In 1834, just two years after the founding of the publishing house W. & R. Chambers, Chambers's Journal boasted that the firm had already undergone a significant transformation. “Not the least has been the labour of organising a proper system of printing and publishing,” an editorial declared. “The nature of our publications was, in every respect, so extraordinary, that all the old modes of procedure may be described as having fairly broken down under it” (quoted, 63).

Steam-Powered Knowledge, by St. Andrew's University lecturer Aileen Fyfe, describes in fascinating detail both the “old modes of procedure” dominant in the emerging nineteenth-century publishing industry and the more technologically advanced and forward-looking “proper system” devised by William and Robert Chambers and subsequently adopted by other firms. As Fyfe explains, this “proper system” enabled Edinburgh-based W. & R. Chambers to produce and distribute an extraordinary quantity of inexpensive but substantive texts for lower- and middling-income readers at a steady and dependable profit. Although the book's primary focus is the evolution of the Chambers firm, Fyfe provides a wealth of information about the ins and outs of many aspects of the early and midcentury printing and publishing trades, including the role of technology, emerging sales and marketing strategies, and the exigencies of domestic and transatlantic business relations. Her account sheds new light on the efforts to supply the needs of rapidly growing reading audiences on both sides of the Atlantic.

As Fyfe makes clear, the Chambers brothers were innovators in several crucial areas. Although a number of individuals and organizations had invested seriously in cheap print for mass readerships before the firm was created, W. & R. Chambers was the first to be truly commercially successful, and it outlasted many of its contemporaries, most notably Charles Knight and the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. William Chambers was both an idealist with a vision for bringing inexpensive, instructive fare to a universal readership and an exceptionally savvy entrepreneur. One of the keys to his success was that he was an early adopter of new technologies, quickly seeing their potential to enable the firm to print and distribute large quantities of text quickly and inexpensively. Thus, even though steam presses were primarily the domain of daily newspaper publishing in the early 1830s (books and magazines continued to be produced by letterpress), Chambers was so keen to exploit the speed and consequent potential for expanded and dependable circulation that he commissioned a local engineer to build a steam press from scratch—and antagonized his neighbors in Edinburgh's Old Town by installing a steam engine to drive it on the firm's premises across from St. Giles' Cathedral. He also quickly saw the benefits of stereotyping, not only for stretching the firm's type stocks and increasing print runs, but also for enabling editions to be printed simultaneously in multiple venues, including internationally.

The Chambers firm, driven by William Chambers's desire to reach the largest possible readership, also innovated in its sales and marketing strategies. Conducting a wide-reaching domestic business—let alone a would-be global one—was extremely challenging in the early nineteenth century. Transportation and communication were expensive and often unreliable before the extension of the railway lines and the 1840 institution of the penny post, and even then large shipments of heavy print or metal stereotypes were cumbersome and expensive. Financial arrangements were also tricky, with complicated credit arrangements built on exchanges of bills and no established and regulated system for transferring funds internationally. But the firm dispatched the various Chambers brothers to London, the provinces, and North America to gauge the personalities and reliability of possible business partners and to sign profitable deals. They opened branch offices and carefully negotiated the most efficient ways to ship unbound pages, bound books, or stereotype plates to where they were needed, whether by rail, steamship, or sailing vessel.

While other publishing firms foundered on the rocks of bad investments and failed partnerships, the Chambers brothers' business had few downturns. Even the literal foundering of the steamship City of Philadelphia in 1854 did not sink the firm's prospects. The steamship was carrying a consignment of printed sheets of the second half of William Chambers's book Things as They Are in America to Chambers's Philadelphia publishing partner, Lippincott, Grambo & Co. Time was of the essence, because Lippincott was trying to preempt a pirated New York edition of the book. Despite the confusion over the sinking and the worrying time lags inherent in pretelegraph transatlantic communications, the Chambers firm was able to get replacement pages and bound copies of the book to Philadelphia in time for the authorized (and remunerated) edition to beat the pirated one to the marketplace.

Despite the book's subtitle, Steam-Powered Knowledge encompasses a broader canvas than the Chambers firm or even the significantly larger topic of midcentury mass-market publishing. Fyfe discusses several other publishing firms in a fair amount of depth, most notably Routledge, which also adopted steam presses and steam transport to print and distribute its highly successful Railway Library and other series, and she devotes nearly as much coverage to the American publishing world as she does to British concerns. Furthermore, while this review can give potential readers a general idea of the content of this compelling book, what it cannot possibly convey is the level of detail that Fyfe provides about nearly all aspects of the Victorian printing and publishing world. Press equipment design and printers' wages, traveling conditions on trains and early steamers, the precise wares available from railway bookstalls, how bills were discounted and circulated, the particular hotels frequented by commercial travelers—all of this is related in an accessible and even breezy narrative that wears its erudition lightly. Numerous illustrations from contemporary books and periodicals further bring the times and events to life. In addition, for readers who wish to plumb the depths of any of these subjects, Fyfe's extensive endnotes and detailed index will provide an invaluable starting point and indications for further investigation.