Letters of William Emerson and Francis Holliday to the publisher, John Nourse

Abstract

This paper discusses the background to letters from textbook writers William Emerson (1701–1782) and Francis Holliday (1717–1787) to their publisher John Nourse (1705–1780).

Acknowledgment

I am grateful to Library Services, UCL, for giving permission to quote from the Graves Papers.

Notes

¹See the article on Nourse by Giles Barber in the Oxford dictionary of national biography (ODNB).

²See the article on Upcott by Janet Ing Freeman in the ODNB.

³MS Graves 23 (2): letters to John Nourse. In addition to the letters of Emerson and Holliday, the collection contains letters of Hugh Hamilton (on the English language version of his Conic sections), John Wright (on Elements of plane and spherical trigonometry), John Stewart, Robert Thorp (commentary on Newton's Principia), Nevil Maskelyne, Robert Heath, John Robertson, John Colson, John Landen (on his Residual analysis).

⁴Hutton 1795, English cyclopaedia 1856, Encyclopaedia britannica 1879, Oxford dictionary of national biography 2004.

⁵This was presumably Robert Heath (1720–1779), a former army officer who edited the Ladies's Diary for several years. Heath's letter to Nourse, mentioned in footnote 3, sends information about Emerson.

⁶Probably George Robinson (1736–1801), bookseller at 25 Paternoster Row, London.

⁷See the article on Elizabeth Montagu by Barbara Brandon Schnorrenberg in the ODNB. (The year of birth of Elizabeth Montagu is given as 1718 here.)

⁸This must refer to Emerson's Miscellanies, published a few months later.

⁹According to Feather (1981), Nourse paid fees of between one guinea and three guineas per sheet, although he usually agreed a fee for the whole book, comprising a specified number of sheets. Authors were also paid in part by receipt of a number of printed copies of their book (either bound or unbound). It is interesting to note that, according to Feather (1981), Nourse rarely purchased an unsolicited manuscript, such as Holliday's appears to have been. In any case, the fee anticipated by Holliday seems to be in line with what Nourse usually offered. For the 32 sheets of his Miscellanies, Emerson suggested a fee of £2 per sheet, slightly more than the rate sought by Holliday. In the nineteenth century, when a mathematician's work might serve as a school or university textbook, successful authors could command much more advantageous fees. We have in our possession a letter of Bewick Bridge to his publisher Thomas Cadell, dated 1821, in which he demanded (and apparently received) a fee of £500 for 5000 copies of the fifth edition of his Treatise on the elements of algebra, and £1000 for the copyright.

¹⁰Presumably William Jones (1675–1749), known for his introduction of the symbol π for the fundamental constant of geometry, and for his substantial collection of manuscripts relating to Newton and his associates.

¹¹Drawcansir: a blustering, bullying fellow.