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  • Printscape
  • Mark J. Noonan (bio)

The term “printscape” functions as a useful framing device that attends to the fluid borders of the printed page, which traverse both geographical and imaginative space and are propelled by a variety of actors, historical, and technological forces continually on the move. The term was coined by Russ Castronovo and relates to the term “bookscape” used by James Raven.1 As used by Castronovo, the metaphor of a “scape” allows the print scholar to focus on a distinct moment or object in print history to highlight shifting material and ideological formations and meaning-making inherent in the production, circulation, and reception of print documents. In place of the more static metaphor of print culture, printscape emphasizes concepts such as print affect (in the form of propaganda and mass persuasion); the formation of collective memory; the dissemination of new political ideas and social concerns; the interconnected circuits of print matter (including the courts, coffeehouses, pulpits, lecterns, and parlors); the evolution of technology and new forms of distribution; as well as print workers, capital, images, genres, and the periodicals themselves, in motion. Emphasizing both place and movement, Raven’s use of the “scape” metaphor, in turn, seeks to highlight the geographies of print production while eliciting the broader historical perception of the world of print, including its “uses, travels, and representations.”2 Both authors draw on the definition of a “landscape” in which natural and man-made (or “scaped”) features dynamically interact, evoking memory and local or national identification. A printscape shares such vital features; it is at once a locatable space and a concept, a term that calls attention to how both page and place are suffused by social and cultural practices, imbued with symbolic meaning and memory, and instrumental for identity formation.

My own use of the term demonstrates its dynamic possibilities. I use the printscape metaphor, for example, to describe geographical spaces such as New York’s Printing House Square, which emerged from the interplay of distinct cultural and historical forces. From a cluster of small printing shops and bookstores at the corner of Ann and Nassau Streets in the 1830s, this site—in the vicinity of City Hall and the criminal courts—became a mecca for an enormous range of printing establishments and periodical productions. Its rise is partly a story of rapidly advancing print technologies and growing rates of literacy. It’s also the story of intrepid actors, new methods in advertising, reformist impulses, lurid showmanship, an absence of copyright laws, new audiences and topics of interest, and the growing desire to reflect on and participate in a burgeoning new social order. All of these elements were part of a vital synthesis of people and place that established New York City at the epicenter of nineteenth-century American politics and culture. [End Page 9]

The printscape metaphor can also be applied to the dynamics of the physical page. As periodical scholars have come to recognize, meaning inheres as much in the physical contours of a printed object as in how it travels and circulates amongst readers—or its failure to do so. It is thus important to attend to differences and changes in page size, paper quality, typeface, mastheads, and paratextual ornaments, which convey as much meaning as textual content and illustrations do. The newspapers of the Revolutionary Era, for example, show mastheads that changed to reflect current events (e.g., the Stamp Act crisis) and sought to galvanize readers to unite as one against a new common enemy. The poor quality of paper and ink used in post-1776 productions, in turn, reveal not only a scarcity of printing supplies but also the general desperation of the patriots as well as the sheer urgency of communication at the time.

The printscape metaphor also highlights the juxtaposition of paratextual content and various reading matter. In “reading across the page,” readers make imaginative connections to these varied materials and come to share a worldview with other readers. Seriality and reprinting serve to reinforce this process, through what Benedict Anderson describes as “mass imagination.” The continuing stories of a newspaper or magazine helped to develop readerly expectations and understanding of a variety of concerns...

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