The Press: Junket

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Had a fourth or firth-rate author entered a certain railroad car that loaded up one day last week in the Pennsylvania Station, Manhattan, he would have thought that, verily, he had strayed into heaven. It was a car completely filled with potent publishers—about 30 of them.

There was a figure like an English country gentleman—Mr. George H. Doran. There was a firm-jawed, genial Virginian—John Macrae, president of E. P. Button & Co. There was a well-preserved gentleman of some 67 summers, upon whose watch-chain hung a small gold ivy leaf—Arthur Hawley Scribner, who with his older brother Charles has carried on the business begun by their father in 1846. The swarthy gentleman whose dress, manner and accent bespoke the complete cultured cosmopolite was Alfred A. Knopf, master of the coursing Borzoi hound; the handsome lady with him —Mrs. Knopf.

There in the flesh were men whose names stand for houses: Lippincott, McBride, Dorrance, Burt, Brace (but not Harcourt), job—riding merrily together to Grosset (without Dunlap). There was many another publisher or his trusted lieutenant, like shrewd young George Brett Jr., representing the comparatively vast Macmillan interests. One and all were making a junket out of a serious Washington to appear en masse at public hearings of the Patents Committee of the House of Representatives on a subject close to the hearts of all U.S. authors, song writers, scenarists, printers, librarians, dramatists, actors, librettists and bookbinders whatever, but most of all important to publishers —a new national copyright law.

Of all those pilgrim publishers, the oldest and the most distinguished was Major George Haven Putnam, 82 this month, who has been fighting, ever since he fought his way from private to major in the Civil War, for better copyright conditions in the U.S. and internationally. Just as he carried on his father's business, he revived in 1887 and led the American Copyright League, originated by his father, George Palmer Putnam, in 1851. In 1891, this organization secured the passage in Congress of the present copyright code, an event France signalized by presenting Major Putnam with her Legion of Honor cross.

But the present code has flaws. It does not permit the adherence of this country to the International Copyright Union, or publishing league of nations, which excludes citizens of nonmember nations from copyright privileges in member nations, making it necessary for U.S. artists to obtain English protection for work they seek to introduce on the Continent. It does not care for domestic publishing by barring the importation of foreign editions of U.S. books, does not even bar English publishers from shipping over their editions of U.S. works to sell in competition with U.S. editions.

These defects and others—defects that on the one hand make the U.S. appear uncivilized, and on the other deny to U.S. artists legislative benefits of a kind long enjoyed by manufacturers—were to be remedied by the passage of a new bill, containing an automatic, blanket copyright feature, framed by Representative Albert H. Vestal of that most profusely literary state, Indiana. Also in Washington to boost this bill were Novelist Will Irwin, Songwriter Gene (Follies) Buck, Laborite Matthew Woll, Hearstling Karl Kirchwey.