Essay Review

✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦ Essay Review THE BOOK IN, AND AS, AMERICAN HISTORY adrian johns A History of the Book in America, 5 vols. David D. Hall, General Editor. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press in associ- ation with the American Antiquarian Society, 2000–2010. Pp. 664; 712; 560; 688; 632; illus. $300.00 the set.) HE publication of the final volume of the History of the Book T in America in 2010 marked the culmination of one of the great scholarly projects of the late twentieth and early twenty-first cen- turies. Any review of the five-volume set should first acknowledge the scope and scale of that achievement. The History is a miracle of extensive and intensive scholarship, sustained over decades and across continents. The quality of the work hits a high level at the beginning of volume 1 and, astoundingly, that level is sustained consistently throughout the later books. All of the editors and sponsors—and in particular David D. Hall, who initiated the project in the early 1980s and saw it through to completion—are to be congratulated. Their work sets new standards for the field and deserves to be embraced by anyone interested in the broad history of American culture. Hall and his co-workers presumably had to struggle against all the obstacles large and small that inevitably get in the way of any major enterprise. It was worth it. A history of the book appearing in the early twenty-first century is not for historians alone; it speaks to all of us, as both readers and citizens. One can hardly approach this History without suspecting that, as well as being one of the great multivolume histories of the modern age, it may also be among the last. That it may well be so is only partly owing to the myopia of our research institutions, which find it increasingly difficult to accept that some questions require more than three years to answer. The suspicion also, and more obviously, The New England Quarterly, vol. LXXXIV, no. 3 (September 2011). C 2011 by The New England Quarterly. All rights reserved. 496 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_r_00113 by guest on 23 September 2021 ESSAY REVIEW 497 reflects anxieties about the book itself. Jeremiads about “the end of the book” have rarely been wanting, but they are louder now and more pressing than ever. As even major booksellers go bankrupt, libraries close—or turn into “libraries without books,” which amounts to the same thing—and the lines that trace e-book and print-book sales cross on corporate graphs, the temptation is to see ourselves as living at the end of a great historical arc extending from the first introduction of print in the early modern period, through its golden age in the nineteenth century, to celebrity-saturated decadence in the late twentieth, and then . extinction. One opens a history of the book in America hoping to understand that arc and, hence, our own predicament. These five volumes do satisfy that need but they do so, paradox- ically, because they disdain a common, overarching narrative. This “lack” is a great strength, and it was intended from the outset. Too many works devoted to the book have not really been about the book itself, certainly not, in a deep sense, about its historical character. They have tended to move very quickly from commonsense asser- tions about the book—or, rather, about “print,” which they tend to hypostasize—to their real concerns, which are typically modernization theses of one kind or another. So the book becomes an agent of major, progressive change, even of revolution, acting on culture rather than as culture, and it is deemed of interest only in that light and for that reason. The approach is familiar and time honored—think of Marshall McLuhan and Elizabeth Eisenstein or, for that matter, of any number of media revolutionaries going back to Condorcet and forward to Wired—and it is not without its virtues. Grand theses tend to seem coherent and plausible. They sell. People read them, and they act on what they read. The trouble is that the very coherence of these theories makes them brittle. What we think we know securely about the nature and power of print is often not appropriately said, or in- deed even true, of past times and other places, and this makes them systemically vulnerable. I do not mean to imply that the articulation of long-term narratives is “premature,” or that it should, or could, be dispensed with. Such efforts would, however, benefit from a dose of epistemic modesty. As is so often the case, more flexible and resilient views may come from attending closely to what we can discover of the mundane, practical, constitutive labors that sustain what we re- fer to as “print” or “the” book—or “digital media,” for that matter. What we want, then, is not so much a theory as a sensibility. Beyond its authoritative statistics, exhaustive coverage, and fine writing, this Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_r_00113 by guest on 23 September 2021 498 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY sensibility is what consistently distinguishes A History of the Book in America. The series’ five volumes cover the entire period from the early colonies to the present (Amazon’s Kindle and the Google Books case make it in under the wire; the iPad does not). Volume 1 (The Colo- nial Book in the Atlantic World, edited by Hugh Amory and David Hall) takes the story as far as the Revolution. In the colonial period, it shows, the American book—that is, written by American colonists and manufactured in the colonies—barely existed. Much that was written by colonists still circulated in manuscript—including major texts of the Revolution itself—whereas the printed works they read were yet another commodity exchanged within the transatlantic trade that sustained an empire. Colonists’ reading choices were remarkably stable: they read sermons and almanacs by the cartload, which printers in Boston, Philadelphia, and elsewhere regarded as dependable labor. Laws and other government documents were always welcome work too, because so secure, and news was an increasingly popular commodity, endlessly recycled. But a printer’s lot was largely jobbing work, as was broadly true in Europe as well. For other fare, elite readers got hold of books from London (or sometimes Dublin). Ben- jamin Franklin’s printing of Pamela was an almost unique exception, and not even Franklin himself repeated it. There was no concern about literary property, because printers’ markets were local enough not to overlap, and neither writers nor readers were valuable enough for London’s book trade grandees to care about them. That was why Americans could produce almanacs for colonial readers, even though London’s Stationers’ Company still held the legal monopoly to produce them. There is certainly no high road to modernity discernible here. Even the adoption of copyright in the early days of the newly independent United States seems odd; although it is always seen nowadays in terms of subsequent history, in light of the previous 150 years, it was a strange and scarcely necessary innovation. Ideology seems the most plausible explanation for the legislation. Literary property was adopted because it—and the entire Enlighten- ment cultural economy it stood for—seemed the virtuous course for a new nation to follow. And that decision marks a real, substantial development, one justifying a transition to a second volume. By the middle of the eighteenth century one could already find a few figures—often Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_r_00113 by guest on 23 September 2021 ESSAY REVIEW 499 politically committed arrivals like the bookseller Robert Bell, experi- enced in the pirate trades of Scotland and Ireland—who saw different possibilities in the printer’s craft. The controversy over the Stamp Acts suited them perfectly. American printers fanned the passions that drove non-importation agreements. Those passions, once aroused, forged lasting memories and commitments. In future decades, their legacy helped drive the development of an autonomous American book trade. Volume 2 (An Extensive Republic: Print, Culture, and Society in the New Nation, 1790–1840, edited by Robert A. Gross and Mary Kelley) traces that development. The distinctly unpromising situation at Independence gave rise, in a generation or so, to a thriving com- merce in publishing, conceived as integral and essential to the new republic. Central to the phenomenon was the publisher—a specula- tor in literary properties who emerged and, by the mid–nineteenth century, had become the dominant figure in the book trades. Pub- lishing took advantage of new techniques like steam printing and papermaking, but it relied no less on new distribution networks and financial structures. And it faced obstacles, because those machines, networks, and structures were all still ill defined and unstable. Credit arrangements were tied to honor and patterns of acquaintanceship. As networks grew, so markets coalesced, and frictions developed among what were now rival centers, notably Philadelphia and New York. As a result, domestic accusations of piracy arose for the first time. During the same period, the trade’s leading houses—those who made such accusations—came to depend on transatlantic reprinting, which Lon- doners like Dickens denounced as the epitome of a piratical trade. So booksellers, printers, and publishers struggled to define some kind of morality and community for themselves in hopes that they might create a self-regulating order and live up to their desired reputation as the enabling force of a virtuous republic. By the end of the era, a many-layered publishing trade—ranging from the great houses like Harper’s down to the hawkers of newsprint—would be in full swing.

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