LAUSR

In 1822, E. T. Scott, a Philadelphia publisher, brought out a 24page adaptation of Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe (1819) called Ivanhoe; or, The Knight Templar: And the Jew’s Daughter. An Ancient Tale of English Chivalry. It is a curious document from the archives, one of those artifacts whose preservation feels accidental. Billed as coming “from the celebrated romance of ‘Ivanhoe’ by the author of ‘Tales of My Landlord,’ &c., &c.,” the chapbook otherwise lists no evidence of the story’s origin. A bibliographic search reveals that it was most certainly reprinted from a 24-page juvenile version of Ivanhoe that was published in London by J. Bailey in 1821. With only one copy of the 1822 Philadelphia edition available in libraries around the world, the pamphlet’s serendipitous survival tells a story of the early nineteenth-century book trade: it speaks to the intertwining of the British and American literary marketplaces and to copyright issues threading through the nineteenth century, and beyond. This Philadelphia Ivanhoe chapbook challenges the critic because it slips out of traditional categories of literary analysis. It is not an authored book: the only author alluded to on the cover (“by the author of ‘Tales of My Landlord’”) did not create the text, and the name of the person who wrote it is lost to literary history. The Philadelphia publisher, Edwin T. Scott, is likewise largely unknown in literary history, though a bibliography of Walter Scott’s works lists him as one of many US publishers who raced to reprint Scott’s novels (Todd and Bowden 323, 511, 542, 565). As an artifact, then, Ivanhoe; or, The Knight Templar raises questions that animate the study of the transatlantic book trade and copyright—questions about the