The bestselling author of The Dante Club takes us deep into a shadowy era in publishing ruled by a forgotten class of criminalsA golden age of publishing on the verge of collapse. For a hundred years, loose copyright laws and a hungry reading public created a unique opportunity: Books could be published without an author's permission with extraordinary ease. Authors gained fame but suffered financially--Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, Robert Louis Stevenson, to name a few--but publishers reaped enormous profits while readers got their books on the cheap. The literary pirates who stalked the harbors, coffeehouses, and printer shops for the latest manuscript to steal were known as bookaneers. Yet on the eve of the twentieth century, a new international treaty is signed to protect authors and grind this literary underground to a sharp halt. The bookaneers, of course, would become...
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