The publishing firm of Harper & Brothers, seeking a wider distribution for their publications were more successful, and about 1830 succeeded in bringing down the price of reprints of English books from one dollar and fifty cents, and one dollar and seventy-five cents, to around one dollar. According to William Gilmore Simms prices shortly afterward rose to about their former level, though there was "an occasional fall at retail, from $1.50 to 50 cents--but only when there was a prospect of struggle between two of the publishers for the foreign spoil."[1] The difference in price between American reprints of English novels and American novels at this time was seldom more than ten or twenty-five cents.
Various unsuccessful attempts were made during the following years to cheapen the price of books, one of the most notable of which was Carey's Library of Choice Literature, a good collection of books issued in weekly parts which could later be bound in individual volumes. Priced low enough at five dollars a year, or about ten cents a part, the postal charges practically doubled this cost to the consumer, and the Library was discontinued for lack of sufficient patronage in 1836, a little more than a year after its beginning.
The first great wave of cheap books, however, came in the early 1840's. This movement for cheap literature was started by Park Benjamin, an editor and poet of some fame at the time, who began in 1839 the literary newspaper Brother Jonathan, in which foreign novels were printed in continued form from week to week. Other such publications soon sprang up, and in 1842 Benjamin, then editor of the New World, began issuing complete books in paper covers, as quarto "Extras," offering books which formerly had been priced at from one to three dollars at new low prices ranging from six and one-fourth cents to twenty-five
- ↑ Southern Literary Messenger, 10:449-69 (1844).
