Waverley to Go!

[steepholm]

I am a slow reader at the best of times, but I just outdid myself by taking over a month to read Waverley. Normally when I get bogged down in a book it's because I don't like it, but I actually enjoyed Waverley quite a lot. Part of the problem was that it was a very different book from the one I was expecting - and a more interesting and subtle one, with far more psychology and far less derring-do - and it took me some time to recalibrate my generic expectations and appreciate it for what it was. Mostly, though, it's that I read it before going to sleep, which isn't the best time to wrap one's brain around phonetic eighteenth-century Scots.

But my shame was magnified by realising from the editor's introduction that it took me rather longer to read than it took Scott to write. At least, Volumes II and III, which were composed some years after the first volume, were, according to a letter from Scott himself, written in a few short weeks in 1814: "begun & finished between 4th June & the 1st July during all which I attended my duty in court and proceeded without loss of time or hindrance of business" (Letter dated 28 July 1814). By my estimate, those two volumes amount to 100,000 words, so polishing them off in four weeks' worth of spare time is pretty good going, especially as he was also working on his edition of Swift. Impressive - but not unheard of, I guess. What I don't understand is the fact that the book was published on the 7th July - i.e. six days after Scott finished it. Even taking into account that he sent it to his publisher in batches, this seems an infeasibly quick turnaround, considering that it would have had to be edited and punctuated (Scott wasn't big on punctuation), set in type, proofs made and corrected, and a run of 1000 copies printed and bound and distributed to booksellers. Is that physically possible, in the conditions of 1814? My editor merely reports it without comment, but I find myself somewhat costive of belief.

Comments

[calimac.livejournal.com]

I once read somewhere that Bach wrote so much music that it would take 75 years to copy it out. As Bach only lived to be 65 years old, there is something wrong here.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

That is rather strange...

[gair.livejournal.com]

All is explained in Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency! (The book, obviously, not the random TV drama which shares a name with it.)

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

Presumably it was the first volume that came out on 7th July, or was that the whole thing?

Bizarrely, modern systems haven't always speeded things up. It now seems to take far longer for books to be published than it did 50 or 100 years ago.

But really it's the desire to get something out quickly that will be the deciding factor. If the publishers had a ready audience for the book, I could imagine them pulling out all the stops to get it out to the booksellers in record time.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

It was "published on 7 July in three volumes", according to my editor.

They certainly had a ready audience for the book: the first print run sold out in 2 days, and a second edition was in preparation by the end of the month. These days you do get publishers pulling out all the stops with hugely topical books (the first Michael Jackson memorial tribute, the first Royal Wedding souvenir, etc) - and no doubt they could have done something similar then, employing extra typesetters, binders, etc to work through the night. But since this book wasn't especially topical and the audience would have been just as ready a few weeks later, I don't see why they'd have bothered to go to the extra expense.

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

Cash flow? To create a buzz? Just because they could? :)

Apparently, according to the book The Maker of the Omnibus Scott often wrote fast. He wrote a volume of Woodstock in three weeks.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

It certainly brings home to me that I know far less about printing and publishing during the Regency than I do about those industries in Elizabethan or in modern times.

[dorianegray.livejournal.com]

Well, if they didn't bother with editing, skipped the proof stage, and punctuated as they typeset, I could see them doing it that fast.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Maybe, but the corrected proofs still exist (though the MS doesn't), so they didn't skip that bit.

[dorianegray.livejournal.com]

Oh. Oh well, scrap that idea then.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Maybe volume one came out then? Didn't pretty much everything come out in three volumes, before the Age of the Periodical set in?

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

It did come out in three volumes, but they were all published at once, according to my editor.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Huh!

[ayelle.livejournal.com]

I really liked Waverley when I read it in college, in Scottish Literature. That was a long time ago... I should read it again.

Wikipedia has nothing to say on the publication issue -- not that I actually expected it to, but I took a look -- but it does offer a link to this letter from Jane Austen with the following charming tidbit: "Walter Scott has no business to write novels, especially good ones. It is not fair. He has fame and profit enough as a poet, and should not be taking the bread out of the mouths of other people. I do not like him, and do not mean to like 'Waverley' if I can help it, but fear I must." http://www.pemberley.com/janeinfo/brablt16.html#letter88

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

That's a nice quotation! Scott and Austen seem to have admired each other's work, different as it was. Though not, in fact, as different as I'd assumed before I read Waverley (having been misled by Scott's self-description as writing the "big bow-wow strain" of fiction). His book might easily have been subtitled First Impressions.

[dru-marland.livejournal.com]

coincidentally, I just finished re-reading Ivanhoe, though I preferred Waverley. I started The Talisman once, wondering if it woulod be a prequel for Ivanhoe, but, by my halidome, it me beseemed to pong a bit too strongly of that fish that cod hight.
Just added a BB reference to the Wikipedia entry for Walter Scott. Another five minutes wasted....