Religion and the Culture of Print in Modern America

From Tracts to Mass-Market Paperbacks Spreading the Word via the Printed Page in America from the Early National Era to the Present

I take my text from John 21:23, the last verse of the last of the four Gospels attributed to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John that circulated among the early Christians: “And there are also many other things which Jesus did, the which, if they should be written every one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that could be written.” Dating from the dawn of Christianity, this text anticipates the importance of the written word in the Christian tradition. Indeed, as one contemplates the volume of printed material produced by American Christians from the early nineteenth century onward, one is struck by the prescience of whoever made that hyperbolic observation two thousand years ago. “The world itself ” does, indeed, seem hardly able to contain that vast mountain of books, periodicals, tracts, and leaflets. And adherents of other faiths, not to mention successive generations of religious dissidents, scoffers, and critics, have made their own substantial contribution to this vast bibliography. One is reminded of another familiar text: “Furthermore, . . . my son, be admonished: of making many books, there is no end” (Ecclesiastes 12:12). 14 > From Tracts to Mass-Market Paperbacks Spreading the Word via the Printed Page in America from the Early National Era to the Present  .  The history of religion in America is incomprehensible without close attention to the centrality of print materials in promoting, consolidating , defending, and sometimes attacking the cause of faith in its many manifestations. My examples in this overview essay come mainly from the Protestant tradition, the focus of my own work in American religious history. But an extensive literature documents the crucial role of print in other traditions as well.1 Happily, too, many of the developments that I mention in passing are treated more fully in the essays that follow. Christianity, like Judaism from which it sprang, is a religion of the Book, so the Bible, that all-time best seller, must be our beginning point. The Bible, itself a collection of books, is the Ur-source for the wide array of print materials discussed in Religion and the Culture of Print in Modern America. In the early national era, Philadelphia’s Matthew Carey and Isaiah Thomas of Worcester, Massachusetts, pioneered in large-scale Bible printing and distribution. Carey’s sales force included the Episcopal clergyman Mason Weems, best known for inventing and promulgating the legend of George Washington and the cherry tree. As Paul Gutjahr and others have documented, the American Bible Society (ABS), founded in 1816, centralized Bible production, distribution, and competitive pricing long before John D. Rockefeller or Andrew Carnegie— those titans of consolidated production and marketing—were even born. Thanks to a corporate bureaucracy in New York City and a network of regional agents and outlets, the ABS soon dominated the market. The Society printed half a million Bibles in 1829–31 alone, charging six cents for New Testaments and forty-five cents for the entire Bible. When it opened in 1853, the ABS’s new and expanded headquarters, the sixstory Bible House, boasting the latest in steam-powered printing presses, was the largest publishing establishment in America.2 Thanks to the ABS and other publishers, Bibles pervaded nineteenth-century America, from inexpensive editions to lavishly produced family Bibles. My own bookshelves include a 1715 German Bible purchased by my father in the early 1920s; an 1819 ABS Bible from the library of my wife’s Connecticut ancestors; the ABS Bible my greatgrandfather took with him into war as a Union soldier in 1863; an 1870 family Bible acquired by my ancestors in southern Ohio containing birth, death, and marriage records going back to the eighteenth century ; an ABS New Testament presented to my nine-year-old grandfather by his father in 1880 (and adorned by him with several drawings of fashionably dressed young ladies); a New Testament owned by my From Tracts to Mass-Market Paperbacks 15 grandmother; a New Testament given to my father by his parents in 1913; a Greek New Testament acquired by my father around 1927; a New Testament presented to me by my grandparents in 1939; an illustrated Gospel of John I received as a Sunday school award on 26 July 1942 (a printed message on the inside front cover states: “In accepting this Gospel I agree to carry it in my pocket and to read it through at least once.”); and a complete Bible, with...