Shaw's efforts to publish his plays for a large reading public helped define the “New” or “Modern” Drama as a reading as well as performing canon. Deliberately following the example of Henrik Ibsen whose plays often circulated in printed translations before being produced, Shaw aimed to fashion his plays as “high” art by giving his published scripts the material look and poetic weight of fiction and poetry. Shaw promoted play publication not to devalue stage production but to reclaim for the playwright from the actor-manager both legal ownership and primary authorship of the written script. Determined to strengthen playwrights' economic and cultural leverage by establishing their status as authors, Shaw argued for the literary merits of drama and for the author's exclusive right to the script as a property. Grounding his economic plan for selling his labour in Fabian socialist principles, Shaw anchored his aesthetic plan for publishing his plays in a modest adaptation of William Morris's revolutionary return to the arts of papermaking, printing, and bookbinding.