BOOK 1. Chapter II. of book which they should print thenceforward" 1 Dr. Hudson's account of the Bodleian Library, printed in Macky's Journey through England (1722), 71, et seqq. 2 There is a decree of the Court of Star-Chamber, as early as 1637 (11 July), which recites the agreement between Bodley and the Stationers, and proceeds to "hereby order and declare that every printer shall reserve one book new printed or reprinted by him with additions, and shall, before any public vending of the said book, bring it to the Common Hall of the Company of Stationers, and deliver it to the officer thereof, to be sent to the Library at Oxford, accordingly, upon pain of imprisonment," etc. In 1640, however, this arbitrary Court was dissolved, and its decrees (virtually at least) annulled. BOOK 1. Chapter II. Sedition Acts. sities." This Act was to continue until the 10 June, 1664. By the 17 Charles II, c. 4, it was further continued, with an additional clause directing the Master of the Company to deliver the copies to the Libraries Provisions of the within ten days of their receipt, under penalties. This Act expired in May 1679, but was revived, for seven years, by 1 James II., c. 17, and again, by 4 William and Mary for a year, and to the end of the then next session of Parliament, when it was finally allowed to expire, after a Bill had been introduced for its continuance, on which the two Houses could not agree. Meanwhile, the frequent piracies of literary property led to much discussion and litigation, and in course of time to the introduction into Parliament of several measures for its protection. At length, after various failures, the famous 'Copyright Act' of the 8th of Queen Anne was passed and by its 5th section it enacted: "That nine copies of each book or books upon the best paper that after the said 10 April 1710, shall be printed and published as aforesaid, or reprinted and published, with additions, shall be ... delivered to the Warehouse-keeper of the Company of Stationers for the time being, .... for the use of the Royal Library, the Libraries of the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, the Libraries of the four Universities in Scotland, the Library of Sion College in London, and the Library of the Faculty of Advocates in Edinburgh, respectively;" and the Warehouse-keeper was directed to deliver them to the Libraries within ten days after demand. The words in this clause-"printed and published as aforesaid"-were speedily laid hold of to BOOK I. Chapter II. Bentleys account of the Evasions his day. justify the substantial evasion of the enactment; it being contended that their effect must be to limit the exaction to such works, or parts of works only, as had been individually entered into the Register-book of the Stationers' Company, in order to the securing of Copyright therein, according to the 2nd section of this Act. That the former Acts-the last of which, as we have seen, expired in 1695-had been much evaded by the publishers, Bentley has told us, in a curious passage of the Act in of the preface to the Dissertation on Phalaris. When nominated to the Royal Library-keeper's office, "he was informed," he says, that the copies "had not of late been brought into the Library, according to the Act. Upon this, I made application to the Stationers Company, and demanded the copies. The effect whereof was that I procured near 1000 volumes, of one sort or other, which are now lodged in the Library." And he adds, that chancing to call upon one of the London publishers, whilst this transaction was in hand, he mentioned the circumstance. "But to my surprise, he answered me very pertly that he knew not what right the Parliament had to give away any man's property; that he hoped the Company of Stationers would refuse, and try it out at law; that they were a body, and had a common purse; and more to this purpose." At a period a little later than that here referred to, the booksellers, it must be owned, might have found a pretext for their violation of the law in the grossly neglected state into which the Royal Library had fallen, if we accept as authoritative, Bentley's own statement, in his paper entitled, A Proposal for building a Royal Library. “The Royal Library," he says, "has gradually gone to decay In 1775, the Copyright Act was amended by the passing of the 15 George III., c. 33, by the 6th section of which it is enacted that no person shall be subject to the penalties inflicted by the Act of Queen Anne, for printing a book without the author's consent, "unless the title of the copy of the whole, and every volume, be entered in the Register of the Company of Stationers, and unless nine copies shall be actually delivered to the warehousekeeper for the use of the several Libraries in the said Act mentioned." This new clause must obviously have tended to confirm the then prevalent impression --whether right or wrong-that the Statute of Anne intended to make the compulsory delivery of the copies to the Libraries contingent on the entry of the work at Stationers' Hall, for the purpose of securing a Copyright in it. And this impression must have been strengthened by the phraseology of the subsequent Act of the 41 George III., c. 107, which extended the law of Copyright over the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and added to the nine copies required by the Act of Anne, two other copies, the one for Trinity College, Dublin, and the other for the King's Inns in that BOOK 1. Chapter II. BOOK I. Chapter II. city, from "the printer of every such book as shall hereafter be printed and published, and the title to the Copyright whereof shall be entered in the Register book of the Stationers' Company." It thus became a popular opinion that both the author's right to his exclusive property in a book, and the right of each of the privileged Libraries to a copy of that book, alike depended on the fact of entry at Stationers' Hall. In 1798, however, the decision of the Court of King's Bench, in the case of Beckford v. Hood, ruled that an author whose work is pirated may maintain an action on the case for damages, although the work was not entered at Stationers' Hall, such entry being nevertheless essential to the recovery of the statutable penalties.' This decision substantially involved the affirmation of the title of the Libraries to their copies, irrespectively of entry, and it was so held in the subsequent case of The University of Cambridge v. Bryer. 2 3 As books rapidly increased, both in number and costliness, and as the decision in the Cambridge case naturally led to increased stringency in the prosecution of the claims of the privileged bodies, the exaction of copies became extremely obnoxious, both to authors and publishers; so that in 1813 a Committee of the House of Commons was appointed "on the Acts respecting Copyrights of Printed Books," with special 1 Durnford and East, 620. Comp. Lord Mansfield, decision in Tonson v. Collins, 1 Black, 330. 2 East's Reports, 317. 3 In the seventy years ending with 1780, the number of books entered was 4208; in the four years ending with 1818, it was 4353. |