The Theory of Money and Credit
Today, we're going to turn to 19th century book publishing, and I want to begin with a quotation from Charles Dickens.
Now, Charles Dickens is generally thought of as a critic of cataclysm, people pointing for hard times, for example.
For example, in fact it's a critique of industrialization, you really study it and you'll see Dickens was quite a catalyst himself, a small-time entrepreneur to begin with, but a big-time entrepreneur for much of his life, he died an extremely wealthy man, a multi-millionaire in our terms, and capitalism was pretty much Dickens'
and he had a high regard for free enterprise, the great supporter of free trade, for example,
in his journal, Helpful Word.
In 1853, he was honored at a banquet in Birmingham, that's in the industrial midlands
of England, Birmingham and Manchester, the center of the Industrial Revolution.
And as if to say words that would make any true Marxist cringe, he got up and proposed
a post to the city of Birmingham, Birmingham, the very heart of middle class England, the
very heart of industrial England, to the great compact spines of the people by whose industry,
Perseverance and Intelligence, and their results in money wealth,
stuff functions in Birmingham, and many others like it have arisen.
So that great center of support, that comprehensive experience about beating the box,
literature has turned happily from individual patrons,
sometimes with its participants, often selling them, always few.
And it's all there, there in the English middle class, its highest purpose, its natural range of action, and its best reward.
Let's drink to that.
So Dickens, saluting the middle class virtues, industry, perseverance, and intelligence.
And we're involved in Moe, which has now given literature its proper support.
I know he says, to hell with patrons, we are so relieved not to be dependent on patrons anymore.
Because there were sometimes new deficients, there were third graders, but they were often sordid, and they were all in fields.
and so very huge, you know, a writer who, again, most people would think of as anti-capitalist celebrating the triumph of capitalism and the industrial revolution in England until the artists finally have their proper sources of support and it goes on to say,
Let a good book, in these bad times, be made acceptable, even upon an extremely difficult subject, and my life upon it, it shall be extensively fore-read and well-considered.
No complaints from Charles Dickens about the case of the Eastern reading public.
Now you can say, yeah, it's all that was easy for you, Charles Dickens, to praise the case of Eastern reading public.
in the History of the World, but that, of course, is very important because it shows
that, in fact, being the 3 to 10 I've faced here was the first mass commercial market
pollinator and who emerged from it as the number one author, the number one author in
quality, the one that to this day, you know, anybody would say was the greatest novelist
in English, probably ever and certainly in the 19th century.
So, the dumb math reading public was pretty smart.
And, in fact, by and large, the authors who were most successful are the ones we still read today,
the ones who failed as people go study those novels, induct the bloggers, find out why they failed.
They were generally very bad authors.
and so I think field was Exhibit A for me that Dickens would exhibit B. That is the greatest playwright
in English, the greatest novelist in English, operating in full commercial environment.
And so there can't possibly be a simple antithesis between the world of commerce
and the world of high culture.
And it's very ironic that what today is regarded as high culture in foreign novels, you know,
many of the television series on Masterpiece, Feeder, and of course Society of the Universe,
and that was the absolute heart of popular culture in 19th century England.
So, we're now firmly within the 19th century, and that does mark a turning point
and it's been a week's romp through cultural history because we're now after the Industrial Revolution,
we are in the world of math society and math culture.
And we're really getting to the heart of the argument today.
That is up to now, you know, I've been trying to show the commercial basis
of St. Peter's Peter, Rubin's painting and that sort of thing.
but we haven't yet gotten really into the world of mass culture.
We're now in the world of the commodity, the world of commodification, as my leftist colleague would say.
Dickens' novels are sold in a hundred thousand layers.
And now, you know, we've got these mass-produced commodities, mass-related art by Martin Luther King today.
You know, just picture yourself, a hundred thousand copies of Oliver Twist lined up next to each other.
And here it is, mass-productive, uniformed product and being marketed to a vast public.
Now in a way I'd probably show that's not quite unique to the industrial world, that Rubens had a factory.
On a W.E. Pine show, artists desperately wished their works to be commodified.
Rubens kept thinking, you know, I can't paint as many paintings as a public will buy, what can I do?
And so he created a painting factory.
and, effectively, to turn out more movement in the state by having people like Van Dyck as me then.
Talk about tapestry, and again I say that the tapestry industry was a major industry in Flanders during the Renaissance.
It produced great works of art that hang in museums now.
But it was extremely profitable and one of the central industries of that area.
of that area, so I don't want to, uh, uh, overstate the move we've made here, uh, in the way we've been looking at how artists have made a living by finding ways to commodify what they do.
and those are the pieces of writing the pieces you did and then getting it printed
and selling it to a market.
Actually, you know, the, the, as I was saying, there's no artist who's ever thought more easily
to commodify what, what to do, go to the lithograph market, go to the ceramic market,
the print market and so on, the whole history of print, of engravings and prints and paintings,
and so on, but now we really, the numbers start to look real to us.
You know, even Ludwig turned out, things back in maybe thousands of paintings, but now we're going to be in the hundreds of thousands.
And this is where the Marxist critique kicks in, that the commercialization of culture is the basement of culture.
But this debate culture is what produced these great Victorian novels, including the works of Dickens, and so how the benching could have really been.
What I'm going to try to show today this morning is that Dickens and the other great novels of the year in Europe still didn't have problems with the English publishing industry.
And you can say they managed to be great in spite of it, which is enough to say, but I want to suggest further that they managed to be great because of it, that there were aspects of the very commercialization of English publishing in the 19th century that actually improved the novel of people like Ickin, and above all because it kept them in touch with their audience, and that's something, sort of my online theme here,
is that the commercialization of art, which looks negative to so many critics, especially Marxists, is one way of keeping artists rooted in a moving audience.
And I think it gives their works more vitality and more vibrancy.
Now, the other thing, as we enter the 19th century, we just have a lot more information, and we really know much more about what was going on.
We start to have surviving correspondence between authors and their publishers, we have statistics that are much more reliable, very anecdotal up to now, how much in debt was Mozart when he died, how much money did Bach have when he died, you know, now we start to have real records that stick in bank accounts and that sort of thing, so we can get a little more specific with things now.
So let me begin by describing basically the publishing industry in England
in the 19th century, and then go on to show how it interacted with authors
and authors interacted with it.
Publishing was an amazing industry in the 19th century.
in London became the world's center for publication, it's still one of the great centers
for publications in the world, and it was very much one of the great beneficiaries
of the Industrial Revolution, and again, we're looking at one of these situations
where capitalism made certain positive cultural development possible.
I really recommend a book called The U.S. Common Leader by Richard Althaus.
I've put it on the supplementary to be actually sub-titled The Social History
of the Mass-Feeding Public, 1800 to 1900.
And although Althaus would never say this, he tells a great story,
The Science of Catallism in this book.
He shows that catallism is impossible and even worse to create the mass-feeding public.
and I'll give some specific examples from the book in a minute, but just some
of the technological changes that made it possible for American reading public.
One thing was a vast reduction continuing throughout the century in the price of paper.
Here's one of the incredible side effects, benefits of that horrible industrial revolution
were always being fought, ruined things. The textile industry, which was one of the great
industries that grew up in England in the 19th century, and it was dominating the textile industry
for most of the 19th century, resulted in the proliferation of rags, both in the
manufacturer of textiles and in the recycling of them. And you suddenly have a
One of the great uses of rags then, was to make paper, rag-content paper, that is quite
subversive to the paper, these things today, and was acid-free, anyway, but suddenly it
became much cheaper to make paper so that you could make it out of surplus rags.
Converting this positive tendency was the government taxes on paper, which was extremely high, relatively speaking.
You know, it's the kind of thing that the American Revolution happened over, like the Stamp Act.
The British government thought that taxing paper was a great source of income, and they didn't mind that it made publishing more expensive,
and Books, and above all, Newspapers, most of it.
So, Ludwig was happy not to see the development of the newspaper industry.
These newspapers were critical of the government.
So, there was a new battle in the course of the 19th century over the factors on paper
which were, in fact, called taxes on knowledge, and from now on, I'll be talking about ways
in which the market has helped culture flourish.
I'll also keep mentioning ways in which government interventions
in the Market have impeded the development of culture, and, you know, basically my advice
to people who want government support of our arts would be this, as an old French line,
laissez-faire, just leave the market alone, stop interfering in it,
that's the best thing you can do for encouraging culture, and this is one of the examples.
And the liberalist in England in the 19th century was very hard
to get these various facts and knowledge eliminated.
So paper became paper, the introduction of steam engines into printing was a huge development.
It speeded up the process of the printing exponentially and made possible large-scale printing.
Just looking at all six, I think he says that the average print run for a novel in the 18th century was 750 copies total.
The huge runs of Dickens novels, eventually in the hundreds of thousands, that required new technology and platforms and roads to meet the needs, and later in the century,
of Money, long-type printing was developed and stereotype printing.
There is, at the beginning of the century, there was essentially a type shortage in England.
You couldn't set a whole book at once.
You had to, just some individual pieces of type, and they had to set a couple of pages,
and so in the course of the century, all sorts of developments made it easier to set type.
By the end of the century, they had automatic type setting.
So, all these things which pathology made possible, which were driven by the pathology's desire to reduce costs and certainly increase volume in order to reduce costs per item.
So, on the production end, there were all sorts of ways in which the success of the novel for the Dickens would not have been possible.
on the other hand, these technological developments were driven by the prospect of people like Dickens.
Publishers wouldn't have worked so hard with Twinters to increase their capacity if they didn't see that they could sell these large numbers of books.
and, above all, Dickens, who opened up this possibility when he saw how many copies of his book were selling.
They said, we've got to find ways to print faster, and we've got to find ways to reduce the cost of paper.
So again, Marxists are always production-driven in their thinking.
And when they talk about these developments, they see it all, whether they're independent developments in technology,
and they then govern the writing of novels.
And we know that the economy is customer-driven and demand-driven.
You know, I think that Kevin Costner, a costler from Field of Dreams,
remember the great slogan that, if you build it, they will come.
That's Marxism.
Capitalism is, if they will come, you will build it.
And we know that that's the truth.
The Italian business anticipates the demand and responds to its production methods.
So it's really market-saving in a sense if you build a stable product, you know.
If you create these great high-speed team practices, then you'll buy the novel.
Well, it's because you think there's a market, vast market for these novels
that you develop these new technologies.
Now, in a related way, marketing a book went through incredible developments, and one thing I'm going to try to show you is that the book industry was much more modern than we think, and that its marketing methods were very sophisticated, and you're going to recognize them and see that much of what we think is a 20-second development is really already there, the 19th century,
Well, again, the Marxist prison, the Frankfurt School, you know, complain about mass markets
and mass marketing and how films really don't have any here's bad news just the way they're
marketing, marketed in famous television programs.
Well, we're going to see if that's true, then Dickens novels have no bad news and they
were just marketed as well.
For example, the marketing of Dickens' novels was quite extraordinary.
They had all sorts of tie-in products and the equivalent of Dickens' action figures.
And part of the way they made money was you'd sell all this stuff in conjunction with a Dickens' novel.
One of these is something from one of my colleagues in Virginia, Jennifer Wicksbrook,
Advertisers, fictions, literature, advertisement, and social reading.
This is first new success with the Kippel papers, absolutely unprecedented.
It starts selling 40,000 copies.
I wouldn't ever seen anything like that before, except for the Bible.
And so, they capitalized on this.
They decided, let's start selling the little figurines.
After the publication of Pickwick, Warner's tabs were plying the sheets, Sandweller is one of the famous pages in his Pickwick sidekicks, and so the taxi tabs in London, the horse-drawn, were named after Weller.
Pickles name was written in gold. Burgers of it were soon fixed for the most popular penny cigars and a writing pen and pickles, obi mugs,
Sawyer Crop drops, water booths, and candy tins printed with pick-pickies, pick-wicking levels again to be sold.
So there has to be, you know, just the way a film comes out now and that Donald the Burger King starts having its name lost,
And what I really love, you can find it, but I'm guessing it's the first example of a product like this, you know, in a film where the camera zooms in and the hero's drinking Coca-Cola or, you know, he's got a Rolex watch off or something, that's not by accident.
Well, uh, in one of the original illustrations of the Pickwick papers, uh, uh, predicting Mr. Weller helping his son Samuel, the picture clearly shows a black card on the mantle reading distinctly,
It's astounding to discover how commercial this world is, as you now know.
I don't think that's a bad thing.
It says something more about the actual marketing, how books were published.
As some of you may know, books were really quite expensive at this time.
It is very hard to compare prices, but basically all it shows
that, at the beginning of the 19th century, a book cost the equivalent
of the average worker's daily, a day's wages.
So that was a lot to spend on a book.
A book does not cost anywhere near a day's wage for anybody today.
It shows you one of the things that, okay, capitalism,
except from a university press book, I take that back.
Their socialist production for you, half of the production reduces the price of books.
I can actually tell you something about that.
So books were in fact, certainly in the beginning of the century, expensive.
And so they were rented.
This, again, comes as a shock to most people. Were you aware that books were rented in the 1930s? They had what are called personalized libraries, and you rented a book that you couldn't afford to buy? That sounds so weird to us, or could you start thinking about video rental?
and the
long time ago video was coming out in a fight to $80.
They didn't want to buy it and so they rented it for $3.
And that's basically how the book industry made a lot of this money in the 19th century
through rental and there were great circulating
Library, as you can well imagine, there were various arrangements, you could rent an individual
book, you could get a pass for certainty that would allow you to rent a certain number of
books over a certain time and so on.
There were other libraries where you could pay a subscription fee and you could read anything
in the library.
Again, there's the market for it.
It came up with all, it's faced with the problem that books aren't literally too expensive
for People to Buy, so it came up with a whole variety of solutions to make it possible for people
who didn't have the money to buy books to rent them.
But of course, also, in the course of the century, the price of books was reduced tremendously,
so by the end of the 19th century, it was quite easy for people to buy books.
The prices came down and the pound essentially did not change in value in the 1970s.
It was that awful gold standard, you know, it's so terrible, it had this terrible result,
but the pound kept its value for the entire century.
And the price of books came down from $30,000 to $1,000 at a time when the value of a show
was essentially unchanged.
It was actually a little higher in 1900 than it was in 1800.
And how did this happen? Again, for the operator of the market. And I could give you many examples, all this book, as he would never admit it, is filled with the story of one heroic and accomplished entrepreneur after another, whose own purpose was to make money and whose own theft was to reduce the price of books. I'm just going to give you one example, one of the great, unsung heroes of culture. You will never, ever hear this man mention, certainly at any moment,
in a positive way, but we should all bow down to James Washington, the inventor of the remainder
book sale. This is a great man. I appreciate this more than anybody except my remainder
book sellers today. He just went back to the 18th century. James Washington was the son
of a Journalist Shoemaker, and saw how that way himself, he became a shoemaker, and then
he converted to Methodism, and that was a turning point in his life, because the Methodists
wanted to finance the spread of books. They had the Bible in mind, they had John Hensley
and so they had a fund, uh, to go into the book business and, and Lackington availed himself,
uh, of this fund to set up a book shop that started in 1774, and I'll just read from, uh,
also here, he bought up large quantities of books that he often, where publishers periodically unloaded their slow moving stock,
So that's, you know, the major books, books that aren't selling,
probably just want to get them off the shelf, get rid of that.
So that doesn't blow them up, and then, instead of sending half or three quarters of the purposes
to the bank bankers who use the paper for lining and selling what remains at the full price,
he offered all the acquired at half or even a quarter of the public price.
The first guy who wrote the sort of price fixing of books at the time, and again, most
people who bought our books as remains of sales just dumped them then, sold them for
scrap value.
But Larkington had the brilliant idea of just reselling them for a fraction of the original
cost.
I'll tell you, I don't doubt Peter said, but he loosed money on his book and said, I'll make it up and buy it. No, he understood he was buying in fees, so he just sold him fees. His unheard of actual college immoral procedure brought down on him the wrath of the trade, but this was more of a constant save for by the business he did with the bargain-hunting public.
When in a short time, he was the most lavish buyer of remainders in London, at one time he boasted he had in stock 10,000 copies of Roth-Pom, an equal number of his pittance. At a single afternoon's auction, he bought 5,000 pounds worth of books.
That's about $2 million worth of books to raise money, and that's $100, I guess, but it's extraordinary.
Notice, of course, religious books, that's why the method is financed, and it's very interesting if you look at what drove the book trade from the start.
It was two great books of the human race, the Bible and pornography.
This is actually, hey, if Kansas laws are media, you go back, printing,
Gutenberg, the introduction of printing, what was initially printed, the early phase of printing,
basically from the Bible, other religious facts, and the Renaissance equivalent of pornography,
all these men who spent a delightful day on, at least folks recall, things like the book,
and so forth. And this is a move towards decision law. What first spread on the internet? The Bible and pornography. I feel like the highest and the lowest in the motors, I will leave it to you to sort out which is which, always drives the new medium. I think this is very movies. I mean, this is incredibly consistent. Mankind against the new is a medium, religious and quarterback material,
Why did you earn the increased hostility of Rothbard's booksellers and the verbal gratitude
of readers by cutting prices on new books, thus initiating the understanding classes
that would provide animosity in the trade for the next hundred years?
These steps, as well as the dealing in secondhand books sent up from the company, resulted in
well-deserved prosperity.
In 1791 and 1792, he says, it is engaged in a kind of memoir, he had an annual turnover
of 100,000 Biden and a profit of 4,000 and 5,000 pounds, multiplied by 200, yeah, so
that's a million dollars in profit.
The name of his book store was the Temple of the Vusors, London's Temple of the Vusors
in St. Petersburg Square was one of these sites of London. A large block of houses had been
turned into a stout, the holes were mounted by a dome and a flagpole. This bottle was sort of heavy as is Wal-Mart, too.
Over the main entrance appeared the sign, which Carl claimed no one evidently challenged,
the deepest bookseller in the world. Reportedly, the interior was so strange that a coat and fix
could be driven clear around it. In the center was a tower behind which the clerk waited on the fine ladies and gentlemen to cluster about it.
At one side, a staircase led by the laundry room, and through a series of circular galleries under the dome.
Speaking of a town like Barnes and Noble and Boarder City, it's incredible that capitalism knows how to sell things.
Around each of these galleries ran crowded cells, the higher the cells, the fattier the vices, and the lower the price.
Nothing like the temple of the muses with it's cut prices, it's missed, had, and carried policy as the standard traveling had ever been in the book world.
The key prices low, lackings and wouldn't sell on credit.
You know, it seems so wonderful that we have praised the extended credit.
You didn't even have to have the money to go where you wanted, but the result of that was higher prices for everybody,
for everybody, because so many people defaulted and never paid their bills.
So, Lacknitz says, you want a book, you pay for it now.
I'll get you the cheapest price, but I'm not going to give you credit.
And, also, for no haggling, no bargaining.
And, here's what Lacknitz has said, thousands have been effectively prevented from purchasing,
though anxious so to do, from circumstances in life, would not permit them to pay the full price,
and thus were totally excluded from the advantage of improving their understanding and enjoying a rational entertainment.
Now, I can give you one of the great examples, but Mises spoke in his three moments of no point to also get a step back and say,
you know, 60 years past won't really affect us, I think.
But he tells one story or another of a man who was the king of the Circulate Library,
and the Federal Reserve orders, there's a man named Moody, or Moody, it's N-U-B-I-E,
I don't know how to pronounce it, we can recognize these people, they are Sam Walton,
they are Ray Kroc, they're the same kind of people that build businesses today,
and it's the same philosophy, did the public what it wants,
reduced costs in every possible way, market effectively, I mean it worked now, it worked then,
But the thing I understand is what they were technically marketing was things like Dickens' novel.
Now, I like Dickens earlier than that, but he obviously built the basis for the retail frame,
the one that made, both making and cost one.
Now, again, for Marxists, they're so obsessed with production, they look at distribution
and marketing as these totally negative things that add no value.
They always see distributors, middlemen, marketers as pure exploiters.
You know, the only person, you know, they've got the labor theory of banking,
but the only person who deserves a war is the laborer.
You know, they would complain, Lachington's making all this money and the poor guys
in the sweatshop, print shop are not making anything of this product.
Well, those guys would have no job if Lachington wasn't moving the product they were producing.
He, as a retailer, is performing a social economic function.
He's there, actually, as a mediator between the printing industry and the bought,
for-fine public, and he was someone who was always figuring out what does the public want,
what should be printed, so, in fact, he was performing a vital social and cultural function.
That's why he made all the money.
Now, let me turn maybe to the most important aspect of the
Dickens publishing industry in the 19th century, and that was serialization.
Again, I'm not sure how much you're aware of this fact, but
many of the novels in the 19th century, including Dickens,
were not originally published in book form. They were
And that means they either appear in magazines, sometimes on a biweekly basis, sometimes on a monthly basis, depending upon the magazine, or they were actually published in separate parts.
A typical novel, when it was eventually published in book form in the 19th century, occupied three volumes.
Three volumes, the famous three-decker novel was called.
And a three-decker novel appeared in serial parts, usually appeared in 20 parts, and usually
over a period of roughly a year or a year and a half.
Now one of the reasons serialization became popular is because novels in book form were
too expensive, and so people, for example, liked the idea of buying a novel
And, you know, you buy the novel part by part over a year and a half, and again, the figures vary, but let's say, you know, maybe let's say the novel, in book form, the novel would cost 15 feelings, and you didn't have 15 feelings, but you buy it over the course of a year, one feeling apart, 20 times.
Now it does end up costing $20,000 instead of $50,000, but if you have, you know, it's like, that's like buying on credit or a stated plan, you know, it's the way psychopedias are sold or these time-lifes are sold, that system of marketing is developed in the 19th century, and God bless the capitalist, again, they came up with fees, if you bought it, if you bought all 20 parts, you'd get a binding for free at the end, or if you bought
for Money Parts, you only had to pay for 19 of them and you got the 20 of them.
I mean, they had every marketing gimmick then that we think of as so specific to the 20th century.
And if you go to the Dickens House in London, you can see all this stuff.
You can see the actions for Dickens' mums and the Dickens' watches and all that.
You can see the parts publication. They still have them.
I mean, there's so hundreds of thousands of them or hundreds or thousands of copies, I suppose.
As fascinating as it looks at the park features in particular, they're on, you know, faded, crumbling papers, they use keypapers, they kind of look like conicals, they have the female conicals, you understand how rock culture they were, they won't have mirror illustrations on the covers, but the covers are kind of fancy, and you can just see how remarkable they were.
And so a lot of, again, a lot of the most famous 1970 novels, not all of them, but many of them appear in this form, magazines like them because they boosted circulation.
If you could be publishing a popular novel, it would great for circulation.
In fact, they note, as this was how they first started focusing to Dickens, the incredible
numbers of parts of magazine phones, Dickens eventually started his own magazine, Household
Words, which was quite successful for about a decade, and his main asset was himself,
he published his own novel, but he also spotted young talent, like Elizabeth Astor, published
and so on.
So, you can go through it and it's just, it looks like a modern magazine, there'll be an
article on India and the latest agricultural methods in India, there'll be an article on
and how to fix a wagon wheel, an article on a new scientific discovery.
I mean, it looked like Time Magazine, you know, they like to have departments.
They don't quite have departments, but you can see it was aiming for a middle class audience.
It's kind of interesting what's going on around the world.
It's interesting how to fix it, that's what it takes, and it's interesting fiction.
Now, it's convenient enough how, you know, just to see how the market responded to a problem
that both were still too expensive and published the works in serial form.
But what people learned to do now was to make a virtue of this destiny and exploit this form.
Again, I have to, no one, in retrospect, still the publication looks absolutely brilliant,
artistically and financially, commercially, but it's not as if some genius sat down and planned
out this system. People kind of stumbled into it. It is precisely an example of spontaneous order
in the Austrian sense, that people tried out various methods and then followed up work
and eventually developed a very sophisticated method of producing and marketing a novel.
Now, what I mean about exploring the form is that pretty quickly people figured
out the cliffhanger principle, that is, if you were going to cover the thing in cards,
And, but people start feeling the way, you know, at first I went for a walk, you know,
it was a long novel, it was a write-up, it was a 20-equal part, and then you start to
get a feel for how to end a part. A part was typically about who factors were, but you
start to notice when at the end of the part, someone was about to die, or there was a knock
on the Door, and I said, who could that possibly be, you know, continued next month, and, you know,
this is one of the great characteristics of Victorian fiction.
We lose a lot of this now, actually, when we read the novel in a book.
A lot of good modernists have actually now marked off the parts and you can actually see
and so on.
And, you know, in fact, in many ways, the way we, you know, especially in the academic
world, when you do a book a week or less, we don't read these novels the way they were
meant to be read.
They actually were meant to be read over a long period of time, and you sit there and
see a thousand page Higgins novel and say, oh, I hope to read this in one week.
That was not the original intention.
and in some ways we spoil the effect of them and I put on the original bibliography a book
by Jennifer Haywood, Conquering Pleasures, the terrific book, it's all about the serial
as the modern form, that's S-E-R-I-A-M by the way, I like to do too much as the next guy
but I'm talking about, about fixing here, but the, the book is about Dickens' novels,
the Terry and the Potter script, radio soap operas, and television soap operas.
And she really made this leap of imagination to see that the serial actually is the modern form
And he talks about his unique characteristics that you can trace through all these genres.
Now, one obvious example would be the cliffhanger principle, who named it after movie serials where, you know, at the end of the part, someone was hanging on a cliff and he wondered if he could fall to her death.
but, you know, Who Killed J.R., you know, the greatest cliffhanger in history, but when you think about it, television and so forth, radio and so forth, history has always been a very popular genre in all different forms, and it really talks about its distinctive characteristics. I mean, we have a tendency, in some ways, to misread these Victorian novels because we apply to them what we're used to,
We should be applying to them the standards of television soap operas and not those of
low-barian, perfectly planned and conceived novels.
And I'll maybe talk about this when we get to the X-Files on Friday, that there are certain
ways in which television has developed this serial form, and it is a new kind of art form
with a loose headache in many ways, and it's able to do things that other forms can't, and again, the serial form is generally associated with the lowest forms of pop culture in people's minds, soap operas, comic strips, and it actually is a subtle art form, and it allows for kinds of pieces of long-term developments in character, in cloth, but most of the time, it's a very subtle art form, and it allows for kinds of pieces of long-term developments
and the more traditional, you know, prosecution of Oedipus is a rooted and concentrated piece of Brahma and all of the, you know, happening in the union time and that's a great art form, but there's also something said for the enormously strong canvas of a Dickens novel which was largely made possible by the legional method of deliberate that again Dickens
and so on.
So, he was making, not only knew that his audience had a year and a half to wait, but
he was making them wait, he was drawing things out, and these things can be incredibly well
planned.
So, it's very distinctive to the 19th century novel and it was, well again, some were not
published seriously, some of the great ones were not, but many of them were published
and that had commercial reasons, it was a form of production that was effective,
it was a form of marketing that was effective and a lot of what you need to do to understand these models,
the ones that were serialized, is to understand the consequences of civilization
and some of them were negative and some of them were positive.
Let me begin with the negative ones, because again, I'm deliberately trying not to play
down some of the negative aspects of the commercialization of literature.
And in fact, many of the writers at the time complained about civilization,
and some of them tried to avoid it.
I have some quotes here that I'll leave in the middle, just trying to find them.
But let's look at some of the negative effects.
Serialization meant you had to write to a certain length and the novel couldn't be shorter or longer.
And in fact, people signed contracts.
I'm going to produce this novel for you at, I'm going to produce 20 parts,
I'm going to say so much for 20 parts over this schedule, and you then had a schedule.
I mean, they were not going to have 18 empty pages in the message or in a magazine on this
debate on the part.
And so you had to write to a schedule, and you know, if you were on part 19 and you had
18 spot lines still going, the publisher then said to you, it's time to wrap it up for part
20.
The whole thing has to not end for the next issue to resolve all 18 foot slabs and put on these 17-year parts resolvers, no, that mouthful is going to end the next month.
And similarly, if, you know, if invention lags, if you know you have to produce something on time, then we have correspondents, sometimes from different areas,
And so, this is an example of negative commercial pressures, and many authors did complain fiddly
about this, but I don't want to overlook it, so I'm going to give you some sort of quote,
this is from Alan Zuley's book, author and printer, terrific book on the sort of the publication
in details of the industry in the 19th century, I put it on your supplementary bibliography.
He gives us an example of Anthony Fowler, you know, one of the greatest and one of the most successful
novelists in the world, I think a hundred novels, and his sister and mother.
And there's the Fowler family with the whole novel industry under themselves.
Spalak called this system the hurried publication of incompletive work, and he called it the
watching mode of publication to which particular serial stories are given rise, and by which
small parts of it were written or sent out to the press, were delirious to the work done.
So there is Spalak, one of the best most successful novels of the time, says this system is delirious.
and doing those on the basis of file size, was during the system when it came to effect not only the publications, but also the initial
composition of work resulted in a loss of artistic control. So here, there's a standard complaint against commercialization of art that
resulted in loss of artistic control of the author. But, there was a solution, and so I found it. The public protection against pressure that might have led to
and Hasty Publications was to complete a novel and revise it to be followed before sending it to any visual publisher.
The serial issue was signed, he then needed out the manuscript to the printers while he went to work on his next book.
So again, there was a market problem, there was a solution.
If he didn't like this system and he were incredibly fluent at writing his novels, he just wrote the book to be like this
and then pretended to write it month by month for the public.
So, market problems, market solutions, another example, very interesting one, from Harry Marknell,
who's one of the great unsung writers of the Victorian Age, but he was so capitalistic.
If you ever want to have a fun, weaver, illustrations of political economy,
a little bit too much David Ricardo in economics, but basically,
It's one lesson after another in how fake news are bad, free trade is good, she was the Bastiat of the English.
She was a marvelous writer. I tried to reintroduce her. It's horrific to discover that the most successful female writer in the first half of the 19th century was not just pro-capitalist, but rabidly pro-capitalist.
She would sell 30,000 copies of one of these newspapers at close to time.
Finally, Broadwood, the Canadian class, has brought some of these tales back into print.
Harriet Marginal, N-A-R-T-I, N-A-A-E, he would like to consider a method of production.
And in her autobiography, she says, I could not consciously adopt any method so unprincipled
in an artistic sense as piecemeal publications.
Whatever other merits that they have,
a work of fiction cannot possibly be good
in an artistic sense which can be cut off
into portions of an arbitrary length.
The success of the portions requires
that each should have some sort of effect of both.
We know it's a cliffhanger principle,
and to provide a certain number of these at regular intervals
is like breaking up the broad license shadows
of a great picture and spoiling it as a composition.
I might never do anything to advance or sustain the real art, but I would never do what,
I would never, ooh, level negative, I would never do nothing to corrupt it
by adopting a false principle of competition.
So there it is, Harry Martin, who, instead of being pro-Catholic,
does not like this aspect of commercial publication and civilization and wouldn't do it.
Here's an example in the case of Elizabeth Gasco,
," a novel north and south in the defense of the industrial system.
These guys did an amazing story.
Dickens was writing Hard Times and publishing it in Household Word.
He did a test on the industrial midlands, and Baskill wanted to write a defense of it,
and Dickens published it.
Her first novel sold well, he liked it, he wanted to get it in his magazine.
In fact, Gaskill's book, The North and South, is supposed to teach the Dickens hard times.
He's supposed to tell hard times, he's a very disordered, blue, industrial middleman.
But, you know, Dickens had an ideological problem with Gaskill, but he published it because he could make money that way.
He had to try and fit the political system.
But when they planned out the publication of North and South, Dickens miscalculated.
and so, he pressured her to make the work shorter than she intended, this is from,
I'm quoting from an edition of the novel, a page with an edition,
but from her viewpoint, it constituted the worst compression of that made
in the last few chapters of the novel.
So, again, I'm not denying that this system has built itself in talking about one
One of his own early theory publications, I believe it was the old theoryology stuff, said I was obliged to plant most dreadfully what I thought a pretty idea in the last chapter of I was having room to turn.
So even Dickens felt at times uncomfortable with it too.
Now there was an answer to that, which was that yes the novel was initially published serially,
But then, particularly if it was successful, it would be republished in book form, and at that time, authors had the opportunity to revise that.
So this example, North and South, Glasgow, expanded the ending for the book form that was enforced to compress to the serial form.
So, again, market problem, market solution, it's nasty that they had to rush to finish some of the novels,
but it's not the end of the world because it wasn't the end of the book
and again the market gives you the second chance
and so it's, you know, it's a great scholarly enterprise now to get to compare the sterile publications
of the novel with the eventual book publications
so again, I, this is an example where we have really detailed information
and I can show you, I don't have to speculate what Bach felt about his patron
or things like that. We have records here that show that artists were uncomfortable
with certain aspects of the system that had developed for largely commercial reasons.
But there's another side to this sort of, and a beautiful kind of a negative case
against civilization, and let me talk about the positive case, and that is that civilization
and one of the things I want to argue from here on in is that what characterizes commercial culture is feedback and here's where the relation of an artist to the public is important on how it can actually improve his work or her work in the face of cases like Hayek-Martin and Elizabeth D'Astrow and by the way, again, as you know, I've been working on this for a long time,
I mentioned that Daphne and Mark Noble were very sympathetic to capitalism, and a good reason because capitalism was very good to women in the publishing business in the 19th century.
You can talk about every system of finance and the arts, patronage, government funding.
Nothing ever opened up more opportunities for women in culture than 19th century British publishing.
and more than half the novels were written by women and they were published in the last few centuries as Britain and there's no record like that anywhere else in culture up to that point
and it's not because Charles Dickens as a publisher was a feminist, it's because he was a Catholic and he wanted to publish talent and he was scared, who wrote the book if he thought it was sad?
In some cases, women have to publish on the male names, the thought they had to, like George Eliot, Mary Ann Evans, or the Brontë Institute, or like Proud on Saturday Night Live, they had to publish on the sexually ambiguous names, or as per accident, Ellis Bell, that was all that they had, and then it was Brontë, originally.
So, but still, an incredible opportunity, you know, the greatest cultural opportunity yet open for women in the world, was the 19th century British publishing management.
So, let me now turn to the way in which the serial system actually had a positive effect on literature.
And that means that novelists could watch the reaction of their audience as they were.
And it took several films.
Of course publications were in some ways, some things were viewed as they came out, you know,
and you see reviews, you know, like reviews of TV shows, you know,
you know, all of the latest installments of Oliver Twist is terrific, Dickens has carried the story on as Dickens said, or, you know, something's going wrong with down being sun, it's getting a little dark, Dickens, you know, we love you for the laughter, you know, so the last TV reviews there was certainly word of mouth and a sales figure, and that was quite easy
to Start, and so authors couldn't always tell why the sales figures were changing,
but they seemed to have tons of guesses, and so you get a phenomenon in the Victorian novel
that is very similar to what we see in TV soap operas, and that is the life and death
of a Character, on sales features, sometimes, now we know this from soap operas, TV, you
know, they try all sorts of business characters and they can tell which ones click and which
ones don't.
as well. It's often also a case of weak actors, click or don't click. But, you know, one week, a character is very healthy with his soap opera. Next week, the student develops a rare form of cancer and is gone by the end of the month. Similarly, you know, a delivery boy, you know, brings a teacher, and he's incredibly handsome, you know, suddenly they write a romance
with one of the characters, and you know, this is easy to, to some extent, on prime time shows. I'll jump ahead to the X-Files here. The X-Files, one person introduced the characters of Lone Gundam, the freaky nerdy computer types of Heldmolder, and the, I think it was Glenn Morgan that did the episode. I mean, he thought it had failed, you know, what a silly idea that was.
And then the internet grew up, of all the computers that were identified with the Lone Gunners and said, you know the greatest thing we ever see in the show, bring it back, bring it back, I know the rest of the history, they eventually got the whole spin-off series, they certainly were one of the greatest things over the years, and the X-Files, what's feedback?
As you can see in our case, we author, didn't realize, we author the characters, didn't even realize how good they were, we didn't actually see the potential in them, and if they hadn't been into that no more long dungeon, and again, they don't make a breakthrough, but they knew they ended up adding a great element to it, and that's probably why I talk about feedback in the serial mode, where there's ways of monitoring or interaction.
Now, you know, again, in this sort of high-classic, extreme mode of criticism, or the Marxist mode of criticism,
that long-run episode is an example of Marxist corruption.
That Glenn Morgan had this pure artistic vision, and he allowed it to be corrupted by the impact of the market.
All of them have been through a long discussion with his creation, but, you know, in retrospect, it seems the audience was right and Morgan was wrong, that he stumbled upon something that was really good, he didn't understand its potential, but the market did.
and, fortunately, the market was there to see him, put him on course.
Now, this is the feature of all serial production.
Hayek's book is very good on tracing it.
He wrote on repairing the pirate comic strip.
He was the creator of it, had saved all his fan mail,
and made it available to her and explained to her how he listened to his fans.
You know, the fans are great, they tell you exactly what they think, they like this character, they hate that character,
they want the character to go to Brazil this time, or, you know, with the Simpsons, you know, Canadians love the Simpsons.
But, you know, the Simpsons went to Japan, they went to Australia, but they never went to Canada.
Canada, Canadians, that's just like what sent the citizens down to Canada.
What sent the citizens finally into Canada?
Maybe the Canadians could start some for you.
But what you did is, you did the things that happened that made modern popular culture so vibrant.
One of the charges of Marxist and the great Frankfurt school argument is that mass,
Capitalist mass culture produces passive consumers, that they just sit there and take it to point B, that Bollywood or, you know, Capitalist, the Capitalist culture industries, all kinds of other, so they can market everything.
Tell that to the guy who produced ITAR, the guy who produced Battlefield Earth, or who produced Waterworld,
I bet Hollywood didn't marketside anything, and that's the end of the story of this great book called Fiasco,
about Hollywood's great marketing, production and marketing standards.
But it's really amazing that the Stanford School based this argument on no evidence whatsoever and to the beginning of a very important movement in popular culture studies, coming out of the, oddly enough, from a Marxist orientation, but to look at the profit consumer in popular culture, not the profit consumer.
It's led by a professor at MIT named Henry Jenkins, whom I'll refer to several times now, but he did some of the first studies of fan fiction.
The audience of Star Trek, for example, is not passive. They have taken suggestions of the show and the characters.
as you know that these fans create stories that Gene Roddenberry never imagined. Things are happening on the internet between Spock and Spurk that Gene Roddenberry never dreamed of because fans have taken over the characters. They're not going to sit back passively and Jacobs has written a book about that. They're called posters. That's now the technical term.
for Active Fans, and what I think that goes all the way back to Dickens' novels and Hayward's book includes that.
He sees it as this wonderful aspect of modern math culture, that it involves feedback, and we see the phenomenon,
One, this is actually an example, some papers are fully present, about Dickens.
He greatly expanded Sam Weller's role in Pickles Papers, with sales down to 40,000 after Sam's first appearance.
And nothing had ever sold 40,000, except from the 32nd of August, when this happened, and, you know, things went through the roof.
Another example of this is the old curiosity shop, let me see if I can find my CD's on there.
This was having an intended to be a novel.
He was just putting it together, wanted to be an isolated essay, various other things,
But, you know, just for a relief collect, you know, play all the essays, but the Institute's character, Little Nell, and just the appearance of Little Nell in one of the parts of publication, increased the circulation from 60,000 to 100,000.
and that was a great thrill by the first movie that sells a hundred billion dollars, the first thing that ever sold a hundred thousand dollars and suddenly it emphasized, how am I going to write a novel about Bill Maher?
and it took a lot of scrambling on its part and it got a lot of things wrong in the book after that,
that are written from Manion Easton in his Introduction to the Body.
The local result of this last-minute expansion of the little town can be detected in the early part of the novel.
The malicious, propagate Fred Plante is too broad as Dickens prefers to develop a far more spectacular analysis of Quilt and Dick Swillers' engaged in profligacy.
The Sophie Wachowk episode proves to be of a layer of irrelevancy here, who introduces a harmless semi-invent, occasioning some lug rooms in Chapter 1, by some 20 chapters later, as becomes the furthest responsible young man.
So, this quick transition contains a list of essays and tales into a novel, resulted in a kind of aesthetic mess there, but resulted in a novel that has ridiculous energy, particularly to tap into the energy involved in it.
That's the point, you know, the expires people to the internet to tap into the energy of their audience.
Haywood traces in this correspondence between the guy of the Italian party, I think that's his name, and his audience.
And he's a feedback loop, and that's what's characteristic of spontaneous orders.
that Hayek has shown in the social community in some ways, you know, the essence of all
three economics are that, that, that economics is a feedback, that the market is a feedback
loop. The way the market works in general is that people try to anticipate what will
sell, sometimes through marketing studies and things like that, they try to figure out
what will sell, they try to figure out how to produce it at a price at which they can
and a lot of branding goes into it, but you never know until you bring the product to market and it's typical of markets that the majority of these products fail.
It's just that when they succeed, they succeed big because so many people are failing and the thing that happens in the market is when you succeed you really push what succeeds.
And then everyone comes in from copying what's succeeded, the original marker, you have to work harder to improve the product and how do you improve the product, trying to figure out what made it sell, listening to your customers, how you can improve the product, that's the way markets work and it's no different in culture, you know anything about the television business, the movie business, that's exactly the way it operates.
I hear about the academics, they think you somehow failed if you didn't plan out everything perfectly in advance, and they somehow think it would be possible to plan out everything perfectly in advance.
That's the socialist way of thinking, that's the thinking behind central planning. In general, when socialists look at the markets, they see all the failures, they see all the blessings.
This has got to be a more rational way to do this. This is the stupidest way to do things. All these different people trying things out. Look, so many of them are failing. Look at all the wasted resources. We can just get together and pile it out. It would work perfectly.
But no, of course, many have one giant fan, because nobody can anticipate everything perfectly, so if you're only making one guess, you are just tremendous that that will be wrong, and then everybody's fooled.
The way markets work is a lot of success, but somebody succeeds and then everyone can start copying that and get better ways of doing things.
That's the way the market economy work is dealt, and what I'm saying is, that's in fact the way the social market works.
You see it in films and television, but you can see it already in the 19th century novel.
Yes, novelists panned out their novels in advance, even when they were doing stereo publications.
We have Fickens' sketches, for example, when he starts the novel, he tries to figure out who the characters are going to be, or have notes when to introduce them, he may have an ending in mind, we see in some cases, he's talking about a static crucible, he says, you know, have a staff staffer here to balance that staffer here, he was the novel writer, yeah, so the finished novels never follow the initial plan, the initial plan that you have, the initial plan,
He always revised in the course of production. Now again, a Marxist would say he's revising
under commercial pressure and that makes the novels worse. And then S. Beech would say,
many of the new critics would have said this, he's putting in, he's compromising, he's
spelling out, and you know, this will be repeated even to the video game market now they're
and I've pointed to it, you can definitely see times when the novels have problems, but if the customer is not always right, it's also true that he's not always wrong, and sometimes what the public was telling Dickens was right, and he recognized that.
He realized that some characters weren't working. A lot of these filled off.
Some of the characters had much more potential than he realized, and they should be expanded.
One of the books I've recommended is called The Lady's Literature, Money in the Market.
Money in the Market, a great title. I've talked about factory when, in writing the last chronicle of Bastiat, he decided to kill off his character, Mrs. Crowley.
We've seen it on both sides, but just as in folk operas, some characters they span them all, some characters they seriously die if the public doesn't seem to like them.
And that sounds very crude to people, I mean, the market can be crude, but it's effective because it's crude.
And again, you can see the, someone with the aesthetic of Paul Baer, someone with the aesthetic of James White,
a novel must be absolutely perfect, every word must be perfect, no one word could be added, no one word could be subtracted.
I don't deny the greatness of that aesthetic, and there have been novelists, especially modern novelists, who work on that principle, you know, to read something like George's portrait of the artist and see how perfectly constructed it is, how perfectly any sentence is constructed, it's really amazing and it's great, but it's not the only ballad aesthetic.
Welcome to the end of the day of the Dickens novel.
Move one word and the entire structure falls.
Remember that in the movie last night?
It was most of it.
You know, there is a legitimate aesthetic.
You know, the aesthetic of perfection.
And many of the greatest works of art are produced by artists like that.
And it's typically characterized by the color phrase.
You know, when you've got a 20-line poem, indeed you want every word to be there.
And you want to be able to say the great words, don't remove one word, it will be diminishment as Salerno said, but a 1,000 page Dickens novel, remove one word and there would be diminishment? Thank God!
And as you know, it's hilarious, a duet phase is this, in the accidents of printing, strange things happen there, it's very much on record, that novels have come to print, sometimes not just with a word missing, but a whole staff are missing, the editor missed it, the author missed it in proofreading, and you know, there probably was something over long about the novel if that could have happened, and so, you know,
This is a characteristic of popular culture that it does not have the aesthetic perception of a modernist lyric by Hayes or even of a great classic art novel by Flaubert or Droy, but it compensates for that with other virtues.
What you tend to get in popular culture, and, you know, here I'm talking about things,
what makes a Dickens novel so good is the vitality of it, the richness of the canvas.
You can't have everything. You can't have the aesthetic perfection of a brief,
and Modernist Mirrors, and a collided scope of human life, as we get in the Dickens novel.
The weakness of Dickens' novels is the strength of Dickens' novels. Henry James, who will
suck at it, asked me, complaining about other people's novels as meat-bagging monsters.
And there's a certain truth to that. But there's also a certain prettiness for the
of Henry James, and you know, I basically think the public's taste is indicted in that it's the perfect example of identity as our world, but let my aesthetic friends never get me to say that.
But what I'm saying is that there's a kind of looseness at the same time with this modern popular cultural form from Dickens' serialized novels down to serialized television.
and it's, there's something wrong about applying the aesthetic of a Flaubert novel or a Yeats
lyric to a Dickens novel or to a television series like The X-Files.
They're very different things, produced under different conditions, with different audiences
in view and they each have their defects and their virtues and what I'm saying about the
The centralized novel here is a real example of a marketed commodity, with all the aspects of catalyst production, standardized production, mass production, the need for cost cutting, the need for marketing, buying products, all these things, that's the financial underpinning of it, and why the Victorian novel attracted such talent in the 19th century.
said this about the Elizabethan theater.
It was a way to offer economic and social mobility
at a time when it was not generally available.
Well, economic and social mobility had increased greatly in the 19th century,
but there's always room for more,
and it became clear that there was money to be made in fiction writing.
I've seen various figures on this, but it seems that I think there was something
like 40,000 novels published that were in the corporate 19th century.
It's actually a pretty staggering feature, a figure of which I doubt that more
than 200 are read by anybody today, including professors of the foreign literature.
of those 200, about 50 of them are canonicals.
That's really staggering, but that's what culture's like.
That's why I was trying to get across to you that when we look at television
and say it's a vast wasteland and it's full of junk,
you can't believe how much junk there was in the first novel.
I'm interested in mummies and mummies stories.
I love the mummies movies.
I went back and read a novel, I guess it's the first money novel, it's called The Money Infected,
a little bit in Roudy, it's called The 1840s, I discovered it by accident, and thank God there's only a good one available.
I mean, it's unspeakably bad. It's just a chance for you to understand, it's not like a bad novel, it's just,
It's just, it can't tell a story, it can't, I mean, you realize why this novel's unread.
I mean, take the worst Italian novel you ever had to read in college, and this is 50 times worse.
And, you know, I just can't imagine how bad some of these Austrian novels were.
I'm never going to find out, because life's too short, I'm never going to read them.
But, you know, it's as easily as that, it's the worst movie ever made.
And then we're saying fine and fine about its place of the, of the 19th century novel here.
We're telling the movie that this is the way, this is the way markets in general operate
and the way, I'm saying, cultural markets operate.
You just try everything.
And the way to try everything is open up the market.
And there was relatively easy entry to the business of writing novels.
And, you know, that's like saying, you know, why have 40,000 toothpaste?
That's why people can't figure out ahead what we're working on.
It's even more complicated than some of the simple things.
In some ways, presumably, it's easier to design a toothpaste than to write a novel.
But, so, again, today when we look at the Vicar novel,
Well, you see those 50th-grade novels, you know, 15th-Cent by Dickey, and you say, wow,
what a total repeat, and look at all these bad movies in the 20th century.
Well, if you took the 50th-gradest movies of the 20th century, I'm going on record,
they are better than the 50th-gradest novels of the 19th century in all of Europe.
Well, that's the best thing I've seen.
The 50th-graded movies are better than the 50th-graded English novels of the 19th century.
I have to say the 50th-graded English movies of the 20th century are not better than the 50th-graded movies.
Oh, you get my point.
It's unfair to compare the thousands of garbage movies of the 20th century
with the 50th-graded novels of the 19th century.
and compare the greatest with the greatest, compare the math with the math.
The math of Victorian novels is easily as bad in aesthetic terms as the math of movies.
But here's the nature of culture.
It isn't spontaneous order.
It works by trial and error and feedback.
It does not work by careful prior planning.
And even what I'm saying is the individual novels do not often work by perfect prior planning.
Like entrepreneurs, the novelists went into the process of writing novel with a plan,
but like good entrepreneurs, they were willing to look at how things were working
and revise their plans as they go along.
Now, that's what government planning never allows for, is competitive planning,
alternative planning, and plan resistance.
The government stumbles ahead with its standard operating procedures
into one failure after another, and that's what our culture looked like with the government we're playing in.
Imagine if in 1800s the British government had a cultural policy and decided how England could develop a great novel in the 19th century
and kicked out to committees and grant applications who the great novelists would be and how they could write their novels.
Dickens? Who saw Dickens? Pickler papers? Some picker-ass tale about some guy wandering around in them with a sidekick there? Rejected.
So, anyway, I think that Bitcoin is a case where we get a really concrete example of the interaction of commerce and culture.
and again, have certain negative assets, but I think the positive assets very much count for more than the negative ones.
So, let me stop here again and take a few questions, yeah.
It's a lucid reputation of, you know, time preference and a lot of the __________ culture but people __________
But indeed, how do we respond to modern today, ______ ______. I mean that ______ is often a very good ______ ______
Yeah.
I actually have a kind of ruddy aspect to it, and I'll just, since you're a bulldozer,
I'll say this. I think it's actually a kind of tribute to popular culture that that book
has been successful. I mean, it's not a great book, but it really has a good cliffhanger
and what are you saying about the content, I'm just astounded by the book that talks about the allegorical fame, the Gnosticism, the Gnostic Gospels, Gnogma, that that speaks from the most part of the book, almost the whole time, and if I had read that for a publisher, I would have said, this son of a bitch was electoral.
The public is never going to go for this. I actually, I think it says something good about the public in this one case that a book that deals with issues that I've been fascinated with for years and have studied for, that, you know, Rosicrucianism comes up. So, I think the DeVinci Code is actually a compliment to Prop. Code, but in general, I think it's a compliment to Prop. Code, but in general, I think it's a compliment to Prop.
And, in general, what I would be, we'll actually get to this when we talk about modernism.
What has happened in mass culture is that the whole range of readings has just exponentially increased.
And so, so many more books are published now, and in such greater numbers,
that, you know, even Dickens never sold in the numbers that Dan Brown does.
And so, novels that would be the aesthetic equivalent of Dickens or let's, I mean,
Dickens here, novels that would be the aesthetic equivalent of George Eliot and faculty
and Lebronte, they are selling in larger numbers now, the compiler makes me quite well,
but what upsets people is again the envy principle, the relative principle.
They are frustrated that Dan Brown sells many more copies than, let's say, Don DeLillo.
I had an interview with a great American novelist, let's say, Don DeLillo.
But Don DeLillo sells in larger numbers than the Bronte sisters ever did, and by a rather large figure, and he got a million dollar advance, I believe, for what was in the underworld, and he's been able to live on his creative novel.
So, the relative numbers look bad, the absolute numbers look really good, that is, art, what we would call art novels now, actually sell larger numbers of books than what we now, in retrospect, call the art novels of the 19th century.
So, if, you know, the complainants pounce as if our novelists now can't make a living at it, that's untrue.
Look at Thomas Keating, for example, writing these unbelievably comprehensive books.
You know, Bradley Greenblatt blundered into being a bestseller.
So, you know, the world, again, never say that the capitalist world is perfect, it says better than the alternative.
and the government system trying to look out ahead of time which novelists are the ones who should be allowed to write and publish it, so that sort of would work, and we'll see that overlooking some of the totalitarian systems, so to me it's not a marked failure that Dan Brown can be successful, the other thing I would say is that the 19th century novel was the center of popular culture,
and the Center of Artistics also, so the fact that the novel as a whole has been displaced in the 20th century by movies, and again, the record of the motion picture in the 20th century is absolutely astounding, and I would say, you know, the accomplishment of the theme of the motion picture is as great as virtually any other artistic field in human history, except for thinking of it as part of the question.
The question is, what's my response to the fact that we really don't have free markets,
we have a mixed economy, and indeed I was thinking of that as something I really should dwell on more.
I've been talking about markets, and all these civil ages, in fact, we didn't have a free market.
The Federal Food Market in the 19th century is a complete myth that Eugen was operating as a laissez-faire in the 19th century.
They had a central bank, what was called under the central bank system.
There were all sorts of government regulations.
It was freer than any other economy except the U.S. in the 19th century and became the strongest economy in the world
because it was relatively free, but obviously it wasn't absolutely free.
And I actually suggested in this direction what I said that, for example,
One example of a mixed economy, you can say, in the United States and in the public, was that the government
all in fact hated it, and Erickson, Lee Erickson, the father of Women in the Fourth, made some fascinating arguments
when he said, when books are expensive, poetry prevails in the market, when books are complete, fiction prevails.
and it counts in terms of the marginal utility of a book, it's really the same learic, or whatever that is, the economy is really very poor, and the relative steepness or expensiveness of books was related to government intervention economy, I haven't even gone into detail in the way that I do this, but that is now, they're resisting every advance in technology, the printer's union,
in England did everything they could to prevent line-of-typing, predicted disasters, economic
disasters with an automatic house setting.
Of course, what it did was allow the public industry to flourish as ever before, and more
people got jobs and plenty than they'd ever had before, but yes, there's in fact always
and I would point, in fact, to the negative effects, to the extent the British economy was not free in the 19th century, it had a negative impact on culture, that's why what I would say to people who advocate government support of the arts, the best support the government could give to the arts would be to get out of the picture entirely, and that would be such a boost to the economy, it would be a boost to all culture, and you can actually see
and the government withdrawal from regulation in 19th century Britain increased the cultural
vibrancy of Britain.
It's a fact that, you know, the media often tend to be unregulated because they're one
step ahead of the government, you know, as in the case of the internet, you know, don't
know how it works, so they basically can't regulate, but as we'll see, you know, we'll
I want to talk about before we get to most of history and television, the way government regulation actually has reported the cultural development of those forms.
Well, it's typical, this is the anti-Walmart argument, that Wal-Mart has too big of a position
in the market, and so it affects wealth produced and so on.
There's no question that Moody was a make or a breaker, the big slogan was what did Moody think in the public state industry, but nevertheless, he didn't have a monopoly, he didn't have, he didn't have what an Austrian would call a monopoly, he didn't have a government privilege, he was a very crude businessman and achieved his market share by his limited means, based on the tools he had,
He was a student as a businessman. He had a large effect for a long period, but not for all that long. For example, here's a typical example where often an economist is going to work for Booty, you could say, was a problem. He had too much of a controlling effect on the market.
The result was people found ways to produce books cheaper, people started buying books instead of reading them, and the booty monopolies, and the boonies took over the market.
Now, people panic when anyone has a big role in the market. Just look at history, and that role will disappear.
You know, you guys all think Bill Gates is the type, 20 years, my prediction is, you know, the market will pass him by.
The government was obsessed with IBM for two decades, couldn't stop them till they took care of them.
The market takes care of its own. But on the board of Rudy, though, Rudy got where he got by reading the market.
He was, we would say, puritanical. He was the one, he would say, I don't want sex in these novels.
Oh, English fiction would have been like French fiction. It would have been like Saint-Denis, but it hadn't been for Moody. No. Moody was just reading the actual moves of the Victorian public well. Moody had no capability of calling the Victorians, uh, you shouldn't be talking about sex as much as you are, y'all. You know, I know you guys want your daughters to be reading sex novels, but I'm going to prevent it. Well, it's because the public
Remove Moody and he would not have had Stendhal left novels, hopefully, in England, or Dupont left novels, or whatever.
This is a good example of how the market actually operates.
Moody does not have a monopoly. He has a strong position in the market, because he's read the market correctly.
And in fact, he was certainly an important middleman. He was a very important middleman.
The Chronography that has flooded the market in Victorian Britain. He was just reading the mood of it, but it's a good question. I'm glad to see some of you even heard of me. I just love that.