Lydia Bailey: A Checklist of Her Imprints

Other Works in the Series, Back Cover

the penn state series in the history of the book James L. W. West III, General Editor editorial board robert r. edwards (pennsylvania state university) paul eggert (university of new south wales at adfa) simon eliot (university of london) william l. joyce (pennsylvania state university) beth luey (massachusetts historical society) jonathan rose (drew university) willa z. silverman (pennsylvania state university) Peter Burke, The Fortunes of the “Courtier”: The European Reception of Castiglione’s “Cortegiano” (1996) Roger Burlingame, Of Making Many Books: A Hundred Years of Reading, Writing, and Publishing (1996) James M. Hutchisson, The Rise of Sinclair Lewis, 1920–1930 (1996) Julie Bates Dock, ed., Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-paper” and the History of Its Publication and Reception: A Critical Edition and Documentary Casebook (1998) John Williams, ed., Imaging the Early Medieval Bible (1998) Ezra Greenspan, George Palmer Putnam: Representative American Publisher (2000) James G. Nelson, Publisher to the Decadents: Leonard Smithers in the Careers of Beardsley, Wilde, Dowson (2000) Pamela E. Selwyn, Everyday Life in the German Book Trade: Friedrich Nicolai as Bookseller and Publisher in the Age of Enlightenment (2000) David R. Johnson, Conrad Richter: A Writer’s Life (2001) David Finkelstein, The House of Blackwood: Author-Publisher Relations in the Victorian Era (2002) Rodger L. Tarr, ed., As Ever Yours: The Letters of Max Perkins and Elizabeth Lemmon (2003) Randy Robertson, Censorship and Conflict in Seventeenth-Century England: The Subtle Art of Division (2009) Catherine M. Parisian, ed., The First White House Library: A History and Annotated Catalogue (2010) Jane McLeod, Licensing Loyalty: Printers, Patrons, and the State in Early Modern France (2011) Charles Walton, ed., Into Print: Limits and Legacies of the Enlightenment, Essays in Honor of Robert Darnton (2011) James L. W. West III, Making the Archives Talk: New and Selected Essays in Bibliography, Editing, and Book History (2012) John Hruschka, How Books Came to America: The Rise of the American Book Trade (2012) A. Franklin Parks, William Parks: The Colonial Printer in the Transatlantic World of the Eighteenth Century (2012) Roger E. Stoddard, comp., and David R. Whitesell, ed., A Bibliographic Description of Books and Pamphlets of American Verse Printed from 1610 Through 1820 (2012) Nancy Cervetti, S. Weir Mitchell: Philadelphia’s Literary Physician (2012) “In this study, Karen Nipps draws together a remarkable amount of information about the life and work of Lydia R. Bailey, a job and contract printer in Philadelphia during the early years of the United States. The picture of Bailey’s career that emerges goes a long way toward enriching our understanding of the early American book trades in all their variety.” —Michael Winship, University of Texas at Austin “Karen Nipps’s useful checklist of Lydia Bailey’s imprints and her perceptive account of Bailey’s business methods provide a valuable glimpse into the inner workings of the Philadelphia book trade at the peak of its prosperity.” —John Bidwell, The Morgan Library and Museum “Karen Nipps has made a substantial contribution to early American bibliography and printing history with Lydia Bailey: A Checklist of Her Imprints. This is, so far as I know, the largest checklist of any nineteenth-century American printer’s output and the only one covering such a long span of time. More than most bibliographies, it is both a work of scholarship and an incitement to more scholarship.” —James N. Green, Library Company of Philadelphia Little known today, Lydia Bailey was a leading printer in Philadelphia for decades. Her career began in 1808—when her husband, Robert, died, leaving her with the family business to manage—and ended in 1861, when she retired at the age of eighty-two. During her career, she operated a shop that at its height had more than forty employees, acted as city printer for over thirty years, and produced almost a thousand imprints bearing her name. Not surprisingly, sources reveal that she was closely associated with many of her now better-known contemporaries both in the book trade and beyond, people like her father-in-law, Francis Bailey; Mathew Carey; Philip Freneau; and Harriet Livermore. Through a detailed examination and analysis of various sources, Karen Nipps portrays Bailey’s experience within the context of her social, political, religious, and book environments. Lydia Bailey is the first monograph on a woman printer during the handpress period. It consists of a historical essay detailing Bailey’s life and analyzing her role in the contemporary book trade, followed by a checklist of her known imprints. In addition, appendixes...