“A good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life.”

350 years ago today, John Milton's Paradise Lost was published. To celebrate, Henry Bemis Books offers a fine modern edition:

Milton, John, Paradise Lost (Easton Press, The 100 Best Books Ever Written Collector’s Edition, 1st. ed., 1976). Leather-bound w/22k gold accents. Attractive moire end pages with silk ribbon page marker. Smyth sewn with concealed muslin joints. Full leather with hubbed spine. Gilt edges. Fine condition. HBB price: $100 obo.

Blind fifteen years, out of favor at court after the monarchy was restored, and broke, John Milton had been at work on a ten-thousand line epic poem, Paradise Lost, when he went looking for a publisher in the spring of 1667.

The Morgan Library explains Milton's labors:

Blindness forced him to compose orally, rendering him entirely reliant upon amanuenses (casual copyists among his friends and family circle) to whom he gave dictation. He composed the poem mostly at night or in the early morning, committing his composition to memory until someone was available to write down his words. He revised as his text was read back to him, so that a day's work amounted to twenty lines of verse. According to contemporary accounts, when dictating, the poet "sat leaning backward obliquely in an easy chair, with his leg flung over the elbow of it" or "composed lying in bed in the morning." 

The only surviving manuscript of Paradise Lost is this 33-page fair copy, written in secretary script by a professional scribe, who probably transcribed patchwork pages of text Milton had dictated to several different amanuenses. This fair copy was corrected by at least five different hands under Milton's personal direction and became the printer's copy, used to set the type for the first edition of the book.

On April 27, an aide signed a contract for publication of the work in Milton's presence. It is now reckoned among, if not the, first legally enforceable deal to publish a book and set terms for the author's compensation.

Even more unlikely, the contract has survived, and rests in the British Museum:



On the Library's English & Drama blog, curator Sandra Tuppen picks up the tale:

The contract between John Milton and Samuel Simmons reveals that Milton was to receive £5 from Simmons immediately for Paradise Lost, and a further £5 once 1,300 copies of the poem had been sold. There was potential for Milton to earn an additional £10 if two further editions, also of 1,300 copies each, were sold. Unfortunately Milton died shortly after the second edition was produced in 1674, and so received only £10 for his masterpiece. 

On display alongside Milton's contract is the first edition of Paradise Lost, which Simmons duly printed in 1667. It is in ten ‘books’ or sections, and contains over ten thousand lines of verse. Simmons did not include his own name on the title page, but listed the three London booksellers who acted as wholesale distributors of the book.

His timing was poor:

Although Milton had completed Paradise Lost by 1665, publication was delayed by a paper shortage caused by the Second Anglo-Dutch War, the Great Plague (during which over eighty London printers died), and the Great Fire of London, 1666, which destroyed many of the city's presses. The absence of Simmons's name on the earliest title pages indicates that he may have been unable to print the book himself. The title pages that do bear Simmons's name do not give an address, suggesting that the printing of the first edition was assigned to Peter Parker. 

The first edition of 1300 copies sold out within eighteen months, though sales were, initially, slow:

Sales of the work were sluggish at first, and Simmons reissued the first edition sheets of Paradise Lost with seven different title pages between 1667 and 1669. The 1669 reissue included, as per Simmons’s note to the reader, a 14-page “Argument” that provided a prose summary of each book’s plot. 

...It also includes Milton’s impassioned explanation of “why the Poem Rimes not”: 

The Measure is English Heroic Verse without Rime, as that of Homer in Greek, and of Virgil in Latin; Rime being no necessary adjunct or true Ornament of Poem or good Verse, in longer Works especially, but the Invention of a barbarous Age, to set off wretched matter and lame Meeter…. This neglect then of Rime so little is to be taken for a defect, though it may seem so perhaps to vulgar Readers, that it rather is to be esteem’d as an example set, the first in English, of ancient liberty recover’d to Heroic Poem from the troublesom and modern bondage of Rimeing. 

It is not surprising that Milton’s first readers were nonplussed by his use of unrhymed iambic pentameter, since it was seldom used at the time except for dramatic works. But his influence on succeeding generations of English poets was great, and by the 19th century blank verse was the standard form for long poems.

But, as would prove ever thus, the publisher held the whip, and it took sixteen years for Pope and his widow to extract the full twenty pounds promised- at five pounds each- for the first and three later editions:

In exchange for the sum of £20, Milton gave to Simmons "All that Booke, Copy, or Manuscript" of the poem together with "the full benefit, profit, and advantage thereof, or w[hic]hshall or may arise thereby". 

There is documentary evidence that Simmons paid Milton £5 for the first edition of the work on 26 April 1669; however, thereafter, the question of payment becomes less clear cut. The second edition was published in 1674, shortly before Milton himself died. A third edition followed in 1678, after which we do know that Milton's widow, Elizabeth, received £8 from Simmons on 21 December 1680. This money was accepted by Elizabeth "in full payment for all my right, title, or Interest, which I have, or ever had in the Coppy of a poem Intituled Paradise Lost". Four months later, however, on 29 April 1681, Simmons nevertheless secured another formal release from Elizabeth. This, Lindenbaum suggests, may well have been "in return for the final two pounds owed from the original 1667 contract".

Milton scholar Kerry McLennan has written that Milton was not the blind naif of popular lore but a shrewd negotiator:

There’s more:  According to MacLennan, “For a writer to be paid in cash at all by a publisher was not customary at the time: seventeenth-century authors typically provided manuscripts to their printers in exchange for a small number of complimentary copies of the published work.”

This was not a royal work commissioned for an aristocratic audience.  Paradise Lost was a “risky speculative venture,” dependent upon “small press runs on speculation, displayed in bookshop windows, and awaiting discovery by readers with the interest, impulse, and either the cash or credit to buy them.”  In short, this contract marks the beginning of the decline of the aristocratic patronage system, to be replaced by a capitalistic, republican framework for writers.

Authors had little rights to their own work in Milton's day. Printers and booksellers held those rights. They came with royal monopolies for printing and selling books: the authors' ideas were secondary to the felt need of government to control what ideas the tiny- but wealthy and powerful- reading public consumed.

Milton drove a pretty hard bargain for the time. He retained the right for periodic accountings of sales. He capped each edition's press run so Simmons couldn't simply run the first edition through endless press runs to avoid the five-pound payments new editions would engender. 

The parties clearly intended and understood the content of Paradise had a potential online value in and of itself, and so retained rights to the work in Milton, and to publish it in Simmons, to pass to their heirs.

Milton died in 1674, and Simmons extracted a restated, more comprehensive release of the author's rights from his widow in return for her last payments under the 1667 contract. In 1680, Simmons sold the rights to another publisher- a friend and pallbearer of Milton's called Brabazon Aylmer for twenty-five pounds. Alymer, a modestly successful publisher, resold the rights, in two deals dated 1683 and 1691, having never published his own edition of Paradise Lost. Aylmer used to rights to stump up cash for another book he was sure would be his golden ticket, and which has since disappeared from history's radar.

Aylmer rightly saw Tonson as an up-and-comer:

Aylmer referred to Tonson as a young man destined to become "the greatest of English publishers" because of his dedication and commitment to publishing excellence.

Tonson did go on to become very well known as the chief publisher for John Dryden as well as his deluxe editions of Shakespeare, Spenser, Prior and other notable authors. However, when Tonson had to choose a text to hold in a self-commissioned portrait of himself, he chose Milton's Paradise Lost, the publication of which made him a very wealthy man.

The purchaser was on Jacob Tonson, a shrewd entrepreneur who actually made money in publishing and retired to a country estate. In 1719, Parliament passed the Statute of Anne, an attempt to organize the loose collection of laws and practices accreted around publishing. It was the first legal regime to recognize an exclusive copyright period, then set at 21 years. 

Not only did Tonson have a sharp eye for business, he seems to have actually adored Paradise Lost. He saw himself as the keeper of the author's literary flame:

Paradise Lost was not an overly popular book at the time Tonson purchased the copyright in 1683. It is believed his desire to purchase the rights to this work came more from a strong appreciation of Milton and his work than for financial gain. Tonson however, through his editions, convinced the English reading public of Milton's importance, secured Milton's reputation as one of England's greatest authors, and created a permanent place for Paradise Lost in the literary pantheon. His first edition (the fourth of Paradise Lost) was published in 1688 with financial partner Richard Bentley. 

Due to his continuing success as a publisher, Tonson was able to purchase the remaining half of the copyright for Paradise Lost in 1690 and set about to widen Milton's appeal to a general audience. Tonson contracted with editors to add textual notes, indexes and other textual aids to ease the accessibility of the text for the reader. A serialized criticism appearing in the The Spectator and Tonson's introduction of smaller editions aimed at wider audiences increased the poets appeal tremendously. 

Tonson's hold on Paradise Lost began to come to an end in 1709 after Parliament passed a new copyright act granting current copyright holders only 21 years of copyright before works by authors already deceased entered the public domain. The Tonsons (I, II and III) fought this law citing discrepancies within it and managed to forestall almost all other English editions until 1749. During this time, Tonson and his heir and nephew, Jacob Tonson II produced texts of every shape and size, with and without illustrations to a Milton-hungry public. 

The elder Jacob Tonson retired in 1720, leaving the business to his nephew Jacob Tonson II. During the younger Tonson's tenure, the textual integrity of Paradise Lost deteriorated rapidly culminating with Richard Bentley's "revisionist" text of 1732. This edition was corrected by Thomas Newton's "authoritative" text of 1749. However, the physical quality of Tonson editions during this time remained high. 

When Jacob Tonson II's son, Jacob Tonson III took over the business at the mid-point of the eighteenth century, he watched the Tonson exclusive copyright on Paradise Lost slip away and did not exhibit the same tenacity shown by his father and great-uncle in publishing and the Tonson publishing house folded in 1760. 

Much of the success of Milton's Paradise Lost can therefore be ascribed to Tonson's work as publisher. Scholar A.W. Good summed up Tonson's work by writing: 

By constantly encouraging critical activities upon the poem, [he] did much to prepare the way for the first variorum edition of Paradise Lost... Tonson made the poem attractive in form and appearance. He produced it in all sizes, from the handy pocket edition quarto, to the large ornamental edition folio. He used the best materials available, and probably engaged the best talent for the work of engraving and binding that the times could afford. He was constantly on the alert for new and helpful additions to the work in the way of notes and illustrations.

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