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4-. Under the Exchange: The Unprofitable Business of Michael Perry, a Seventeenth-Century Boston Bookseller The inventory of Michael Perry's bookstore that was taken after Perry's death in Boston in 1700 has been widely cited by historians. But until Amory studied it closely, no one had fully understood what this text tells us about trade practices at the end of the seventeenth century. Perry's shop included books in which his own imprint appears, but as Amory demonstrates, some of these are examples of shared printing or of an exchange of sheets. The broader story that emerges from this close study of imprints is that the slow rate of sales, the limited scope of the market, and the virtual impossibility of exchanging books (or sheets) with the English trade made local printers and booksellers loath to risk too much on any single item. This, then, is an example of bibliographical analysis turning into economic history. It is also an example of bibliographical analysis helping to resolve a difference of interpretation, the Botein-Foster debate, as Amory frames it: did the colonists rely on locally printed books or on imports, and what was the impact on the local reading public of the English "congers" that controlled the rights to certain titles or kinds of books? The essay concludes with appendices in which Amory re-edited the inventory in order to classify the books according to the categories of analysis indicated in the essay. That is, he was hoping to demonstrate the nature of Perry's business as printer and bookseller and to clarify which editions were printed locally and which were imported. Anyone using these appendices should pay close attention to the "note" that precedes them in which Amory defined the meaning of "edition" and "issue." souRcE: Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 103 (1993): 31-60. Reprinted with the permission of the American Antiquarian Society. At the end of the seventeenth century, Boston booksellers clustered around the Town House, where the Old State House now stands. Here, at street level, was the merchants' exchange; above them stood not only the courts, but also the armory and the public library; below them lay a once-new, preliterate world. In this symbolic situation, American goods, arriving from Roxbury Neck along Cornhill Street, met European credit, ascending along King Street from the harbor. The centrality ofthe Town House was not just geographical and commercial, however, but social and even intellectual. At either end of town lay traditionally rival areas, whose younger male inhabitants bonded in a ritual brawl once a year on Guy Fawkes Day.1 In the North End, at Second Church, twinkled the liberal wit ofthe Mathers; in the South End, at Third Church, glared the systematic learning of Samuel Willard. Boston's printers worked in those intellectual extremes, but the booksellers occupied the center, near First Church, the pulpit ofthe moderate Benjamin Under the Exchange 81 Wadsworth. Their imprints located them "under the Exchange" or "near the Old Meeting House," on either side of Cornhill Street. Here, the Artillery Company and the governor, council, and House of Representatives assembled for annual election sermons; here, since 1679, the Boston ministry by turns had delivered lectures every market day (Thursday). These discourses provided regular jobs for the booksellers in the vicinity. Michael Perry was baptized in First Church on February 15, 1666, but never became a member.2 Following an apprenticeship to the prominent merchant and bookseller John Usher,3 he set up business under the stairs at the west end ofthe Exchange in 1694-. On July 12, he had married the widow of the wealthy Robert Breck, Joanna, whom John Dunton, the eccentric English bookseller who visited Boston in 1686, called "the Flower of Boston?' She brought Perry not just beauty, but the wealth he needed to set up shop; and she carried on as a bookseller in her own right after his death. The premises had just been vacated by the bookseller Samuel Phillips, who moved into a large brick shop across the way, measuring twenty feet by twelve. In 1699, Perry entered into partnerships with Nicholas Buttalph and with his cousin Benjamin Eliot, who continued in business at the same premises until 1703, when he moved into "greatly enlarged accommodations" measuring nine feet eight inches by four feet one and one-half inches.4 Perry's first apprentice was Judge Samuel Sewall's son Sam, who contracted chilblains in the tiny shop and had to quit.5...

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