A Companion to the History of the Book (58 page)

The popular appetite for news was insatiable. In 1869, the British journalist Edward Dicey characterized the American as “a newspaper-reading animal.” A periodical existed for virtually every breed of genus Amerkanus. Where the party and penny press targeted readers in particular cities and towns, other enterprises identified groups with specialized interests and fashioned them into regional and national audiences. Vocational publications abounded, with farmers getting the most attention and advice. No self-respecting denomination of Christians was without its house organ. Temperance advocates drank from the
Fountain
and enlisted in the
Cold Water Army;
health reformers looked to the
Sanitarium;
abolitionists championed the cause of the slave in the
Emancipator
and the
Liberator.
Starting with
Freedom’s Journal
in 1827, African Americans fought not only for their own liberty but for the
Rights of All
(as the paper was renamed). The Cherokee Nation advertised its progress in civilization in the bilingual
Cherokee Phoenix,
and although that effort failed to stop forcible removal from Georgia, the paper, true to its original name, was reborn in Oklahoma as the
Cherokee Advocate.
There were “amulets,” “garlands,” “mirrors,” and “toilets” for ladies (and an
Agitator
for women’s rights); “assistants” and “companions” for mothers; “friends” for orphans and youth. Alas, “sporting papers” like the
Flash
and the
Whip,
modeled on English originals, led young men astray with titillating tales of vice in the nation’s cities and detailed guides on where to find it.

Those preferring the safer precincts of fiction could turn to the “story papers” that flourished in the mid-1840s, when canny businessmen took advantage of a loophole in the postal laws and began churning out cheap editions of foreign novels in newspaper format. In the spirit of James Gordon Bennett, the editors of Brother Jonathan and
New World
in New York and
Universal Yankee Nation
in Boston (which claimed to be “the largest paper in all creation”) won the hearts of “the Reading Million” and threatened the interests of established publishers by snapping up the latest works of Charles Dickens, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, and other popular writers as soon as they arrived on the transatlantic steamers and getting them into print well before they appeared as books. “We are friends of the people,” boasted the
New World,
“and our motto is ‘The greatest good to the greatest number.’ “ Though that practice was soon halted, newspapers never stopped running fiction. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
first created a sensation in the anti-slavery weekly
National Era,
where it was serialized in forty installments in 1851.
Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Magazine,
launched by an English engraver-turned-publisher in New York, played a prominent part in popularizing such novelists as Wilkie Collins in the Civil War decades and after, while literary syndicates marketed works by the leading American and British writers to newspapers all over the country during the last two decades of the century. Thanks to the post office, the railroad, and the telegraph, the newspaper could chart diverse paths – local, regional, national, or perhaps all at the same time – in the building of a literary marketplace.

In histories of American literature, book publishing usually holds pride of place and with good reason. Books carried a cultural prestige lacking in periodicals. Whether bound in leather or cloth, they were made to last, embodying “timeless” knowledge across the generations; newspapers, by contrast, were typically as short-lived as the information they contained. Ephemera comprised the bulk of items issued by colonial printers: almanacs, broadsides, newspapers, pamphlets in political and religious debates, primers, and spellers. For their books, Americans went to London, Edinburgh, and Dublin in a habit that survived the Revolution. It was simply cheaper to import the latest literature from Britain than to patronize the native press, and it signified a cosmopolitan desire to participate in the international republic of letters. For that situation to change, entrepreneurs would have to find new ways of conducting the book business, and consumers would have to alter their literary tastes.

In the early 1790s, the printer Mathew Carey, a radical Irish nationalist who had fled prosecution for sedition by the English authorities and set up shop in Philadelphia with an endorsement from Benjamin Franklin, devised an ingenious route into publishing. With the backing of well-heeled merchants, he ordered thousands of pounds worth of books from several leading British booksellers, stocked a store on Market Street, and turned the inventory to immediate profit. Carey’s ambitions went beyond the import trade. Instead of paying his suppliers, he pocketed the money and invested it in two risky ventures, expensive reprints of William Guthrie’s
New System of Geography
(1786) and Oliver Goldsmith’s
An History of the Earth and Animated Nature
(1774), which had gone through multiple editions in London and Dublin. Carey aimed to cover his costs by signing up advance subscribers, some 1,200 in all, for Guthrie’s two volumes, which were adapted for American readers by the Philadelphia astronomer David Rittenhouse and Massachusetts geographer Jedidiah Morse. So ambitious was this design that Carey was obliged to give up printing altogether and concentrate on marketing his wares – no easy task, as it turned out, since the ready audience for the project in the Middle States and New England was quickly tapped out and the newspaper advertisements Carey placed brought in few others. Facing an imminent crisis of debt, Carey seized on the expedient of hiring a footloose Anglican parson named Mason Locke Weems to peddle his books wherever they could be sold. A born salesman, Weems traveled throughout the Chesapeake, winning over the gentry with visions of “Worlds upon Worlds” about “to burst upon their senses” from the pages of Guthrie. The sales pitch did more than rescue Carey from financial ruin. It pointed up the opportunities and the obstacles in publishing books for a people dispersed across the countryside of an extensive republic. In the bid to bring books to readers, rather than wait for them to come into his store, Carey learned a crucial lesson: picking titles was only part of a publisher’s task; marketing and selling them demanded equal attention.

Carey’s example was repeated by other printers-turned-publishers in the 1790s, not all of whom obtained working capital by expropriating British creditors. The patriot printer Isaiah Thomas of Worcester, Massachusetts, launched his publishing career with a line of “toy” books for children, reprinted from London originals, and with substantial quarto and folio editions of the Bible. However they entered the business, these entrepreneurs built American publishing on the recycling of British and European books. This specialty was made profitable by the Copyright Act of 1790, which, in keeping with the Constitution’s mandate to “promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts,” granted authors “the exclusive right to their Writings” for a limited term of fourteen years (renewable, in the author’s lifetime, for another fourteen) – a provision modeled on English precedent (the 1710 Statute of Anne, the first copyright law in the world). There was a catch: only American citizens (and resident aliens) need apply. Foreigners could claim neither protection against nor payment for unauthorized reprints of their works by the likes of Carey and Thomas. In effect, the vast body of British and European literature constituted a public domain free for the taking. Like squatters on the frontier, booksellers seized the opportunity; from the 1790s on, the bestselling books in London were being reprinted in the United States within one or two years.

The loose copyright laws fostered a “culture of reprinting” that made the American reading public the largest and most up-to-date in the Western world. In Britain, where the “intellectual property regime” tightened sharply in the early nineteenth century, publishers exploited their legal monopoly over current titles and kept book prices high and edition sizes low. As a result, the great works of the Romantic age, especially the poetry and novels of Walter Scott, gained a wider audience across the Atlantic than in their native land. With no legal obligations to foreign authors, American booksellers saved on royalties, and they cut costs further by altering texts at will. In the course of reprinting, “three-decker” English novels shrank to two volumes (and often two-in-one), shorn of unnecessary verbiage. One Boston publisher had no apologies for condensing Scott’s Waverley novels: “there is a great deal of rubbish – such as the long introductions &.” Every branch of knowledge, from theology to biography to natural history, suffered such cavalier treatment. In 1820, 70 percent of the titles issued in the United States were pirated from overseas; three decades later, following a great expansion of original American publishing, that figure remained a substantial 43 percent. Even with all those reprints in circulation, Americans had not lost their taste for imports. Serious learning still carried an Old World lineage. Well into the nineteenth century, book collectors, colleges, and library societies provided a sturdy market for British books, which such businessmen as George Palmer Putnam serviced by setting up quarters in London as agent for customers back home. In similar fashion, prosperous Americans were accustomed to celebrate Christmas by presenting loved ones with fancy gift books from England. Far from retreating before American books, the import trade boomed, growing nearly tenfold over the middle decades of the century.

British models shaped virtually every aspect of American publishing during its formative decades. Technology came from abroad, as did the craftsmen trained to use it. What books and periodicals Americans did not import or reprint they imitated and made their own. Many genres – the evangelical magazine, the gift book, the picturesque “tour,” the illustrated weekly, even the Valentine writer – originated in the Old World, then spread to the New, where they won large followings. In one crucial respect the fledgling book trade departed from the norm. Unlike the highly concentrated business of London and Paris, publishing developed as an infant industry in diverse cities and towns, from Boston to Charleston on the coast and west to Pittsburgh and Cincinnati. Decentralization was due both to the transportation barriers obstructing a national market and to the economic opportunities afforded by the copyright laws. Anybody could enter the field, issue a new title, or reprint an existing one by a foreign writer, so long as he had the capital to hire printer and binder and the willingness to assume the financial risk. But how to get books to potential readers beyond a locality? Publishers combined forces to enlarge the geographical scope of bookselling, while regulating regional and national competition. In emulation of an English practice known as “courtesy of trade,” they devised a rule for reprinting: whoever first issued a foreign text was its rightful owner, notwithstanding the absence of copyright. Under this compact, a single reprint of an English work could circulate throughout the nation, free from competing editions. Booksellers, like newspaper editors, would exchange publications with one another, thereby increasing and diversifying their stock. Or they might join together in co-publishing ventures and divide up the territory for sales. Other methods of dissemination were to purvey books on commission, supply them at standard discounts, establish branch stores, and send traveling salesmen into the countryside. These cooperative arrangements rested upon a shared sense of identity and common interests. Splitting off, like Carey, from printers and devoting themselves to publishing and selling books, the leading figures in the book trade cultivated a collective image as urban gentlemen, promoting the economy and culture of the republic. In reality, they were following in the well-marked trail of English stationers, collaborating to uphold prices, curb competition, and limit risks.

The pace of change was actually set outside the established book trade. From the 1820s to the 1850s, the leading agents of the “benevolent empire” – the American Bible Society, the American Tract Society, and the American Sunday School Union – produced and distributed millions of pious pamphlets and books. Intent on propagating the word and winning converts for Christ, these religious publishers employed stereotype plates and steam-powered presses well in advance of their commercial counterparts. But delivering the divine message to needy souls proved a more difficult challenge. The benevolent societies relied on a network of local auxiliaries to finance and distribute their publications, and therein lay the problem. Rich, respectable communities, abounding in professed Christians, were quick to answer the call, while hardscrabble frontier settlements went unserved. The prevailing localism of American life circumscribed the reach of philanthropy. To overcome those limits, the national agencies enlisted an evangelical army of divinity students and ministers willing to work for minimal pay and deployed them to the dark corners of the land. Their mission was to be traveling salesmen for the Lord, going from door to door handing out Bibles and tracts to starving souls at whatever price, if any, they could afford. Employing these colporteurs brought additional complications: they had to be recruited, trained, supervised, paid, and held to account. By the 1850s, the benevolent societies were operating as modern corporate bureaucracies, their central headquarters overseeing a chain of regional offices that directly employed scores of agents in the field. Ironically, they did so in order to combat the immoral influence of the literary marketplace, which supplied people with what they wanted in this life, not what they needed for eternal salvation. Reversing that equation, the tract and Bible societies reinforced older habits of reading. Inside the peddlers’ packs were the steady sellers of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century divinity – Baxter’s
Call,
Alleine’s
Alarm,
Flavel’s
Touchstone –
along with newer evangelical titles like
The Dairyman’s Daughter,
nearly all the products of English pens. In urgent matters of the spirit, numerous Christians still found inspiration in the mother country.