A History of the Book in America: The Industrial Book 1840–1880 (review)

In his introductory chapter to this volume, Scott Caspar provides a lively, detailed account of the third annual conference of the American Book Trade Association, held on "the sweltering Tuesday afternoon of 11 July 1876," on the grounds of Philadelphia's Centennial Exhibition (1). The description of the welter of activity surrounding the conference and the centennial exhibition itself, from celebratory speeches to demonstrations of modern print technology, captures the vigorous, dynamic quality of the publishing industry in this period and serves as a useful point of reference for this "collaborative history of the creation, distribution, and uses of print and books in the United States from 1840 to 1880" (4). Caspar identifies the volume's "five major themes" as the rise of "industrial book" (defined as "the manufactured, bound product of a publisher, and the quintessential product of the industrialization of both the printing and papermaking trades"); the national book trade system; the various attempts to define the "American book"; the emergence of an American book culture that centered on the middle class; and, finally, the complicating factors that worked against "the consolidation and nationalization of the industrial book" (4–5).

The jumble of diverse but interrelated events, speeches and demonstrations that Caspar describes in his "Introduction" is mirrored, in some respects, by the structure of The Industrial Book, 1840–1880 itself. The volume comprises eleven chapters, some consisting of single essays, others containing multiple, separately authored essays, yielding a total of 26 individually authored pieces on distinct dimensions of book culture, plus a "coda" and a bibliographical essay. Subjects range from Michael Winship's technical and data-driven chapter on "Manufacturing and Book Production" to Barbara Sicherman's more abstract analysis of "Ideologies and Practices of Reading," to Tamara Plakins Thornton's short essay on "Handwriting in an Age of Industrial Print." As diverse and seemingly unmanageable as these issues are, there are many points of overlap and interconnectedness, and the result is a coherent, if not orderly, panoramic view of nineteenth-century America's book culture.

The section of most direct interest to readers of American Periodicals is Chapter 7, on "Periodicals and Serial Publication." This substantial chapter consists of an "Introduction" by Jeffrey D. Groves and four relatively concise sub-sections: "Newspapers and the Public Sphere" by John Nerone; "The Business of American Magazines" by Eric Lupfer; "The Cultural Work of National Magazines" by Susan Belasco; and "Religious Periodicals and Their Textual Communities" by Candy Gunther Brown. The entirety of this chapter runs about seventy tightly written pages.

In his introductory section, Groves argues that "All producers of printed works ... understood the economic and cultural importance of periodical publication" (224), and this claim is borne out not only in the subsequent sections of this chapter but also in the many other sections of this volume. More concrete are Groves's useful tables on the number and distribution of periodicals by decade and by state or territory.

John Nerone's essay on "Newspapers and the Public Sphere" (by far the longest of the subsections) emphasizes the integral connections between newspapers and the book trade: newspapers reviewed and advertised books and also served as a "training ground for authors" (230). But he also emphasizes their distinctly different characteristics: "Book culture emphasized timelessness, the authorial persona, and the cultivation of the reader's interiority. News culture emphasized ephemerality, collective anonymous production, and the collision of the reader's mind with the exterior world" (230-31). In further sub-sections, Nerone addresses "the party press" (including reform papers); "the transformation of the press and the public sphere"; the impact of the Civil War on the newspaper press; and the late-nineteenth century news system. In all, a wealth of detail is contained within this thoughtful narrative of the evolution of...