Sprecher
Beschreibung
Between 1960 and 1973, Jonathan Cape's manuscript books record 1,744 submissions of foreign-language and translated works, of which fewer than five per cent reached contract. This paper reads that ledger as an archive of refusal as much as of acquisition, and uses it to reassess the place of the literary agent in Anglo-American translation commissioning under Tom Maschler.
Drawing on a funded project at the University of Reading's Special Collections, which catalogued these entries in the Archive of British Publishing and Printing and identified 407 named intermediaries, the paper distinguishes three overlapping channels through which foreign fiction reached Bedford Square: continental publishing houses trading rights directly, translators acting as unpaid scouts, and a small, densely networked cohort of London and Paris agents. The last group is disproportionately female. Rosica Colin alone accounts for more submissions than any other single source, while Carmen Balcells, Hope Leresche, Denyse Clairouin's agency and Tanja Howarth recur across the decade, even though only three of the seventy-eight accepted titles are by women authors.
Set against The Bookseller's contemporaneous reporting and recent sociologies of translation, this evidence complicates the familiar account of the agent as commercial gatekeeper. In Cape's practice the agent operates less as a broker of price than as a curator of linguistic access, shaping which literatures became legible to a house that read, in this period, in forty-six languages. The paper closes by asking what a submissions ledger can and cannot evidence, and what the declined manuscript owes the historian.
Speaker Bio:
Daniela La Penna is Professor of Italian and Translation at the University of Reading (UK) and co-founder of the Centre for Book Cultures and Publishing. She has published extensively on publishing and translation and has held numerous research grants, including awards from the AHRC, Leverhulme Trust, and the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA). She is co-editor of Edinburgh Companion to Women in Publishing (Edinburgh University Press, 2024) and is currently writing a book on Tom Maschler and Jonathan Cape.