An Empire of Print: The New York Publishing Trade in the Early American Republic by Steven Carl Smith

Abstract

Reviewed by: An Empire of Print: The New York Publishing Trade in the Early American Republic by Steven Carl Smith Ronald J. Zboray Smith, Steven Carl – An Empire of Print: The New York Publishing Trade in the Early American Republic. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2017. Pp. 244. A nation-centered histoire du livre has never really found a foothold in the United States to the degree it has elsewhere, particularly in France, the UK, and, in its own peculiar way, Germany. Among the many possible reasons for this is that book historians of the US have difficulty finding an institutional home, whether [End Page 445] in departments of English or history, or schools of communication, information science, and journalism. Because all these potential support sites are mostly interested in topics other than past print cultures, it is unsurprising that historians of the US book must paint with a very wide brush and, due to a relative lack of prior and ongoing detailed bibliographic work, a very sparse pallet. Many generalizations based on sketchy evidence consequently have been advanced and, for lack of interest in questioning them, allowed to stand uncontested. One of these is that the circulation of imprints in the early republic was not extensive enough to provide a culturally or politically binding force for the young nation. According to this view, any print-assisted cohesion would not occur until at least the 1830s and 1840s with the spread of industrialization and its attendant transportation networks that, as a corollary result, made New York the dominant print communications hub. Steven Carl Smith's An Empire of Print challenges this generalization with an enormous amount of evidence, much of it found in little-consulted manuscript sources of the type that would make many cultural historians blanch: business papers of forgotten figures like Samuel Loudon, William Gordon, and Evert Duyckinck. Smith effectively proves that New York bookmen—indeed, there is nary a "book-woman" in sight in these pages—had developed a considerable network in the years between the American Revolution's end and the final rail-based phase of the transportation revolution. It was these entrepreneurial efforts more than transportation innovations that made New York the nation's publishing capital, according to Smith, and they were in effect much earlier than previously supposed. Smith develops his argument through five chapter-length cases reflecting "government publishing, subscription publishing, the bookshop, the first national literary fair, and the wholesale book trade" (p. 5)—all understudied areas in this time and place. Most of the first chapter on bookseller, library proprietor, and newspaper publisher Samuel Loudon provides background on him, which, however fascinating for showing how he navigated revolutionary turbulence, elides government publishing until its concluding pages (pp. 34-43). Nevertheless, it is in this passage examining Loudon's service as New York State printer that Smith provides the clearest picture of the economics of government printing in this period to date. He can thus highlight the imbrication of printing and state politics in a way that qualifies Trish Loughran's recent attempt in her Print Culture in the Age of U.S. Nation Building, 1770-1870 (2007) to diminish print's centralizing role in the early republic. Smith next turns to Revolutionary War historian William Gordon's subscription publishing initiatives amid his larger authorial marketing push. Once again, the discussion drifts from the main topic at first, but Smith comes through in mid-chapter with an innovative analysis of subscription lists for the London edition of the first volume of Gordon's antidemocratic History of the Rise, Progress, and Establishment, of the Independence of the United States (1788). Smith's occupational rundown of the subscribers points to a largely male professional group of lawyers, ministers, physicians, and Members of Parliament (Britons [End Page 446] unsurprisingly dominate). Little in this anchors Gordon to New York, however, until Smith supports the subscription list findings by comparisons to data from the New York Society Library's charge records for the book, before concluding with a discussion of the dismal fate of a later American subscription edition marshaled by a trio of Gotham booksellers who floated a national marketing campaign. While the...