This chapter focuses not on a particular literary technology, but on the shifts in the literary field that occurred in response to the threat of obsolescence at the hands of competing media such as film and television. Adapting marketing techniques from those media, and capitalizing on new formats such as the paperback, the literary field broadened to expand its appeal to an ever-widening “middlebrow” reading public. By the 1930s, Jaillant argues, these developments in format and marketing had effectively broken down any rigid dividing line between “literary” and “nonliterary” reading publics, so that advertisements for a bestseller such as Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth and James Joyce’s modernist classic Ulysses could appear side by side.

When we think of US modernist presses, a series of images comes to mind: Horace Liveright, who issued T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land alongside bestselling novels and popular theater plays; Alfred Knopf and his wife Blanche, who promoted the new African American literature and original crime fiction by Dashiell Hammett; B. W. Huebsch, who published Sherwood Anderson, James Joyce, and D. H. Lawrence, but also radical political texts. This chapter focuses on the diversity of American modernist presses – from avant-garde imprints to long-established houses, from limited editions to inexpensive reprints. The period between the wars has been mythologized as a “golden age.” This chapter scraps the gold to reveal a more nuanced picture of the publishing landscape. As Bennett Cerf (the owner of the Modern Library) declared, flamboyant but dysfunctional houses had no chance of surviving: publishing was a business, and the fun and excitement of discovering new authors would always compete with the necessity of making a profit.

This series of monographs on selected topics in modernism is designed to reflect and extend the range of new work in modernist studies. The studies in the series aim for a breadth of scope and for an expanded sense of the canon of modernism, rather than focusing on individual authors. Literary texts will be considered in terms of contexts including recent cultural histories (modernism and magic; sonic modernity; media studies) and topics of theoretical interest (the everyday; postmodernism; the Frankfurt School); but the series will also reconsider more familiar routes into modernism (modernism and gender; sexuality; politics). The works published will be attentive to the various cultural, intellectual and historical contexts of British, American and European modernisms, and to interdisciplinary possibilities within modernism, including performance and the visual and plastic arts.

In May 1933, Ezra Pound's article ‘Past History’ appeared in the English Journal, the publication of the National Council of Teachers of English. Writing for this audience of American professors, Pound reflected on James Joyce's career – at the time when the publisher Bennett Cerf was preparing to challenge the ban on Ulysses. In his article, Pound told a story that would become the conventional narrative on the early days of modernism. Joyce's struggles against philistine publishers, hostile censors and prudish readers eventually leads to his triumphant entry into the literary canon. As Pound put it, ‘anyone who has not read these three books [Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses] is unfit to teach literature in any high school or college.’ For Pound, this recognition had attracted the wrong kind of publishers:

There are several interesting things here. First, Pound compares reprint publishers such as Tauchnitz and Albatross to parasites, who obtain nutrients at the expense of the host organism (the little magazines). This parasitic behaviour is presented as harmful, since the reprint publishers have primarily commercial motivations. Second, Pound notes that the wide diffusion of Joyce's work in cheap continental editions has led to a changing readership, from an ‘exclusive circle’ of autonomous readers to the ‘general mass of people’ attracted by an author's reputation.

By the late 1920s and early 1930s, Joyce and other modernist writers certainly had a well-known ‘name’. But what Pound does not mention is that reprint publishers had in part contributed to this increasing recognisability. As we have seen in Chapter 2, the Travellers’ Library in Britain and the Modern Library in the United States had made Dubliners available to a large audience as early as 1926.

On Monday, 30 September 1929, readers of the Aberdeen Press and Journal came across a short article entitled ‘Virginia Woolf “Collected”’. The Hogarth Press had just started publishing a ‘charming’ Uniform Edition at five shillings a volume. ‘Of pocket size, tastefully produced in green, and clearly printed, this edition is a model of what such reprints should be’, declared the newspaper. Readers were encouraged to buy Jacob's Room and Mrs Dalloway, which had their place among the ‘leading fiction of our day’, as well as The Common Reader, a book with passages ‘of great beauty and insight’.

The Uniform Edition was a new step in Woolf's campaign to reach ordinary readers – including readers based in Aberdeen and other cities far from the literary centres of southern England. As we have seen in Chapter 1, Woolf was already a well-known writer in the late 1920s, a writer whose name could boost the sales of titles in cheap series of reprints. She was also determined to expand her readership on both sides of the Atlantic. But there was one hurdle on the way to a greater audience: the price and availability of her own books. The Hogarth Press had given Woolf exceptional creative freedom (‘I'm the only woman in England free to write what I like’, she declared in 1925. ‘The others must be thinking of series & editors’). But it had also tied her – at least initially – to the sphere of small presses with limited market opportunities. Between 1919 and 1923, books were available by subscription: ‘A’ subscribers received all publications in exchange for a deposit of ￡1; ‘B’ subscribers ordered and paid for only specific works. When Jacob's Room was first published in 1922, its audience was restricted to a relatively small readership already familiar with Woolf and her press. Three years later, Mrs Dalloway had a first printing of 2,000 copies and sold for seven shillings and six pence. By 1929, both novels were out of print. The Uniform Edition gave new life to Woolf's titles: they were now advertised in major newspapers and available in bookstores for a reasonable price. As J. H. Willis puts it, the Uniform Edition ‘marked one more stage in the evolution of the Hogarth Press into a commercial publishing house’.

‘For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics have brought readers closer to the world's great literature’, declares a statement at the beginning of recent books in the series. ‘The pocket-sized hardbacks of the early years contained introductions by Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, Graham Greene, and other literary figures which enriched the experience of reading.’ Indeed, in 1928, Woolf and Eliot wrote prefaces to Laurence Sterne's Sentimental Journey and Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone respectively. Two decades later, Greene contributed a foreword to the Oxford World's Classics edition of Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady. These introductions increased the appeal of older works, and continue to serve the reputation of the World's Classics as a major cultural enterprise.

This chapter focuses particularly on the late 1920s, at the time when Humphrey Milford (manager of the London branch of Oxford University Press) commissioned introductions by Woolf and Eliot. 1928 was a turning point in the history of modernism – the moment when commercial publishers published modernist writings that had previously been confined to little magazines and small presses. This was the year when the Modern Library reprinted Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Woolf's Mrs Dalloway in the United States. However, the Modern Library was very different from traditional series of classics such as Everyman's Library and the World's Classics. It was sold as a daring series of ‘complete and unabridged’ texts for readers who wanted to keep abreast of modern literature. The fact that Portrait of the Artist was reviewed as ‘slightly pornographic’ was unproblematic for the Modern Library, since Joyce's subversive reputation contributed to the commercial appeal of the series.

In contrast, the World's Classics published mostly out-of-copyright works and shied away from controversy. Oxford University Press, whose London branch bought the World's Classics from Grant Richards in 1905, was known for its Bibles, scholarly works and anthologies, not for literary experimentation. The group of Delegates who ran the press from Oxford were extremely reluctant to include contemporary fiction on the Oxford University Press list. Although the London office had a large autonomy, its successive managers preferred to avoid any conflict with Oxford.

Cheap Modernism: Expanding Markets, Publishers’ Series and the Avant- Garde is the first study of European uniform reprint series that widened the market for modernist texts (or rather, texts that literary scholars now see as ‘modernist’). We often think of Mrs Dalloway or A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as difficult books, originally published in small print runs for a handful of readers. But from the mid-1920s, these texts and others were available in a cheap format across Europe. Series of reprints such as the Travellers’ Library, the Phoenix Library, Tauchnitz and Albatross sold modernism to a wide audience – thus transforming a little-read ‘highbrow’ movement into a mainstream phenomenon. By ‘wide audience’, I mean thousands of readers – much less than a mass-market readership, but much more than the small coteries that had read texts by Virginia Woolf, James Joyce and others in their original context of publication. Readers also encountered ‘modernist’ works alongside ‘popular’ literature, including detective fiction. The expansion of the readership for modernism was not only vertical (from ‘high’ to ‘low’) but also spatial – since publishers’ series were distributed within and outside metropolitan centres in Britain, continental Europe and elsewhere. Many non-English native speakers discovered modernist texts in the original language – a fact that has been mentioned rarely in histories of modernism.

In a recent review essay, Ann Ardis notes that the field of modernist studies has been deeply transformed by the study of ‘modernist print culture’. She gives the example of Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker's three-volume Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines. For Ardis, this ambitious project is ‘like the tip of an iceberg’:

It is certainly true that the rise of periodical studies has led to fascinating studies of little magazines – including influential digital projects such as the Modernist Journals Project.

The three-and-six-penny libraries and other quality reprint series reached their peak in the mid-1930s. By 1934, the Travellers’ Library had more than 200 titles on its list. The Phoenix Library included desirable books such as Brave New World (the fourteenth title by Aldous Huxley in this series). Albatross had energised a continental market long dominated by Tauchnitz. But after the rise came the fall. First, there was the growing competition of the Penguin paperbacks, launched in 1935. Then, the Second World War created major disruptions. Not only was it was difficult to obtain paper to print books, it also became impossible to distribute Anglophone texts on the Continent (including in German-occupied France). Albatross was forced to close its office in Paris. Successful series simply disappeared from circulation: Albatross, but also Tauchnitz, the Travellers’ Library and the Phoenix Library. Series with a more modest scope – such as the two-shilling Dolphin Books, published by Chatto & Windus – were also discontinued.

For a brief moment after the war, publishers tried to revive their old collections. Albatross and Tauchnitz resumed production, but it soon became clear that both enterprises were in serious trouble. As Alistair McCleery points out, ‘the Tauchnitz name and any residual rights were sold off in July 1950’ and ‘nothing much more was ever published under the Tauchnitz imprint’. Albatross did not survive much longer, due to mismanagement and difficulties brought by the war (including the loss of many contracts). Moreover, in a context of intense competition in the reprint market, British publishers increasingly refused to sell rights for continental editions. In a letter to Arnoldo Mondadori (the printer of Albatross titles), Harold Raymond of Chatto & Windus wrote:

In 1950, Chatto & Windus decided to launch the New Phoenix Library – and Jonathan Cape did the same thing with the New Travellers’ Library. Both were commercial failures.

Four years before his death, Wyndham Lewis wrote to the modernist scholar Hugh Kenner:

Lewis added: ‘In Tarr (1914–15), I was an extremist.’ This image of a difficult, uncompromising novel for an elite could well apply to the first version of Tarr – completed in 1915 and published by the Egoist Press in Britain and by Knopf in the United States in 1918. But in 1928, Lewis accepted an offer to reprint his novel in the newly created Phoenix Library, sold for only three shillings and six pence. Lewis was reluctant at first, complaining about the low compensation he would receive. But he then threw himself into the project and decided to rewrite the entire novel. At that time in his career, Lewis was eager to address not a ‘publique d'elite’ or an ‘aristocratic audience’, but a large audience who had never read Tarr before.

Scholars have often discussed the merit of the 1928 edition over the earlier versions. ‘Just ask any one of the two dozen Lewis scholars in the world which of the versions of Tarr is the best or most complete text’, wrote John Xiros Cooper. ‘Be prepared for a lively response.’ While some might prefer the less polished Egoist or Knopf texts, it is likely that very few university teachers choose these versions for their courses. When Scott Klein edited a reprint edition of Tarr in the Oxford World's Classics series, he selected the 1928 text. As he put it, ‘Lewis intended Tarr to be known solely in its revised version.’ Although the differences between the 1918 and 1928 texts have been extensively studied, the Phoenix Library is mentioned only in passing (if at all). This gap in scholarship is all the more surprising given that Lewis self-consciously recorded his engagement with the publisher's series. ‘This is the copy of the american edition of “Tarr” on which I made the corrections for the revised edition of “Tarr” published in Chatto & Windus’ “Phoenix” library.’

In February 1926, a long essay on ‘The Poisoning of Youth’ appeared in the English Review. John Rudd, a librarian at a boy's school, simply refused to provide the books that the students asked for, books by ‘the most advertised moderns’ – including H. G. Wells, Arnold Bennett, Rose Macaulay, John Galsworthy and Warwick Deeping. For Rudd, the treatment of love and sex in modern fiction made it unsuitable for teenage boys. The imagery of food and health runs throughout the essay: boys have been ‘brought up on the healthy diet of Kipling, Marryat, Ian Hay, Wells (early period)’ and they ‘want diet more suitable to their years’. But the lack of morality in modern books risked poisoning the ‘bright and clever and healthy lad’. Rudd gives the example of Deeping's 1925 bestseller Sorrell & Son, a novel with ‘immoral’ and ‘rebellious’ female characters. Reading this kind of fiction could give the boys the impression that emancipated women have sexual desires and want to ‘have a good time’. To prevent corrupting young readers, Rudd asked novelists to write cleaner books and publishers to fulfil their educational mission. His essay shows that issues of obscenity and censorship applied to all kinds of texts, including texts that we now see as ‘middlebrow’. If Rudd could present Deeping as a problematic writer, it is not difficult to imagine what he would have thought of James Joyce or D. H. Lawrence.

Of course, Rudd was not the first one to denounce the poisonous effect of modern fiction. Rachel Potter notes that ‘prussic acid, strychnine, and arsenic; leprosy, excrement, and open sewers’ were ‘some of the more colourful images conjured up by nineteenth- and twentieth-century commentators to capture the noxious effects of obscene literature’. The Obscene Publications Act of 1857, and the subsequent ‘Hicklin ruling’ that defined obscenity as the tendency ‘to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences’, were used to censor a wide range of books. This official censorship was complemented by actions from members of the book trade (printers, publishers, booksellers, librarians) to prevent the diffusion of questionable books. Despite these strict controls, concerns over obscenity did not disappear. In early 1926, the debate between the home secretary William Joynson-Hicks and the MP Joseph Kenworthy led to a series of articles on indecent books and plays.