Protect our authors: Fields’s mandate above all else. That is what Osgood thought about as they walked. His efforts in England were not only for the financial life of the company and all its employees, it was for the authors, too—Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes, Stowe, Emerson, and others. If the publishing house plummeted from its current financial precipice, how would the orphaned authors fare? Yes those writers were beloved, but would the breed of publisher represented by Major Harper care about them. Without Fields and Osgood to protect them, would they be buried by obscurity, like Edgar Poe or once promising Herman Melville? The true future of publishing was not publishers as manufacturers, as Harper foresaw, but publishers as the authors’ partners—the joining of the upper and lower half of the title page.
