their lives that were unknown to me before opening the book.

Also ‘exhaustive,’ I’m afraid, is Faktorovich’s pursuit of her thesis about the challenges facing author-publishers over the past 250-or-so years ... corrupt business practices, royal and political censorship, market control and cultivated contempt by what she labels ‘the Big Four’ publishing conglomerates, even the stuff of intrigue - the exhaustive part for me - suggesting the possibility of attempts to corrupt an individual’s mind/body/spirit through various practices, up-to-and-including assassination.

Profile after profile, life story after life story, theory after theory. More than once, I reached a point where I’d think, “sheesh .... okay, I get it ... enough already!”

Some points are totally believable, as they continue to this day ... corrupt business practices, royal/government censorship, market manipulation by conglomerates. But the rest? I’m not so sure.

If there was something to gain from all of this, it was the increased respect I have for individuals who struggled against a variety of challenges to bring their work to the public’s recognition and acclaim ... though in some cases, that all came too late for the individual.

Story by story, chapter by chapter, Faktorovich is consistent in sharing these stories of struggle in a way that earns my added appreciation and respect for these author-publishers ... which is why the last chapter (“Chapter 14: A Quest for Inter-Racial Equality: Alice Walker’s Wild Trees Press”) before her ‘Conclusions’ left me scratching my head. This was one individual whose career - as related by Faktorovich - did NOT gain my respect.

Was it offered as an example of that saying, about “the exception that proves the rule?” I don’t know ... and I have never had much use for that saying, anyway.

To conclude, I recommend this read, and I recommend reading it all the way through. But I also recommend patience, and maybe planning to take a little longer to finish than you might expect ... give yourself time to take a break and catch your breath, maybe enjoy a cup/glass of your favorite beverage, before diving back in.

__________

NOTE: I received a free e-copy of this work through LibraryThing, in exchange for a review. ( )

It took me quite a long time to finish reading this book: its prose was heavy and the bad formatting of the electronic review copy I read did not help a lot. Moreover, there are many repetitions thoughout the text: I think a good editing is necessary.

On the plus side, the book contains a lot of information about many writers who happened to have published their work by themselves: looking at their biographies from that point of view is interesting because you may notice unknown aspects, like the choice of Benjamin Franklin to help people creating their own presses to foster literacy in the then colonies; also of interest is the history of the four current big printing corporations, for which printing books or journals is not the core of their activity - this says a lot about publishers' market.

On the other side, I found some of the ideas od Dr Faktorovich really far-fetched and even morbid, with her obsession for the deaths of many of those authors and the hypotheses that they were murdered (why, since most of them went bankrupt?) Unless other reviewers, I don't mind the many digressions in the text, except when they repeat the same idea: they are useful to understand the framework in which the authors work.

In a nutshell, the book is useful for people interesting in the history of publishing, but I am not sure that - at least in this form - the casual reader would be impressed. ( )

This was so incoherent that I couldn't persist with it. The subject matter veers madly from Rembrandt to block printing in China, to the author's own publishing business. The author seems to believe that every author who started their own printing business and subsequently died must have been murdered. Frequently, she denigrates all the books that are being published today, but quite a few of these are quite good and I've reviewed them on LibraryThing.

I would have rated it lower, except that:
1. It reminds me that the imprints are generally now part of larger publishing firms, large media conglomerates, with all the likely consequences of that.
2. It suggests, possibly correctly, that Dickens had trouble finding a market for his "A Tale of Two Cities", because it was about revolution, and that was an unpopular subject with publishers.
3. It mentions Sir Walter Scott's self-publishing activities, which I really hadn't thought about very much. ( )