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From Three-Deckers to Film Rights: A Turn in British Publishing Strategies, 1870-1930

In his 1985 Panizzi lectures, D. F. McKenzie claimed for bibliographers a new and wider role. They should, he said, look at "the construction of new texts and their forms" to examine "the human and institutional dynamics of their production and consumption."' In disciplines from literary to media studies, he observed a shift toward the study of "dissemination and readership as matters of economic and political motive and of the interaction of text and society as an important source of cultural history." One aspect of this contemporary movement has been the burgeoning of studies of literary adaptations to the big and small screen and, more broadly, intertextuality across media. Today we are familiar with news headlines that announce "record deals" between publishers and authors for novel and film rights and with the sight of film tie-ins in the best-seller lists. In this article I shall examine the origins of the sale of such rights and explore the relationship between Victorian publishers' book-publishing strategies and the techniques they later used to market film options on their novels. When the economic interdependence between novel publishers and the libraries began to fail in Britain in the 1880s, a newly competitive marketplace arose. Shrewd publishers looked to their strengths and developed innovative publishing strategies to exploit them. Many factors affected their