My (formerly) bad publisher

TLS reviews a book by Michael J. Everton called "The Grand Chorus of Complaint" which makes mid 19th c. American publishing sound like a collection of busy conmen and thugs.  Among the most hated was Harper and Brothers (now absorbed into HarperCollins).  Harper's battled Carey and Hart for the lucrative transatlantic textbook market.  There were suspicious warehouse fires, crates of books "lost" at sea.  

"Harper's ruthless approach to writers was equally notorious," says TLS.  They kept an engraving on the wall of a skull,  which a contemporary labelled "the last relic of a starved author.  The brains have been picked out and the man dead long ago."  One "aggrieved writer went so far as ro parade in front of Harper's lavish New York headquarters dressed in a sandwich board reading 'One of Harper's Authors; I am Starving.'"  (I note the distressing delicacy of the semi-colon.)

I post this in full knowledge that this was all a long time ago, and that in HarperCollins's lavish headquarters no such meanness can any longer be found; nor am I making any charge whatsoever of maltreatment or expressing any dissatisfaction with my corporate benefactors, whom I revere and whose good opinion I strive every day to earn.