To the extent that literary periods define themselves by the works they canonize as well as by the books they print, the year 1774 should stand as a doubly conspicuous marker to Romanticists and to historians of genre. The year of Donaldson v. Beckett, the House of Lords' decision that ended perpetual copyright in Britain, 1774 saw fundamental changes in book production as publishers rushed to reprint titles suddenly thrust into the public domain. Representing the decision as nothing less than a wholesale assault on property rights, The Morning Chronicle of 23 February identified the magnitude of the loss: ‘By the above decision of the important question respecting copy-right in books, near 200,000 £. worth of what was honestly purchased at public sale, and which was yesterday thought property is now reduced to nothing’. With the term of copyright now set at twenty-one years and with a host of British writers from John Milton to James Thomson thrust into the public domain, Donaldson did more than affect the profits of British publishers; it directed their attention to British authors and away from foreign ones who, repackaged in the form of new translations, had previously been the staple of new editions, anthologies, and collections.