Network, Book, Page: Compacting Early American Book History

Each of the three studies under review features at least one anecdote about early American printer Isaiah Thomas. Revolutionary Networks documents Thomas's close working relationship with Boston's Committee of Correspondence, a network of Revolutionary-era activists who fomented rebellion against Great Britain. When Novels Were Books considers Thomas's likely role in the binding and preservation of a small manuscript book of sixteenth-century Reformed Protestant confessions. The Intimacy of Paper mentions a folio of three blank pages, which Thomas collected to document his small papermaking business. Since these studies all consider the material history of early American print culture, it comes as little surprise that they would all be interested in Thomas, one of the most prominent printers of the period. But the fact that three works of early American studies would find common ground in a printer—and not, say, a minister, politician, or author—also seems to be evidence of the critical purchase that book history has achieved recently. It's been almost forty years since Robert Darnton's "What Is the History of Books?" helped establish the field of book history and over thirty years since Cathy Davidson brought book history to bear on the early US novel in Revolution and the Word; however, only in the last decade or so have early Americanists truly begun to reckon with the material history of texts' publication, circulation, and reception. This shift is due, in no small part, to a cluster of important studies published in the early 2000s, including the first two volumes of the series A History of the Book in America as well as monographs by Eric Gardner, Trish Loughran, Meredith McGill, Phillip Round, and others. These works have not only popularized book history as a methodology but also demonstrated its potential to upend—or, at the very least, nuance—many of the dominant scholarly narratives in early American studies. And the three studies considered here all take part in this revisionist work, bringing the realities of early American and Anglophone print culture to bear on, among other things, Habermas's public sphere, Warner's republic of letters, Anderson's imagined communities, and Watt's "rise of the novel" narrative.

But it is also notable that, while these three studies all discuss Thomas, they discuss him in very different ways. In Revolutionary Networks, he is a networker; in When Novels Were Books, he is a bookmaker; and, in The Intimacy of Paper, he is a paper manufacturer. These different perspectives demonstrate the scope of book history, a broad and interdisciplinary field without a unifying object of study—book history is only sometimes about actual books—or a salient critical methodology. More centrally, these anecdotes indicate the studies' divergent aims: Joseph Adelman is primarily interested in the networks through which texts were created and circulated in and around the Atlantic world; Jordan Stein is primarily interested in how the physical properties of the book impact a text's reading, reception, and circulation; and Jonathan Senchyne is primarily interested in paper as an object of study in its own right rather than as a means of transmitting information. Taken together, then, the three studies under consideration here not only provide an increasingly compact view of early American material print culture—from network to book to page—but also offer an avenue to appreciate the potentialities and limitations of these three approaches.

Joseph Adelman takes the broadest view of early American print culture, examining how print networks played a role in the formation and shaping of political rhetoric during the imperial crisis and American Revolution. As such, he nuances the theory of a colonial and early American disinterested public sphere by documenting the ways economic concerns influenced printers' decisions. Printers were not simply...