A History of the Book in America. Vol. 2. An Extensive Republic:Print, Culture, and Society in the New Nation, 1790-1840 (review)

Any history of the book in the United States, particularly one concerned with the early part of the nineteenth century, confronts more than one teleological claim. If the ghost of Frederick Jackson Turner were not enough, the work is complicated further by a long tradition in certain strains of book history locating the origins of egalitarian democracy in print culture. Editors Robert Gross and Mary Kelley, with the distinguished group of scholars contributing to this volume, negotiate with nuance and consistency between the unavoidable fact that print played a role in the development of "an extensive republic" and the less evident but equally important truths that the structures of printing, authorship, and reading developed between 1790 and 1840 were not inevitable, and that remnants of alternate paths to the future, for both the book and the nation, remain visible.

The contributing scholars are indeed a distinguished group, many of them writing on matters for which their expertise is already well known (Kelley on women's seminaries, David Shields on the learned world, Georgia Barnhill on visual culture, and the list could go on). Almost all of the material is new, written specifically for this volume, a feature that likely contributes to its unusual level of coherence. If a book of this scope, authored by over two dozen hands, can advance a single thesis, the central argument here might be that "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). The cosmopolitan, specifically transatlantic, nature of American print culture was central to the first volume in this series. This volume maintains that focus, both by documenting the role of imported books and of immigrants in the printing industry and by delineating the central place of British and European books in the American reading experience throughout the era. We learn, for example, that despite the 1790 copyright law, American publishers focused on reprints well into the 1820s, and that the US printing industry continued to run a trade deficit in the 1830s, with exported books totaling only a quarter of imported ones (28). Moreover, nearly half the new titles printed in the United States during this half century were foreign, and although Charlotte Temple was the most reprinted book of the era, the second most frequently reprinted was Robinson Crusoe, followed by Rasselas, Pamela, and The Vicar of Wakefield (442-43).

Whereas in the colonial period this transatlantic focus might seem merely the inevitable result of a regionalism that reflected a lack of a coherent "American" identity before the Revolution, many narratives of social history in the decades between 1790 and 1840 treat the nationalizing force of industrialism, westward expansion, and transportation innovations as having created a unified national public almost in a single moment. This volume maintains that the effect of these changes in the development of a truly national reading audience was delayed: well into the 1830s, these essays demonstrate, the cosmopolitan and transatlantic tendencies in American publishing and reading were complemented not by a single national literary culture, but by local and regional subcultures, both in news media and book publishing. The evolution of a genuinely national audience was gradual, with a stable national market emerging only in the 1840s.

One factor encouraging localism throughout this period was the fact that books could not legally be sold through the mail before 1851. Localism did decrease with the transportation revolution beginning in the 1820s, but development of publishing networks took a few decades; by 1840, most newspapers were still local and a national book distribution system did not yet exist. Religious publishing led the way to a national market and national distribution network. Comprehensively describing a heterogeneous, locally organized system is inherently challenging, since...