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in such reprints, some of which were officially out of copyright but still claimed as protected.¹⁵ Largely permitted to sell and distribute books in local and North American markets, the Scottish reprint industry eventually got in trouble when it encroached upon England, as was the case with Alexander Donaldson, whose reprint of James Thompson’s The Seasons was at issue in the 1774 case that bears his name and that of the poem’s London printer, Thomas Becket.

      Ireland’s book trade operated similarly to Scotland’s even though in the eighteenth century, it remained outside of British copyright and avoided the legal battles of the Scottish trade. In Dublin, book buyers chose between new London editions and cheaper, perfectly legal reprints, sometimes sold side by side. “In Dublin—as elsewhere [in Ireland],” Mary Pollard writes, “the wealthy customer usually preferred the London edition to any other,” while reprints satisfied the lower end of the market and, like reprints from Scotland, were also heavily exported to North America.¹⁶ As in Scotland, authors from Ireland—including Jonathan Swift, Oliver Goldsmith, and Edmund Burke—sought London publishers for prestige, profit, and convenience (if they lived there) and also because Dublin editions, unlike new editions published in Edinburgh, were not copyright protected in Britain.¹⁷ Some Dublin publishers established informal partnerships with London firms; George Faulkner, for example, published editions of Samuel Richardson by purchasing advance sheets of London texts so he could be the first to reprint them in Ireland.¹⁸ For the most part, however, elegant and expensive London imports competed for a reader’s attention with “reprints of London originals.”¹⁹ New literary works retained an especially strong association with London, since fiction and poetry were far less often reprinted than other kinds of texts.²⁰

      In North America before and after the Revolution, the book trade was also defined by the sale of London imports and cheap reprints, although many of the latter were also imported from Ireland and Scotland. Benjamin Franklin and James Rivington were supplied with books by business associates in London, and the latter bragged in the 1760s that he was “the only London book-seller in America.”²¹ The materiality of London-printed books sent clear signals: “Large paper, large format, and large type all enjoyed a high social status,” Hugh Amory writes about the colonial period, “generated not only by the ‘louder,’ attention-grabbing volume of the text but also by the conspicuous waste of paper.”²² Such volumes contrasted to the cheap reprints from Ireland and Scotland and also to local reprints by colonials, including some who had been book trades professionals in Ireland, like Mathew Carey, or in Scotland, like Robert Bell. In the last decades of the century, the market for reprints in America was met mostly by imports from Ireland. The transatlantic dynamics of the American book trade changed little up through the 1790s; before and after the Revolution, for example, Thomas Jefferson preferred to read London texts in their Dublin editions because of their price and more manageable size.²³ Toward the end of the century, some important changes occurred, such as an increase in domestic reprinting, led by Carey; attempts to coordinate bookselling through trade sales; and an interest in new books of specifically American manufacture.²⁴ But a new federal copyright law in 1790 that granted U.S. residents and citizens rights to their texts did not much affect the general pattern of American bookselling.²⁵ The Gentleman’s Magazine corroborates this in a 1796 article about the U.S. trade; “serious books would only do as imported,” it writes, “as the people esteemed English-printed books much better than the productions of their own presses.”²⁶ Charles Brockden Brown felt this keenly, as he admitted in a letter to his brother about arranging transatlantic editions of his novels. “The salelibility [sic] of my works will much depend on their popularity in England, whither Caritat has carried a considerable number of Wieland, Ormond, and Mervyn.”²⁷ Up through the turn of the century, bookselling in North America was still characterized by the authority of the London trade, London imports, and the dissemination of London texts via cheap reprints.

      The robust trade in reprints around the Anglophone Atlantic demonstrates the vibrancy of provincial publishing. But there was an important difference between two kinds of reprinting: the reprinting of old texts whose copyrights had expired and the reprinting of new texts (legally or illegally) from copyrighted London editions. The former practice was common everywhere following Donaldson v. Becket, including in London and England. Reprinting copyrighted texts, however, was largely the prerogative of provincial publishers. Before and after Donaldson, publishers in Scotland produced illegal reprints of in-copyright titles that undersold London editions, while Irish and American reprinters were not beholden to copyrights at all.²⁸ In all of these areas, original London editions were sometimes sold alongside unauthorized provincial reprints that echoed their originals. This produced a kind of double vision in Scotland, Ireland, and North America that did not characterize the marketplace in England. This double vision emphasized the provincial book trade’s distance from London as it reinforced that city’s traditional importance as the origin for new literary texts. In the provincial marketplace, a new and imported London edition signaled its high cultural status directly through its own materiality, while a local reprint alluded to such status through its text’s known metropolitan origin. Distance from London was reflected in a reprint not in the book’s physical journey to the hands of readers, as was the case with an import, but rather through the reprint’s invocation of such distance as an immanent feature of the object itself. While readers of a London import were aware of its distant material origins, readers of a reprint felt the absence of a book’s original London edition as a ghostly presence within it.

      The Provincial Book Trade After 1801

      Events surrounding the turn of the nineteenth century led to significant changes even as London’s overall dominance persisted. Scholarship has typically marked the Donaldson decision as the most significant turning point in this period because the explosion of reprinting after 1774 expanded the availability of old texts. From the perspective of the provincial book trade, however, which had always trafficked in such texts, a later date emerges as more significant: 1801, the year of the Act of Union, which absorbed Ireland into Great Britain to create the “United Kingdom” and was accompanied with a Copyright Act that for the first time extended British copyright across the Irish Sea. The effects of this new law reverberated around the Atlantic: it led to the collapse of the reprint trade in Ireland and drove Irish book trades professionals to London or to the United States to find work. It also led to the rise of reprinting in the United States, which fueled the growth of that nation’s book trade. Copyright in Ireland can be seen as the latest of three events in the history of intellectual property that attempted to regulate the relationships between the London trade and provincial publishers engaged mostly in reprinting. Donaldson was decided in favor of a Scottish reprinter who ignored customary London monopolies, and the 1790 U.S. law denied foreign authors copyright protection and sanctioned the wide reprinting of British texts. The U.S. federal copyright law has been described as “negligible” in its first decades, and the post-Union law has been cast mainly in a limited role for its impact on the Irish trade.²⁹ The reverberations of the events in Ireland and the United States—with one reprint trade shut down and the other sanctioned and on the rise—had more of an impact on the provincial book trade than did Donaldson, especially in the long term. By the 1820s, the U.S. reprint industry was able to invest capital in forging relationships with booksellers in Britain and also to produce their own books for the transatlantic marketplace. Meanwhile, the controversy over the Act of Union inspired a wave of Irish fiction that paved the way in London for the success of subsequent writers from Scotland and the United States who took such fiction as their model. By the 1820s and 1830s, provincial literature flooded the London marketplace and formed a recognizable sector of the market. The trajectories of the Irish, American, and Scottish trades diverged widely in the early nineteenth century, especially in regards to reprinting and the double vision it created, but they remained indelibly connected to London and, increasingly, to each other.

      After the extension of British copyright, Irish reprinting and publishing was “almost annihilated,” as one observer put it, and in the ensuing decades, imports soared.³⁰ “There is no encouragement for literary exertion in the Irish metropolis,” wrote Robert Walsh in 1816, “the cautious Dublin bookseller will run no risk publishing an original work, however great its merit.

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