Charles Belford (April 25, 1837 – December 19, 1880) was a journalist and publisher from
County Cork, Ireland
County Cork ( ga, Contae Chorcaí) is the largest and the southernmost county of Ireland, named after the city of Cork, the state's second-largest city. It is in the province of Munster and the Southern Region. Its largest market towns are ...
.
Belford came to Canada with two younger brothers in 1857 and later they formed Belford Brothers publishing. Since there was no international
copyright
A copyright is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the exclusive right to copy, distribute, adapt, display, and perform a creative work, usually for a limited time. The creative work may be in a literary, artistic, education ...
agreement at the time, they took advantage of the
Canadian Copyright Act
The ''Copyright Act'' of Canada is the federal statute governing copyright law in Canada. It is jointly administered by the Department of Industry Canada and the Department of Canadian Heritage. The ''Copyright Act'' was first passed in 1921 and s ...
of 1875 to reprint many authors, most notably
Mark Twain
Samuel Langhorne Clemens (November 30, 1835 – April 21, 1910), known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American writer, humorist, entrepreneur, publisher, and lecturer. He was praised as the "greatest humorist the United States has p ...
, when it was legal to do so; the unauthorized editions were then sold in the United States as well as Canada. Twain estimated that the Belford Brothers' edition of ''The Adventures of Tom Sawyer'' alone had cost him ten thousand dollars.
The company was successful and eventually was absorbed into the Rand McNally Company after Charles had left.
References
External links
Biography at the ''Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online''
1837 births
1880 deaths
Canadian publishers (people)
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