d the honor of being introduced
to the English public. According to the statistics of 1878, ten per
cent of the works issued in England in that year were American
reprints. The acknowledgments, however, of any rights on the part of
American authors have been few and far between, and the payments but
inconsiderable in amount. The leading English houses would doubtless
very much prefer to follow the American practice of paying for their
reprinted material, but they have not succeeded in establishing any
general understanding similar to our American "courtesy of the trade,"
and books that have been paid for by one house are, in a large number
of cases, promptly reissued in cheaper rival editions by other houses.
It is very evident that, in the face of open and unscrupulous
competition, continued or considerable payments to authors are
difficult to provide for; and the more credit is due to those firms
who have, in the face of this difficulty, kept a good record with
their American authors.

One London publisher in London made a custom for years of sending a
liberal remittance to the author of the "Wide, Wide World" for each
new volume sent to him. But the competition of the unauthorized
editions had proved so sharp that he told me he got no profit from his
purchases, and did not see how he could continue them.

The fate of the author of "Helen's Babies" was still harder. Of his
first book seven editions were issued by different British houses,
aggregating together an enormous sale, from which he received hardly a
penny. For the advance sheets of the sequel to this one firm paid him
L50. But so fierce was the scramble for it among the half dozen or
more publishers who hurried through their reprints from the American
journal in which it was appearing as a serial, that one energetic
house sent it out to the British public minus the concluding chapter,
while another, still more enterprising, had the last chapter of his
edition added by an English hand, and the moral of the story was
entirely transformed.

Of the books of Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes, Mrs. Prentiss, Mark Twain,
Dr. Mayo, Miss Phelps, Miss Alcott, Mrs. Stowe, Bayard Taylor, and
most of our more popular authors, there are, in like manner, various
rival editions, and no one house, however good its intentions, can
afford to make a practice of paying these authors, as its neighbors
cannot be depended upon to respect its arrangements.

On the other hand, the leadi