Carnival on the Page: Popular Print Media in Antebellum America by Isabelle Lehuu, and: Hard-Boiled: Working-Class Readers and Pulp Magazines by Erin A. Smith, and: A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire by Janice A. Radway (review)

© Canadian Review of American Studies/Revue canadienne d’études américaines 31, no. 3, 2001 Isabelle Lehuu. Carnival on the Page: Popular Print Media in Antebellum America. Chapel Hill & London: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. Pp. xii + 244 and illustrations. Erin A. Smith. Hard-Boiled: Working-Class Readers and Pulp Magazines. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000. Pp. xiv + 215 and illustrations. Janice A. Radway. A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire. Chapel Hill & London: University of North Carolina Press, 1997. Pp. xvi + 442 and illustrations. British publisher Jonathan Cape once claimed that “successful publishing … is the art of making a profit out of books you publish at a loss” (Clarke 17). The tension between culture and commerce his words imply is a familiar concept to anyone who has done research in the field of publishing history. It is an idea one encounters repetitively in house histories, publishers’ and editors’ memoirs, and academic studies, and one which continues to have resonance to the present day. Integral to contemporary anxieties about the consolidation of publishing interests and the emergence of “box store” booksellers is the perception that Mammon is at risk of winning. Isabelle Lehuu’s Carnival on the Page: Popular Print Media in Antebellum America, Erin A. Smith’s Hard-Boiled: Working-Class Readers and Pulp Magazines, and Janice A. Radway’s A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and MiddleClass Desire all engage the culture versus commerce debate to some degree. The most significant area of contiguity among these three volumes, however, is their authors’ exploration of the relationship between cultural authority and the respective publishing or bookselling initiatives they examine. Each of these authors uses her subject as a means of accessing contemporary notions of culture (both narrowly and broadly defined), and the degree to which each subject challenged or manipulated those conceptions. In Carnival on the Page, Lehuu asserts that scholarship has failed in the past to recognize the antebellum period as one of significance in the history of American print culture. In her view, the period between the 1830s and 1850s “was a historical moment when the world of print was betwixt and between, when polarities were exaggerated” (4). “Eccentric publishing experiments,” she explains, “provoked altogether great pleasure as well as great anxiety when antebellum America witnessed a massive desecration of a tradition of printed words with the onslaught of the marketplace. In the so-called era of the common man,” she adds, “it was not the Canadian Review of American Studies 31 (2001) 210 democratization of knowledge that drew criticism, but rather the emergence of a different, vernacular print culture – cheap, sensational, ephemeral , miscellaneous, illustrated, and serialized – that transgressed the boundaries of conventional media and defied orthodox uses of the printed word” (7). Although her metaphor of the carnival is somewhat overused during the course of the work, Lehuu is successful in communicating the diversity and particularities of print media present in antebellum America. Daily penny papers, mammoth weeklies, giftbooks, and Godey’s Lady’s Book are the four print media of the period Lehuu uses to argue her case. The daily penny papers, the first of which appeared in 1833, helped to privatize the act of reading and initiated in the United States a cash-and-carry system of newspaper distribution. The absence of an obligation to subscribe and the low price of a single issue meant that newspapers became affordable to a much wider range of the populace. That populace sought both information and entertainment in the penny newspapers, but methods of presentation used by editors blurred distinctions, and the newspapers’ daily appearance provided ongoing news reports that read like serialized stories. Crime writing in particular, reveals Lehuu, provided readers with “a window onto the saga of private life” (50), personalizing victims and criminals , and exposing their respective bodies and habits in vivid detail. The sensational and visual elements of the penny press had their counterparts in the mammoth weeklies that came on the scene in the late 1830s, but their exaggerated proportions (the largest known one to survive is 10’ 8” x 4’ 5”) demanded a public space...