Notes Introduction 1. Poe, review of Lambert Wilmer, The Quacks of Helicon, Graham’s Magazine 19 (August 1841), in Essays and Reviews, 1006. 2. Benjamin Franklin, Public Advertiser, 22 May 1765; quoted in Wonham, Mark Twain and the Art of the Tall Tale, 12. 3. See, for example, Harris, Humbug; Cook, The Arts of Deception. 4. See Kuhlmann, Knave, Fool, and Genius; Wadlington, The Confidence Game in American Literature; Lindberg, The Confidence Man in American Literature; Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women; Lenz, Fast Talk and Flush Times; and Elmer, Reading at the Social Limit, chap. 4. 5. Christopher Caustic, M.D. [Thomas Green Fessenden], Terrible Tractoration!! A Poetical Petition against Galvanizing Trumpery, and the Perkinistic Instiution, in Four Cantos (London: Hurst, 1803); and Terrible Tractoration, and Other Poems (Boston: Russell, Shattuck and Co., 1836), vi. 6. Tompkins, Sensational Designs, 130. 7. Ibid., 125. 8. Volumes two and three of the American Antiquarian Society’s five-volume A History of the Book in America offer the most thorough and up-to-date account of this transformation, but see also several important forebears: Lehmann-Haupt, Wroth, Silver, The Book in America; Tebbel, A History of Book Publishing, vol. 1; Mott, A History of American Magazines; and Charvat, Literary Publishing in America. 9. Tebbel, A History of Book Publishing, 257–262; Lehmann-Haupt, Wroth, and Silver, The Book in America, 72–90; Zboray, A Fictive People, chaps. 2 and 4; and Winship, ‘‘Manufacturing and Book Production.’’ 10. Tebbel, A History of Book Publishing, 43; Winship, American Literary Publishing in the Mid-Nineteenth Century, 122; List of Important and Attractive Books (Boston: Phillips, Sampson, and Co., 1856). Some earlier publishers did offer books in cloth or leather bindings, but because binding by hand was expensive and time-consuming, they rarely bound entire editions. Instead, they sent the books to binders in batches to suit demand, and the books tended to lack the design elements—ornamentation, distinctive typefaces, blind and gold stamping—common to cased bindings. See Green, ‘‘The Rise of Book Publishing,’’ 115–118. 178 Notes to Pages 7–8 11. Lehuu, Carnival on the Page, 64. 12. Johns, The Nature of the Book, 172. 13. McGill, American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 2. 14. For an example of this critical tendency in performance studies, see Diana Taylor’s groundbreaking The Archive and the Repertoire, which pits the archive’s ‘‘unchanging text,’’ which ‘‘assures a stable signifier,’’ against the ‘‘embodied,’’ ‘‘ephemeral’’ performances that constitute a repertoire (19, 20). I discuss Taylor and the print/performance dichotomy further in Chapter 2. In new media studies, the tendency to reify print dates back to Marshall McLuhan’s characterization of print as ‘‘uniform, continuous,’’ and not ‘‘reacting’’ (Understanding Media, 172, 173), and it gained traction in the era of desktop publishing and, later, the internet. Thus Richard A. Lanham’s influential essay ‘‘The Electronic Word: Literary Study and the Digital Revolution’’ (which first appeared in New Literary History in 1989) contrasts the ‘‘razzle dazzle’’ of desktop publishing with the ‘‘stable transparency’’ of the printed page, ‘‘clumsy, slow, unchangeable . . . and above all author-controlled’’ (rpt. in The Electronic Word, 5, 6); and Pierre Levy contends that the ‘‘static substrate’’ of the printed word encourages a ‘‘demand for a universal truth,’’ while the ‘‘dynamic substrate’’ of hypertext allows for a multitude of possible readings (Becoming Virtual, 51). In the past decade, however, a growing number of new media scholars have complicated this division, arguing that forms of ‘‘new media’’ do not break with older ones but ‘‘remediate ’’ them to stake their claims to newness; see Bolter and Grusin, Remediation; Manovich, The Language of New Media; and Gitelman, Always Already New. Their insights suggest that the digital media shift may be more phenomenological than technological , attuning us to the instability that has always existed in the printed word. As Jacques Derrida, once the leading proponent of the notion that the ‘‘idea of the book, which always refers to a natural totality, is profoundly alien to the sense of writing,’’ put it in an interview thirty years later, ‘‘the adventures of technology grant us a sort of future anterior; they liberate our reading for a retrospective exploration of the past resources of paper, for its previously multimedia vectors’’ (Of Grammatology, 18; Paper Machine, 47). I thank Jeff Pruchnic for tutoring me in the role of print in new media studies. 15. The list of antebellum writers who had their works set to music is...