London Booksellers and American Customers: Transatlantic Literary Community and the Charleston Library Society, 1748-1811

Abstract

London Booksellers and American Customers: Transatlantic Literary Community and the Charleston Library Society, 1748-1811. By James Raven. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2002. Pp. xxii, 522. Tables, figures, illustrations, appendices. Cloth, $59.95.)Of the many research problems vexing early American cultural historians, one of the most surmountable centers on the history of libraries, especially that of specific institutions. Though the study of these would seem to offer much insight into local literary life, it too often has yielded little of substance for future historians to build on. For example, how many writers have generalized that a library foundation in a particular town signaled improvement in the intellectual climate and then have gone on to equate future increases in acquisitions with advancing cultural attainment? A kind of retrospective if unconscious boosterism informs this approach, which banishes all skepticism that might prompt key questions of who read what, when, and where, as well as what it meant to them. The line between the book on the library shelf to the mind of the reader, not to mention beyond to an intellectual community, can be conceptually difficult to discern through an exclusively institutional focus.Nevertheless, James Raven's 522-page tome, London Booksellers and American Customers, attempts just such an institutional history for cultural ends, and does so with a wealth of primary source material. Raven focuses on the Charleston Library Society from its foundation in 1748 to 1811. That odd terminus coincides with the abrupt end of correspondence with London booksellers, as recorded in the society's Copy Book of Letters, consisting of 120 items. Perhaps because these copybooks provide the book's evidentiary backbone, they are reproduced in full, with heavily annotated transcriptions-itself an impressive scholarly accomplishment. But beyond this, Raven has apparently left no stone unturned, as he summons manuscript material from twenty-three archives on both sides of the Atlantic along with an abundance of newspaper material, contemporary printed books, and all-important (though infrequent) printed catalogues of the society's holdings.Raven assembles this mountain of material to situate the library within what he dubs a literary community. That phrase sums up Raven's main contribution: a precise narrowing, at least for one city, of the cultural lag between the South and Britain posited decades ago by Richard Beale Davis in his three-volume Intellectual Life in the Colonial South, 1585-1763 (1979). The narrowing is precise because Raven painstakingly calculated, based mostly on the letterbooks, the interval between ordering a book from London booksellers and its arrival in the library (roughly about a year). Moreover, his close perusal of his manuscript material allows him to see how much, in most cases, Charlestonian taste, as exemplified in the Library, was aligned with that of London. Perhaps this finding is not as remarkable as Raven's way of getting to it, for it allows him to detail a truly transatlantic history of the book. The very heft of London Booksellers and American Customers corrects a longstanding overemphasis by many Americanists upon colonial and early national printing and publishing.Raven's transatlantic vision shines through each of the book's fourteen chapters, which may be broken down into four different subsections: background, people, distribution, and collection. The first two chapters provide an admirably lean but comprehensive orientation to the time, place, and local state of literature, and they introduce another of the book's concerns: establishing a middle ground of hierarchical sociality for understanding the motives of the Library Society's members-a discursive space somewhere between a Habermasian community of conscience and the ludic sociability discussed in David S. …