A History of the Book in America, vol. 3: The Industrial Book, 1840–1880 (review)

This volume, the third of five in a series, synthesizes and showcases the multifaceted scholarship that now characterizes historical studies of the book. Until the last quarter of the twentieth century, antiquarian accounts of printing equipment and biographies of leading publishers and their firms dominated the inwardly looking field of book history. The Industrial Book, in contrast, opens outward, offering a much broader purview that blends insights from historical subfields dealing with business, labor, communication, culture, religion, audiences—and technology.

The first chapter locates technology in the foreground. Historians not familiar with the technical processes involved in producing books—typecasting, papermaking, platemaking, press design and operation, binding, and illustration—will appreciate Michael Winship’s accessible discussion of developments in the mid-1800s. More important, Winship suggests—and other contributors amplify—how changes in these technologies affected book production in fundamental ways. For instance, the growing use of stereotyping, which permitted printers to make multiple plates of a page after tediously setting type, altered publishers’ decision-making about the size of press runs, competition with rivals, and even the ease of revising contents.

None of the other ten chapters (some divided into two to four parts with separate authors) deal primarily with technology, but several explore themes intimately entwined with it. Historians of technology will find Bruce Laurie’s chapter on labor and unionization in the printing trades particularly helpful. In addition, several chapters underscore the importance of networks, a hot topic today, even though books did not depend on physical connections in the manner of telegraphy and telephony. Contributors examine trade networks in the emergence of national and international markets for books, communication networks in publicizing them, social networks in the lives of readers, and transportation networks in distributing the printed word.

This volume’s attention to reading, literacy, and the varied cultures of print signals the most dramatic advance in a field formerly preoccupied with production and allied matters. Nearly a third of the essays explore books from the vantage of readers, a reorientation toward the use of artifacts now familiar to historians of technology. Still, the fragmentary evidence about book consumption and the varieties of readers’ experiences frustrate efforts to craft tidy summaries of how books figured in people’s lives.

The editors keep the twenty-two contributors focused on a handful of overarching themes enunciated in Scott Casper’s excellent introduction. One sensible editorial decision was to include examinations of non-book print matter (e.g., newspapers, magazines, sheet music) and communication activities related to books (speech and handwriting). Newspapers, for instance, both serialized books and advertised them. But readers might quibble with other editorial decisions. The case study of “Speech, Print, and Reform on Nantucket” sketches ideas worth exploring over an area much larger, and more representative, than one isolated community. In fact, the geographic coverage of this volume, though understandably skewed toward northeastern publishing centers, could deal more uniformly with the nation when considering distribution and readership. Part of one chapter concentrates on print culture in the South, but no other region, nor the frontier, gets such focused treatment.

Almost all the chapters move seamlessly between scholarly generalizations and concrete examples partly because the contributions deftly exploit the new data sources tapped by recent specialized studies. Whereas such earlier general histories as John Tebbel’s four-volume A History of Book Publishing in the United States (1971–81) relied heavily on Publishers Weekly and a handful of other easily accessible published materials, this latest overview samples the primary sources—business records, government documents, readers’ reports, and more—that sustain newer studies. The carefully selected tables and figures suggest the value of digging into these often hard-to-find primary sources.

The Industrial Book succeeds both as a reference work and as a status report on the field’s scholarship. Those seeking information about a particular aspect of mid-nineteenth...