Two Sides of Mark Twain

BRIAN: Ed, Peter. I’ve heard a lot of discussion about things. Stuff.

PETER: Mmhmm.

BRIAN: Inventions. But what about books? What about American authors? And we’ve talked about the economy and the free flow of ideas and how it helps the economy. What about all of those American– that literate society? All those readers?

PETER: Yeah. Well, copyright law and even the patent provision in the Constitution has got a history going back before the Constitution. And it’s– in America it’s Noah Webster, the great dictionary writer who, in 1783, gets Connecticut to pass an act on behalf of the encouragement of literature and genius.

And that’s copied by other states. And eventually that becomes, you might say, the [? er ?] source for the federal constitutional provision. So literature’s right there.

But where are American authors? And the problem is, how can American authors find their voice and find their audience? And it has to do with the price of books, because British authors are underselling them.

ED: Yeah, you might think that the most popular authors in the world, Peter, would actually command a premium.

PETER: Yes.

ED: But as it turns out, their books are dirt cheap in the United States because they’re basically stolen. A printer will buy the latest novel from Dickens or Scott, reprint the sucker, sell it, and keep all the money for himself.

BRIAN: So literally just the printing cost. Nothing goes to the author. No cost of intellectual property.

PETER: It’s as of those books grow on trees. Right?

BRIAN: Yeah. Exactly. In more ways than one.

[LAUGHTER]

ED: So a lot of Americans have an interest in this system. Not only do the publishers have an interest in it, but so do the printers, the working men, the unions who produce all this, as well as the book-buying public. There’s really no incentive for Americans to pay the English these royalties except that it’s the right thing to do.

But you keep getting the books anyway. So what’s the problem?

BRIAN: It’s got be good for society to have all these people reading. It helps our literacy rate.

PETER: Think of the word royalty?

BRIAN: Yeah, exactly.

[LAUGHTER]

PETER: I thought we overthrew that nonsense.

ED: But that’s fine, as long as you think of books being written by that royalty back there in England. But some Americans insist on being geniuses. They insist on writing their own literature. So if you’re an American author, you find yourself in the strange situation of competing with much more popular, and yet underpriced, English authors at the same time that your own books are expensive, even though you’re not making much money from them.

PETER: Right.

BRIAN: But they have copyright protection here, right?

ED: Yeah.

BRIAN: It’s just not doing them any good.

ED: That’s right. You’ll have somebody very popular like Harriet Beecher Stowe come along who can make a living. But most American writers, say, Herman Melville, cannot. And so you find that the United States at the time of the Civil War really hasn’t figured this out.

After the Civil War, we finally have somebody who strides right into the fray and speaks out of both sides of his mouth.

[LAUGHTER]

BRIAN: How American.

ED: It is. And it’s Mark Twain.

BRIAN: Right.

ED: And early on, he is, of course, the great voice of the American vernacular. He speaks in the accents of the enslaved, of the frontier, of the white South.

PETER: Meaning he ripped that stuff off from them.

ED: Yes, if you prefer to think of it that way.

[LAUGHTER]

ED: And as a result, Americans go, now here’s a literature that we can really see as our own. And we really do want to foster that.

And because cost Twain is confident that Americans are going to be able to find their own voice, he’s actually against a copyright treaty with England which would make us complicit in protecting English authors and driving up the price of English literature.

BRIAN: He’s standing up for the little guy, Ed.

ED: Exactly. He says, it’s great that these novels can be found in every shack across America because it’s really making America one of the most intelligent countries in the world.

And then Twain, you gotta love him, completely changes hist mind in the next six years.

[LAUGHTER]

ED: About 1886. And in between, all that’s happened is he’s written the remarkably popular Huckleberry Finn. He says–

BRIAN: Ah. The blockbuster, right?

ED: Yeah. Exactly. And, of course, there’s no more American novel than Huckleberry Finn. But now he says, you know what we need to do? Is we need to have international copyright. Because he says, look. If you go– this is a direct quote.

You go into any public library you’ll see that of every 100 books read by people about 70 are novels and 9/10 are foreign ones. They fill the imagination with an unhealthy fascination with foreign live, with the dukes and earls and kings and the fuss and feathers. It’s graceful immoralities. It’s sugar-coated injustices and oppressions.

And he says, this is not good for America.

BRIAN: Ah, so no discussion of price or competition. It’s all about what’s good for America.

ED: The moral fiber of the nation, Brian.

PETER: Yeah. And that’s, Ed, why we need to protect British authors so they get the royalties from sales of their books. All of a sudden, we protect foreign authors under the idea that we’re serving American interests because we’re going to have fewer of those books circulating.

BRIAN: Yeah.

ED: It’s a win-win-win.

BRIAN: For Mark Twain.