The Life and Works of Robert Burns Author:Robert Burns General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1896 Original Publisher: Longmans, Green Subjects: Literary Criticism / Poetry Poetry / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Book... more »s edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: The autumn had worn into winter, and still the end of the transaction appeared as remote as ever. There is, indeed, a want of clear light as to the commercial relations of the poet with his publisher. One thing is notorious -- Creech never settled an account till it became impossible to put off his creditor any longer. This might seem enough to explain the delay of settlement with Burna; but, on the other hand, the time which had elapsed since the publication of the volume would not seem very long in ' the trade' -- the ordinary practice of a publisher who issues a book for an author being to render accounts annually, at June 30 or December 31, always upwards of six months from the date of publication, and to pay only six mouths thereafter. If Creech had acted as publisher for Burns on this footing, there would have been nothing unusual in his still delaying payment; the money, indeed, for sales previous to June, would not have been due till the middle of the ensuing year. But we know that Burns's poems were published by subscription, Creech taking five hundred copies at the same rate as the other subscribers, with the view of selling them at one shilling more by way of profit. The publisher must have received the money due from a large proportion of the subscribers; and for this, as well as for his own copies (the full price of which was £125), it might be alleged that he was bound to pay immediately. He, on the other hand, would probably have to show that much was still unpaid to him by...« less