“The history of the book is everywhere, so widely diffused that it merits comparison with the famously elusive Scarlet Pimpernel, whose pursuers sought him without success,” the eminent scholar of Puritan print culture David D. Hall felt compelled to write in 2007. “Like that figure, book history passes among us in disguise, reluctant to reveal its presence even as it gains greater recognition.”Footnote ¹ With the recent completion of the University of North Carolina Press's five-volume A History of the Book in America, however, it would be fair to say that book history in the US has found a highly visible way to declare its existence, with Hall himself playing a significant part in this unmasking as chair of the project's editorial board. These five volumes bring together over a hundred scholars, many of them authors of highly respected monographs, from an impressive number of institutions, and they cover the entire sweep of American history from “The Europeans’ Encounter with Native Americans” (Volume I) to the “Post-Typographic World” (Volume V). Moreover, A History of the Book in America is just one reflection of the current vibrancy of the field, which ranges from specialist journals like Book History (est'd 1998), to academic organizations like the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing (est'd 1991), to research centres like the Program in the History of the Book at the American Antiquarian Society (est'd 1983). Given all this activity, it can therefore sometimes be hard to recall that for most of the twentieth century an interest in typefaces, bindings, and booksellers was largely the province of analytical bibliographers, professional librarians, and wealthy collectors of Americana, with a few stray academic monographs such as Lawrence Wroth's The Colonial Printer (1936) and Rollo G. Silver's The American Printer, 1787–1825 (1967) providing tightly focussed accounts of the early New England book trade. Indeed, this general disregard for textual materiality and enumeration only began to change in the 1970s, when French cultural historians fused the quantitative book history of the Annales school with an interest in microhistory and mentalité, when German hermeneuticists dismissed the “affective fallacy” in favor of a reader-oriented Rezeptionsästhetik, and when British bibliographers overturned their peers’ view of printing as a discrete constant through which the author's original intentions could be recovered.Footnote ²

Essentially, all these concurrent international trends were driven by a new concern with the “sociology of the text,” but there was still plenty of scope for methodological disagreements.Footnote ³ As Robert Darnton noted in “What Is the History of Books?” (1982) – an essay which effectively announced the arrival of the burgeoning field to Americanists – even to initiates the study of print could look very much like “interdisciplinarity run riot.”Footnote ⁴ In order to help establish a “general model for analyzing the way books come into being and spread,” Darnton included an influential visualization of a “communications circuit” in his essay, which mapped out the reciprocal connection between authors, publishers, printers, booksellers, and readers.Footnote ⁵ Partly intended to orient neophytes baffled by the field's rampant “crisscrossing of disciplines,” this diagram makes clear the three major themes which subsequent research into American print culture would pursue: consumption, production, and distribution.Footnote ⁶ Yet it remains the case some thirty years later that these overarching rubrics cut across a dazzling range of subjects, from literary theory to gender studies to ethnic history, as well as frequently unsettling each other. In fact, part of the reason for the remarkable rise of American book history has been its ability to speak to so many constituencies and ride so many waves. Whether it is new historicism's emphasis on the reproductive power of ideology, the new economic criticism's concern with the aesthetic formation of markets, or the interest of transatlanticism in cross-cultural exchange, book history has typically prospered by lending empirical weight and conceptual heft to the latest methodological turns. Book history, to put it another way, has offered us new ways to understand democracy, capitalism, and nationalism; the perennial triumvirate of American studies. On another level, meanwhile, the increasing prominence of the field has also helped to push formerly marginal topics, like library history and the history of journalism, further into the academic mainstream, and has contributed to the resurgence of major subdisciplines like intellectual history, which had fallen out of favor during the heyday of “history from the bottom up.”

This potent combination of wider trends, familiar questions, and specialist approaches, then, is evident in A History of the Book in America, which justifiably positions itself as “a fuller synthesis than heretofore attempted” of developments in the field.Footnote ⁷ A quick glance at the contents pages of the five volumes reveals, in the latter respect, both the distinctive issues that different periods of print culture have raised – from “The Importation of Books in the Eighteenth Century” (Volume I) and “Handwriting in an Age of Industrial Print” (Volume III) to “U.S. Academic Publishing in the Digital Age” (Volume V) – and the recurring concerns which span the centuries: censorship, copyright, the Bible, political patronage, public associations, and education. The extent to which the individual volumes in the series succeed in synthesizing these major spheres of research is discussed in the review essays which follow, as is the question of what these volumes have left out. For while A History of the Book in America is pitched as a totem for a body of work which “deserves to reach an ever widening readership,” its progenitors are open about the fact that American book history “remains a field in the making.”Footnote ⁸ Traditionally, for example, one very concise way to define the characteristic approaches of the field has been through Darnton's assertion that “books do not merely recount history; they make it,” but as we enter the era of the iPad and the Kindle many voices are emerging to declare that books are history.Footnote ⁹ The rapid growth of print culture as an arena for study may, some critics have suggested, even be a direct consequence of the book's recent translation into the realm of “silicon chips, keyboards, monitors, and fiber optics.”Footnote ¹⁰ Still, if the future of the book is unclear there is also much that is obscure about its past, not least in regard to the second half of the twentieth century (so far the least-excavated period of American print culture). Just like the American book, it is probably safe to conclude, American book history will evolve in response to new conditions, even as it seeks to preserve the remarkable authority it has already gained. Pace Hall, American book history is starting to look less like the elusive Pimpernel, and more like the indefatigable Citizen Chauvelin.

Writing to French and Indian War veteran, merchant, and customs collector David Wooster in 1773, Phillis Wheatley recounted how she, a recently manumitted slave, entered the world of authorship with some trepidation. “I am now upon my own footing,” she reported, “and whatever I get by this [book] … I have to depend upon.”Footnote ¹ The book in question was Wheatley's Poems on Various Subjects, published in London the same year she wrote to Wooster. It was with the success of that publication in mind that she asked Wooster to intervene on her behalf with the “Printers of New Haven.”Footnote ² Wheatley feared they would pirate the London edition for their own purposes, capitalizing on her notoriety and cutting her out of the profits. “It will be a great hurt to me,” she told Wooster, “preventing any further benefit that I might receive from the Sale of my Copies from England.”Footnote ³ Just freed from chattel slavery, and swept up in her colony's clamor for independence, Wheatley well understood that the English book trade had a substantial part to play in how she shaped her own destiny.

The bookish side of Phillis Wheatley we glimpse in this letter is just one among many that scholars have begun to explore in earnest since the publication of The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World, a work partly responsible for the resurgence of book history as a singularly explanatory methodology for studying early America. When it first appeared (in 1999 from Cambridge University Press, and subsequently from the University of North Carolina Press), this volume promised “a history of beginnings” and a “story of change” from the first settlement at Jamestown down to the close of the Revolution (1). It more than delivered on these goals, and in the decade since it has become an indispensible source of data about the transatlantic book trade and its impact on the American colonies.

As its title suggests, however, The Colonial Book aspired to something higher than data collection; its larger contribution was to be methodological, and it aimed at expanding our sense of what constituted an “American” book by placing such books in the context of Atlantic history. When viewed from the perspective of Atlantic history – with its attention to the convergence of maritime geography and world-system market dynamics – the American print trade took on a distinctly transatlantic cast, within which “the term ‘colonial’ designates not only certain structures of the British Empire and the Atlantic economy but also long-lasting aspects of intellectual life and cultural identity” (8). Unlike previous work in early American bibliography that had perhaps unfairly privileged colonial difference in its account of the role of books in the cultural formation of the United States, this collection argued that neither the technological inferiority of American print shops nor the imprints that issued from them were reliable indicators of the consumption or circulation of books in the colonies.

Even the old question raised by Elizabeth Eisenstein's work as to “whether the printing press in the colonies was an agent of change or cultural change an agent of print” (27) faded in the face of more significant facts about “the ways in which books were distributed and bound, the supply of paper and type, and the organization and recruitment of personnel” (54) in the colonial world. Rejecting the painstakingly catalogued local imprints detailed in Charles Evans's American Bibliography (1903–34) as “a less suitable archive” (31) for exploring the American book trade in the twenty-first century, The Colonial Book cast its net widely, scouring inventories across the Atlantic world for evidence that American readers absorbed print from both local and metropolitan sources. The circulation and consumption of American books, the contributors to this volume discovered, reflected a deeper social structure that proved to be much more heterogeneous than previous scholars had imagined. “Print represented both authority and non-conformity,” David D. Hall and Hugh Amory recounted in their Afterword, “the imperial center and the colonial periphery, the laity and the clergy, the loyalist and the revolutionary” (484). Colonial difference existed, but it was subtle and profoundly structural, distinguished by “a thickening of commercial connections” with England at the same time that local entrepreneurialism fostered more competition in colonial book markets, a situation that spurred “a singular growth in newspapers” (479) unique in the Atlantic world.

As important as these insights were for reorienting histories of American print culture towards its fundamentally mercantile nature (a structural identity more akin to provincial publishing in the mother country than to a “shining city on a hill”), it was the social horizon of early American books which The Colonial Book opened to view that has proven to be the most significant for the generation of scholars to whom it was directed. With its emphasis on the social as well as the economic dimensions of the book trade, this collection hinted at the interpenetration of orality, script, and print; of literacy and illiteracy; of print and public discourse; of authorship and intellectual property; and of the significance of the reading revolution that coincided with the American Revolution. In the process, it redirected discussions of authorship and influence toward the social horizon of significant events in a publishing history that both America and England shared.

Thus, the on-again–off-again role of the 1662 Licensing Act in metropolitan publishing found its analog in a constant “tension between a licensed press and a commercially viable press” (201) in places like Philadelphia, where local printer William Bradford went the rounds with both the Quaker Meeting and local provincial authorities over whether his imprints were properly authorized. Neither wholly “exceptional” (for a Pennsylvania magistrate assured Bradford that Britain's licensing rules applied in the colonies), nor exclusively metropolitan, the American book trade contrapuntally pulsed with both local and transatlantic political and mercantile imperatives. In America, as in England, print “flowed hierarchically” (115). Bibles could be printed only by licensed printers, and until the Revolution these were all in England. Government printing played a determinative role in the output of presses on both sides of the Atlantic, but there remained a significant role for handwritten copies of statutes and legislative proceedings in the colonies well into the eighteenth century. All colonial printing was undertaken, first and foremost, within the overarching context of British mercantile policy, and, after 1750, “the ever-growing integration of the colonies into the British marketplace” (163) dictated that American books would embody an element of transatlantic exchange.

Recuperating the lived worlds of printers and booksellers lost to previous studies, The Colonial Book also furnished a rich set of portraits of less-studied places and players in the American book trade. Annapolis, Charleston, Baltimore, and Williamsburg emerged as co-contributors to the early American world of books, no longer completely eclipsed by the more robust printing centers of Philadelphia, New York, and Boston. Alongside Benjamin Franklin, lesser lights like William and Mary Katherine Goddard, printers of the Maryland Journal and the Baltimore Advertiser; Robert Bell of Philadelphia (called a “provedore to the sentimentalists” (285)); and Boston bookseller Joshua Hampstead emerged as significant contributors to a decidedly noncentralized culture of print in the colonies.

For all of its significant contributions to the field, however, The Colonial Book at times gives the impression that it is not all that given to exploring what Michel de Certeau calls the “tactics … of everyday life” in which print and manuscript practices played important roles.Footnote ⁴ Even though the book's Introduction includes a section titled “The Europeans’ Encounter with Native Americans,” it soon becomes obvious that “books and literacy among the Native Americans can only be touched on briefly” (25). In its more than four hundred pages of analysis, the reader will find no mention of writers like Prince Hall, founder of the African Masonic Lodge, and just a page or two on Phillis Wheatley and Samson Occom.

Thus, despite this volume's influential data collation and methodological innovation, most recent scholarship on the role of books in early American cultural formation has not followed the rigidly structural, strictly chronological, and resolutely transatlantic formula set out by The Colonial Book. Among those scholars whose work has appeared since The Colonial Book was published, it is indeed the tactical nature of books that has provided some of the most interesting revelations about early American life. In The Pilgrim and the Bee: Reading Rituals and Book Culture in Early New England (2005), for example, Matthew Brown teased out how colonial readers employed reading tactics on imported “steady sellers,” tactics that functioned as devotional practices of their own, marking the colonial world as culturally distinctive even as it imbibed metropolitan print. The tactics Brown uncovers are grounded in the experiences of everyday readers from outside the culture of learnedness whose embrace of the nonsequential possibilities of codex reading are not so much “exceptional” as more “thickly described” and redolent with common, lived experience.

In a similar fashion, Sandra Gustafson's Eloquence Is Power: Oratory and Performance in Early America (2000), published just a year after The Colonial Book, takes issue with the earlier study's relatively print-centered, nonperformative understanding of mid-eighteenth-century American communicative culture. For Gustafson, the American colonies were a “crucible of cultures” in which European, Native, and African “oral traditions collided, merged and polarized to create vibrant traditions of verbal art.”Footnote ⁵ In Eloquence Is Power, oral performance and written text coexist in early America not as “discrete and hierarchical entities,” but rather as antinomies in a “performance semiotic” in which “relations of power were given form and meaning through the reliance on or freedom from text in oral performance.”Footnote ⁶ Most recently, Trish Loughran has adopted a more materialist approach to understanding how such canonical “nation-founding” books as Thomas Paine's Common Sense (1776) and the Federalist Papers (1787) were actually produced, circulated, and consumed in The Republic in Print: Print Culture in the Age of U.S. Nation Building (2007). In Loughran's reading of Revolutionary America and the early republic, there existed no infrastructure adequate to mount “national” public opinion centered on the circulation and reception of such books. Loughran believes that Tom Paine greatly inflated the print numbers for Common Sense, never having been able to saturate the thirteen colonies’ thirteen different cultures of the book, and that the Federalist, published serially in New York, was extremely local in focus, directed toward blunting the force of Governor DeWitt Clinton's anti-federalist stance, rather than persuading a protonational audience at large.

Even more thought-provoking responses to The Colonial Book have appeared from scholars concerned with recovering the literacy practices and book worlds of the colonies’ Native peoples. As Matt Cohen comments in The Networked Wilderness: Communicating in Early America, assumptions like those in The Colonial Book that “there was a common language” in early America can only be agreed to “if we forget about the many Algonquian dialects heard … and transcribed.”Footnote ⁷ A more complex colonial communicative space had, in fact, been outlined by Hilary Wyss's Writing Indians: Literacy, Christianity and Native Community in Early America (1999) just a year before The Colonial Book appeared, but its insights took some time to be appreciated. In Writing Indians, Wyss asserted that early Native “documents all point to the role of print culture in defining the emerging identities in colonial New England,” and that the colonists who partook of these new identities produced both a substantial canon of literature and a heretofore unexplored set of literacy tactics that added new dimensions to our views of the American past.Footnote ⁸

In like manner, Joanna Brooks assembled the very substantial manuscript and print archive of the Mohegan missionary Samson Occom in a 2006 anthology of his writings, to demonstrate “that English language literacy did not cancel out other forms of Native writing.”Footnote ⁹ In works like Occom's A Choice Collection of Hymns (1774), Brooks argues, Euro-American Christology and Mohegan sacred migration traditions were woven together to establish “the base text for a new, common Christian Indian culture.”Footnote ¹⁰ The historian Lisa Brooks has taken this line of reasoning even further in her recent book The Common Pot: Indigenous Writings and the Reconstruction of Native Space in the Northeast (2009). In it, she explores her Wabenaki ancestors’ “spatialized writing tradition,” detailing how writing and print entered and circulated in Native communities through already established channels of communication.Footnote ¹¹ Just as wampum both physically and symbolically “circulated” up and down river ways and through woodland forests, so too did alphabetic print and manuscript text follow well-trodden indigenous paths. For Brooks, “the map and the book are the same” and the texts that have emerged from the “common pot” of Abanaki land and intercultural negotiation represent “an indigenous American literary tradition.”Footnote ¹² Taken together, the insights of scholars who have revised the model of early American communicative practices outlined in The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World have greatly broadened the field of inquiry, fruitfully asking whether the Native peoples' tactical print and scribal practices may have an even broader explanatory power when applied to the cultural development of early America as a whole.

If Phillis Wheatley lived in a mercantile world in which she was herself initially treated as a commodity, the marketplace circulation of printed books also enabled her eventual cultural enfranchisement as an “author,” that socially visible public figure who embodied voice and agency. It also established a cultural matrix within which she could perform “tactics” of resistance and affiliation, all through the aegis of the written word. Her letter to David Wooster performs such tactics of agency, just as her concern for her book's financial success implies her personal and psychological investment in the book trade that goes far beyond financial well-being.

The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World argued that book production and consumption in early America remained largely an engine for the reanglicization of American society after the Revolution and that those citizens like Wheatley who sought a corresponding cultural independence to match their newfound political freedom largely did so within “Reformation … frameworks of meaning for literacy, reading, writing, and printing” (483). Yet Wheatley's own fascinating appropriation of the book trade is little discussed in this work. While impeccably researched and plausibly argued, The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World has thus left scholars with plenty of work to do, and many have already uncovered a rich trove of manuscript and print materials that do not quite fit the storyline given them by this otherwise valuable study. Some, like Elizabeth McHenry, have gone in search of the “forgotten readers” of the American past who – like Phillis Wheatley – harnessed the Protestant literacy practices and British literary fashions promulgated by the transatlantic book trade to new social roles and personal identities unforeseen by the writers, booksellers, and merchants who set up the system in the first place.Footnote ¹³ Writing and reading books (or hearing them read), such unsung early American people of the book inaugurated the era we now call the modern.

Five years after his contributions to The Federalist Papers (1787–88) helped to determine the political identity of the newly formed United States, James Madison published a short article in the National Gazette in which he declared,

Established as a mouthpiece for the nascent Republican Party in 1791, with Madison's enthusiastic backing, the Gazette itself was evidently designed to fulfill this enlightening remit. Notwithstanding the lucrative State Department job which Thomas Jefferson had secured for the Gazette's editor, however, the newspaper ran into financial trouble in 1793 and folded, battered by poor distribution and tight-fisted subscribers, not to mention bitter criticism of its partisan agenda. Such was often the fate of ventures into print during the post-Revolutionary period. As the former editor of the Gazette, Philip Freneau, ruefully noted in his poem “The Country Printer” (1794), while “pressmen” were widely perceived to be “Guardians of your country and her laws” they had to wrestle with everything from “wretched proofs” and “humble Type” to the stagecoach which “scarcely deigns to stop” and a stock whose “charms” have “faded.”Footnote ²

Borrowing Madison's felicitous concept of the “extensive republic” for its subtitle, the second volume of A History of the Book in America seeks to measure the extent to which his vision of the nation united through print was realized in the ensuing five decades, and the ways in which the obstacles faced by men like Freneau continued to hamper that goal. Precisely because of the grand ideals and profound changes enacted in the wake of the Revolution, the early national period has long been one of the most-discussed and liveliest of fields for American book historians. It is understandably hard to resist the allure of the era's high points: the threefold increase of newspaper titles in the 1790s, the emergence of America's first internationally successful authors in the 1820s, the rise of mechanized printing and the penny press in the 1830s. But while An Extensive Republic covers all these advances, and more, it is hardly in thrall to the Whiggish narrative of progress which such developments have often encouraged book historians to write. Self-avowedly structured around three major themes of “longstanding interest to [all] historians” (6) – economic growth, the spread of democracy, and the formation of national identity – An Extensive Republic nonetheless tempers any sense of triumphalism or teleology with a wary attention to inconvenient truths. Though the volume situates the American book, as Robert A. Gross puts it in his admirably lucid introduction, “in the mental realm of myth and ideology and on the physical ground of everyday life” (3), it is the latter which most obviously grabs the reader's attention. Freneau rather than Madison is ultimately our guiding light.

Of the three key historical strands which the volume tackles the most consistently realized and the most revealing is probably that pertaining to the market revolution. There was clearly a shift toward internal commerce across the period, Gross notes, as entrepreneurs like Isaiah Thomas in Worcester, Mathew Carey in Philadelphia, and later the Harper brothers in New York “assumed a quintessentially capitalist role” (7) by abandoning the colonial mainstay of book importation for domestic production, a move which also led them to forsake the direct retail of books in order to concentrate on publishing. Far from embodying the streamlined “takeoff into modern, self-sustaining economic growth” (6) familiar from general accounts of American industrialization, however, these successful ventures in the print trade were often the result of various prolonged and painful experiments. In the case of Carey, for example, James N. Green's indispensable entry on “The Rise of Book Publishing” traces how the former bookseller initially hired the famous peddler Parson Weems to serve as his agent in the Chesapeake, switched to dealing with southern retailers themselves, and then eventually persuaded local postmasters to help disseminate his stock, at which point he was finally turning a profit.

Through these efforts, and others, Carey managed to cobble together an extensive distribution network, but even he could not surmount the paucity of the nation's commercial infrastructure. The now fabled transportation revolution of the antebellum period simply came about too erratically or too late for most of the figures discussed in this volume. Instead, the characteristic of the market system which had the most beneficial impact on early nineteenth-century publishing was that of specialized production and technological innovation, a combination neatly illustrated in Carey's editions of the Bible. Seeking to breathe new life into this colonial steady seller, Carey took the unusual decision to offer it in small print runs in a range of formats, versions, and prices, all of them kept in standing type; a highly lucrative, though investment-heavy, strategy which saw his American Bible become the bedrock of his other business. Many of the urban publishers who followed in Carey's wake cultivated a niche, whether it were in schoolbooks or scientific texts, and some embraced new means of manufacturing, as the Harpers did with stereotype plating in the 1820s. Yet, as a startling statistic from Green's essay reveals, the cost of producing and purchasing a book hardly fell in the fifty years after the Revolution. “In the interest of limiting competition and avoiding risk, publishing proved a conservative, inward-looking endeavor,” Gross concludes. “For those with the capital and connections to tap the possibilities … the new opportunities brought huge returns. But most enterprises in printing and publishing remained small operations down to 1840” (8). A firm like Harpers, with its integrated production model and carefully branded Family Library series, was very much the exception rather than the rule.

When new market structures did infiltrate the print trade, An Extensive Republic suggests, the results were often disastrous. The circulation and endorsement of promissory notes at the semiannual book fairs which Carey initiated in 1802, for example, created a “dangerous illusion of sales” (95) because publishers were actually still using their unsold stock to establish credit. Combined with the “courtesy of the trade,” which allowed individual publishers to claim a monopoly over particular titles, the open-ended circulation of texts in lieu of money led to massive overproduction and, come the War of 1812, a wave of bankruptcies. Even wily operators like Carey barely managed to survive the financial squeeze of these years, but country printers, who had no capital to innovate and little stock on which to reestablish credit, were particularly hard-hit. Indeed, it was symptomatic of the continuing fiscal immaturity of the American book trade that when papermakers began to demand cash payment from country printers a decade later they were unable to meet their debts and the whole “structure of rural book production was fatally undermined” (157). Probably the most powerful evidence of the havoc wrought by the market revolution, however, comes in William S. Pretzer's vivid chapter on journeymen printers, who were increasingly forced by what technological innovation there was into a system where training was cursory, pay was low, and the division of labor was highly stratified. Just as publishers willingly cooperated in order to exchange books and secure their regional dominance, so journeymen printers formed unions to try and protect their rights and wages. Thus, notwithstanding their opposing aims, in both cases the impulse, except when the rare appeal of someone like Sir Walter Scott overwhelmed the “courtesy of the trade,” was toward the avoidance of economic competition.

Consequently, any real drive toward a national mass market for print had to come from outside the closed circuit of the book trade, and it is in making this case that An Extensive Republic is at its most illuminating for historians of American economic development. The printers who survived longest in the antebellum period, it becomes evident, were those who could solicit federal patronage or tap into state-level politics, particularly once the two-party system was fully established. Though the regular rotations of political office after 1800 created a degree of uncertainty, as a case study of the erratic career of John Norvell makes abundantly clear, regional printers (who invariably doubled as newspaper editors) could make a decent living from nationally oriented publications and were encouraged to compete for readers with their ideological rivals. Equally, another highly significant spur to the trade came from religious organizations eager to spread the Word. During the 1820s, David Paul Nord points out, groups like the American Bible Society used charitable donations to produce millions of evangelical texts for free distribution, thus pointing the way for other reform movements to “gather national audiences independent of the needs of commerce, and to use mass communication to lead the market rather than follow it” (222). By pioneering new “economies of scale in publishing” (235), and by turning themselves into a central hub for local suppliers, these not-for-profit societies ironically succeeded in modernizing the book trade where commercial publishers had largely failed.

Through all the detail provided by contributors like Nord, Pretzer and Green, An Extensive Republic not only contains an exceptionally comprehensive and complex portrait of the economics underpinning antebellum publishing, it also offers broader insights into the randomness and upheaval of the market revolution. It is here we glimpse the most obvious corroboration of Gross's assertion that An Extensive Republic “challenges, complicates, revises, and enriches our picture of American life” (6). Thus it is an all the greater shame that the book is less good on the relationship between authorship and commerce than it is on the relationship between publishing and commerce. The problem here is that the volume tends to take too little notice of the challenge to traditional conceptions of the “writer as professional” which Leon Jackson issued in The Business of Letters: Authorial Economies in Antebellum America (2008). Dismissing earlier market-oriented understandings of literary success as “too ahistorical and too simplistic,” Jackson persuasively argues that antebellum writers drew instead on “multiple economies,” wherein the “borrowing, bartering, gifting or selling [of] a book … created webs of connection that were no less important … than any money that might have changed hands.”Footnote ³ But while James Green touches on how country printers used texts as “a kind of currency” (96), and Mary Kelley describes the way female teachers used the gift of books to “strengthen bonds with students” (340), Jackson himself only gets a half-dozen pages in An Extensive Republic to elaborate on Thomas Willis White's adherence to the “very different rules [of] a literary economy that confounds scholars’ distinctions between amateur and professional” (417).

In the absence of a fully fledged theoretical account of print as social capital, a number of contributors then fall into the trap of overprivileging the pecuniary challenges of authorship. David Leverenz's thinly conceptualized entry on “Men Writing in the Early Republic,” for example, insists that “marketplace adversities helped to cut the cord binding American authorship to England, and reoriented male American authors to function in and against the man-making, man-breaking conditions of marketplace capitalism” (360). But this is to obscure the extent to which even financially successful writers like Irving and Cooper had a fraternal and variegated understanding of the value of books. Equally, from another angle, by focussing largely on the best sellers of Susanna Rowson, Elizabeth Barnes's disappointing chapter on “Novels” fails to provide the wider account of generic development which Georgia Barnhill and Dana Brown offer for book illustration and travel writing respectively. Overall, Meredith McGill's keen point about the reluctance of nineteenth-century authors to consider their texts as property, from her essay on copyright, is unwisely neglected by those scholars who posit possessive individualism as the norm.

If the story of how American authors related to the market revolution sometimes gets muddied in An Extensive Republic, the story of their relation to the rise of democracy is generally better handled. Following Michael Warner's groundbreaking articulation of how “the textuality of print determined political culture” in the eighteenth century, students of the antebellum period have been busy extending and revising his Habermasian conception of a book-oriented “public sphere” which stands between the “state and civil society” in two ways: first, by tracing the alternative publics of women or blacks which arose to complement and contest the white, male-dominated institutions of the colonial era; and second, by emphasizing the continued importance of speech and orality to civic life.Footnote ⁴ In regard to these two trends, An Extensive Republic scores poorly on the latter. For while Dean Grodzins and Leon Jackson do emphasize the extent to which college students “combined oral performance, scribal reproduction, and printed publication” (331), and Grey Gundaker is alert to how African American “folk beliefs and literacy can intertwine in contexts that static contrasts between ‘oral’ and ‘literate’ societies fail to envision” (494), Gross's concluding observations on nineteenth-century America as a “world of mixed media” (518) seem too much like an afterthought. When it comes to delineating the counterpublics of the era, on the other hand, the volume is fuller and more focussed. Thus Joanne Dobson and Sandra Zagarell provide a strong account of how the “rapid expansion of print culture” (364) offered women “a secure power base for significant interventions in the public arena” (378), even as they found themselves increasingly tied to the rhetoric of domesticity, and Gundaker in turn engages with African American culture's fervent “association of literacy with freedom” (483) before concretely outlining how blacks used print to establish intellectual equality, historical pride, and vernacular continuity in the face of endemic racism.

Both of these chapters acknowledge the ironies and complicities which confronted their subjects when engaging with the public sphere, but neither sees print as an ultimately regressive force. Much more equivocal, and less familiar to book historians, is the experience of Native Americans with the printed word during this period. “Among the colonizing powers, writing … became a critical differentiation from the New World cultures and the primary medium of exploring and categorizing difference,” Barry O'Connell notes in his illuminating discussion of Cherokee literacy. “It also figured centrally in the colonizers’ different ceremonies to take possession of lands and people to whom they had no valid claim within their own legal traditions” (498). Tracking this pattern of subordination through the early nineteenth century, O'Connell emphasizes how the Cherokee adoption of print “with the aim of influencing public opinion in the United States” (505) combined with the assimilation of other religious and political discourses to displace their oral tradition, thus pointing the way toward a less progressive model of the subaltern counterpublic than that envisioned in recent work by Mary Kelley or Joanna Brooks on antebellum feminists and abolitionists.Footnote ⁵

The notion of a female, black, or indeed Indian counterpublic is meaningless, of course, without a normative public sphere against which these groups can define or measure themselves, and An Extensive Republic offers perhaps the most comprehensive survey to date of the cultural institutions where white men typically encountered and discussed books. Those who haunted the many libraries, learned societies, voluntary groups, debating clubs, and post offices mentioned in the pages of this volume may have objected to the public activism of women or African Americans, but importantly they themselves were often the beneficiaries of print's democratizing potential. Clearly it was not always the case that the spread of print facilitated a sense of intellectual and political freedom among nonelite males. Irrespective of the high cost of joining a social library, for example, patrons of these institutions, as Kenneth Carpenter points out, had to struggle with limited opening hours, poor cataloguing, and stagnating collections. In general, though, the growth of the press, in tandem with the rise of public associations and political partisanship, seems to have undermined the “practices of deference that had prevailed in colonial America” (54).

Still, if An Extensive Republic builds a convincing case for the argument that “by the 1820s, the public sphere of politics no longer upheld a model of disinterested discourse” (10), it does rather shirk on coverage of the working classes. The volume ably handles the middle-class men, and those equally bourgeois women, who laid claim to “genteel status” (54) in the early nineteenth century, but some vague references to apprentices’ libraries and the populism of the penny press aside, we get little sense of the richly varied approach to proletarian book history displayed by David M. Stewart in his recently published Reading and Disorder in Antebellum America (2011). Nor, it should perhaps be added, do we get enough careful analysis of post-Revolutionary textual consumption of the kind in which Stewart engages, and which earlier scholars like Cathy N. Davidson pioneered.Footnote ⁶ For despite Mary Kelley's assertion that antebellum readers “constituted books as sites for meditations and experiments with the individual subjectivities they were fashioning” (340), it is only in Robert Gross's detailed consideration of some particular reading experiences at the end of the volume that we get a firm sense of the complex mixture of resistance and accommodation involved in book-learning. On one hand this oversight is down to the crudely affinitive paradigm of reading which a number of contributors adopt. Elizabeth Barnes and Scott Casper, for example, take the Enlightenment notion of sympathy at face value in order to argue that novels and biographies “could encourage people to think of their own lives as stories, with themselves as both authors and protagonists” (458). On the other hand this oversight is down to book history's more general predilection for form over content. Though An Extensive Republic usefully pushes this discussion of form in new directions (vide Green's discussion of bookbinding) and by no means ignores content (vide Charles and E. Jennifer Monaghan's account of how children's texts evolved), there are simply too few points where the volume gets to grips with how both these factors influenced the individual moment of reading.

The need for a clearer understanding of how reading contributed to the “making and remaking [of] subjectivities” (340) is particularly evident in relation to the volume's final theme – the formation of national identity. Here many contributors inevitably rely on Benedict Anderson's influential definition of the nation as an “imagined community” joining people together through the “mutual awareness, collective sentiments, and emotional bonds” generated in print (12). The problem with the use of this thesis in An Extensive Republic, as with its use elsewhere in American historical scholarship, however, is that too much emphasis is placed on community and too little on the imagination. One of the volume's great virtues is that it shows with unerring precision how the US “remained tightly integrated into an Atlantic world of trade, communication, and culture” (1) during the decades after the Revolution. Chapter after chapter underlines the centrality of British texts to the print world of the new republic. Thanks to “copyright law's uneven disposition of property rights” (199), for example, the reprinting of unprotected foreign works became “the foundation of the entire publishing industry” (24) in the early years of the nineteenth century. The challenge for the historian of print, then, is to determine how the book in America finally became the American book, and it is in pursuing this line that An Extensive Republic sometimes comes unstuck. For while we get plenty of accounts of how patriotic writers like Noah Webster or Jedidiah Morse “adapted and altered both single texts and entire genres, often claiming to Americanize them in the process” (28), the picture is much hazier when it comes to American readers. How, exactly, I was left wondering, did these readers find traces of a “distinctive literature” (13) in the “self-consciously imitated British forms” (441) of Charlotte Temple or the “heavily represented … news from Europe” (396) in the Kentucke Gazette? Without a fuller discussion of the average citizen's imaginative life it is hard to tell.

Instead, rather ironically, the most compelling engagements with Anderson's thesis in the volume pertain to indigenous and immigrant groups situated at the very periphery of the nation. In a fascinating entry on “Readers and Writers of German,” for instance, A. Gregg Roeder notes that while the New England literati were busy embracing German philosophy as a means of advancing American independence, Teutonic immigrants to the United States had a much more “impermanent and insubstantial” (472) conception of their cultural heritage. The “local, pragmatic, and intermittently political” nature of the German-language press, Roeder concludes, “does not support Anderson's account. During the first half-century of the American republic, print media neither forged nor reflected a permanent, collective German American identity in North America” (472). Similarly, the Cherokee too were pulled into the colonizing orbit of the English language, notwithstanding Sequoyah's famous attempt to popularize a syllabary of his native tongue. The Cherokees’ efforts to “project themselves as a nation … to white Americans” faltered, O'Connell notes, beneath the realization that “writing undermines and destabilizes meanings as much as it establishes them” (502).

If An Extensive Republic occasionally fudges the transnational dimension of America's national formation it is generally better on the domestic barriers to an imagined community. It is often the fate of multivolume snytheses that are years in the making to have their conclusions outstripped by the time they finally appear, and in the case of An Extensive Republic the critical ground has been shifted by Trish Loughran's already much-discussed The Republic in Print: Print Culture in the Age of U.S. Nation Building, 1770–1870 (2007). Dismissing the “text-based model of U.S. nation building” as a “historically noninevitable fantasy” shared by the Founding Fathers and modern scholars alike, Loughran argues that the weak commercial infrastructure of the early republic largely prevented books from circulating beyond a local audience.Footnote ⁷ Describing antebellum print culture as a “factory that produced the nation-fragments called regions and sections rather than as the great unionizer and unifier it is so often remembered as,” she convincingly maintains that the nation remained spatially dispersed until the 1840s, when better communication ironically brought North and South into greater disagreement rather than closer collaboration.Footnote ⁸ Measured against this bold thesis, some contributions to An Extensive Republic then inevitably pale. Richard D. Brown's claims about how the Revolution created a “free market of ideas” (59), for example, seem dated and overemphatic in comparison with Loughran's careful discussion of the limited circulation of Common Sense and the Federalist Papers. But on the whole the volume effectively seconds the argument of The Republic in Print. There was self-evidently a yearning for “national integration” among authors and publishers, Gross notes in his introduction, but “if anything, closer contact between the people of different regions created conflict, not concord” (2); “The print culture of the new nation was at once local and cosmopolitan but hardly national, and it retained this character down to 1840” (6). Accordingly, a familiar refrain in many of the chapters which follow is that the most successful ventures in the book trade were those which “could count on an interested local audience” (439) or “sprang into existence to serve specialized needs” (271).

In fact, in making this case, An Extensive Republic not infrequently manages to push Loughran's thesis in interesting new directions. Thus Nord brings religion back into the picture with his account of how poor distribution stymied the evangelical desire to ensure “universal circulation of the same message” (236), and Grodzins and Jackson intriguingly suggest that where a “national market” (325) for print did come about it was actually in the highly elite realm of college textbooks, since every institution stuck to the same archaic curriculum. More broadly, meanwhile, the furore over the abolitionist postal campaign of 1835 emerges across several chapters, on “Print and Politics,” “Expanding the Realm of Communications,” and “Benevolent Books,” as a key moment in the textually generated tension between North and South, and as a subject worthy of a good monograph or two. My only substantial quibble with the volume's treatment of America's textual provincialism would be that, for all its emphasis on the decentralized nature of the book trade, New England, Philadelphia, and Boston tend to get the lion's share of the attention, leaving the rise of Cincinnati as a major publishing centre thinly sketched and the South to function largely as a negative example, whether it be of resistance to schooling or of the poor uptake of libraries. An Extensive Republic could, in short, have done more to accommodate the scholarship contained in Richard Clement's informative Books on the Frontier: Print Culture in the American West, 1763–1875 (2003) or Michael O'Brien's magisterial Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life in the American South, 1810–1860 (2004).

Still, if An Extensive Republic has its blind spots and blurry edges, the fragmented nature of American print culture in the early nineteenth century renders the inevitably scrappy appearance of a multicontributor volume less problematic than it is in other iterations of A History of the Book in America. Critics with particular fields of interest will no doubt have their gripes about inclusion. Personally I wish that Andie Tucher's chapter on “Newspapers and Periodicals” had lent secular magazine culture the subtle understanding which Mary Kupiec Cayton devotes to religious journals, rather than recapitulating material covered elsewhere in the volume. But as a primer to and paradigm of post-Revolutionary book history, An Extensive Republic is highly impressive (the statistical information it contains is worth the price of entry alone). Moreover, the volume not only provides a welcome synthesis of current research, it also is pleasingly frank about what we do not yet know. In the course of arguing that “the transition to a partisan press was far more limited than the standard accounts suggest” (182), for example, John L. Brooke calls for a “new conceptualization” (186) of the relationship between print and politics in order to explain why voters paradoxically became more loyal when the press expanded; similarly, in their chapter on literacy rates, Gerald Moran and Maris Vinoskis note of improvements in schooling that “we are only beginning to appreciate and explore the larger questions about the impact of these changes on postrevolutionary and antebellum American society” (303). Consequently, should An Extensive Republic come to be rewritten in thirty years’ time, the portrait it presents of antebellum book history will no doubt look very different. It would be hard, however, to surpass the utility, breadth, and detail of the present volume. After reading An Extensive Republic it is impossible to disagree with James N. Green's assertion that early national print culture “deserves to be studied in its own right” and “not merely as a forerunner to the more dramatic expansion of book publishing that was to come” (76).

Covering just forty years from 1840 to 1880, the fewest of any of the books in the series, Volume III of A History of the Book in America takes as its focus the industrial book, which it defines both as “the manufactured, bound product of a publisher and the quintessential product of the industrialization of both printing and papermaking,” and as the object which “played a disproportionately significant role in the justifying and embedding of a market culture in the lives, homes, and ideas of Americans” (4). Along with establishing the process by which the industrialization of the book occurred, this volume has four other major themes: the development of the book trade system; the ways in which “publishers, editors, and authors worked to define a sense of the ‘American book’”; the connection of books to values “centered on, though by no means limited to, the middling classes” (4); and the factors which “complicated, stood against, and existed outside the consolidation and nationalization of the industrial book” (5).

The massive enterprise involved in creating this five-volume series can only be admired. That said, any attempt to mark out the field of a history of the book in America must also establish a purpose. If it is more straightforwardly to gather together existing knowledge – to provide synthesis, that is, rather than chart new horizons – then the evidence of The Industrial Book is that while to some extent this objective has been fulfilled it is by way of a rehearsed narrative of change and industrialization often much better told and imagined in more specialist work. The chapters by Meredith L. McGill on copyright and David Henkin on the city and urban print, for instance, give only a flavour of their work on the same subjects in full-length books.Footnote ¹ The best edited collections amount to more than the sum of their parts; they provide a collaborative archive of knowledge which outstrips the monograph but coheres to be much more than a reader. They also enliven a field in ways which make new sense of existing knowledge or suggest the possibilities that new angles of vision might create. In this respect, The Industrial Book is more frustrating than fulfilling.

In part this is because the structure does not always help to create a sense of unified purpose. The volume is divided into eleven chapters which navigate the chronological life of the book: from “Manufacturing and Book Production” and “Labor and Labor Organization” in chapters 1 and 2, “Authors and Literary Authorship” and “The National Book Trade System” in chapters 3 and 4, through “The Role of Government” in chapter 5, and then into the disparate realms of the cultures of reading and print in the concluding chapters after a diversion into periodical publication in chapter 7. Some chapters are self-contained and general; others are divided into subsections that may themselves be quite general in nature (“The Cultural Work of National Magazines” in the chapter on periodicals, for instance) or much more specific (“Libraries” in the chapter on sites of reading, or “Speech, Print, and Reform on Nantucket” in a chapter on alternative practices) without much explanation as to why these more specific instances rather than others might be worth investigating in the context of a broader narrative. Without a series introduction which seeks to place this particular volume into the intellectual trajectory of the project as a whole, what one finds instead in The Industrial Book is patches of expertise being stitched together rather than authors writing with a common project in mind and answering specific issues from a variety of different, though interrelated, perspectives. If the scope of the project mitigates against cohesiveness then the risk of diluting the expertise at the volume's disposal would have been worth it to see single-authored chapters covering the same ground of the volume but providing a more directed narrative. This volume is frustrating in other ways too, notably the connections it relies on between book history and American history, its sense of periodization, and its conceptualization of disciplinarity in the field of book history.

The first of these issues is encountered in the decision to bookend the volume with a discussion of the 1876 American Book Trade Association annual conference, which opened on the afternoon of Tuesday 11 July 1876 on the grounds of the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition, exactly a week to the day after the hundredth anniversary of the creation of the United States of America. Clearly the overarching title of this series has been carefully chosen not to be the history of the American book, but the history of America is never very far away in this history of the book in America. The imposition of a nationalist frame is obviously intended to mark out the dimensions of the rhetoric of the speakers at the book trader's conference, and it certainly chimes with their sense of ambition and faith in technological progress, but it is a distortion that would not have arisen had, say, the editors chosen the 1875 conference (held in Niagara) to frame the volume.

It is also hard to forgive books whose opening relies on some account of the weather, especially when that weather is endowed with a portentousness – in this case the afternoon of 11 July, Scott Casper writes, was “sweltering” (1) – meant somehow to be symptomatic of the events about to be narrated. The intensity implied by such a meteorological context only ratchets up J. B. Mitchell's claim in his introductory address that steam, the telegraph and the printing press had “changed the civilized world” (1). But considering that industrialization and these same technologies did not respect national boundaries, what would have been much more interesting is a sense of how different, if at all, was Mitchell's opinion to that of the leading publishers in Britain or France who could have made much the same claim without relying on a nationalist discourse. In one sense, the industrial book has nothing to do with the history of America; it is only that America provides one instance of how the industrial book manifests itself. There is little attempt to provide a comparative dimension to the history of the industrial book in America in this volume, though, apart from a short subsection on the international trade in books and snippets in other chapters about international copyright and the origins of technological developments outside the US.

It is not entirely churlish in this regard also to note that the contributors to this volume, without exception, are based at North American institutions. While there is no guarantee that the industrial book in America would look more comparative to other scholars, exactly what constitutes “the book in America” during this period may have been defined differently had some attempt been made to reinforce not only the transatlantic but also the hemispheric context. The war with Mexico falls neatly into the period covered in this volume, but the West, let alone the Southwest, receives scant attention; the South gets its own short subsection in a larger chapter on “Cultures of Print,” and at least a slightly longer subsection than Lloyd Pratt's on Nantucket. I do not mean this to be nitpicking about what is and is not included in this volume. All editors of chronological surveys have to make choices about coverage. The point here is that such choices shape a project and even in a book which seeks to bring together existing knowledge it is surprising that some topics receive so little attention. As the bibliographical essay that closes the volume makes clear, there has been plenty of research on the history of the book in the South to warrant a fuller treatment than is provided in this volume, especially given that the Civil War is the fissure which divides this period. It is paradoxical, then, given the emphasis upon nation in the framing of the volume, that during a period of territorial expansion and internal division the chapters predominantly follow a centralizing narrative where the industrial book economy is ever more concentrated in New York, Philadephia, and Boston.

There is also a price to pay for the concentration of time and the marking out of the forty-year period from 1840 to 1880. Almost inevitably developments in book history refuse to sit neatly between these limits. As Michael Winship points out in his chapter on “Manufacturing and Book Production,” the technology for making paper by machine rather than by hand, which facilitated the growth in the number of books and periodicals, was already in place by 1840. So too was stereotyping and the power press. The cylinder press which superseded the power press did so gradually over the course of the nineteenth century and it is the century-long industrialization of the book which is the real story of this volume but which is squeezed out by its start and end dates. A cursory glance at the contents of Volume II in the series, for instance, suggests that the beginnings of the industrialization of paper making, printing and manufacturing at the beginning of the nineteenth century do not receive much more attention than they get here.

The other problem with periodization is that it is perpetually forward-looking. So the emphasis in this volume, on the whole, is the state of the industrial book by the end of the 1870s, almost as if the way in which the book was made, circulated and consumed in America was equivalent to the narrative of industrialization. It was satisfying to see the final chapter of the volume take on this problem. “Alternative Communication Practices and the Industrial Book” strikes a much more interesting balance between emergent and residual economies of print, examining in short subsections the connection between speech and reform, handwriting and amateur authorship. The history of the book in America is the history of objects and practices that disappeared, not just of the things which took their place. A greater recognition of this fact, rather than a deterministic emphasis on the industrial forces shaping what came next, would have brought to life the contingencies of book and periodical production and consumption.

Excavating these contingencies is often an interdisciplinary challenge and too often disciplinary boundaries in The Industrial Book keep knowledge frustratingly apart. The work in the first two chapters on manufacturing and labour is clearly vital to any understanding of the book in America but it need not just be context. The chapter which follows on “Authors and Literary Authorship” gestures towards this context by thinking about authors as engaged in a business which is part of a market, but if it is industrial and technological change which helps facilitate that market then it is worth thinking about how such change altered the demands and constraints of authorship – literary and nonliterary – in practical and material terms; that is, how writing was different as a result of the industrialization of the book and how authors were different, rather than just watching authors become professionalized as a result of the buffeting of market forces. If the field of book history presents real intellectual challenges to disciplinary territoriality then the interaction between history and culture needs to be more sustained than it is in this volume.

These criticisms should not take away from the array of excellent scholarship displayed in this volume. Many of the chapters offer useful stepping-off points into the book's bibliography. But writing a history of the book in America is not just a chronological challenge, it is an intellectual one. After the consolidation of book history scholarship over the past twenty years or so into what now amounts to a field of study engaging multiple disciplines, the completion of this valuable series hopefully marks the end of the beginning rather than the beginning of the end of the history of the book in America, which is poised to develop in fascinating directions.

In their prologue and framing statements to the fourth volume of A History of the Book in America, Carl F. Kaestle and Janice A. Radway set in play ideas about the nature of modernity, definitions of print culture and the book, and the role of readers that illuminate and complicate the task of those seeking to navigate the vast range of material covered by Print in Motion. “Motion” here refers broadly to the accelerating, conflicting forces that the volume accommodates with “a general argument about a crucial tension within the larger culture of print between centripetal forces of concentration and integration on the one hand and centrifugal forces of multiplication and diversification on the other” (2). When considered critically the relationship between modernity and the history of the book generates the contributors’ most significant insights; when presumed upon, it produces rote arguments. The above reference to the “larger culture of print” signals an expansive definition of “the book”: positioning the scope of this volume in relation to that of the series, the editors assert that although “our volume appears in a series entitled A History of the Book in America, we have broadened our focus in order to look at the production, circulation, and use of print in a general sense, that is, to include magazines, newspapers, and other forms” (1).Footnote ¹ This expanded field generates openings for pathbreaking scholarship, but also leaves the volume open to “why this and not that?” questions that range from minor quibbles to significant omissions. Kaestle, for example, goes on to state that it “is an article of faith in print studies today that texts have no meaning without readers” (24), and this position is cited as another way that the design of the volume works to broaden further the parameters of the discipline. But a frustrating, if exciting, strain in Print in Motion expands the boundaries of “the book” to the point where a history of the book in modernity demands or devolves into a history of modernity itself.

American historians have long understood the decades around 1900 in terms of tumultuous social, cultural, technological and political changes; from Alan Trachtenberg's The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (1982) to Jackson Lears's recent Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877–1920 (2009) scholars have sought ways to characterize, nuance, and synthesize the far-reaching and multifarious processes of modernization. These compelling narratives, in which the second industrial revolution begat a corporation-driven modernity that was national in reach and bureaucratic in character, intersect in complex ways with the history of the book. If, as the third volume in this series contends, American publishing was industrialized in the period between 1840 and 1880, then the present volume argues that it was made modern by processes of commercialization and restructuring that took place over the subsequent sixty years. While Print in Motion presents strong evidence and arguments that locate print culture within these main currents of American modernization, however, a nagging, intriguing counterargument persists.

One of the strengths of Kaestle and Radway's collation of specialized contributions is the way that processes of modernization can be traced across diverse areas of activity and through unexpected circumstances. In “The American Public Library: Construction of a Community Reading Institution,” for instance, Wayne A. Wiegand reveals that Melvil Dewey's “library science” and Andrew Carnegie's philanthropy led not only to the standardization of library catalogues and the working practices of librarians, but also to standard library floor plans being recommended to communities that applied for Carnegie building grants. To support the assertion that by 1900 “commercialization had produced an astounding variety of Bibles that only expanded as the twentieth century progressed,” William Vance Trollinger Jr. cites “a Bible sheathed in ‘protective’ gilt metal and stamped with the phrase, ‘May God Bless You,’ [that] was marketed to World War II soldiers” as well as “the ‘Self-Pronouncing Bible’ to aid in reading Biblical names and places, the ‘Runner's Bible’ for ‘him who runs,’ and the ‘World's Smallest Bible … with imitation leather cover” (369–70). The iron cage of bureaucracy was imposed on libraries and numerous other aspects of book production, circulation and reading (the latter, for example, through increasingly standardized school curricula), yet at the same time the carnivalesque energies of American marketing and advertising were unleashed within the secular and nonsecular publishing trade.

The most eloquent expression of publishing's modernization occurs in the more obvious context of Ellen Gruber Garvey's chapter on “Ambivalent Advertising: Books, Prestige, and the Circulation of Publicity.” Garvey begins by describing the reluctant advertising practices of old-line publishers such as Houghton Mifflin, Harper's, and Scribner that, far from demonstrating encroaching Barnumization, register these houses’ distance from the emerging commercial culture. In the late nineteenth century, these publishers used advertisements in selected publications to communicate in quite specific terms to known, familiar audiences. Such advertisements worked to assure authors of their publisher's committed efforts on their behalf and spoke to other publishers of the influence and affluence of the house. They rarely sought to make connections beyond what Henry Houghton and others perceived as the “natural circle” of readers, which, as Garvey states, “was bounded by class, taste, and education and excluded the buyers of cheap reprints” (172). The breakup of this cozy world registers symbolically in the shift from “publishing houses,” with the term's hereditary, aristocratic ring, to the prosaic, business-like world of “publishing companies.” It took more concrete form in events of the late 1890s, as described by Michael Winship in an earlier chapter, which led to the quintessential nineteenth-century American publishing house, Harper's, being propped up by J. P. Morgan. The bank imposed a new management structure that led, by the turn of the century, to the removal of family members from meaningful roles within the recapitalized, reorganized firm. In Garvey's account of modernized publishing, billboards, movie adaptations, public relations, endorsements from celebrated scholars (most famously Charles W. Eliot, whose Harvard Classics series was marketed as the “Five-Foot Shelf of Books”), orchestrated word-of-mouth campaigns, and “Radio Book Chat” programmes that cultivated an “intimate, emotional, enthusiastic approach to books” (188) all worked to advertise reading to those outside the “natural circle” of the nineteenth-century patrician imaginary.

This argument for the modernization of the book is most vividly expressed in Winship's conclusion that “if in 1880 books still shared at least some characteristics with those that had appeared during the preceding centuries, by 1940 they had become a thoroughly modern, and familiar, product” (77). Various aspects of this volume work to emphasize that sense of proximity to our contemporary print culture, including the use of seemingly anachronistic terms: Kaestle and Radway, for example, describe publishing at the end of the 1930s as “a trade in subsidiary rights and fungible ‘content’” (49). Invited to contribute to a Time Warner travel website that is “focusing on gathering a lot of regional content,” J. Sutter, the protagonist of Colson Whitehead's John Henry Days (2001), is struck by the implications of this term: “All J. can think is content. It sounds so honest. Not stories, not articles, but content. Like it is a mineral. It is so honest of them.”Footnote ² If a savvy New York journalist-turned-novelist writing in 2001 gives such weight to an equally savvy New York journalist's encounter with the notion of “content” in the 1990s, how would it have struck their 1930s counterparts? This sense of “content,” which Whitehead italicizes, and Kaestle and Radway invoke in scarequotes, seems bound to the Internet, an apt descriptor for the text that fills unlimited white spaces around which marketing strategies are wrapped. It appears out of place when applied to pre-twenty-first-century media, never mind the print culture of the 1920s and 1930s. Yet Whitehead's Sutter concludes that this is an “honest” term, coined by website managers unconcerned with the traditions of print culture, a term that cuts through conventions to name what journalists and authors have long been required to produce. “Content” draws attention to the fungible, for-hire character of mass-produced prose but carries a good deal of baggage relating to how people think and feel about what they read and write now, not all of which can be confidently backdated to the middle of the last century.

An equally compelling interpretation, which complicates but by no means negates the narrative of modernization, posits that while book production, promotion, distribution, and reading practices underwent significant changes between 1880 and 1940, in certain important ways the nature of the book remained static: in this period books were imbued with nostalgic, antimodern, reassuring qualities by readers experiencing rapid and radical change in so many aspects of their lives. Significantly, this idea comes to the fore in Print in Motion on occasions when contributors move from general claims about book production and the systems of print culture to closer attention to books as objects which were owned and read by individuals. In a detailed analysis of the cultural politics of typography, “Unruly Servants: Machines, Modernity, and the Printed Page,” Megan Benton argues,

Consciously constructed (in a manner analogous to the sacralizing ritual spaces of an art gallery or opera house), and in itself readily exploitable as a marketing ploy, the traditionalist “retreat” encountered inside the book jacket's recommendations and illustrations offers one kind of evidence about what readers wanted from books.

In the volume's closing chapter, “Making Meaning: Analysis and Affect in the Study and Practice of Reading,” Joan Shelley Rubin offers another kind of evidence by recounting the reading experiences of “Mr. M.” as recorded in William S. Gray and Ruth Munroe's The Reading Interests and Habits of Adults (1929). Mr. M. described reading experiences bound to memories of his childhood and a lifelong relationship with certain authors and books. Noting the diversity of a reading practice that took in “the ‘light’ and the canonical, best sellers and ‘steady sellers,’” Rubin argues that this case “marks the difference between the history of reading – which must always account for such survivals and overlaps – and literary history, typically regarded as a series of discrete movements remaking high culture: romanticism, realism, modernism, and so on” (517). The case also speaks to the history of the book as presented in this volume, for while the material objecthood of a book and the social conditions in which it is read are inherently timebound, one real or perceived quality of some if not all books is their timelessness. Later in the chapter, Rubin describes forms of outdoor, self-improving, religious and quasi-religious poetry recitation and appropriation practiced in the 1920s. These were not, she suggests, an archaic retreat from the world of mass print culture, but rather a “residual” phenomenon in Raymond Williams's sense, something “effectively formed in the past, but … still active in the cultural process, not only and often not at all as an element of the past, but as an effective element of the present” (526). Nothing here contradicts wider claims for the modernization of the book – indeed, as Jackson Lears has argued, in a variety of ways forms of antimodernism were often a potent reaction to, and a telling sign of, modernity – but an awareness of print as stasis does nuance the narrative of print in motion.Footnote ³

It is significant that Benton reinstates the distinction between print and book culture while analyzing the connotations of modernist and traditionalist typography, and that Rubin's Mr. M. discusses reading specifically in relation to novels and poetry. The embrace of a broadened conception of print culture arguably works to best effect in this history at such moments, at points where it illuminates the difference between books and other of print forms. The volume is less successful in addressing ideas that travel across print cultures and other areas of cultural production in the period. Most contributors take a theme and explore its development across a timeframe roughly coterminous with Print in Motion's sixty-year span. Thus many discussions end in the 1930s, where they identify activities that seek to engage and expand book audiences, whether it be Langston Hughes's efforts to engage a reading public for The Negro Mother and Other Dramatic Recitations (1931), the work of William S. Gray and the other scholars who initiated the study of everyday reading practices, or the reintroduction by Pocket Books of cheap paperback editions in 1938. When seen within the frame of a paradigmatic history of the book, these developments look like the continuation or culmination of the narrative of expansion beyond the “natural circle” of late nineteenth-century readers. Viewed syntagmatically, though, in relation to comparable projects such as the People's Theatre movement, the Federal Arts Project Community Arts Centers, or Associated American Artists’ scheme to sell five-dollar signed fine-art lithographs, they can also be located within a cross-cultural movement bound to specific historical circumstances. In For the Millions: American Art and Culture in the 1930s (2004), A. Joan Saab argues that the “desire to locate, or create, a cultural foundation for participatory democracy seemed to escalate during the Depression as a diverse public participated in wide-ranging debates over the meaning and forms that the fine arts could take.”Footnote ⁴ Much of what Saab and others have written about the art world's emphasis on community and on cultural democracy during the 1930s, including Andrew Hemingway's account of the influence of John Dewey's pedagogy on New Deal arts programmes, would enrich the discussions of print presented here.Footnote ⁵

With some notable exceptions – such as Benton's description of navigating a magazine “by glance and by scan, pausing to read texts that were often brief and fragmented, laced from page to page through an array of images and tableaux of consumer advertisements” (166); several references to the revolutionary impact of halftone reproduction processes; and the rich, well-selected illustrations that accompany chapters such as Paul Boyer's “Gilded Age Consensus, Repressive Campaigns, and Gradual Liberalization: The Shifting Rhythms of Book Censorship” – there is a general lack of attention here to the nontextual elements of print culture, and to the bodies of scholarship that attend to them. In “The Government as Publisher,” for instance, Charles A. Seavey gives a preliminary account of a vast archive of print material, of which the best-known, most visible, elements are the Farm Security Administration documentary photographs made by Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans and others. But he also claims, alongside a reproduction of Lange's Migrant Mother (1936), “Original publication of many of the images … is difficult to trace. Many were widely reproduced in the popular press, and there is no adequate inventory” (274). Thus he ignores Cara A. Finnegan's Picturing Poverty: Print Culture and FSA Photography (2003), which, while not offering a complete inventory, does go to considerable lengths to detail the circulation of FSA photography in a range of publications including Survey Graphic, U.S. Camera, Life and Look.

The photo-essays pioneered by Life in the 1930s, meanwhile, might reasonably receive brief attention as external developments or “threats” in a study devoted to “the book” narrowly conceived, but would surely be a major concern for a survey of the history of print cultures in this period. Here attention to mass-market magazines more or less begins and ends with Richard Ohmann's chapter, which, like his monograph Selling Culture: Magazines, Markets, and Class at the Turn of the Century (1996), focusses on the decades immediately before and after 1900. Henry Luce's picture magazine, which was selling 1·5 million copies per week by the end of 1936 (its first year of publication) is not mentioned in Print in Motion. Such omissions, along with the emphasis on readers reading rather than viewers viewing, indicates that despite the expansion of focus from “the book” to the “use of print in a general sense, that is to include magazines, newspapers, and other forms,” this remains, primarily, a history of printed text.

Back in 1985 Christopher Wilson's The Labor of Words: Literary Professionalism in the Progressive Era set out to explore the relationship between the professionalization of authorship and the emergence of naturalism and to “demonstrate how the contradictions within the [literary] market's occupational nexus exerted pressures and set limits on the literary practice of certain vanguard writers.”Footnote ⁶ That Wilson's work is in a sense author-centric, concerned with changes in the way that books are marketed and sold to the extent that those changes affect the way books are written and conceived, is one way to differentiate a literary historian's approach from that of book history. This distinction is helpful in marking the boundaries of the latter field, as well as drawing out one of its necessary blind spots. Authors are present in Print in Motion primarily in lists of names that comprise a genre, a literary movement or a publisher's roster; in the traces of their (often youthful) reading of other writers’ work drawn from memoirs and biographies; and in accounts of what might be termed their ‘extra-authorial’ activities in the world of books. So, for example, we encounter Sinclair Lewis as a teenage patron of smalltown libraries (445), a manager for a book review and advertising syndicate (184), and a writer whose work was promoted among salesmen using innovative word-of-mouth techniques (186). Any perspective on or feeling for the history of the book that Lewis gained during a long career in which he received the Nobel Prize for Literature and wrote the best sellers Main Street (1920) and Babbitt (1922) falls outside the purview of this volume.

Still, like any emerging field, book history is (rightly) determined to show what else it can tell us, to demonstrate its capacity as an addition and corrective to preceding scholarship. As those distinctive contributions become increasingly established, authorship may be more comfortably incorporated as one of the many forms of experience that make up the history of the book. In the meantime, the “traditional frameworks” of book history that privilege it are here displaced as they tend “to concentrate agency in authors and publishers and to render readers and consumers secondary and subordinate to them” (3). The contributions that comprise the third and fourth sections of the volume, “The Social Uses of Print” and “Readers and Reading,” do much to draw out the agency in and significance of reading and consuming print culture in acts of production as well as circulation that occur outside the channels of mainstream publishing. The time not spent contemplating Sinclair Lewis's career is thus perhaps well spent.

Nonetheless, on some occasions authorship does find a place as one act amongst many. Elizabeth McHenry's “Reading and Race Pride: The Literary Activism of Black Clubwomen” includes an account, drawn from an essay by Elizabeth Davey, of Langston Hughes's efforts to “mobilize the audiences of [his] public readings into a reading public” (705).Footnote ⁷ McHenry acknowledges that such mobilization is bound to the performative, accessible poetic forms in The Negro Mother and Other Dramatic Recitations, but places Hughes's acts of authorship and engagement in a reciprocal relationship with the black clubwomen who were among the community audiences he encountered and who are the chapter's primary focus. Hughes meets his readers here on equal terms in a way that would be hard to conceive in a more conventional literary history. Bureaucratically structured, devoted to making reading accessible, and at once producers and consumers of print culture, the late-nineteenth-century black women's club movement took up many of the practices concurrently shaping the corporate-driven book world. It thus represents a powerful example of the “centrifugal forces of multiplication and diversification” that Kaestle and Radway identify as the corollary to modernity's centralizing, standardizing processes. In a similar vein, McHenry's chapter begins with an account of an African American traveling bookseller, Kathryn Johnson, who appropriated the Harvard Classics marketing campaign to pitch “two feet of books … that you and all the colored people ought to read” (491) to the communities she encountered as she traveled the Eastern seaboard.

McDaniel concludes that these forms of “literary activism … [illustrate] the crucial role of print as a vehicle by which subordinated social groups could imagine themselves as political bodies and unite themselves in coalition” (508). James Danky similarly identifies other examples of African American print culture as sites of “interconnectedness” amongst scattered people and for the elaboration of “a powerful counternarrative to the dominant press” (339, 340). Just as Zora Neale Hurston found in the porch-talk of African American communities a space of freer speech away from the inhibiting presence of white ears, so the African American print cultures facilitated by both one-person publishing operations and large networks of collaborators can be understood as counterpublic spaces. Here, as in the pages of the immigrant press, the construction and assertion of complex identities and forms of citizenship and nationalism occurred long before such statements were made in the mainstream press or public sphere. Nicolás Kanellos's chapter on “Exile, Immigrants and Natives: Hispanic Print Culture in What Became the Mainland of the United States,” however, is one of the few to acknowledge geographic difference and so resist the notion of a homogeneous national print culture. Kanellos shows the emergence of multiple “Hispanic presses,” their character and politics shaped by immigrants’ and exiles’ differing relationships with their homelands and with the US, and by these groups’ and Hispanic natives’ physical and imagined location within America.

These case studies of the “Social Uses of Print” inevitably raise questions about inclusion and exclusion (for example, separate chapters are devoted to the Protestant, Catholic and Jewish presses while the radical press is covered in a few paragraphs of an overview chapter). But here, as in the displacement of authorship and other instances in which objections might be raised, the editors’ decisions and the methodological positions that shape this volume produce compensatory payoffs: not asking some questions enables unencumbered attention to others. Thus this version of book history would not have been harmed by being as explicit about setting boundaries as it is in setting out expansive aims.

Contrary to many predictions, the book in America survived the emergence of television, the era of blockbuster films, the conglomerate takeover of American publishers, and the early years of the Internet. From its opening pages, Volume V of A History of the Book in America rightly suggests that the fact of this endurance – the fact, that is, that during the first decade of the twenty-first century people continued to buy and read books – calls into question prevailing assumptions not just about the marketplace for books but more generally about how the book has functioned within American culture over the past sixty-five years. Over the course of twenty-eight essays, The Enduring Book proceeds to tell us much of what we missed about the book while we were announcing its demise, and to suggest, though not settle on, reasons why the most pessimistic predictions proved wrong.

At their best, these essays tell stories that deepen our understanding of familiar developments and then connect them to unfamiliar and surprising ones. Technological change unsettled the cultural marketplace in which books participated, but it also dramatically altered how books are produced and distributed in respects that help them endure as a cultural force and a profitable business. New media conglomerates absorbed pre-World War II independent publishers and in doing so restructured the book business, prompting alarm but also clearing ground for the emergence of newer independent publishers that appealed to various niche audiences. A much-discussed decline in the felt authority of the book was accompanied by an increase in the total population of readers. Competition from television for consumers’ leisure time threatened the book, but an incredible increase in the availability of books throughout the country spread them farther and wider than ever before, as first chain bookstores and then Internet sellers transformed the marketplace. While some segments of book production, such as academic publishing, have struggled in recent decades, religious publishing, including a relatively new form of religious fiction, has experienced an astonishing growth, still not fully accounted for.

In telling these disparate stories, the volume smartly defines “history of the book” in broad terms, and it takes that history to encompass, among other things, external events that influenced book production, the book business, or the lives of readers (suburbanization, the Cold War and mid-1960s education legislation); specific developments in the story of how books got made, distributed and sold (the emergence of chain bookstores and of desktop publishing, for example); entire categories of sometimes neglected book production (government publishing, science books and Spanish-language books); the lives of readers in general and the role books played for specific readers (such as a Texas-based African American women's book group); and finally developments clearly tangential to book history, such as the histories of daily newspapers and the underground press, that set into relief the development of the book as commerce and culture after World War II.

Most of the volume's chapters complement each other and reinforce the same general narrative of the book's surprising vitality between 1945 and 2009. But as coeditor Michael Schudson allows at the start, the contributors do not share a “uniform sensibility” (3), and a tension emerges in a few essays that usefully reflects paradoxes embedded in the book history project. To what extent, for example, is scholarship on book history invested in the idea that the book is special, something more than a mere commodity? And how has this long-standing idea of the book's importance affected book history during the period this volume covers? In the middle of an illuminating chapter on “Markets and Audiences,” Linda M. Scott offers a sustained critique of the “myopia of publishing” (85), on the surprising grounds that the publishing industry continues to, but should not, treat the book as though it is something special. “Publishers,” she writes, “seem to have felt that they were above ordinary consumer marketing because they had produced a special kind of product,” not a mere commodity but a “cultural, aesthetic container of ideas” (84). Scott faults the largest publishers for continuing to cede control over the marketing of books to booksellers, instead of making their own targeted judgments about which books will sell. “Instead of developing consumer expertise,” she laments, “the publishing industry continued to rely exclusively on editor judgment” in deciding which books to publish (82).

This is a bracing argument in a volume that might be expected to take the specialness of its subject for granted. What most partisans of the book would see as cause for celebration – the fact that marketers alone do not decide what books get published – is here treated as a sign of the book business's continued immaturity. The result, Scott suggests, is a wasteful overproduction. “Instead of developing more methods to help in selection” – by marketing better and taking power away from editors – “the industry apparently attempted to reduce the risk of loss by spreading it across more titles. New titles rose from 11,000 in 1950 to nearly 50,000 in 1990” (83). This overproduction is more typically viewed in part as a function of the unpredictability of the book trade. Earlier in the volume, Beth Luey refers to the recent finding that even in the present era of well-capitalized conglomerate-controlled publishers, “7 out of every 10 frontlist hardbound books fail financially … 2 books break even, and 1 is a hit.”Footnote ¹ As Luey explains: “Despite advances in market research and management, publishers never have been able to tame an industry of ‘infinite variance,’ where each title is, in some ways, a completely new product line. That is simply the nature of the business” (42).

On the contrary, Scott contends, seven out of ten books fail because publishers have given editors too much power to choose which books are published, and have failed to make the kinds of advance in market research and management that other industries have made for their products. To demonstrate her point, Scott points to “organizations such as Reader's Digest and Book-of-the-Month Club and Time-Life books,” which “showed that consumer research could be used effectively to smooth away the very risks and waste that publishing has long experienced” (84). Scott also cites Hollywood studios, which refuse to invest in movies with limited commercial potential, on similar grounds (84–85). Leaving aside the question whether these are fair comparisons, a world in which all of the major publishers acted like these institutions – a world in which large publishers would reject books that could not reliably produce profit – is one that would alarm guardians of book culture. How many novels by authors of minority or marginalized groups, and how many controversial nonfiction works, and how many works of experimental or avant-garde fiction would have been published if all publishers functioned like the Book-of-the-Month Club? Some of these “marginal” books did become best sellers; some that did not have been recovered and remain in print decades after publication; some, even if they did not sell, have enriched our cultural lives. The fact that the book trade cannot be controlled the way Hollywood studios once controlled the movie business has long been a source of the perception that books have not just economic but also cultural value. And that perception has been seen as a driver of the book's marketplace success. Thus on the volume's opening page Schudson connects the book's endurance to its centuries-old “magical power” as a cultural form (1).

In any event, it is not clear how different postwar book history would have been had publishers streamlined and marketed more aggressively. Book production is a big business, but it is also a small business, and Dan Simon and Tom McCarthy's chapter on “Editorial Vision and the Role of the Independent Publisher” helpfully acknowledges the “mutuality” (211) that connects large and small publishers: any segment of the market ignored by corporate publishers can be targeted by independent ones. As its title indicates, “Editorial Vision” resides on the opposite end of the spectrum from Scott's chapter on marketing, and the differences between the two are instructive. While Scott argues that the book should be just another commodity, Simon and McCarthy take for granted that the book is special; that there is a clear distinction between good, literary books and bad ones; that corporate control needs to be resisted; that editorial vision is worth fighting for. Scott puts the term literary in quotation marks, and refers as well to “‘good’ titles” (79), signaling the constructedness of, if not skepticism towards, often-drawn distinctions between literary and nonliterary books. Simon and McCarthy, on the other hand, explain that postwar presses Pantheon Books and Dalkey Archive succeeded “because of a passion that was broad enough to include good books and balancing the books” (216), and it praises “editors and executives who care about literature” (219).

Simon and McCarthy equate the endurance of the book with the emergence of independent publishers in the corporate age. “Merely by existing,” they write of publishers Pantheon Books and Dalkey Archive, “they each resisted and proposed an alternative to the relentless corporatization of book publishing” (216). But this puts the point too strongly. It is their success with a segment of readers that marks Pantheon and Dalkey as an alternative, and since their existence is in some sense determined by corporatization, they are less an alternative than they are a by-product. (In addition, as Simon and McCarthy elsewhere acknowledge, Pantheon has been corporate-owned since the dawn of publishing's corporate era.) In contrast to Scott's picture of an immature industry, Simon and McCarthy refer to corporate publishing as “all but completely controlled by its owners, who were able to determine not only what was and was not published but also, to some extent, what did and did not succeed” (212). And they quote the editor Ted Solotaroff's essay on the editor's diminishing role: “The independent publisher is the editorially driven publisher … As late as the early 1980s, the editors were telling the sales force how to sell their books. Now that's all changed” (216). Simon and McCarthy conclude pessimistically that “the larger the present six publishing conglomerates become, the greater the danger that the smaller independent houses will fall between the cracks” (217). But it is not clear why this should be the case, given their earlier assertion of mutuality, of the “unending dialectical spiral” (211) by which corporate control of publishing engenders book- and editor-centered independent publishing.

The tension between these two essays encapsulates debates about how to think about books that recurred frequently during the period the volume covers. Elsewhere the volume emphasizes that these debates obscure a lot. Exceptional insights abound: on the ways in which nostalgia for earlier, book-centered eras is shaped by New York City provincialism; on the complicated impact of globalization; on the relationship between generational change and reading and reading patterns, which challenges conventional ideas about the correlation between education level and reading. Refreshingly making no claims to comprehensiveness, the final section offers snapshots of reading subcultures (book clubs and book collectors and members of Alcoholics Anonymous among them) and speculates usefully about a post-typographical future. It appears that most of the essays were written before the Kindle and iPad became big sellers, so the volume, unintentionally, might prove to capture well a distinct era in book history.

The volume is notable, finally, for what is left out. Book history, it reminds us implicitly, is perhaps by historical or institutional accident distinct from literary history: there is little on the specific books that critics have deemed the greatest since 1945, and little on the books that have sold the most. This is not a problem. We already have many literary histories of the postwar era, and many of them to their detriment exclude the context of book history. Telling essential and rarely considered stories about postwar America, The Enduring Book is a valuable complement to existing discussions of the American book's past and a reminder to be cautious when predicting its future.