Two Paradigms of Literary Production: The Production, Circulation and Legal Status of Rudyard Kipling’s Departmental Ditties and Indian Railway Library Texts

Abstract

Rudyard Kipling, one of several authors commissioned by the Canadian editor Robert Barr to help launch his new magazine The Idler, gives us his account of how he came to produce his first piece of published writing in ‘My First Book’:

So there was built a sort of book, a lean oblong docket, wire-stitched, to imitate a D. O. Government envelope, printed on one side only, bound in brown paper, and secured with red tape. It was addressed to all heads of departments and all Government officials, and among a pile of papers would have deceived a clerk of twenty years’ service. Of these ‘books’ we made some hundreds, and as there was no necessity for advertising, my public being close to my hand, I took reply- postcards, printed the news of the birth of the book on one side, the blank order-form on the other, and posted them up and down the Empire from Aden to Singapore, and from Quetta to Colombo. There was no trade discount, no reckoning twelves as thirteens, no commission, and no credit of any kind whatever. The money came back in poor but honest rupees, and was transferred from the publisher, the left-hand pocket, direct to the author, the right-hand pocket. Every copy sold in a few weeks, and the ratio of expenses to profits, as I remember it, has since prevented my injuring my health by sympathising with publishers who talk of their risks and advertisements.