Cadell and Davies Analyze the Costs and Potential Profits of a Medium-Sized Non-Fiction Book

Several years ago I acquired a manuscript invoice sent by London printers Strahan and Preston to publishers T. Cadell and W. Davies for the printing of TA TSING LEU LEE; Being The Fundamental Laws and a Selection from the Supplementary Statutes, of the Penal Code of China...Translated from the Chinese; and Accompanied with an Appendix, Consisting of Authentic Documents, and a Few Occasional Notes...by Sir George Thomas Staunton (1810). This was the first book translated directly from Chinese into English. The English translation was a quarto volume of lxxvi, 581pp., with a single engraved plate reproducing the title page of the 1805 edition in Chinese.

The publisher paid for the paper and had it sent to the printer. The printers charged for printing by the number of sheets of paper printed. At the top of the invoice a representative of the printers, Strahan and Preston, indicated that 750 copies of the book, which was typeset and printed on 83 sheets, were printed at a cost of £1.18.0 each or £157.14.0. There was an extra charge of £6.16.0 for the Appendix, Index, Tables and "Small Letter". They also charged £31.7.0 for "Corrections throughout."

In the second half of the document in a different handwriting, a representative of the publishers Cadell & Davies calculated the potential profit in the publication. This took the printer's expense of £195.17.0 as the top line and to it added the cost of paper, £374.5.0, followed by a payment of £500.0.0. to the author, George Staunton, and incidentals such as plates and advertisements. This produced a total cost for the book's production at £1125, with a bottom line calculation that if priced at 46 shillings '(3.3.0. in boards)' the entire edition would gross £1725. 

From this we may conclude that the cost of paper for the edition was nearly twice the cost of typesetting and printing. Since the invention of printing in the second half of the 15th century paper had been the highest cost in book production. Once machine-made paper became widely available, by around 1820, the cost of paper declined.

The payment of £500.0.0 to the author seems exceptionally high; it is conceivable that other publishers were competing with Cadell & Davies to publish this work, so they had to offer the author a payment higher than would have been usual. The book may also have had some strategic value in England. According to the Wikipedia article on the Great Qing Legal Code, "The translation played an important role for Europeans to gain insights into the Chinese legal system. Due to the increased competition among European powers in the 18th century AD, understanding of the Chinese legal foundation was crucial to gain profitable trading access into China. Even though the Qing Code was in form exclusively a criminal code, the British were able to use it to their advantage to resolve trading obstacles and resistance, such as those resulting from the First and Second Opium Wars. It was this fundamental understanding of the Chinese legal code that made it possible for Britain to devise a number of unequal treaties geared to their advantage".