Traitors and True Poles. Karen Majewski
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Paryski, Dyniewicz, and other journalist-publishers were able to operate so successfully in part because the business of journalism facilitated book production. First, it was expedited and made less expensive by the use of technologies and distribution networks already in place for the production of newspapers. Not only did Paryski, for example, offer subscribers book premiums (along with silverware, razors, and curative “electro-chemical” jewelry), but he and other publishers often issued in book form novels and short stories that they also serialized in their papers.26
A high-volume newspaper business (Chojnacki reports a circulation of more than one hundred thousand for the daily Ameryka-Echo by World War I) also made possible the purchase of state-of-the-art equipment and the employment of a specialized workforce.27 While other newspaper editors might be writing (or, as critics charged, clipping) copy, setting type, running presses, and sweeping floors, in 1911 Paryski employed seventy men and women in his printery alone.28 In conjunction with newspaper publishing, book production could be very cheap, and very profitable.
Toledo printing plant of Ameryka-Echo and the Paryski company. Source: [Rosiński], Antoni A. Paryski: Życie, prace, i czyny. Courtesy Paryski family
That these works were so often produced by newspaper publishers also accounts in part for their ephemerality, and perhaps for a perception of their artistic inferiority. Most books appeared on cheap newsprint in chapbook editions, many fewer than one hundred pages long. Relatively few books, rarely works of immigrant fiction, were published in hardcover. But it was these low production values that made literature available to an enormous number of Polish immigrants on very limited incomes, facilitating the emergence of a populace of reader-consumers. Of three hundred forty items in Paryski’s 1911 catalog, nearly half were priced at from five to ten cents. Dyniewicz’s 1913 prices averaged only slightly higher. Given that Ameryka-Echo offered readers one dollar’s worth of books for each newspaper subscription, these books must have been distributed in large numbers. Paryski alone, it is estimated, was responsible for twenty-five hundred separate titles, amounting to up to eight million pieces.29 Distrust of the clergy did not prevent him from publishing religious volumes, either, including Roman Catholic prayer books. The market-conscious Paryski, like Dyniewicz, priced these popular items higher than his other publications. His Lives of the Saints, for instance, sold for five dollars, and his fanciest Bible for an astounding twenty-five dollars.30
Whatever the success of certain publishers, journalism could be a precarious profession. Julian Czupka, in “W jaki sposób zostałem literatem” (How I became a writer), describes the precarious existence of a Polish literary magazine in 1890s New York. For his investment in the enterprise, Czupka is paid four dollars a week “with the right to sleep on a table in the editorial office.”31 The workers live off handouts from their advertisers, and every week their manager has to win the money for newsprint at the card table: “When he won, the paper came out; when he lost, the world was deprived of that week’s pearl of literature.”32
Almost no evidence exists of how much authors were paid for their work, as company records are rare, but the financial possibilities for immigrant writers were certainly limited.33 Although Paryski claimed, in 1891, to have paid Alfons Chrostowski $150 for his novel Uwiedziona (copies of which sold for thirty-five cents), other writers complained that they weren’t paid at all. Stanisław Osada admitted, “It is indeed rare to hear of a case in which the author received some money for his work. As a rule, he would be presented with a few copies. Very often the author himself would cover the cost of publishing his book.”34
In 1907 Helena Staś blamed the Polish-American press and publishers for undermining the development of Polonian literature, and of national consciousness, by refusing to compensate contributors: “I’m sure that more than one youth in America has tried his literary powers in the Polish papers, but when his work was exploited, and other papers repeatedly criticized it, he transferred his efforts to a foreign field, because there they value it and pay for it. If in these circumstances the youth is denationalized, whose fault is it?” It is no wonder, given publishers’ economic exigencies, ideological requirements, or simple power plays, that many Polish-language authors who were determined to see their work in print were forced to publish it themselves.35
Staś claimed to have no choice but to “turn away from my countrymen. . . . Rather than my own, I have to learn a foreign language; rather than by my own, I must be moved by a foreign spirit.”36 She was to repeat charges like these, and worse, in her self-published 1910 novel In the Human Market, bitter with criticism of institutional leadership in general, and of the immigrant press and publishing industry in particular. In this and other works, Staś pleads for a distinctly Polish-American literature that addresses readers’ experiences and concerns while serving national and community ideals.
But struggling immigrant authors were at a disadvantage, because publishers had a steady supply of literary material for which they did not have to pay at all. Book pirating was widespread among Polish-American publishing houses. In fact, even after the 1891 enactment of copyright laws, Russian Poland was still not under copyright agreement with the United States.37 Again, Dyniewicz and Paryski were the most blatant offenders. Paryski, for instance, issued Polish-language editions of The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (without crediting an author), along with works by Arthur Conan Doyle, Alexander Dumas, Robert Louis Stevenson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mark Twain, Jules Verne, Upton Sinclair, and Leo Tolstoy, as well as by contemporary and classic Polish authors. The matter seems to have given immigrant publishers very little concern, as evidenced by Paryski’s reprint of a Warsaw newspaper’s description of his company, in which the correspondent reveals that
[Polish-]American publishers reprint without paying the European authors for their works, unless the author takes out a copyright in Washington for a given work. . . . T[adeusz] Korzon didn’t get any material benefit at all from the fact that ten thousand copies of his general history were distributed in America. [Kazimierz] Gorzycki was suffering dire poverty while tens of thousands of copies of his “Social History of Poland” were being reprinted. [Yet] neither of these authors would be one jot richer if those reprints did not exist; as for the distribution of their books in America, they have a certain moral satisfaction that their works are entering the consciousness of the nation.38
Publishers were probably convinced that they would not be prosecuted by Polish authors and copyright holders across the ocean, and that non-Polish authors would not even be aware that their works were being released in Polish-language editions. Still, occasional attempts were made to protect authors. In his Winona, Minnesota, newspaper, Hieronim Derdowski alerted writers in Poland that their works were being reprinted in America and advised them that they had legal recourse. He even offered an English-language sample letter enabling them to request a copy of American copyright laws from the Library of Congress.39 Gwiazda polarna was threatened with a lawsuit when Polish Nobel Prize winner Władysław Reymont, on a trip to the United States, discovered his novel Chłopi being serialized in its pages. When the publishers were forced to pay him a settlement, spiteful critics reportedly rejoiced that “at least one writer made something off them.”40 But piracy was so lucrative, and the efforts to stop it so haphazard, that it continued unabated until World War I.
If unpaid immigrant writers and pirated European ones were to take comfort in the knowledge that they were contributing to Polonia’s enlightenment, the same blend of business strategy and national mission is discernible in publishers’ promotional techniques. Besides offering their publications in bookstores (in Dyniewicz’s case, one he himself owned) and through newspaper mail order advertisements, large publishers used networks of newspaper subscription canvassers to publicize and sell books as well. These “education agents,” combining organic work with traveling salesmanship, traversed Polish settlements, visiting immigrants in their homes and suggesting reading material in addition to the newspapers they were promoting. Wiktor Rosiński, one of Ameryka-Echo’s editors after Paryski’s death in 1935,