A History of the Book in America, Vol. III: The Industrial Book, 1840-1880 (review)

These are auspicious times for the history of the book on the national plan, the recent appearance of volumes from Australia, Canada, and Scotland all bearing witness to the groundswell of the kind of activity to which the present volume is a recent addition. This latest offering in the History of the Book in America covers a forty-year period when books became a mass-marketed commodity and, as its editors remind us, when a new 'national book trade' can be seen to have emerged in the United States.

In terms of the series as a whole, the dedication of a whole volume to merely four decades is something of a luxury, nor does it make altogether good intellectual sense. Had the scope of the volume been taken back by at least a decade a more complete story of the impact of the new technologies could have been better told. This was a period in which trends set in the 1820s and 1830s were increasingly felt and consolidated and, while contributors have attempted to keep assiduously to the chronological brief, they frequently strain at the artificial constraints of an 1840 watershed.

Introductions to such large-scale reference works are difficult to write (Amory and Hall's in the first volume was a model of its kind). In this instance, the major themes are framed through the device of what is effectively a case study, namely an account of the conference of the American Book Trade Association of 1876. It is a bold departure from the usual practice, but one cannot help but feel that a more conventionally synoptic Introduction would have served better. One consequence of the present arrangement is that subsequent chapters are made to deliver general information that could have been more usefully provided in the preliminaries.

One of the opportunities provided by such volumes is surely to allow for the engagement of more traditional bibliographical study with the broader fields of cultural and national history. At moments this volume does so with impressive deftness. David M. Henkins's chapter on print in the urban environment is worthy of mention in this regard, as is Jeannine Marie DeLombard's account of reading in African-American culture. Susan Williams's thoughtful survey on authorship provides a helpful overview of the topic. Elsewhere, however, a persuasive engagement with Big History is sometimes lacking. The Civil War gets short shrift, and is mentioned only in passing. Native American culture hardly gets a look in, with only a fleeting mention in the Introduction.

Books of course are no respecters of borders, for which reason there is a lot of talk these days about the transnational history of the book. One wonders whether ten pages —largely comprising illustrations and tables —can begin to do justice to the pivotal role that the United States played in the nineteenth-century global trade in books. By the 1870s the US was importing about two and a half million dollars' worth of books, two-thirds of these from Britain. Although the American export market was smaller, it was not inconsiderable, the porousness of the border with British North America enabling a vast and invisible trade in books with its northern neighbour.

The tasks of general histories such as this one are onerous. They have to deliver grand narratives for the general reader who may not be familiar with the most basic of historic trends in a given period. They also have to rehearse the well-known and sometimes less well-known aspects of their chosen field. Perhaps most importantly, they have to provide additional details, correct misapprehensions, and provide scope for possible future lines of research. This volume more or less satisfies all of these demands.

Finally, a few words about production...