In a book, as a writing, the author speaks to his reader; and he who printed it speaks by his copies not for himself, but entirely in the name of the author. The editor exhibits the author as speaking publicly, and mediates only the delivery of this speech to the public. Let the copy of this speech, whether it be in handwriting or in print, belong to whom it will; yet to use this for one's self, or to traffic with it, is a business which every owner of it may conduct in his own name and at pleasure. But to let any one speak publicly, to publish his speech as such, means to speak in his name, and, in a way, to say to the public: "A writer lets you know, or teaches you, this or that, etc., through me. I answer for nothing, not even for the liberty, which the writer takes, to speak publicly through me; I am but the mediator of the writer's thoughts coming to you." That is no doubt a business which one can execute only in the name of another, and never in one's own (as editor). The editor furnishes in his own name the mute instrument of the delivering of a speech of the author's to the public;** the editor can publish the said speech by printing, which consequently shows himself as the person through whom the author addresses the public, but he can do so only in the name of the author. [**Footnote: A book is the instrument of the delivering of a speech to the public, not merely of the thoughts, as pictures of a symbolical representation of an idea or of an event. What is here the most essential about it is that it is not a thing, which is thereby delivered, but is rather an opera, namely a speech, and certainly literal. In naming it a mute instrument, I distinguish it from what delivers the speech by a sound, such as a trumpet in music, or the mouths of others.]