The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture, Volume 5: US Popular Print Culture to 1860 ed. by Ronald J. Zboray and Mary Sarcino Zboray (review)

US Popular Print Culture to 1860, a remarkable collection of forty essays, demonstrates the breadth of the field of print culture studies in the United States and points toward its future potential for literary scholars, historians, and other scholars of the early and antebellum periods. Those of us who have relied on the first three volumes of the earlier History of the Book in America (published by UNCP in 2007published by UNCP in 2010, and 2007, respectively) will find Zboray and Zboray’s volume similarly invaluable in our own research and teaching. Brilliantly edited, clearly organized, and responsive to recent trends in the field, broadly defined, US Popular Print Culture to 1860 represents a significant achievement for Zboray and Zboray, as well as for those scholars who contributed to it.

This volume is the fifth in the Oxford History of Popular Print Culture series. (The only others published so far are volume 1, Cheap Print in Britain and Ireland to 1660, and volume 6, US Popular Print Culture, 1860– 1920.) Series editor Gary Kelly outlines the questions driving the editors of the individual volumes in this way: “What did most people read? Where did they get it? Where did it come from? What were its uses in its readers’ lives? How was it produced and distributed? What were its relations to the wider world of print culture? How did it develop over time?” (unpaginated introduction). As in all of their work about print culture in the antebellum United States, Zboray and Zboray respond to these questions with a keen sense of history and social justice, emphasizing the diffusion of print throughout early America and the variety of people encountering it. They accordingly eschew the term history of the book, which seems to them to be “too top-down, value-laden, object-centered, supply-sided, processual, and restrictive,” for “a history of popular print culture, which here is more bottom up, value-critical, person-centered, demand-driven, nonlinear, and fluid” (5).

The book is usefully organized into four parts: “Foundations,” “Pre-industrial Era,” “Mass Market Emergence,” and “Segmentation and Diversity.” The essays throughout are, for the most part, written by the most important scholars in the fields of print culture and book history. Just a few examples will suffice to demonstrate the depth of training and expertise contributors bring to the volume: Jared Gardner writes the chapter “Magazines to 1820,” for example, while Sandra M. Gustafson writes “Oral Genres and Print” and Tom F. Wright writes “Lyceums, Public Lectures and Print.” Eric Gardner’s essay, “Black Engagement with Print,” and Phillip H. Round’s, “Native Imprints and Readers,” are notable contributions. In nearly every chapter, authors undertake a generous and detailed survey of the field, highlighting their own interests and arguments but not allowing them to dominate the essay. As Zboray and Zboray note in the introduction, the organization of the book is intended to indicate continuity as well as change over the centuries, with the past and present mingled in printing technologies, reading practices, and the purchasing of texts, among other things.

Part 1, “Foundations,” contains chapters on authorship, readers, libraries, bookstores, and other concepts integral to any consideration of print culture. Each chapter considers its topic within the broad period covered by the History and presents a summary of the relevant work in the field. As the title of the section indicates, these essays provide a foundation for the work of the rest of the book. Zboray and Zboray’s “Readers,” for example, emphasizes “actual readers’ daily experiences” and argues that it is to our benefit to broaden our definition of reading to a variety of texts and encounters (62). Several of the chapters in this section address the circulation of imprints: Wayne Wiegand, for example, examines the dual and sometimes contradictory goals of libraries to simultaneously uplift...