When 19th and 20th century writers paid to print their own books

What is known today as “self-publishing” was known throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth century as “private printing.” This meant that an author, or an author’s family member, paid someone who owned a printing press to produce a booklet of the author’s work. The International League of Antiquarian Booksellers defines the term “privately printed” as a self-funded publication that was “meant for private circulation, not public sale.”

In nineteenth-century England, privately printed books tended to be produced “at the expense of the authors or of the families most concerned, and distributed exclusively among friends,” usually with fewer than 100 copies and without indices, according to Edward Porritt in an article published in the New York Times on April 22, 1899. Porritt claimed that, as of his writing at the turn of the twentieth century, this convention was changing so that “almost all” memoirs and personal papers were going through traditional editors and publishers (although sometimes not until the subject’s death).

Porritt hailed this as a helpful development for academics. He cited frustrating examples of important books such as Harriet Grote’s "Life of Sir William Molesworth" (1866), which, despite the light it shed on “English politics and party history of the epoch-making period it covers,” was privately printed and did not arrive at the British Museum Library “until about 1894.”

“The idea at bottom of this old-fashioned exclusiveness,” Porritt wrote, “was apparently that with these papers and letters, even when they dealt with the highest affairs of State, the world at large had no concern.” He explained that the move toward traditional publishing was prompted by “the development of the newspaper press” as well as increasing interest in public affairs, in democracy in England, and in writing in general. Furthermore, he said, authors found that someone was generally willing to cover the publication expenses, given the demand for the memoirs of important people on the part of public library patrons.

Books produced in small numbers are, by definition, instantly rare, but this does not mean that they are always valuable to booksellers. Their value would be partly defined by their subject material and their physical condition, according to Jeremy M. Norman’s essay “What is a Rare Book?”

Sometimes groups reprinted copies of an existing work for their own use. "The Rubáiyát" was a work of Persian poetry originally written in the eleventh or twelfth century by Omar Khayyam and was first translated into English in the nineteenth century. In 1907, the Omar Khayyam Club of America privately printed it for their own use, facilitated by the Rosemary Press of Needham, Mass.

Sometimes a privately printed work went on to be accepted by traditional publishers. When D. H. Lawrence’s novel "Lady Chatterley’s Lover" was rejected by publishers in England and the United States due to its sexual content, he paid for one thousand copies to be printed by Tipografia Giuntina in Italy in 1928. Lawrence sold all the copies, yet traditional publishers were still unwilling to print the book until 1960. Today it is considered a classic. A copy of the first edition from 1928, signed by the author, is on the market in 2014 with an asking price of $18,500 USD.

Often, the term “privately printed” implied some level of sexual content or other type of forbidden material, as was the case with "Lady Chatterley’s Lover" and also with books about homosexuality such as John Addington Symonds’ "A Problem in Modern Ethics" (1896). Some publications, like the Panurge Press books which dealt primarily with sexual material in the early twentieth century, stamped "privately printed" clearly and proudly, advertising the books as limited editions "for private collectors of erotica." The term likely had some appeal for people who knew what they wanted to buy.

Some writers had to self-publish their work, not because social convention or the law objected to the content, but simply because publishers did not find it marketable. Gillian Sutherland’s article “Women Writers and the Nineteenth-century Marketplace” in The Cambridge Quarterly indicates that the demand for poetry in England began to slow in the 1820s. Thus the writer Alice Meynell, dually hampered by being a poet who was female, privately printed her book of poetry in 1896.

The term “privately printed” was occasionally used later in the twentieth century; one example is by a scholar who used the term to refer to Ruth Johnson’s "Patchwork: Early Pioneer, Indian, and Faith Promoting Latter-day Saint Stories" (1973). By this time, however, the terms “vanity press” or, more neutrally, “self-publishing” were beginning to be used instead, especially to refer to larger quantities of printed books that authors paid to produce and then attempted to sell themselves, usually unsuccessfully.

Today, writers debate the value of self-publishing in an ever-changing marketplace influenced by new technologies. Regardless of the varying opinions about whether self-publishing is a good choice, it is something that many writers have done throughout the years. Readers should be aware that copies of historical literature marked as "privately printed" are usually rare, may or may not have been printed at earlier or later dates by traditional publishers, and may or may not be valuable.

Originally posted Feb. 10, 2013 to Helium Network.

Addendum

Sarah Kendzior wrote in her memoir, The Last American Road Trip (2025):

"You know you have written the great American novel when each detractor has a different reason for banning it."

About the author

If you'd like to learn more about my work, I've published books. Also, I write for Medium.

Let's bring back typewriters? 2026, CNN video

What makes print books special, compared to e-books?

Print books have certain qualities that give them an advantage over e-books. Chiefly, their permanence has great value, whereas digital content is more easily altered.

This article was originally posted to Helium Network on Aug. 12, 2012.

Books have long been considered objects of art. After the writing and editing is complete, serious publishers pay attention to typesetting, illustrations and even paper quality and bookbinding. An expert can recognize a printed book as a product of a certain era. Book lovers have long recognized that their tomes can be inscribed and given as gifts, and that the pages can be marked up with comments. Books can be passed down to the next generation or sold as valuable antiques. They can carry sentimental value. Many insist that the tactile "feel" of holding printed material in one's hand and the visual pleasure of scanning a page that has been painstakingly laid out cannot be mimicked by electronic media.

The rise of e-books has begun to change how people think of books. It is now easier to consider a "book" as its content alone, independent of the paper it may (or may not) be printed on. Ancient peoples, for whom books were rare and expensive, could not have dreamed of the kind of catalogues available today for instant download anywhere in the world. Consider the New Testament reference to the eunuch official of an African queen who traveled all the way to Jerusalem on a pilgrimage, a journey that must have taken months, and who was in possession of the Book of Isaiah, presumably on a fragile, hand-lettered piece of parchment. (Acts 8:26-40) What would he have thought if he had been told that, two thousand years in the future, an ordinary person would have the ability to carry over a thousand books on a single device in her pocket? There is no doubt that he would have been impressed, but wouldn't it also be reasonable for him to suspect that, as books become economically cheaper and easier to carry and store, people will no longer have the same sense that books are precious and holy objects?

With all that can be said in favor of e-books, they are simply not precise substitutes for print books.

First, purchasing a license to read content is not the same as purchasing a material object of art that is one's rightful property forever and can be given as a lasting gift. While some e-book programs allow the legitimate temporary loaning of content – assuming, of course, that the recipient has a compatible device or app – other programs do not allow the file to be transferred at all. When the devices finally become obsolete or the companies go out of business, there is a risk that the content will no longer be retrievable by the consumer.

Second, the digital economy is fueled partly by the money involved in storing data about what has been read and who has loaned books to whom. While the "book recommendations" made by computerized algorithms can be helpful, there can also be great value in the sense of lifelong privacy when a print book is bought with cash and then finally – secretly – passed on to a used bookstore or to a friend. Whose business is your choice of reading material? With print, it is easier to keep it your own business and not allow it to become some company's data point about you.

Third, print books are currently perceived as the friendlier format in social situations, given the current relative ease of lending them and given their visible covers. When someone on the train is reading a print book, others around them can see the title. They can form an idea about what is trendy or intriguing, and they can even strike up a conversation.

Fourth, when one has a copy of a print book, one has more certainty that it's substantively the same copy that other people saw when they read the same edition. The publisher's imprint serves as a trustworthy historical record that the book is "real"; this is why people cite sources. If necessary, a particular book could even be carbon-dated to prove how old it is. With e-books, readers have reason to be a little more skeptical: how can one know that someone has not changed the text in the file? Does a recently digitized text contain exactly the same words that one's parents and grandparents read? What may have been misinterpreted, mistyped or deliberately purged?

There is no one right answer to the question of whether print books or e-books are "better." Each format uses different material resources and may be priced differently, taxed differently, reach different audiences and be read for separate reasons. Even with the rise of personal computers and e-reader devices, there is still much to be said in favor of print books.

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