Abstract

"Creating Content worth Circulating: Magazine Publishers, Intellectual Property, and Profit in the mid-Nineteenth Century"

Amy Sopcak-Joseph, Wilkes University (amy.sopcak@uconn.edu)

What is the best way for a media company to build its brand and circulate content while also maximizing profit? This sounds like a modern dilemma, one experienced by the executives at Netflix. But nineteenth-century American magazine publishers like Louis A. Godey and George Graham faced the same problem. Both men began to pay contributors for original literary and visual content in the late 1830s. While this decision set their magazines apart from those reprinting tales from British magazines and renaming engravings already circulating (which both men had done earlier in the decade), it also meant that they needed paying customers. They faced additional frustration when fellow printers lifted their content and recirculated it at a lower price or even before issues had reached subscribers. Scholars of literature and media recognize Godey and Graham for taking out copyrights on their magazines in 1845 to protect their intellectual property and profits.

Upon further examination, however, issues of Godey’s Lady’s Book and Graham’s Magazine stopped carrying copyright notices by 1847. Why was this? How does this change our understanding of how “pioneering” these publishers were if the 1845 copyrights were a short-lived experiment rather than a field-shaping trend? This paper explores these publishers’ conceptions of intellectual property, shaped by the early American printing trade and reshaped by antebellum contingencies. Godey and Graham were both steeped in the established norms of periodical editors, which revolved around exchanging content freely. This paper argues that they only experimented with copyrighting their magazines because the benefits of building their brand awareness when other editors reprinted their content outweighed the frustrations of potentially losing subscribers.