Singletree, Darnley & Co.

Singletree, Darnley & Co. is the publishing house whose cautious acceptance of Martin Eden’s The Shame of the Sun became the unlikely hinge of his literary career. Initially doubtful that the philosophical essay would find even a modest readership, the firm found itself managing a bestseller after the book ignited a public controversy. Its changing terms with Martin chart both his sudden commercial rise and his suspicion that acclaim reflected a publishing sensation more than an understanding of his work.

Role in Martin’s Publication History

After other magazines had rejected The Shame of the Sun, Martin followed Brissenden’s advice and sent the manuscript around to publishers. Singletree, Darnley & Co. accepted it after several refusals and promised publication in the fall. Yet the house warned Martin that books of that nature rarely paid for themselves and that it doubted the book would sell a thousand copies. When he asked for an advance on royalties, it declined, explaining that advances were not its custom.

Martin calculated what a thousand-copy sale might yield at a retail price of one dollar and a royalty of fifteen percent: $150. He then offered to sell the rights outright for $100, but Singletree, Darnley & Co. would not take that risk either. The contrast between its early caution and its later enthusiasm makes the firm’s part in his career more than a straightforward story of a publisher recognizing a promising author: the book’s reception transformed the commercial judgment on which the initial terms had been based.

The Bestseller and Its Controversy

The house brought out a first edition of 1,500 copies, unsure that it could sell them. Early reviews prompted a second edition twice that size, and a third edition of 5,000 copies was ordered before the second had been delivered. The book’s attack on the Maeterlinck school arrived at a moment when the subject could provoke a broad dispute. Saleeby and Haeckel defended it, while Crookes and Wallace opposed it; Sir Oliver Lodge attempted a compromise, Maeterlinck’s followers rallied to mysticism, and Chesterton and George Bernard Shaw added to the public argument.

In a letter to Martin, the firm described the result as a critical, philosophic essay selling like a novel. It reported that more than 40,000 copies had already sold in the United States and Canada, with a new edition of 20,000 on the presses. The publisher said it had spent $5,000 on advertising and acknowledged both that it had helped create demand and that the contributing circumstances had been unusually favorable. A London firm arranged an English edition, with French, German, and Scandinavian translations also in progress. The book’s commercial life thus expanded alongside the controversy that had made it conspicuous.

New Terms and Further Books

Once the book’s sales altered the firm’s estimate of Martin, it sent him a contract for his next book and raised his royalty to twenty percent. The offer placed no restrictions on the subject: the publisher was prepared to take a book on any topic and urged him to capitalize on the moment. It also offered a $5,000 advance on royalties in return for a signed contract. Separately, it proposed discussing a ten-year arrangement that would give it exclusive rights to publish everything Martin produced in book form; the proposal was an invitation to negotiate, not an agreement shown as completed.

Martin accepted the immediate contract by inserting The Smoke of Joy as the title. He also sent twenty storiettes he had written before discovering his formula for newspaper stories. The publisher promptly returned a $5,000 check. That payment marks a striking reversal from the earlier refusal to advance royalties on The Shame of the Sun: the same firm that had doubted the first book’s ability to reach a thousand readers was now investing heavily in Martin’s next work.

Collections, Royalties, and the Limits of Recognition

The Smoke of Joy collection first met a cold and doubtful reception. Its unconventional stories challenged bourgeois morality and prejudice, but Paris’s enthusiasm for a translation helped turn the response in America and England. In consequence, Singletree, Darnley & Co. agreed to a flat royalty of twenty-five percent for a third book and thirty percent for a fourth. The two volumes gathered Martin’s short fiction that had received, or was receiving, serial publication: one collected The Ring of Bells and his horror stories, while the other included Adventure, The Pot, The Wine of Life, The Whirlpool, The Jostling Street, and four additional stories.

The firm’s success with Martin’s work did not resolve his doubts about what that success meant. He reasoned that The Shame of the Sun, not the stories that followed, had caused the sudden surge of recognition; the other work had been rejected repeatedly before the book’s success changed the climate around his writing. Singletree, Darnley & Co. itself had been astonished by the sales and could not explain the initial breakthrough. Its commercial support helped bring Martin’s books to a large readership, but the scale of publication and the publisher’s excitement could not assure him that those readers understood what he had written.