William Lane (publisher)

William Lane (* 1745/6? Probably in Whitechapel ; † January 29, 1814 ) was an English publisher and the founder of Minerva Press .

William Lane was best known for the business practices of his publishing house, which he renamed Minerva Press in 1790, even though he had been a publisher and bookseller since the 1770s.

As the new genre of novel grew in popularity, Lane began to publish popular entertainment novels in quick succession. Lane was known with his Minerva Press for the scope of his publishing program and for paying his authors, mostly financially dependent, female professional writers, worse than all other British publishers of his time, and for producing bestsellers of dubious literary quality. Even after the sale of his shares in the publishing house and long after his death, Minerva Press was considered the epitome of junk literature in 19th century England .

Life

William Lane's place and time of birth are not precisely documented. What is certain is that his father John Lane was a poultry dealer, and William initially followed his father into this profession. From around 1770 he began selling books in his father's business before moving to his own business premises in 1773 and establishing himself as a bookseller and book lender. For the next few years he ran his business with some success. Among other things, in 1788 he and several business partners took part in the founding of the first daily evening newspaper, the Star and Evening Advertiser . In 1790 he renamed his publishing house Minerva Press and was known under this name above all as the publisher of undemanding entertainment novels.

At the beginning of the 19th century Lane withdrew more and more from the business of his publishing house, took partners in the business and began to sell shares. In 1808 he retired completely and spent the last years of his life in Brighton . Lane was married twice. When he died childless on January 29, 1814, he bequeathed all of his fortune, an estimated £ 17,500, to his second wife, Phoebe.

Lane and the Lending Libraries

Lane had a lasting effect above all with his program to expand the network of lending libraries , which should secure a larger market for him . In 1784 at the latest , he advertised with the offer to supply prospective library operators with a basic stock of books from their own holdings on favorable terms. In addition, he published a pamphlet in which he informed interested parties about the equipment, organization and management of a lending library.

Lane's efforts were successful and were instrumental in ensuring that a network of smaller book distributors extended across England by the mid-19th century. Many bookstores, but also stationery stores, pharmacies, perfumeries and other businesses secured an additional source of income by starting to lend books, especially popular novels or successful historical and scientific titles, before industry giants like Mudie's Select Library or WH Smith the smaller competitors gradually pushed out of business.

Minerva Press

Lane owed most of his fortune to the shallow entertainment novels that made up the bulk of production while he ran Minerva Press in the 1790s. The literature he published served various fads and clichés prevailing at the time. They imitated the novels of the then very popular successful author Ann Radcliffe , who linked the sensitive romance novels in the tradition of Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1740) with motifs from the horror novels . The Minerva Press novels exaggerated the sensational and sentimental moments in order to achieve the greatest possible effect on the reader.

With its novels, the publishing house became the epitome of this genre and was thus at the center of the controversy that this literature sparked. With one exception, the seven titles that Jane Austen puts alongside Radcliffe's bestseller Mysteries of Udolpho (1796) in the sixth chapter of her ironic swipes at Radcliffe's copycat novel Northanger Abbey (1818) belong to the Minerva Press publishing program.

Most of the novels that were so successful at the time, mostly written in chord and often published anonymously, have now been forgotten along with their authors such as Eliza Parsons and Regina Maria Roche . The only aftereffect was the bad reputation of the entertainment novels to which they contributed.

literature

• Dorothy Blakey: The Minerva Press. 1790-1820 . Bibliographical Society, London 1939.
• Edward Copeland: Women Writing about Money. Women's Fiction in England, 1790-1820 . Cambridge University Press, 1995, ISBN 0-521-45461-1 (= Cambridge Studies in Romanticism, 9).
• Anthony A. Mandal: Revising the Radcliffean Model: Regina Maria Roche's Clermont and Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey . In: Cardiff Corvey. Reading the Romantic Text . No. 3, September 1999, ISSN  1471-5988 .
• Janet M. Todd: The Sign of Angellica. Women, Writing, and Fiction 1660-1800 . Virago, London 1989, ISBN 0-86068-576-4 .