Perspectives on American Book History: Artifacts and Commentary (review)

Book history as a field of study has become increasingly popular over the past several decades. Starting in the late 1950s, with Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin's seminal L'Apparition du livre, and continuing with the work of Roger Chartier, Robert Darnton, and others, scholars have studied the history of the book for what it can tell us about social and cultural change. Though there has been a strong and growing production of monographs on the subject, until recently there has been a lack of textbooks available for the ever-increasing number of courses on the history of the book. Perspectives on American Book History: Artifacts and Commentary ably fills that gap.

Perspectives on American Book History includes an excellent collection of primary documents for the study of print culture in America. Clearly written introductory and explanatory essays link and clarify the documents. The opening chapter, "Texts for the Times: An Introduction to Book History," examines briefly the historiography and history of the discipline. The final chapter is a useful annotated bibliography that supplements the shorter bibliographies at the end of each chapter. Unfortunately, there is no index. The remaining fifteen chapters cover the period from the early seventeenth century ("Literacy and Reading in Puritan New England") into the future ("The Once and Future Book"). This is not a narrative history of the book in the United States but rather a series of studies of selected events and issues across four centuries.

Each chapter consists of a brief introduction, generally of about a page, to the time period or subject under consideration, followed by a selection of documents. A lengthier commentary, generally of six to eight pages, concludes each chapter, explaining and contextualizing the documents involved. The format works very well, providing students with primary source material as well as a narrative explaining some of the significance of the documents. In the chapter on the Gilded Age, for instance, documents cover subscription publishing, copyright, royalties, and the development of typesetting machines. Many of these focus on Mark Twain, and the commentary "Mark Twain—The Complex World of a Successful Author" discusses Twain in the context of these documents: how he was affected by copyright and the lack thereof, how he made use of subscriptions to sell books, and how he invested, unsuccessfully, in the Paige typesetter, which lost out to the Linotype. By bringing together the narrative and the supporting texts, the authors show not only the significance of the documents but how history is done.

An accompanying "Image Archive" on CD-ROM contains almost two hundred digital images that can be explored by chapter or topic. These images (of books, magazines, manuscripts, technologies, and readers) differ from and are meant to supplement the documents in the book. The images are easily accessible through a Web browser and could be displayed in a classroom setting.

Perspectives on American Book History is, in some ways, a misnomer. As the preface indicates and as the documents make clear, this is really a book on print culture, of which books are just one aspect. Print culture also includes magazines, newspapers, and manuscripts, all of which are covered in this book.

Perspectives on American Book History is an excellent resource that could stand alone as a text for courses on the history of the book in the United States or as a supplementary text for American history surveys.