How Books Came to America: The Rise of the American Book Trade 9780271072272

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How Books Came to America

The Penn State Series in the History of the Book James L. W. West III, General Editor Editorial Board Robert R. Edwards (Pennsylvania State University) Paul Eggert (University of New South Wales at ADFA) Simon Eliot (University of London) William L. Joyce (Pennsylvania State University) Beth Luey (Massachusetts Historical Society) Jonathan Rose (Drew University) Willa Z. Silverman (Pennsylvania State University)

Peter Burke, The Fortunes of the “Courtier”: The European Reception of Castiglione’s “Cortegiano” (1996) Roger Burlingame, Of Making Many Books: A Hundred Years of Reading, Writing, and Publishing (1996) James M. Hutchisson, The Rise of Sinclair Lewis, 1920–1930 (1996) Julie Bates Dock, ed., Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-paper” and the History of Its Publication and Reception: A Critical Edition and Documentary Casebook (1998) John Williams, ed., Imaging the Early Medieval Bible (1999) Ezra Greenspan, George Palmer Putnam: Representative American Publisher (2000) James G. Nelson, Publisher to the Decadents: Leonard Smithers in the Careers of Beardsley, Wilde, Dowson (2000) Pamela E. Selwyn, Everyday Life in the German Book Trade: Friedrich Nicolai as insert TP.PDF as shown Bookseller and Publisher in the Age of Enlightenment (2000) David R. Johnson, Conrad Richter: A Writer’s Life (2001) David Finkelstein, The House of Blackwood: Author-Publisher Relations in the Victorian Era (2002) Rodger L. Tarr, ed., As Ever Yours: The Letters of Max Perkins and Elizabeth Lemmon (2003) Randy Robertson, Censorship and Conflict in Seventeenth-Century England: The Subtle Art of Division (2009) Catherine M. Parisian, ed., The First White House Library: A History and Annotated Catalogue (2010) Jane McLeod, Licensing Loyalty: Printers, Patrons, and the State in Early Modern France (2011) Charles Walton, ed., Into Print: Limits and Legacies of the Enlightenment, Essays in Honor of Robert Darnton (2011) James L. W. West III, Making the Archives Talk: New and Selected Essays in Bibliography, Editing, and Book History (2012)

How Books Came to America The Rise of The A meRicAn Book TR Ade

John Hruschka

The pennsylvAniA sTATe univeRsiTy pRess univeRsiTy pARk , pennsylvAniA

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hruschka, John, 1956– How books came to America : the rise of the American book trade / John Hruschka. p. cm. — (The Penn State series in the history of the book) Summary: “Traces the development of the American book trade from the colonial era through the twentieth century. Explores the technological, historical, cultural, political, and personal forces that shaped the trade, paying particular attention to the contributions of the German bookseller Frederick Leypoldt and his journal Publishers Weekly”—Provided by publisher. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-271-05081-2 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Book industries and trade—United States—History. 2. Publishers and publishing—United States—History. 3. Booksellers and bookselling—United States—History. 4. German imprints—United States—History. 5. Leypoldt, Frederick, 1835–1884. 6. Publishers weekly—History. 7. Book industries and trade—Germany—History. 8. Book industries and trade—Great Britain—History. I. Title. z473.h88 2012 381'.450020973—dc23 2011030338 Copyright © 2012 The Pennsylvania State University All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Published by The Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, PA 16802-1003 The Pennsylvania State University Press is a member of the Association of American University Presses. It is the policy of The Pennsylvania State University Press to use acid-free paper. Publications on uncoated stock satisfy the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Material, ANSI Z39.48–1992. This book is printed on Natures Natural which contains 50% post-consumer waste.

Contents

Preface / vii Acknowledgments / xv List of Abbreviations / xvii 1  2 

Inventing America in the English Book Trade / 17

3  4  5 

Creating Book Trades in English America / 25 Creating German Books in the New World / 37

Re-creating the London Book Trade in the United States / 49

6  7 

Creating New Worlds / 1

Revolutions in American Book Production Technology / 61

Transplanting the German Book Trade to the United States / 70 8  9 

The Evolution of the American Book Business / 84

Becoming a German Bookseller in the United States / 95

10 

Creating a German Bookstore in Philadelphia / 103

11 

The Evolution of an American Publisher / 110

12 

Creating an Independent American Publisher / 125

13 

Imposing Order on the American Book Trade / 138

14  15 

Creating the Office of Publishers’ Weekly / 155

Celebrating the Book Trade in the New World / 166 16 

17 

The End of the Beginning / 176

Inventing the Future American Book Trade / 183 Notes / 191 Index / 209

preface

Preface

The future of the American book business is uncertain. Anyone who pays attention to the popular press knows that the new media will soon make books obsolete. Predicting the imminent demise of the book is nothing new: pundits have been predicting it for more than a century. In 1894, Scribner’s Magazine published an article by the French critic Octave Uzanne in which he wrote of the destiny of printed books: If by books you are to be understood as referring to our innumerable collections of paper, printed, sewed, and bound in a cover announcing the title of the work, I own to you frankly that I do not believe (and the progress of electricity and modern mechanism forbids me to believe) that Gutenberg’s invention can do otherwise than sooner or later fall into desuetude [disuse] as a means of current interpretation of our mental products. Printing, which Rivarol so judiciously called the artillery of thought, and of which Luther said that it is the last and best gift by which God advances the things of the Gospel—printing, which has changed the destiny of Europe, and which, especially during the last two centuries, has governed opinion through the book, the pamphlet, and the newspaper—printing, which since 1436 has reigned despotically over the mind of man, is, in my opinion, threatened with death by the various devices for registering sound which have lately been invented.1 According to Uzanne, the new electromechanical phonograph was about to make books obsolete. Today the new media that threaten the book business are tweets, or e-books, or the Internet, but computers (pre-Internet), television, motion pictures, radio, the telephone, and, of course, the phonograph have each in turn figured as the technology that would put an end to books. Despite the challenges of a century and a half of new media, books remain popular. Americans purchase more than eight million books every day. American publishers issue approximately 275,000 { v ii }

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new books each year.2 After five and a half centuries, the printed book remains great technology—cheap, efficient, reliable, portable, and remarkably durable. As it turns out, the history of the American book industry is as difficult to pin down as its future. The making and selling of printed books has always been a complicated business with a deceptively simple name: the book trade. The book trade is actually a collection of interrelated businesses that both cooperate and compete with one another to put books into the hands of readers. To make matters even more complicated, there are many book trades, and they can be divided and classified in several different ways. The book trades are frequently categorized by the sort of work they do. In the modern book trade, there are three major divisions—publishing, printing, and bookselling, but those divisions have never been permanent or clearly differentiated. Book trades are also categorized according to location and language. Nations have book trades, as do languages. Sometimes national and linguistic divisions overlap; the French book trade tends to produce books in French, but it also produces books in German. Sometimes the divisions seem arbitrary or even misleading. When, for example, an American firm, owned by a German media company, publishes an edition of Pablo Neruda’s poems in Spanish, the book could be regarded as the product of the American, North American, South American, Chilean, Spanish, or even German book trade.3 In order to unravel the history of the American book trades, we need to define “book” and “American” both individually and as we use them in combination. First, we need to distinguish between two different ideas that are conflated in the single word “book.” Books are the product of an author’s imagination and labor, but they are also physical objects that are manufactured and sold. The book trade is the diverse commercial enterprise that manufactures and sells books. Literary historians generally study the book trade to discover new ways of understanding authors and the literary process. Although it might seem odd, the book trade tends to be more concerned with books as physical objects or commercial goods, because the book trade is, and always has been, a business. While books have existed and have been bought and sold since antiquity, it is print that created the book trade. Specific technical and economic pressures inherent in printing from movable type created the book trade. Printing makes it possible to manufacture large numbers of identical books. In fact, the financial structure of print production makes it not only possible, but also necessary, to manufacture books in large numbers. Printers must produce enough copies of a book to justify the cost of production. Producing all those copies then creates

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problems of distribution. Long before the steam engine powered the Industrial Revolution, the book trade had to invent new business models to solve the problems inherent in mass production. In order to discuss the American book trades, we also have to decide what we mean by “American.” Most discussions of the “American book trade” are primarily concerned with the books produced and sold in Britain’s North American colonies and the United States. That idea of the American book trade begins, more or less, with the introduction of printing in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1639. It is primarily an English-language enterprise that developed from the British book trade. If we define “American” a little more broadly, then the book trade suddenly has a much longer history. In that broader view, for example, the first printing press was established a full century earlier, in Mexico City in 1539. Once we expand our conception of the American book trade to include all the Americas, or even all of North America, new patterns emerge and the relationship between the European and the American book trades becomes richer. The broader scope means that we have to go back further to locate the beginnings of the American book trade—not as far back as the Fall of Constantinople, but back to the beginnings of print culture. If we push the beginning of the story back to 1450, it becomes clear that the creation of printing and the development of the book trade made America—and thus the American book trade—possible. Of course, the landmass and the people of the Americas existed before Europeans crossed the ocean, but “America,” whether we think of it as a place or an idea, began as a phenomenon of European print culture. Printing created a radical new book trade, the book trade created America, and then Americans created a new book trade. The following chapters explain how the modern American book trade developed and why it evolved into a business enterprise that is structurally distinct from the European book trades that are its parents. My study of the American book trade began while I was looking through the first two years of Publishers’ Weekly using a balky microfilm reader. I sensed then that Publishers’ Weekly was a solution, but I knew very little about the problem it was supposed to solve. I tried to learn everything I could about the man behind Publishers’ Weekly, Frederick Leypoldt. There was very little. Between 1855 and 1884, he created Publishers’ Weekly, the American Catalogue of Books, and the Publishers’ Trade List Annual (the American Catalogue and PTLA were combined in the twentieth century and continue as a single reference called Books in Print), as well as the Library Journal, all of which remain the standard publications in

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their respective fields. Leypoldt deserves much of the credit for the creation of the American Library Association and for launching the careers of Henry Holt, R. R. Bowker, and Melvil Dewey. He was also a dismal failure as a businessman. Beyond the astonishing facts of his professional life, I found next to nothing: Leypoldt left behind nothing more personal than a handful of business letters and a few receipts. Knowing that I had found a solution, I started to look for the problem. I quickly discovered that while almost everyone agreed that Leypoldt and Publishers’ Weekly brought some order to the chaotic American book trade, no one seemed to explain why it was so beset by problems. Contemporary accounts of the book trade in the United States were full of complaints and accusations, which historians of print repeated but did not explain. When I began, the standard reference works of U.S. print history were Isaiah Thomas’s venerable History of Printing in America, Hellmut Lehmann-Haupt’s The Book in America, and John Tebbel’s A History of Book Publishing in the United States. Those books, and Philip Gaskell’s A New Introduction to Bibliography, were helpful, but they did not explain why the book trade in the United States was so peculiar and so fractious. At some point in my early research, I reread a passage in the preface of a remarkable little book by William Charvat, a book historian well before it became a recognized discipline. In the preface to the lectures presented in Literary Publishing in America, 1790–1850, Charvat explained an important point that I had not taken into account: These chapters are, in one sense a skimming, in other ways, a condensation, of materials which I collected years ago toward a history of the economics of authorship in America. I had hoped to add a new dimension to literary history, but the dimension turned out to be too narrow. Literary history, no matter what the historian’s approach, must be primarily concerned with literature. If the approach is wholly extrinsic as mine was at the beginning, the product is likely to be sterile. Facts and figures about sales of books and incomes of authors are interesting—but not interesting enough, unless they specifically reveal something about the ways in which writers and their writings function in a culture. Similarly, the history of publishing, with which I became deeply involved, tended, like most specialties, to become an end in itself. Publishing is relevant to literary history only in so far as it can be shown to be, ultimately, a shaping influence on literature.4

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Charvat’s economics approach was a radical departure from the textual focus of literary studies in the late 1950s, when he delivered his lectures, but his primary interest remained the literature and the authors who created it. The idea that the business of making and selling books—as distinct from the business of composing novels or poems, or the business of bringing great literature before a reading public—might be interesting enough to warrant close study was more than Charvat could allow, but it was exactly what I was doing. My work was part of what is still a new discipline, usually called “book history” or “history of the book.” In his 1982 essay “What Is the History of Books?,” Roger Darnton explained that book history combined traditional bibliographic study with the socioeconomic analyses of French scholars like Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin. As Darnton described the enterprise, book historians might borrow elements from print history, bibliography, library science, Marxist materialism, cultural history, and literary history. The new approach, according to Darnton, encompassed “the social and cultural history of communication by print,” and it was interdisciplinary in nature and international in scope.5 Book history examines book production and distribution, but, as Darnton made clear, it is most concerned with “communication by print.” Thirty years separated Charvat’s lectures and Darnton’s article, but both men seemed to agree that literature was more interesting than the business of publishing. Since Darnton’s essay first appeared, the book trades in the United States have been the subject of hundreds of studies. Recently, the five-volume series A History of the Book in America has taken its place as the new standard reference in the field of American book history. Book historians have examined our manifold relationship with books in remarkable and revealing ways, but no one seemed to explain why the book trade in America needed Frederick Leypoldt or Publishers’ Weekly. While I was investigating the American book trade, my friend and colleague Richard Cunningham introduced me to Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, 1880–1930 by Thomas Parke Hughes. Hughes used systems theory to explain the development of the electric power grid in Great Britain. Systems theory emerged after the Second World War, primarily in the work of Ludwig von Bertalanffy, a theoretical biologist who developed his theory because he noticed in biology the same problem that Henry Adams noted in history: chains of causation tend to break down as we continue to study a phenomenon.6 Studied in isolation, any phenomenon appears to have and beget a particular chain of causation, but, when examined in context, it becomes increasingly difficult to map cause and effect.

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Hughes distilled the principles of systems theory into one cogent paragraph that illuminated the problems I was finding in the American book trade: Some characteristics of systems are so general that they transcend time and place. A system is constituted of related parts or components. These components are connected by a network or structure, which for the student of systems may be more interesting than the components. The interconnected components of technical systems are often centrally controlled, and usually the limits of the system are established by the extent of this control. Controls are exercised to optimize the system’s performance and to direct the system toward the achievement of goals. The goal of an electric production system, for example, is to transform available energy supply, or input, into desired output. Because the components are related by the network of interconnections, the state, or activity, of one component influences the state, or activity, of other components in the system. The network provides a distinctive configuration for the system. For example, a system can have its components arranged vertically or horizontally.7 I realized that the American book trade was a system, but it lacked any sort of controlling mechanism. It certainly had no central control that could be “exercised to optimize system performance.” I wondered if the book trade actually had any goals. I then began to look for the roots of the American book trade. My approach was a practical application of ideas developed by Hayden White and Michel Foucault. Assuming that vestiges of earlier book trade structures were influencing the American book trade as it developed, I began to follow the American book trade back to its European roots. Then I started to follow the threads forward to America. It was a surprise to discover that the American book trade was not simply an extension of the English trade. The modern book trade in America developed from several points of origin that were geographically, chronologically, and linguistically distinct. The American book trade was not a single coherent enterprise until late in the nineteenth century. Until then, it was a loose network of competing and sometimes incompatible trades. Sometime during the process, I realized that printing was perhaps the earliest example of mass production (I later discovered that Lewis Mumford had arrived at the same conclusion in 1934).8 That complicated the problem. It turned out that I was studying a business that was dealing with all the problems of mass { x ii }

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production within the context of the traditional craft economy that developed in the Middle Ages. Book production was fundamentally different from the production of any other consumer goods. Then I happened on Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., and his remarkable book, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business.9 Chandler and Hughes, it seemed, were working the same intellectual vein. Chandler was showing how the railroads built the commercial structures that were needed to fulfill what Hughes called “systems requirements” in Networks of Power. Furthermore, the railroads that Chandler was describing, like the book trade I was investigating, operated within the rough-and-tumble business world of the loosely connected United States. Perhaps Publishers’ Weekly fulfilled a systems requirement of the book trade. When I started the project, I had intended to write a professional biography of Frederick Leypoldt. Instead, I found that I was trying to explain the context of his work; I had to explain why the American book trade needed someone like Leypoldt. Leypoldt became a turning point in a story with many turning points. He had created a mechanism that made it possible for the book trade in the United States to succeed without a formal regulatory agency. Publishers, printers, and booksellers in the United States still rely on a handful of private companies, most of which were started by Frederick Leypoldt, for all of their trade communication and education. The United States never had a formal trade organization like the German Börsenverein or the Stationers’ Company in England—it had Frederick Leypoldt, Publishers’ Weekly, and then the R. R. Bowker Company. That is what I discovered by following the various threads I found in reference books, scholarly studies, popular accounts of the day (whether the day was 31 April 1884 in New York or 15 March 1493 in Seville), literature both minor and great, quirky websites, and archival material. I went backward in time to find out why an obscure German immigrant named Frederick Leypoldt felt the need to sacrifice his life in order to force a trade journal called Publishers’ Weekly on an unwilling American book trade. I discovered some of the events and forces that created the American book trade, and I discovered the problem that Leypoldt was trying to solve. The story is no longer a biography. It traces a variety of internal and external forces that shaped the book industry as it began in Europe, migrated from Europe to the New World, and evolved into the modern American book trade. I pay particular attention to the historical, social, commercial, and technological forces that created the European book trades and transformed those book trades { x iii }

preface

once they were established in America. Along the way, I have the opportunity to tell the stories of the interesting events and people I discovered. Although the American book trade retains traces of a remarkable array of influences, it is not simply an extension of its European parents. In America, the book trade became a unique, wholly commercial institution.

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Acknowledgments

In the course of my work, I have incurred many debts that I will never be able to repay. Four remarkable women encouraged and helped me. Holly Foy has lived with and tolerated this project for nearly half of our married life (my children, Marion and Jackson, barely remember a time before it began). Elizabeth Jenkins came up to me one day and simply told me, “Well, you just have to finish it.” As the project slowly unfolded, Julia Spicher Kasdorf became a friend who makes me feel like a colleague. Mary Skees has been my editor, adviser, guide, and friend throughout the whole process. She has read every word of this manuscript at least four times and she still insists she is actually having fun. This book began life as a kind of book report for James L. W. West, III. I thank him for his help and guidance. Thanks also to the Institute for the Arts and Humanities at The Pennsylvania State University for their financial support during my research. I want to thank Joshua Brown for his translation of Rudolph Garrigue’s Bericht an die Commission für die Begründung einer deutschen Buchhandlung in den Vereinigten Staaten. I would also like to thank John Mutzeck and Stephen Beckerman for their help with German and Spanish source material, respectively. My thanks to Patrick Alexander, Kendra Boileau, Stephanie Lang, Laura Reed-Morrisson, and everyone else at Penn State Press for their help and support. Thanks also to Nicholas Taylor for his careful reading of the manuscript. Finally, I would like to thank the New York Public Library for permission to quote excerpts from the Richard Rogers Bowker Papers, Manuscripts and Archives Division, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

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Abbreviations

ABTA ALA APC LJ NYPL PTLA PW WTC

American Book Trade Association American Library Association American Publishers’ Circular and Literary Gazette Library Journal New York Public Library Publishers’ Trade List Annual Publishers’ Weekly Weekly Trade Circular

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1 Creating New Worlds

More than any other device, the printed book released people from the domination of the immediate and the local. Doing so, it contributed further to the dissociation of medieval society: print made a greater impression than actual events, and by centering attention on the printed word, people lost that balance between the sensuous and the intellectual, between image and sound, between the concrete and the abstract, which was achieved momentarily by the best minds of the fifteenth century—Michelangelo, Leonardo, Alberti—before it passed out, and was replaced by printed letters alone. To exist was to exist in print: the rest of the world tended gradually to become more shadowy. Learning became book learning and the authority of books was more widely diffused by printing, so that if knowledge had an ampler province so, too, did error. —Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization, 1934

Printing from moveable type changed the shape of the world. The constellation of technologies and processes that Johannes Gutenberg assembled and called the “art and enterprise” of printing became a practical reality sometime before 1450. As the new technology of print spread from Gutenberg’s printing shop in Mainz, Germany, the world seemed to grow larger.1 Printed books opened doorways to distant places and times. Printing then made the world seem smaller; ideas, both new and old, traveled faster and further than ever before. Print eventually insinuated itself into every part of our lives. We read automatically, without even realizing what we are doing. We treat books as a feature of our environment. Print is now so much a part of our lives that we rarely even notice that we live in a print culture. Lewis Mumford, an American historian, literary critic, and philosopher of technology, was among the first to propose the idea that printed books transformed culture. In his pioneering 1934 study Technics and Civilization, Mumford noted that within the space of a single generation, printed books had become the { 1 }

How Books Came to America

locus and the embodiment of authority. “Learning,” Mumford wrote, “became book learning and the authority of books was more widely diffused by printing.” All those printed books, however, were more than just a repository or a conduit for knowledge. According to Mumford, printed books quickly became the mode of knowledge: “To exist was to exist in print.”2 Mumford’s multidisciplinary, humanistic approach to the study of technology helped set the stage for a new kind of scholarship that emerged in the second half of the twentieth century. By the end of the 1950s, books about the history and significance of print culture began appearing, first in Europe and then in America. Five hundred years after Gutenberg printed his famous forty-two-line Bible, it suddenly seemed necessary to understand how print culture worked and how it affected us. Three of those “books about books”—The Coming of the Book, The Gutenberg Galaxy, and The Printing Press as an Agent of Change—formed a foundation for most of our subsequent study of print culture and book history. The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing, 1450–1800 (1958, translated into English in 1976) launched the international discussion of print culture and book history. In their book, the French historians Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin abandon the usual view of books as conduits of culture and knowledge. Instead, they consider books, especially printed books, as manufactured commodities, as products to be bought and sold in an international marketplace. In their view, printed books became an evolutionary force that ultimately transformed human history. Marshall McLuhan’s The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (1962) reached a broader audience, and many of his ideas and phrases have become part of our general consciousness. Every day, people say that “the medium is the message,” or they talk about the world as a “global village,” without realizing that they are quoting McLuhan. In a series of idiosyncratic books, McLuhan expanded on Mumford’s original point. He argued that the technology of printed books inevitably shaped our cognitive experience of the information that books contained and, in turn, transformed the ways we organized our world. Elizabeth Eisenstein focused on the shift from manuscript to print culture in The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Europe (1979). She claimed that printing and the proliferation of printed books fostered the dissemination, standardization, and preservation of knowledge. According to Eisenstein, the more democratic culture of print, which she called an “unacknowledged revolution,” fostered the Protestant Reformation, the Renaissance, and the scientific revolution.

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Creating New Worlds

The pioneering work of scholars like Mumford, Febvre and Martin, McLuhan, and Eisenstein opened a new field of study called “book history” or “the history of the book.” Books have always attracted antiquarian and scholarly interest, but for centuries that interest usually focused on the content of books rather than on the books themselves. Very beautiful or very rare or very important books have always attracted a great deal of attention as objects, but ordinary books—the books that are part of everyday life—did not inspire much interest until the 1970s. Since the middle of the twentieth century, book historians around the world have studied books, especially printed books, as social, economic, and cultural phenomena. That work has popularized the idea that books are more than just containers for words, and that living in a print culture has a noticeable effect on the way we live. We are surrounded by, and affected by, printed books, and magazines, and newspapers, and websites, and advertisements, even if we never read them. While it seems obvious, it is important to note that our print culture only became possible because of the constellation of technical, commercial, and social innovations that we call printing. If we want to understand the social, economic, and cultural significance of the printed book, we need to understand a suite of interrelated ideas: the technology of print production; how print production and the business of making and selling books developed; how printing and the book business interact with and influence each other; and how printing and the book business have shaped the print culture they created. Printing changed our world—it also created new worlds. A century before the publication of Lewis Mumford’s Technics and Civilization, Thomas Carlyle had the philosopher-hero of his 1833 transcendental novel Sartor Resartus declare, “He who first shortened the labor of Copyists by device of Movable Types was disbanding hired armies and cashiering most Kings and Senates, and creating a whole new Democratic world: he had invented the Art of printing.”3 Carlyle’s claim sounds like hyperbole; nevertheless, printing did create two “whole new worlds.” The first was the remarkable new commercial world known by the deceptively homely name “the book trade.” The second “new world” created by the book trade was the even more radical New World of the Americas. The book trade, which we will define as the manufacture and sale of books, periodicals, and other materials printed from moveable type, was unlike any commercial enterprise that preceded it. In the first place, a printed book, journal, or broadsheet is profoundly different from anything created by the sort of

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How Books Came to America

copyist Thomas Carlyle had in mind. A manuscript copy of a book produced by a copyist, or scribe, using a pen or a brush might contain the same words and appear to be identical to a printed copy of the same book manufactured by an early printer using a hand press. Beyond content and appearance, however, the two books are fundamentally different. A copyist or a scribe produces a single book at a time. Moreover, the books that copyists produce by hand are composed a single pen stroke at a time. Thus a manuscript book is built not of words or even letters, but of individually created lines. In a manuscript book, the difference between the collection of lines that becomes a drawing of a rose and the lines that become a sentence that describes the rose is pattern and intent. Each book produced by a copyist is a unique combination of lines. Two copies of the same book produced by the same copyist might be virtually indistinguishable or markedly different, depending on the intent or skill of the copyist, the requirements of the patron, or the circumstances of production. A printed book, on the other hand, is manufactured as a group of identical copies. It is not made of lines; it is composed from type. Each piece of type is a meaningful letter or a symbol. A piece of type is an inflexible, irreducible unit with a standard function and meaning—a lower case e, for example, cannot be created by joining two other letters. Neither can that e be made into some other letter, nor can it be used in place of an o or an a. Type can be combined to create crude images, but no one would confuse a clumsy flower constructed of miscellaneous type with the roses that scribes used to decorate manuscripts. Type is an irreducible part of a system. Individual pieces of type, or sorts, are arranged into lines of text that are justified and then locked into pages or groups of pages. Once printing begins, pages are produced two, four, eight, twelve, sixteen, or more at a time. The difference between manuscript and print production is the difference between traditional craft and the assembly line. A scribe creating a manuscript must proceed one pen stroke at a time. Further, the scribe has to choose and direct every stroke of the pen. Even a scribe making a dozen copies of a book must proceed one pen stroke at a time. A printer builds a quantity of identical books out of standardized, interchangeable parts using a standardized process. Even if a printer wanted to produce a single copy of a book, the book would be an industrial product built exactly as if it were but one copy of an edition of ten thousand. From Gutenberg forward, book production using a press and moveable type has forced printers to adopt standardized manufacturing practices. Standardization makes it necessary to produce many copies of each book or broadsheet in { 4 }

Creating New Worlds

order to justify the labor of setting all those individual pieces of type. Except for the cost of the paper, production expenses are much the same whether a printer makes one copy of a book or three hundred. Printing, thus, created a completely new kind of commerce, based on standardized manufacturing processes and standardized products—what we now call mass production. Mass production means that printed books work differently than manuscript books. A manuscript book is unique. In the course of its useful life, that manuscript book might be read by hundreds of people, but it will follow a single pathway from reader to reader. A printed book is one of many identical copies. Hundreds of readers might encounter hundreds of copies of the printed book simultaneously. Instead of a single pathway, the printed copy of the book exists in a network. One copy of a printed book implies the existence of all the others. As a communication technology, therefore, a printed book has more in common with a cell phone than it does with a manuscript book. Printing from moveable type not only changes the nature of the book, but it also dictates almost every aspect of book production. From start to finish, each component must meet a high standard of uniformity and every process must be carefully planned.4 Type must be manufactured to close tolerances if the individual letters are to fit together into even, printable lines of text. The press must be able to exert a sufficient amount of pressure evenly across the entire surface of the type. The paper must be sufficiently smooth and of uniform thickness to take clear and uniform impressions. Because all those individual pieces of type and sheets of paper would eventually become the orderly, coherent pages of a book, printers had to calculate the number of words per page and estimate the number of pages a particular project would require (casting off ). Before printers began composing the first line of type, they had to determine the arrangement of those pages on the sheets of paper (imposing) so that the printed sheets could be folded correctly and assembled into books. All that planning and calculating are critical; while the books that writers write are infinitely variable products, printed books are uniform products manufactured using standardized materials. The careful planning is important for another related reason: printed books are typically manufactured in stages, and the parts produced at each stage must be assembled into a seamless whole. In the hand-press era, it was exceedingly rare for printers to have enough type on hand to complete a large project. Even with sufficient supplies of type, it would be impractical to set type for an entire book in advance. A large project—Gutenberg’s Bible, for example—had to be manufactured in stages. The text of the Bible fills 1,272 folio pages. Four pages { 5 }

How Books Came to America

were printed on each sheet of paper; thus one copy of the Bible required 318 sheets of paper. If, as most experts now agree, Gutenberg printed 180 copies of his Bible, 135 on paper and 45 on vellum, the entire project required 42,930 sheets of paper and 14,310 sheets of vellum (a stack of paper nearly forty feet high).5 Each page of the Gutenberg Bible required about 2,600 individual pieces of type, and the entire book required more than three million. The only practical solution was to set type for a few sheets at a time, print all the copies of those sheets, then distribute the type (take it all apart and return it to the type cases), and begin the process again for another few sheets. Once all the sheets were printed, the job of assembling the printed sheets into books could begin. The early printing press itself was a remarkably efficient machine while in operation. A wooden hand press of the sort used from 1450 to 1800 could produce hundreds, even thousands, of identical impressions every day. It was difficult to take advantage of that potential, however, because the presses required a great deal of work to support the printing of each sheet. To run a hand press with anything approaching efficiency, a printer needed planning, experience, and two assistants. The work began well before the first impressions were pulled. Setting the type has always been the most time-consuming part of the preparation, but printing on a hand press also required a daily routine of tasks. “Making ready,” as the process was called, properly began with wetting up and weighting the paper the night before and continued the next morning until everyone and everything was in place to begin the day’s work. Once the printing day was finished, everything had to be cleaned before making ready once again for the next day’s work. The printing press introduced a new urgency to book production, and the printing of any book required a significant pre-production investment of work and material. Typesetting, making ready, and cleaning up had to be coordinated with the schedule of printing and charged against the output of the press. A long, uninterrupted printing day was crucial. Anything that interrupted printing wasted both press time and the work of making ready; thus press stoppages of any sort increased the unit cost of each sheet. Printing also required a significant financial investment, and that investment had to be made, or at least guaranteed, before production began, which made printing a speculative enterprise. It also meant that the financial structure of printing was markedly different from that of traditional craft manufacture, including manuscript production. In traditional craft manufacture, products were usually made to order, or at least with the solid knowledge of an established demand for the product, which limited the financial risks to the actual cost of { 6 }

Creating New Worlds

the materials and the labor of the manufacturer. Since goods were made to order, craft manufacture rarely required speculation. The advent of printing created the need for a new, more speculative commercial structure. Printers had to have their materials on hand and sufficient cash or credit to cover printing expenses for an entire project before production could begin, making print production inherently risky. Further, the printer had to estimate the market for each book in advance. There has never been any reliable way to test the market for new publications, or to guarantee that a market would exist. Nevertheless, it was important to print enough copies to satisfy the demand and no more. Books were manufactured in stages because the type that was set to print one sheet of paper had to be taken apart, returned to the trays, and then reset for the next sheet. In order to print a few more copies, the entire manufacturing process had to begin all over again. Overestimating the market was just as bad. Unsold copies of a book, now called remainders, have always been a problem in the book trade because they represent wasted effort and material that must be charged against the profits. Printing created another new problem that is now called “distribution.” Getting the product to the buyer has always been a fundamental problem of commerce. A cobbler making shoes one pair at a time in a particular town might be able to make more shoes than the people of the town need. At that point, the cobbler has to limit production or find a market for that excess. In the traditional craft economy that developed in the Middle Ages, finding a market meant traveling to a market town to sell your wares. For printers, the problems of distribution were much more complex. Printers could, and did, manufacture identical books by the hundreds, but finding buyers for all those books was a daunting task. A book is, on the one hand, a highly standardized product: since every copy is identical, a reader must accept the book exactly as it is printed. On the other hand, each book is a unique commodity: very few customers would be willing to purchase more than one copy of a particular book, although many customers ask for books that recreate the reading experience of some other book (e.g., “I want a book just like that last book I read, only different”). Furthermore, books require customers who are also readers, but only a certain number of readers will be interested in any one particular book. Getting the books to the readers or the readers to the books has been a perennial problem of the book trade. Printing from moveable type was thus a radical departure from traditional craft production, and it created a new model of manufacturing. When Johannes { 7 }

How Books Came to America

Gutenberg pulled the lever of his press the second time and made a second impression, he launched a new manufacturing model that we now call mass production. Printing combined the precision of clock making, the repetitive labor of weaving, the urgency of glassmaking or metal casting, and a new reliance on financial speculation. Like the more familiar mass production of the twentieth century, printing used standardized materials and processes to create a complex yet uniform product. Centuries before the first assembly line, the book trade was creating business strategies to cope with the challenges of mass production. The new commercial world of the book trade soon attracted the attention of civil and religious authorities. King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain promulgated the first law regulating the book trade in 1474, less than twentyfive years after Gutenberg printed his famous Bible. Published six years later in Novisima recopilación de las leyes de Espana (New digest of the laws of Spain), the law exempted printed books from the usual tariffs and duties, declaring the importation of books “advantageous” to the Spanish kingdoms. The statute described books as “instruments for creating learned men” and mandated universal education within the kingdoms and an unrestricted international trade in books. That liberal statute was rescinded eight years later when printed books proved dangerous to both church and state.6 The early Spanish laws launched five centuries of legal and cultural debates about the power and meaning of the press. The laws recognized that the creative power of printing and the book trade extended far beyond commercial and national boundaries; they also suggested that the press could be dangerous and might require regulation. Even as Ferdinand and Isabella enacted the first laws concerning the new commercial world of the book trade, printed books were already becoming instrumental in the creation of another new world that was an actual, physical, geographical place: the New World of the Americas. Christopher Columbus, the man who initiated the European encounter with the Americas, had been born into the manuscript culture of the medieval world—a world without printed books. Nevertheless, the idea of the voyage, the encounter with the New World, and everything that followed depended on and was mediated by the new print culture transforming Europe. The popular accounts of Christopher Columbus have usually represented him as an experienced, practical sailor, but he was also the product of the emerging culture of print. Columbus used arguments he took from printed books to develop and support his claim that he could reach Asia by sailing west across the “Ocean Sea.” Four books in particular formed the core of his personal research

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Creating New Worlds

library: Pliny’s Natural History; Marco Polo’s Travels; the Historia rerum ubique gestarum, an encyclopedia compiled in 1477 by Aeneas Silvio Piccolomini, later Pope Pius II; and Imago Mundi, a geography written by the French theologian and philosopher Pierre d’Ailly.7 Columbus owned and annotated copies of all four books—printing made that possible. Using a combination of practical experience and book learning, Columbus crossed the ocean, sighting land early on the morning of 12 October 1492. When Columbus finally returned to Spain, on 15 March 1493, he dispatched a letter to the Spanish court giving a short account of his voyage. Stephen Planck published a Latin translation of the Columbus letter in Rome in May 1493. Known by its incipit, an abbreviated version of the letter’s first line—Epistola de insulis nuper inventis (Letter from the islands newly discovered)—the first printed edition of that account marked the real beginning of the European encounter with the Americas.8 The voyage itself was a remarkable achievement, but it was the popular firsthand account of the voyage that launched the era of European conquest. The Indies became part of the European conception of the world because the Columbus letter was an early media event. There were three printings of the Latin letter in 1493, and at least nine Latin editions were printed in Rome, Antwerp, Basel, and Paris before 1501.9 The first illustrated edition of the Columbus letter was published in Basel in 1493. Also in 1493, Giuliano Dati published a popular illustrated version of the Columbus letter in Italian verse that generated five editions. The first German translation of the Latin text was printed in Strasbourg in 1497.10 In all, eighteen imprints of the letter were printed between 1493 and 1497.11 We can only guess how many copies of the Columbus letter were printed in each edition and how many people might have read them. As popular as it was, the Columbus letter did little to satisfy the public curiosity about the lands that Columbus called the Indies. That curiosity was more than satisfied by the published accounts of another Italian adventurer, Amerigo Vespucci.12 Vespucci was a Florentine from a prosperous family. He was employed by Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici, who sent him to Seville to represent the Medici as a merchant banker and a ship’s chandler. In 1495, Vespucci took charge of Medici business affairs in Seville. Four years later, in 1499, Vespucci commissioned two ships for himself and joined a transatlantic expedition led by Alonso de Ojeda and Juan de la Cosa, both veterans of earlier Columbian voyages. In May 1501, Vespucci sailed on an official voyage of exploration for Portugal with Gonçalo Coelho. Vespucci and Coelho sailed

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How Books Came to America

southwest to survey the cape of Brazil, which Pedro Álvares Cabral had discovered by accident while sailing for India. Vespucci and his voyages became famous because of two published accounts of his travels that both became international best sellers. The first book was titled Mundus Novus (New World), and the second was called Lettera di Amerigo Vespucci della isole novamente trovate in quattro suoi viaggi (Letter of Amerigo Vespucci on the isles newly found in his four voyages), generally known as The Four Voyages. The books were sensational. They gave readers exciting details of the voyages and depicted the Indies as a new Eden peopled with cheerful cannibals who indulged in shocking sexual practices. For centuries Vespucci’s critics, and even his supporters, have questioned the reliability of the books.13 Bartolomé de las Casas was the first to publicly question Vespucci’s accounts, particularly the claim of four voyages, and to accuse him of usurping the glory that rightfully belonged to Columbus.14 Three hundred years later, in an essay titled English Traits, Ralph Waldo Emerson attacked Vespucci, calling him a “false pickle-dealer” and a “thief.”15 Emerson’s comment permanently tarnished Vespucci’s reputation in the country that bears his name. In the twentieth century, the historian and Columbus biographer Samuel Eliot Morison characterized Vespucci as a “genial faker” and a “liar.”16 The questions of authenticity and reliability hardly mattered to Vespucci’s readers. True or false, authentic or forged, the books were exciting. Even more important, they reconfigured the world. The Indies of Columbus came to be known as the “New World” because of Vespucci’s published account of the “new regions” he had explored. Vespucci wrote that the lands he had seen were something new, something that “we may rightly call a new world. Because our ancestors had no knowledge of them, and it will be a matter wholly new to all those who hear about them.”17 Vespucci’s books were even more popular than the Columbus letter. Within two years of publication, more than twenty editions of Mundus Novus were in print. Latin editions were issued in Vienna, Florence, Venice, Paris, Basel, Cologne, Antwerp, and Rostock; German editions appeared in Augsburg, Basel, and Nuremberg.18 The Columbus letter generated twenty-two editions in four languages, after which the name of Columbus virtually disappeared from the literary market. The Mundus Novus and The Four Voyages, on the other hand, generated sixty editions in six languages over the course of fifteen years.19 In his own era, Vespucci was widely regarded as the “discoverer” of the New World. Vespucci became a celebrity because his books were so popular and

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Creating New Worlds

because he was the first to publish the idea that the Indies were something other than islands off the shores of Asia. Vespucci’s books established the idea that there was a New World on the other side of the ocean, which was seized on by the humanist philosopher Thomas More. More modeled much of his 1516 Utopia on Vespucci’s books. Utopia was another publishing phenomenon, and it kept Vespucci’s descriptions of the New World alive for succeeding generations of philosophers and writers.20 Vespucci and his books illustrate the remarkable power of print that Lewis Mumford described in Technics and Civilization. Vespucci might have been a “false pickle-dealer.” He might have been a “charlatan and a liar.” Vespucci’s books might have been frauds or forgeries. Nevertheless, the New World became an established fact in Vespucci’s books. For most Europeans, the New World existed because it existed in printed books. Mundus Novus established the idea of a New World, and Four Voyages spread that idea throughout Europe. The unknown part of the world had become the Indies because that is what Columbus called it in his published account. The Indies then became the New World through the same mechanism of the book trade. Soon the book trade would transform the New World into “America.” The transformation began when an obscure group of scholars, working in a remote and unlikely place, decided to print a revolutionary new map. Martin Waldseemüller, a professor of geography at the Gymnasium Vosagense at SaintDié in the Lorraine, led a group of scholars that shared an interest in modern geography. The Saint-Dié group originally formed to publish a corrected edition of Ptolemy’s Geography with maps detailing the new discoveries made by Spain and Portugal.21 Instead, they published a book and two maps. One map consisted of a set of gores for a globe that could be cut out and pasted onto a sphere. The other was a large wall map, published as twelve woodblock plates; once assembled, the resulting map was fifty-four inches tall and ninety-six inches wide. Although one thousand copies of the wall map were printed, the entire edition disappeared within a few years of its publication in 1507.22 Although the maps were lost, the book changed the world. Cosmographiae introductio (Introduction to Cosmography) was really two books bound as one: a brief treatise on geographical principles written by Waldseemüller and a new Latin version of Vespucci’s Four Voyages. The entire project was conceived as a synthesis of the ancient and the modern. As Waldseemüller explained in the preface, “Studying, to the best of my ability and with the aid of several persons, the books of Ptolemy from a Greek copy, and adding the relations of the four

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How Books Came to America

voyages of Amerigo Vespucci, I have prepared for the general use of scholars a map of the whole world—like an introduction, so to speak—both in the solid and projected on the plane.”23 The inclusion of Four Voyages might explain why an esoteric text like Introduction to Cosmography required three separate editions in 1507 and a fourth edition in 1508. Even so, the book might have faded into obscurity if not for a single paragraph in the final chapter. There, after providing etymologies for the names of Europe, Africa, and Asia, Waldseemüller wrote: Now, these parts of the earth have been more extensively explored and a fourth part has been discovered by Amerigo Vespucci (as will be set forth in what follows). Inasmuch as both Europe and Asia received their names from women, I see no reason why anyone should justly object to calling this part Amerigo, i.e., the land of Amerigo, or Amerige, after Amerigo, its discoverer, a man of great ability. Its position and the customs of its inhabitants may be clearly understood from the four voyages of Amerigo, which are subjoined. Thus the earth is now known to be divided into four parts.24 In that short passage, the “fourth part” of the world, called the New World by Vespucci, became “America.” Waldseemüller’s proposed name for the “fourth part” of the world became permanent in the print culture of Europe. The story of Waldseemüller, Vespucci, and the naming of America took an odd turn at the beginning of the twentieth century. For nearly four hundred years, Introduction to Cosmography was the only evidence that the Saint-Dié maps had ever existed. Then, in 1901, a Jesuit scholar named Joseph Fischer discovered a complete copy of the lost wall map.25 The rediscovered map presented a picture of the world instantly recognizable to modern viewers, but it would have looked very strange to readers used to the world as Ptolemy had drawn it. The Waldseemüller map was the first to use “America” as a place name, but the real innovation was that it depicted a new landmass between Europe and Asia— two continents linked by a narrow isthmus. Waldseemüller’s map demonstrates that the scholars at Saint-Dié were convinced that Vespucci was right when he declared that the Indies were, in fact, a New World. Based on little more than Vespucci’s description and a stunning intuitive leap, Waldseemüller created a map that depicted the American continents in a second hemisphere. The map was lost before it had a chance to introduce the concept of a world divided into two hemispheres, but the idea became the familiar view of the world fifty years later, when Gerardus Mercator created a series of maps based { 12 }

Creating New Worlds

on the observations of Vespucci’s successors. Although the concept of a world divided into two hemispheres was not immediately obvious in Waldseemüller’s large map projection, it was clearly depicted in the map’s decorative border. Above the main body of that map, between portraits of Ptolemy and Vespucci, Waldseemüller drew two small circular maps. Beside Ptolemy he placed a map of the world more or less as Ptolemy had drawn it—the Old World. The map he placed beside Vespucci would have made little sense to Ptolemy or even to Columbus, but we recognize it as a map of the Western Hemisphere—the New World. Just thirty-two years after the name “America” first appeared in print, a printing press was established in the New World. Well before printing was established in Russia or in Ireland, a press was brought to America to support the missionary efforts of the Spanish. As Philip Luckombe explained in his 1771 History and Art of Printing, “Printing was extended to Africa and America, not indeed at the invitation of the natives, especially of America, but by means of the Europeans; and, particularly, of the Spanish missionaries, who carried it to the latter for their ends.”26 The mission to the Indians of the New World was a crucial condition of Spain’s claim to the New World. When Columbus returned to his home port on 15 March 1493, everything he had seen on his remarkable voyage for Ferdinand and Isabella had previously been deeded to Portugal by papal bull. Ferdinand and Isabella immediately petitioned the newly installed Pope Alexander VI, who issued a series of Bulls of Donation that gave Spain control of everything between the Azores and Japan, including the Americas.27 (Portugal regained some of that territory, including much of Brazil, in the Treaty of Tordesillas.) The papal decree that conveyed title to the New World to Ferdinand and Isabella also made them defenders of the faith and the sponsors of an evangelical mission to the inhabitants of the New World. Isabella initiated a policy designed to integrate commercial development of the Indies with the statutory mission of Christian conversion. The duality of the colonial enterprise shaped Isabella’s instructions to Nicolás de Ovando, the second governor of Española: “Because we desire that the Indians be converted to our Holy Catholic faith and their souls be saved and because this is the greatest benefit that we can desire for them, for this end it is necessary that they be instructed in the articles of our faith, in order that they will come to knowledge of it and you will take much care to see that it is accomplished.”28 She further proposed that any Indians who accepted the Christian religion and submitted to Spanish government would become free vassals, entitled to the same rights and protections as her European subjects.29 { 13 }

How Books Came to America

The religious and civil status of the Indians was not a trivial matter. The Spanish claim to the New World depended on the success of the mission of Christian conversion. The success of Spain’s evangelical mission was also enormously important to the church. Threatened by the rise of humanism, the Protestant Reformation, and a rebellious England, the church needed Spain to remain a powerful Catholic presence in a rapidly expanding world. Printing was an integral part of the Spanish mission in the New World. The missionaries who followed the explorers and conquistadors brought printed materials to help them in their work. In 1512, for example, an early Franciscan mission to the islands of the Caribbean, led by Brother Alonso de Espinar, set sail with a quantity of devotional woodcuts and two thousand ABCs, or abecedarios (printed broadsides used to teach the alphabet), that they had purchased from the Seville printing house of Jacobo Cromberger, one of the first printers to take advantage of the commercial opportunities of the New World.30 The missionaries developed a systematic approach to their task based on the use of printed texts and linguistic study. They distributed Spanish and Latin printed pamphlets and prayer cards to the Indians. They later compiled vocabularies and grammars for the principal Indian languages.31 Soon after the conquest of Tenochtitlán by Hernando Cortés in 1521 secured Spain’s military control of the Indies, Charles V, the grandson of Ferdinand and Isabella, took steps to reorganize the New World mission. He nominated Juan de Zumárraga, a Franciscan prelate, as the first bishop of Mexico. When Bishop Zumárraga arrived in New Spain in December 1528, he took sole charge of the mission. Bishop Zumárraga understood the crucial role the book trade could play in his evangelical mission. He established a recognizable book trade in New Spain almost single-handedly. He imported printed goods for the use of the missionaries, and for a time he acted as Jacobo Cromberger’s agent in New Spain.32 In 1534, Zumárraga appealed to the Council of the Indies for a printing press in Mexico, but his request was denied. In June 1539, Zumárraga and the newly appointed Viceroy Antonio de Mendoza opened direct negotiations with Juan Cromberger, Jacobo’s son and partner, to produce a bilingual catechism in Spanish and Nahuatl, one of the major Mesoamerican languages. As a result of these negotiations between Zumárraga, Mendoza, and Cromberger, printing came to the New World.33 On 12 June 1539, Cromberger signed an agreement that made one of his press operators, Juan Pablos, the first printer in the Americas.34 The contract, which survives, required Juan Pablos to represent the house of Cromberger in America { 14 }

Creating New Worlds

for ten years. Pablos was required to produce three thousand sheets per day when he had work at hand. He was prohibited from engaging in any other business, and he was bound to melt down worn type, a provision meant to discourage competitors. For the duration of the contract, everything Pablos printed would bear the imprint “en casa de Cromberger.”35 Juan Pablos was bound not only by his contract with Cromberger but also by strict civil and ecclesiastical law. No book could be printed in Spain, its territories, or its colonies without the explicit permission of the king or his agent, which in New Spain meant Viceroy Mendoza. Further, it was a capital crime to print, sell, transport, or possess any book, written in any language, that had been prohibited by the Holy Office of the Inquisition. Prohibited books had to be destroyed by fire, and anyone convicted of trafficking in forbidden books forfeited both life and property.36 Since the Inquisition was five thousand miles away, Bishop Zumárraga had absolute authority to dispense ecclesiastical permissions. Pablos and his press had come to Mexico to serve the needs of the church, and the first book he printed was Breve y más compendiosa doctrina christiana en lengua mexicana y castellana (A brief and greatly abridged Christian doctrine in the Mexican and Castilian languages), the bilingual catechism that Zumárraga wanted Cromberger to print in Seville. The catechism, now lost, was followed by the Manual des adultos, issued 13 December 1540. Next came a brief account of the earthquake that hit Guatemala in September 1541. After a gap of two years, Pablos began work in 1543 on his first major publication, an octavo edition of eighty-four leaves: Doctrina breve muy provechosa de las cosas que pertenecen a la fe catholica y a nuestra cristianidad (Very brief and beneficial doctrine of the things that belong to the Catholic faith and our Christianity). Compiled by Bishop Zumárraga, the Doctrina breve was a catechism “in simple style for the average intelligence.”37 Because it survives intact, the Doctrina breve is often celebrated as the first book printed in the New World. If we consider the early Mexican press as a practical enterprise, we have to wonder how it survived. For twenty years, Juan Pablos was the only printer and sole authorized bookseller in the New World. During that time, he printed just thirty-seven titles; we have no record of the number of books he might have sold. In his study of the house of Cromberger, Clive Griffin suggested that the “derisory output” of the Mexican press run by Juan Pablos was a case of too much supply and not enough demand.38 Although the Mexican press operated far below its capacity, it was nevertheless an industrial enterprise. As such, it was always subject to the same pressures of mass production that shaped and challenged the book trade in the more hospitable markets of Europe. { 15 }

How Books Came to America

Scarce materials and harsh restrictions hampered the Mexican press. There was little to print, and the paper needed to print it on had to come from Spain. The Cromberger monopoly eventually ended, but the laws restricting the book trade became much more severe in 1560. Colonial authors and printers needed the Council’s approval before publication. That meant all manuscripts had to be sent to Spain, approved or rejected, and returned before they could be printed in New Spain. The law also made it illegal for Spaniards living in Spanish America to “study, examine, or discuss any matters relating to the colonies.”39 In the forty years that followed the end of the Cromberger monopoly, the printers of New Spain produced, on average, four books each year. The harsh economic and political forces that shaped the earliest American book trade persisted in colonial Spanish America for two centuries. The severe laws that restricted the book trade for most of the colonial period were eventually relaxed, but the press continued to operate under the vigorous scrutiny of church and state, changing only when printing became a tool for the Mexican independence movement toward the end of the eighteenth century.40 The early Mexican press was never very productive, but it established patterns that would be repeated in colonial America, first by English-speaking colonists in Massachusetts and then by German-speaking colonists in Pennsylvania. All of the earliest book trades in America began as ecclesiastical enterprises.41 Those colonial book trades were all subject to a variety of civil and religious restrictions and regulations. They were also subject to the pressures that printing created— the new commercial world of mass production. Printing, and the book trade it engendered, created new worlds. The book trade ushered in a new commercial world based on mass production. Printing also transformed the vast Unknown into the radical new world of America. The speed of the transformation was breathtaking; thirty-eight years after Gutenberg issued his famous Bible, Columbus published his short account of his voyage to the islands “beyond the Ganges.” In the space of fourteen years, the Indies became the New World and then America. The book trade arrived in the Americas with the first ships from Spain, and it might have been the reason those ships set sail in the first place. Less than fifty years after Columbus made landfall in the New World, Juan Pablos was running a printing press in Mexico City. A century after Juan Pablos established the Mexican press, a second colonial book trade began in the New World. When the English began their colonial enterprise in America, they established their own American book trade.

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2 Inventing America in the English Book Trade

Had I plantation of this isle, my lord,— And were the king on’t, what would I do? I’ the commonwealth I would by contraries Execute all things; for no kind of traffic Would I admit; no name of magistrate; Letters should not be known; riches, poverty, And use of service, none; contract, succession, Bourn, bound of land, tilth, vineyard, none; No use of metal, corn, or wine, or oil; No occupation; all men idle, all; And women too, but innocent and pure; No sovereignty;— All things in common nature should produce Without sweat or endeavour: treason, felony, Sword, pike, knife, gun, or need of any engine, Would I not have; but nature should bring forth, Of its own kind, all foison, all abundance, To feed my innocent people. I would with such perfection govern, sir, To excel the golden age. —William Shakespeare, The Tempest, 1623

America began to appear in English books long before English books began to appear in America. The Spanish encounter with the New World became a mediated event, but it began with, and was reinforced by, continuous direct experience. The English encounter with the New World began when the Columbus account, Epistola de insulis nuper inventis, was published in 1493. The English launched their own voyages of exploration, but they did not develop their colonial enterprise until 1607. The English had a full century to read and think and write about the New World before they began to establish colonies in America. Thus, the English experience with America was always mediated through print.

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How Books Came to America

The Columbus letter made it clear that enormous wealth waited on the other side of the ocean. The widespread distribution of the brief printed report made Columbus an international celebrity. It also sparked the commercial imagination of many Europeans, including the enigmatic Italian adventurer known by his English name, John Cabot. While both Spain and Portugal claimed sovereignty in the new lands and enjoyed the support of the church, those claims would prove difficult to enforce. Cabot was the first to challenge the Spanish and Portuguese in the New World. John Cabot was like Columbus in many ways. He was an Italian merchant, possibly Genovese, and an experienced seaman seeking a patron. Soon after the publication of the Columbus letter, Cabot began an unsuccessful attempt to gain the backing of Ferdinand II. Cabot turned next to England and made an appeal to Henry VII.1 On 5 March 1496, Henry issued a letter of patent granting Cabot, his sons, heirs, and deputies “full and free authority, faculty and power to sail to all parts, regions and coasts of the eastern, western and northern sea, under our banners, flags and ensigns.” Cabot was further charged to “find, discover and investigate whatsoever islands, countries, regions or provinces of heathens and infidels, in whatsoever part of the world placed, which before this time were unknown to all Christians.”2 Henry’s 1496 letter of patent ignored the 1493 papal Bull of Donation that gave the new territories to Ferdinand and Isabella, although it was based on the same legal principles. According to the terms of the patent, Cabot and his heirs were empowered to act as agents of the English Crown. Henry VII granted the Cabots the right to “conquer, occupy and possess whatsoever such towns, castles, cities and islands by them thus discovered that they may be able to conquer, occupy and possess,” serving as the king’s “vassals and governors lieutenants and deputies therein, acquiring for us the dominion, title and jurisdiction of the same towns, castles, cities, islands and mainlands so discovered.”3 After a failed attempt in 1496, Cabot successfully crossed the North Atlantic in the spring of 1497. Cabot’s return to Bristol on 6 August 1497 gave England a claim to territory in the New World that Spain and Portugal, quite naturally, contested.4 England was, however, remarkably slow to exploit its claim to the New World. Spain and Portugal had established settlements in their new territories almost immediately, but England allowed its claim to languish for decades. England might have exploited its claim to the New World sooner if Cabot had stumbled on gold or pearls in Newfoundland, but Cabot did not find gold. He did discover the world’s richest fishing grounds, but a limitless supply of { 18 }

America in the English Book Trade

cod does not fire the commercial spirit in quite the same way that gold does. It is also possible that the English might have pursued their claim to the New World if Cabot had written a compelling account of his voyages. Cabot’s voyages for England did make their way into a handful of letters, including one from a Bristol merchant named John Day to Christopher Columbus, but there were no published accounts to capture the imagination as the Vespucci books did.5 In 1509, two years after Martin Waldseemüller proposed the idea of naming the New World for Amerigo Vespucci, Henry VIII became the king of England. Like his father, Henry VIII had an interest in ships, and during his reign, England became a maritime power. Henry VIII is generally identified as the founder of the Royal Navy, but he used his ships to make war against France, not to explore the New World. Further, the pressing need for a lasting alliance with Spain probably outweighed the potential profits of exploration. Two weeks before his coronation, Henry VIII married Catherine of Aragon, daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella. Henry later went to great lengths to dissolve his marriage to Catherine, but he never abandoned his efforts to maintain an alliance with Spain. While Henry VIII ruled, the English claim to the New World languished. The English delay allowed the French and the Dutch ample time to establish their own competing claims to the New World. Jacques Cartier and Giovanni da Verrazzano claimed vast territories in the New World for France. France claimed most of the landmass that we now call North America but did little to exploit the claim. “New France” drew adventurers and missionaries but no successful permanent settlements until Cardinal Richelieu organized the Compagnie des Cent-Associés (Company of One Hundred Associates) in 1627. The Dutch were relative latecomers to the New World, but they moved very quickly once they established a claim. The Dutch founded their first American settlement just five years after Henry Hudson sailed into the Hudson River basin in 1609. For the English, the long delay between first contact and settlement meant that America existed in printed books long before it became a physical destination. America was a real place, but its reality owed almost nothing to direct experience. During the century that followed Cabot’s voyages, America became a symbol or an abstract idea. While explorers, merchants, and missionaries sailed back and forth across the Atlantic, the English were learning about America through generations of printed books. Thomas More was the first Englishman to write an account of the New World. His enigmatic little book published in 1516 had a long Latin title, Libellus vere aureus, nec minus salutaris quam festivus, de optimo rei publicae statu { 19 }

How Books Came to America

deque nova insula Utopia, literally translated A Truly Golden Little Book, No Less Beneficial Than Entertaining, of the Best State of a Republic, and of the New Island Utopia. The book is commonly known by the name of the place it describes, Utopia, a word that has come to mean a perfect but imaginary place. More’s Utopia depicted a perfect world based explicitly on Vespucci’s account in The Four Voyages and on Plato’s Republic. Thomas More directly referred to The Four Voyages when he introduced the main character of Utopia, Raphael Hythloday, a sailor who served under Vespucci. Hythloday, for his part, casts himself as a modern Plato while describing the island of Utopia. In the book, Thomas More presented a world in an imagined state of original innocence. It was a world without magnets, or gunpowder, or printing, or the other discoveries that had created the modern world. The intact Eden that More constructed in Utopia was widely influential: Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis and Voltaire’s Candide certainly owe something to Utopia, as do Anabaptist theology and early Communist thought. Utopia was a social and political critique, but the book also popularized a particular image of the New World. The simple orderliness of life on the island of Utopia, the lush environment, and the indifference to material wealth came directly from Vespucci’s descriptions of America. More’s Utopia was an idealized New World, divorced from any actual experience.6 Although More’s Utopia popularized an image of the New World as an intact Eden, it did not have an immediate effect on English notions of America. More was English, but Utopia was not really an English book: it was written in Latin and published in Flanders by Thierry Martens under the supervision of More’s great friend Erasmus.7 German, French, and Italian translations followed almost immediately. Utopia became better known in England after Ralph Robinson’s English translation was published in 1551. A second edition of Robinson’s translation followed in 1556. As editions of Utopia were proliferating in Europe, a short play written by John Rastell was printed in England. Rastell was Thomas More’s brother-in-law, and his play was called A New Interlude and a Mery, of the Nature of the Four Elements declaring many proper points of natural philosophy, and of diverse strange lands, and of diverse strange effects and causes. Written perhaps as early as 1518, Rastell’s play is best remembered now because it contains the first known use of the word “America” in an English publication. Like his famous brother-in-law, John Rastell was obviously familiar with Vespucci and The Four Voyages. The Four Elements combined the familiar features of the morality play with an extended geography lesson and a discourse on the value of commerce and empire. Two characters, Studious Desire and Experience, attempt to educate Humanity, while Sensual Appetite and Ignorance try to { 20 }

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lure him into sin. Experience has traveled widely and strongly advocates English exploration and colonization, especially in the “newe landys founde .  .  . callyd America.”8 Compared to Utopia, Rastell’s play was an insignificant little exercise. Nevertheless, it demonstrates the way Vespucci’s books shaped sixteenth-century perceptions of the New World. It is unlikely that the play had much effect on English attitudes toward America. It was printed, which was a significant undertaking, but only one undated example of the text has survived. The importance and influence of Robinson’s English translation of Utopia, on the other hand, is easy to assess: it sold well enough to require a second edition. Utopia has remained in print almost continuously since 1551, and its influence has never been in doubt. Soon after the English translation of Utopia appeared, Richard Eden began his career translating into English important works of New World geography, history, and navigation. His translations brought English readers into the wider European discussion of the New World. In 1553, Edward Sutton printed A Treatyse of the Newe India, Eden’s translation of the section of Sebastian Münster’s Universal Cosmographia that discussed the New World. Two years later, William Powell issued Eden’s Decades of the Newe Worlde or West India. That book contained Eden’s translations of five separate works that discussed the New World: the first three “decades,” or sections, of De Orbe Novo (On the New World); Peter Martyr’s history of Spanish exploration and conquest from Columbus to Balboa; a partial account of Magellan’s voyage; the text of the 1493 Bull of Donation; and excerpts from Gonzalo Ovieda’s Natural History of the Indies. In 1561, Richard Jugge printed The Arte of Navigation, Eden’s translation of the closely guarded Spanish guide to navigation written by Martín Cortés in 1545. The Arte of Navigation was invaluable because it enabled English readers to learn the principles of scientific navigation from a book. Eden’s translation meant that anyone in England could become the next Vespucci. Taken together, Eden’s translations gave the English access to most of the intellectual tools they needed to exploit their claim to the New World—but the English were busy fighting the French and the Spanish. First published during the early years of the reign of Elizabeth I, The Arte of Navigation was enormously successful—it was reprinted at least five times between 1561 and 1589. Soon after its publication, England became a serious threat to Spain’s domination of the ocean and the Americas. Elizabeth shared her father’s interest in ships, and she intended to use them to extend England’s power. England became a sea power during the reign of Elizabeth I. The queen lent her support to Martin Frobisher’s attempts to find a Northwest Passage to Cathay beginning in 1576. When Humphrey Gilbert proposed to find the { 21 }

How Books Came to America

route Frobisher had failed to discover, Elizabeth issued him a letter of patent to “discover, finde, searche out, and view such remote, heathen and barbarous lands, countreys and territories not actually possessed of any Christian prince or people.”9 Gilbert never discovered a Northwest Passage, but in 1583 he did establish Newfoundland as the first enduring English settlement in the New World. While Frobisher and Gilbert were looking for a Northwest Passage, Elizabeth issued letters of marque authorizing Francis Drake to disrupt Spanish shipping as he led the first English expedition to circumnavigate the world. Drake began his voyage in 1577 with five ships and 164 men; he also carried several books. Nuno da Silva, the captain and pilot of a Portuguese merchant ship that Drake captured, mentioned the books in the depositions he made to various authorities. Silva testified that Drake “carries three books of navigation, one in French, one in English, and another, the account of Magellan’s voyage, in a language I do not know. . . . He has a map of the world made in Portugal but by whom I do not know and some other maps which he said had been made in England.”10 The English book that Drake had with him might have been an edition of Eden’s Arte of Navigation, but it was probably William Bourne’s 1574 guide to navigation, A Regiment for the Sea, which supplanted Eden’s book. On 4 April 1581, Elizabeth knighted Drake for his service. A few years later, Elizabeth once again authorized Drake to disrupt Spanish shipping. He sacked Santo Domingo and Cartagena, which became the opening salvo of the war that ended with the defeat of the Spanish Armada. When Drake died in 1596, English ship voyages to America were almost commonplace, and yet the English view of the Americas was still based primarily on a tradition that ran from Richard Eden and Thomas More back to published accounts of the New World that followed a pattern established by Amerigo Vespucci in Mundus Novus and the Four Voyages. That lineage is apparent in The Tempest, generally regarded as the last of Shakespeare’s plays. There has always been a lively debate about the sources of Shakespeare’s play, but it is clear that much of The Tempest is based on an idealized vision of the New World that existed only in print. One of the most interesting moments of the play occurs shortly after the king of Naples and his company are shipwrecked in the magical storm that gives the play its title. Once they realize that they are safely back on dry land, Gonzalo describes the commonwealth that he would create on the island where Prospero and Miranda have lived in exile. Gonzalo explains that he would create a society in which, among other things: “Letters should not be known; riches, poverty, / And use of service, none; contract, succession,  / Bourn, bound of land, tilth, { 22 }

America in the English Book Trade

vineyard, none; / No use of metal, corn, or wine, or oil; / No occupation; all men idle, all; / And women too, but innocent and pure” (2.1.151–56). Shakespeare’s Gonzalo borrows his name and his vision of a perfect world directly from Richard Eden’s translation of Gonzalo Ovieda’s 1535 Natural History of the Indies, which appeared in Decades of the Newe Worlde. What makes the passage so interesting is that Shakespeare’s Gonzalo is not describing a society that he has discovered; he is describing the world he would create if he ruled the island. It is an application of More’s Utopia. Gonzalo does not find Utopia in the New World; he wants to bring Utopia to the New World. In Gonzalo’s speech, Utopia is a European idea and the New World is a kind of laboratory, which is an underlying theme of the play. It is more than a little ironic that the people who cause Miranda to exclaim, “O brave new world, that has such people in’t,” are all Europeans. The Tempest appeared as England was embarking on its colonial enterprise in America. Early English colonists imagined that they were bound for a place that closely resembled the island Shakespeare depicted. They pictured a wild, fertile place that was paradoxically both inhabited and deserted, because they could not see the original inhabitants as human beings. William Bradford recorded the attitudes of one group of early settlers before they encountered America. In his manuscript account, Of Plymouth Plantation, Bradford summarized the deliberations of the English Separatists (now known as Pilgrims) as they considered emigrating to the New World: “The place they had thoughts on was some of those vast and unpeopled countries of America, which are frutfull and fitt for habitation, being devoyd of all civill inhabitants, wher ther are only salvage and brutish men, which range up and downe, litle otherwise then ye wild beasts of the same.”11 Bradford was describing people whose idea of America had nothing to do with actual experience—rather, it was based on the same literature of the New World that inspired Shakespeare. At about the same time, Captain John Smith, famous for his exploits in the Virginia colony, published a firsthand account that challenged the notion that America was an uncultivated wasteland inhabited by savages. In A True Relation of Such Occurrences and Accidents of Note as Happened in Virginia, published in 1608, Smith wrote that “the Country is execellent and pleasant, the clime temperate and healthfull, the ground fertill and good” and the inhabitants kindly and generous. Even those Smith characterized as “churlish and trecherous” were clearly well-organized, agricultural folk who cultivated regular crops.12 Direct experience and published accounts like Smith’s would, in time, transform the popular view of America, but the English were reluctant to abandon { 23 }

How Books Came to America

the idea that America was a wasteland peopled by subhuman savages. Robert Cushman, a Pilgrim who had traveled to America and back again in 1621, wrote that America was a “vast and empty chaos.” His legal argument, Reasons and Considerations Touching the Lawfulness of Removing out of England into the Parts of America, declared that the inhabitants had forfeited any claim to the land because “they are not industrious: neither have art, science, skill, or faculty to use either the land, or the commodities of it; but all spoils, rots, and is marred, for want of manuring, gathering, ordering, &c.”13 Cushman had seen the New World, but he had not seen the Eden that Vespucci described. He had seen chaos. The inhabitants Cushman had seen were not the virtuous people that Vespucci admired. Instead, he saw creatures that were little better than “wild beasts.” Like Shakespeare’s Gonzalo, Cushman had found a neglected place that could become Utopia only after a regular program of “manuring, gathering, ordering, &c.” could be imposed. After a century of reading about the New World, the English were thoroughly accustomed to the idea that a place called America waited for them on the other side of the ocean. A few adventurers had actually seen it with their own eyes, but for most people in England, America existed primarily in printed books that made it as real as Italy or Egypt or China or any other faraway place. When the English finally began to establish colonies in America, they imagined that they were going to a place they knew. The English colonists who would settle in the New World brought with them well-established ideas of America—ideas that had first appeared in Vespucci’s Four Voyages, then reappeared in More’s Utopia and Richard Eden’s translations of Sebastian Münster, Peter Martyr, Gonzalo Ovieda, and Martín Cortés, and were then incorporated into Shakespeare’s The Tempest. The now-familiar ideas of America had been fostered and distributed by a well-established book trade, which the English colonists also brought to America. A century in the English book trade had changed America. In 1516, Thomas More had used Vespucci’s descriptions of the New World to construct Utopia. About a century later, Shakespeare used Utopia to construct America. It was a remarkable transition, and it had a lasting effect on the English encounter with the New World. The English who came to America were not looking for Utopia—they believed that they were bringing Utopia with them.

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3 Creating Book Trades in English America

Ye are the light of the world. A citie that is set on an hill cannot be hid. Neither doe men light a candel, and put it vnder a bushel, but on a candlesticke, and it giueth light vnto all that are in the house. Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good workes, and glorifie your Father which is in heauen. —Matthew 5:14–16, Geneva Bible, 1587

From the very beginning, the English colonial enterprise in the Americas was dramatically different from the Spanish enterprise that had preceded it. In the first place, the English encountered a very different New World. The terrain, the climate, and the people of the Atlantic coast of North America had little in common with those of Central and South America. In the second place, the English arrived in America after long familiarity with an idealized version of America, which must have influenced their colonial experience. Finally, and perhaps most important, the English colonial enterprise was a uniquely pluralistic undertaking. English America was, from the beginning, a collection of semi-autonomous settlements. Each colony had its own charter, its own relationship to the Crown, its own culture, and its own book trade. English America began in earnest when James I authorized the Virginia Companies in 1606. Under the peculiar terms of the charter, the colonial enterprise began as two overlapping entities. The London Company controlled the territory from Cape Fear to the Long Island Sound, while the Plymouth Company controlled the region from the Bay of Fundy south to the Chesapeake Bay. Thus, the two Virginia Companies shared jurisdiction in the area between the 34th and 40th parallels. The Jamestown settlement, founded in May 1607, was the first colony established by the Virginia Companies. It was followed a month later by the short-lived Popham Colony, in what is now Maine. As soon as the survival of their settlement seemed assured, the early English colonists began to feel the need for printed books. During the century that { 25 }

How Books Came to America

elapsed between Cabot’s voyage in 1497 and the establishment of the Jamestown settlement in 1607, books had not been a central concern to the few Englishmen who sailed to America—the early adventurers carried with them any books they thought they might need. Permanent settlements, however, created a demand for imported books. In 1619, the Court of the Virginia Company, which was in London, began to purchase religious and agricultural texts for shipment to the Jamestown colonists. The record of the Quarterly Court of Virginia for 30 January 1621 noted the acquisition of books for colonial use. The same session of the court announced the foundation of a free library, the gift of Thomas Bargrave, a colonial minister.1 The Jamestown settlement received books, but it also produced several of its own. Captain John Smith was certainly the most prolific early author in English America. Smith was perhaps the first to promote America as a land of opportunity. In a series of publications that began with A True Relation of Such Occurrences and Accidents of Note as Happened in Virginia (1608), Smith developed the idea that English life could be transplanted to America. In Description of New England (1616), Smith wrote, “Here euery man may be master and owner of his owne labour and land; or the greatest part in a small time. If hee haue nothing but his hands, he may set vp this trade; and by industrie quickly grow rich.”2 Smith continued his promotional campaign in The Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles (1624). Jamestown was the only successful English colony in America for thirteen years. During that time, Henry Hudson explored the American coast from Halifax to the Chesapeake. The Dutch used Hudson’s voyage to claim a territory that they called New Netherlands, which stretched from the Maryland peninsula to Rhode Island. The second successful English settlement began in 1620, when a group of English Separatists (the Pilgrims) established the Plymouth Colony. Plymouth was six hundred miles north of Jamestown, just beyond the territory claimed by the Dutch. The Plymouth settlers generated an extensive literature that evolved into a lasting American mythology in the nineteenth century. The first book to come from the Plymouth Colony was A Relation or Journal of the Beginning and Proceedings of the English Plantation Settled at Plimoth in New England, published in London in 1622. Widely known as Mourt’s Relation, the book collected accounts of the Mayflower voyage and the first years of the colony written by Edward Winslow, William Bradford, and others. The book concluded with Robert Cushman’s legal defense of the colony, based in large part on the idea that America was a “vast and empty chaos” waiting to be redeemed by orderly cultivation. { 26 }

Creating Book Trades

The story of the Pilgrims developed into a national myth that is more familiar to most Americans than the story of the Jamestown settlement. The myth focuses on hard work and the quest for religious freedom, very different themes than Robert Cushman’s theme of transforming chaos into order. Generations of American schoolchildren memorized Felicia Hemans’s poem “The Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers in New England,” which begins, “The breaking waves dashed high / On a stern and rock-bound coast,” and concludes, “What sought they thus afar? / Bright jewels from the mine? / The wealth of seas, the spoils of war? / They sought a faith’s pure shrine. / Ay, call it holy ground, / The soil which first they trod: / They have left un-stained what there they found, / Freedom to worship God.”3 Presumably, the “soil which first they trod” was, henceforth, well manured. Although the Pilgrims became an enduring American myth, the Plymouth Colony was soon overshadowed and later subsumed by the Massachusetts Bay Colony, chartered in March 1629 by Charles I. The members of the Massachusetts Bay Company were Puritans who intended to establish a New Canaan in America, but they were not separatists like the Pilgrims. As John Winthrop described the enterprise, the colony would be a godly commonwealth, a Christian example to the whole world—“a city upon a hill.”4 The colonists meant to be godly themselves, and they intended to stand as an example to the people they would encounter in the New World. The Massachusetts Bay Company charter employed the same fundamental legal argument that had been used to justify every previous colonial enterprise— that Christian monarchs have a right and a duty to claim and subdue any territory inhabited by non-Christians. The company was charged to “win and incite the natives of the country to the knowledge and obedience of the only true God and Savior of mankind, and the Christian faith, which in Our royal intention, and the adventurers free profession, is the principal end of this plantation.”5 The terms of the charter directed the governor of the company or his representatives to “assemble and hold and keep a Court or Assembly of themselves, for the better ordering and directing of their affairs.” In an extremely important oversight, the charter was not specific about the location of the assembly that it authorized. That omission led to a profound change in the English colonial enterprise. It allowed the leaders of the company to establish their “Court or Assembly” in their colony, not in London. By establishing the seat of their government in the New World, they could escape royal oversight and establish a semi-autonomous state. The signatories of the Cambridge Agreement declared on 26 August 1629 that “the whole Government, together with the patent for the said Plantation, be first, by an order of Court, legally transferred and established to remain with us and others which shall inhabit upon the said Plantation.”6 { 27 }

How Books Came to America

The leaders of the company fully intended to re-create England in America. The Massachusetts Bay Colony was not going to be a commercial outpost like the Jamestown settlement. Neither was it conceived as a separatist enclave like  the Plymouth Colony. Captain John Smith had claimed that English life could be transplanted to America, and the leaders of the company were planning to do just that. In order to realize their plans for New England, the leaders of the Massachusetts Bay Company organized a rapid, large-scale immigration. The first contingent of four hundred colonists sailed in April 1629, less than a month after Charles I chartered the colony. A second contingent of about seven hundred, including John Winthrop, arrived the following spring. By 1634, the Massachusetts Bay Colony had absorbed nearly ten thousand immigrants. Anticipating the rapid immigration, members of the company expanded Plymouth and Salem and, in 1630, organized the towns of Boston, Dorchester, Newtowne, Watertown, and Weymouth. The rapid settlement of Massachusetts furthered the aims of the Puritan colonists, who intended to make the colony self-sustaining and independent. The Puritan emphasis on reading and preaching directly from the Scriptures made schools essential to the success of the colony. Thomas Dudley chose Newtowne as the site of the New College, which was established in 1636 to train ministers to serve the congregations of the colony. Two years later, New College was renamed to honor John Harvard, a clergyman who bequeathed half of his estate and his entire library to the college. In 1638, Newtowne was renamed Cambridge to reflect its new role as a college town. The Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Company held books in high regard. In his 1810 History of Printing in the United States, Isaiah Thomas proudly announced that “among the first settlers of New England were not only pious but educated men.” Simon Bradstreet, Thomas Leverett, John Cotton, William Pynchon, and John Winthrop had all studied at Cambridge University. It was, however, their belief in the necessity of approaching God through the written Scripture—the Augustinian dictum tolle et lege (take and read)—that moved them to establish grammar schools and to found Harvard College.7 Because the Puritans espoused a print-culture religion, they needed printed books. Books could be imported from England, but the licensing laws that restricted English publishing houses made it difficult to obtain dissenting theological works while Charles I ruled England. Books that had been outlawed in England could be obtained from Holland or Germany, but that was a troublesome arrangement. The Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony arrived at the same { 28 }

Creating Book Trades

solution that the Spanish Catholics in Mexico had a century earlier. Rather than importing the books they needed, they would establish a press and print the books in America. The first press was the idea of the Reverend Joseph Glover. Glover was a wealthy Puritan minister who used his pulpit in England to advocate for schools in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. He also canvassed for funds to both support those schools and establish a printing press in Massachusetts. Although he died during the voyage to America, Glover intended to establish himself, his family, and his press in New England. When he sailed for the New World in 1638, he brought his wife and six children, tools and equipment for constructing an iron foundry, several barrels of books, and a printing press that he had purchased for twenty pounds. Glover had also spent another sixty pounds on paper, type, and all the various bits and pieces needed to run a press.8 Like Bishop Zumárraga before him, Glover had been compelled to transport an entire printing shop to the New World. Glover also needed someone to operate the press. He could have hired a printer, but instead he entered into a contract with a locksmith named Stephen Day, the man who traditionally receives credit for being the first printer in America.9 On 7 June 1638, Glover signed a contract of indenture agreeing to pay Day one hundred pounds for two years of service. Glover also agreed to advance the cost of passage for “Day and Rebecca, his wife, and of Matthew and Stephan Day their Children, and of William Bord­man and three men servants.”10 The contract does not specify what services Glover expected Day, his family, or his servants to perform. The first indication that Day was engaged as a printer in America was a journal entry by Governor John Winthrop: “1639 Mo. 1 [March]. A printing house was begun at Cambridge by one Daye, at the charge of Mr. Glover, who died on the seas hitherward.”11 Glover’s death made the future of the press uncertain. Shortly before embarking, Glover made a will leaving all his property, in both New and Old England, to his wife, Elizabeth, during her lifetime. Upon her death, the estate was to be divided between his sons, except for sizable individual bequests to his three daughters.12 Glover’s will reflected the Puritan aversion to the English custom of entailed estates that passed intact to the eldest son; instead, Puritans preferred what they regarded as the biblical laws of descent, which allowed them to provide for all of their dependents.13 According to the terms of the will, the press with all of its paraphernalia arrived in the colony as the custodial property of Elizabeth Glover and the future property of her children.14 Elizabeth Glover had clear title to the press when she landed in America in September 1638, and there is some evidence to suggest that she put the press into { 29 }

How Books Came to America

service immediately after she arrived. In a letter to a friend in Bermuda dated 10 October 1638, the Reverend Hugh Peter mentions the existence of a printing shop in Cambridge and suggests that he is at work on a manuscript for the press.15 The first issue of the press was a 1639 broadside printing of The Oath of a Free-man, a colonial oath of allegiance that had been drafted by the Pilgrims of the Plymouth Colony. Unfortunately, there are no surviving examples of that document—or of the second publication, An Almanack for the Year 1639. In 1640, the press issued The Whole Book of Psalms, a volume of 148 leaves in quarto popularly known as The Bay Psalm Book, which is generally regarded as the first book printed in English America. Although Stephen Day traditionally receives the credit for these early American publications, there is no conclusive evidence that he printed any of them. Isaiah Thomas pointed out that Day’s name never appeared on any imprint. Thomas, a printer and the first historian of American printing, was apparently ambivalent about Day. As a historian, he was obligated to recognize Day as the first American printer; as a printer, he was forced to admit that Day was not particularly good at his craft.16 Day probably did operate Elizabeth Glover’s press, but it is important to remember that he was working for her. Glover owned Day’s indentures and, according to Frances Hamill, she also assumed the publishing costs of The Bay Psalm Book.17 If Elizabeth Glover owned the press and financed the printing, she ought to be recognized as the first publisher in English America. In June 1641, Elizabeth Glover married Henry Dunster, the president of Harvard College. Dunster assumed control of the press when he took charge of his new wife’s property. When Elizabeth Glover died in 1643, Dunster assumed ownership of her entire estate, including the press. A decade later, her dispossessed children initiated a series of successful suits against Dunster for restitution of their inheritance, including the value of the press. Although the children prevailed in court, Dunster simply ignored the court ruling and retained most of the value of the estate and possession of the press.18 While some of the details of what is now called the Cambridge press remain confused, the general outline is clear enough—one hundred years after Bishop Zumárraga brought Juan Pablos and a printing press to Mexico City, Joseph and Elizabeth Glover laid the groundwork for a domestic book trade in the town of Cambridge to foster the religious education of the Massachusetts Bay colonists. Rev. Glover’s educational goals for that first press were never fully realized, and the press, which subsequently became the property of Henry Dunster and then of Harvard College, languished in relative disuse.19 { 30 }

Creating Book Trades

The Cambridge press never fulfilled its mission of religious education for either the English colonists or the Indians. The early Puritan colonists made little effort to convert the people they encountered, although the charter of the Massachusetts Bay Colony required that they “win and incite the natives of the country to the knowledge and obedience of the only true God and Savior of mankind, and the Christian faith.” There was no organized mission to the Indians in Massachusetts until the 1640s, when John Eliot began the work in earnest. Eliot started the project, but language and literacy were enormous obstacles to Puritan evangelism, as they had been for the Spanish brothers a century earlier. Eliot assumed that he would need printed texts in order to bring Calvinism to the Indians, and so, in 1646, he began to construct grammars of the Indian languages and to translate the Scriptures into those languages.20 Fourteen years later, in 1660, Eliot established a second press in Cambridge to print the Bible in Algonquin. Marmaduke Johnson, a trained printer, was brought to the colony to undertake the publication of the Eliot Indian Bible.21 Producing the book consumed more than three hundred reams of imported paper and three years of labor, but most of that paper and labor was simply wasted. Nearly the entire print run was destroyed during the 1675 conflict known as King Philip’s War, when the very people Eliot wanted to convert burned the remaining stockpile of unbound sheets. Most of the copies that were actually in use were destroyed when the colonists razed the “Praying Towns” inhabited by Christian Indians.22 Between them, the two Cambridge presses were even less productive than the first Mexican press had been a century earlier. Without the help of a major patron like Bishop Zumárraga, neither press generated enough income to support its printer. Henry Dunster had done nothing with the press he “inherited” from Elizabeth Glover. In 1649, the self-taught printer Samuel Green began operating the original Glover press in a desultory fashion. Marmaduke Johnson, once he had finished with the Indian Bible, had little work for his “Indian” press. With no domestic copy to print, Green and Johnson inaugurated that most characteristically American publishing venture—reprinting. They selected popular works imported from London and reproduced them for sale in Massachusetts. Reprinting English books eliminated both the financial risks of publishing new work and the cost of shipping. Over the years, Johnson and Green fought with each other, became partners, dissolved their partnership, and finally turned to contract printing for Boston’s first booksellers, Hezekiah Usher, Joseph Farnum, John Ratcliff, William Avery, and other merchants.23 { 31 }

How Books Came to America

Johnson and Green became the first English colonists to make a living from book production, and their success attracted the attention of the authorities. Although the leaders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony wanted books in order to maintain civic order and to promote religious doctrine, they did not intend to allow a free press. They understood the dangers of the press—their own Nonconformity was, after all, built on the illicit use of the tightly restricted English and European press. In England, the Crown had enacted the Licensing Act of 1662 specifically to suppress publication of Nonconformist tracts. Naturally, the Puritans used the same tactics to protect their own political, religious, and commercial position in the colony. The magistrates investigated Marmaduke Johnson regularly and admonished him several times. Most of Johnson’s legal trouble was caused by his willingness to ignore the laws restricting his press, but he was also cited for unseemly behavior toward Samuel Green’s daughter. Like their counterparts in London, the Cambridge printers had to submit to the law, but they also had to make a living. In the conflict between legal restrictions and economic pressures, then as now, economic pressures generally prevailed. Marmaduke Johnson was not a particularly important printer. None of the books he printed, including the Indian Bible, ever achieved lasting fame or influence except as historical curiosities. Nevertheless, he achieved one lasting victory. Just months before he died in December 1674, he secured permission to establish a press in Boston, which broke the de facto Cambridge monopoly. Of course, Boston would have had a press with or without Johnson, but the proliferation of domestic book production had to start somewhere. Within a few years, Boston would become the center of the book trade in Massachusetts, but it would soon have competition. An aggressively commercial book trade would develop in Philadelphia, in the new colony of Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania was the personal property of William Penn, who intended to make it a haven for his fellow Quakers and other victims of religious persecution. Penn’s “Holy Experiment” was a systematic attempt to create a Utopia in the New World. He outlined his vision for the colony in the 1682 Frame of Government of Pennsylvania, which established religious freedom, trial by jury, and freedom of the press. William Penn was a religious and political visionary, and his vision included a book trade. When Penn first visited his colony, he brought with him a printer’s apprentice named William Bradford. Bradford subsequently returned to London, negotiated his release from his master, Andrew Sowle, and returned to Pennsylvania in 1685 to establish his own business. Like every American printer before him, Bradford had to import an entire printing shop. He also brought a commission { 32 }

Creating Book Trades

from George Fox to print books for the Religious Society of Friends in Pennsylvania and for export to the other colonies. Bradford’s career paralleled that of his predecessors; he had come to America to print books that supported religious education. To the consternation of Pennsylvania’s Quakers, however, Bradford was more interested in the commercial potential of his commission. Bradford began his American career by printing the Kalendarium Pennsilvaniense; or, America’s Messinger: Being an Almanack for the Year of Grace, 1686. Written by Samuel Atkins, the book was an entirely commercial venture. The choice suggested that Bradford never intended to confine himself to Society of Friends business. To make the matter perfectly clear, Bradford included a short notice in the book: “I have brought that great Art and Mystery of Printing into this part of America, believing it may be of great service to you in several respects, hoping to find encouragement, not only in this Almanack, but what else I shall enter upon for the use and service of the Inhabitants of these Parts.” Bradford then apologized for the crudeness of the pamphlet and finished with this remarkable sentence: “And for the ease of Clarks and Scriviners, &c. I propose to print blank Bills, Bonds, letters of Attourney, Indentures, Warrants, &c. and what else presents itself, wherein I shall be ready to serve you; and remain your Friend.”24 The Philadelphia Friends resented Bradford’s commercialism and his defiant declaration that he would print whatever he chose. They did their best to control him. Like the Puritans in Massachusetts, the Friends were well acquainted with the political repression achieved by restricting the press. Likewise, they had long experience with clandestine publishing as a means of political resistance and, their commitment to religious tolerance notwithstanding, they would never allow a free press. The Provincial Council exercised its own version of England’s Licensing Act to bring Bradford to heel.25 Like his predecessors in Mexico and Massachusetts, William Bradford ran a subsidized press. His livelihood depended on a stream of work for the Society of Friends and the colonial board of governors. At the same time, he was the first genuinely commercial printer in English America, by his own declaration and in actual practice. His entire career in Pennsylvania, and later in New York, was a balancing act. He needed to make his press pay, which meant that he had to print commercial work, but he could not afford to alienate the authorities too much. Bradford was also part of a related business enterprise—the construction of a paper mill near Germantown, Pennsylvania. The high cost and the uncertainty of importing paper from Europe was the most vexing problem of colonial print production. In 1690, Bradford became a member of the syndicate, led by Samuel { 33 }

How Books Came to America

Carpenter and William Rittenhouse, that built a paper mill. Most likely, Bradford became involved to guarantee his supply of paper. The domestic production of paper was certainly welcome, but production could not keep pace with demand, and the quality of the paper was sometimes poor. In 1693, Bradford was appointed royal printer for the Province of New York.26 Control over two printing plants gave Bradford a measure of independence, but his ventures remained makeshift, colonial, and economically unstable. In the end, Bradford was not able to abide by the promise he made to print “what else presents itself,” but that principle became a goal for colonial printers. The dream of a free and economically viable colonial press never was fully realized, but an edgy compromise did emerge. It fell to a young printer from Boston to make printing in the colonies a profitable venture.27 When Benjamin Franklin opened his Philadelphia printing shop in 1728, most of the books, pamphlets, and periodicals sold in the colonies were still produced in England. Domestic book production remained very low; before 1750, America’s printers issued fewer than two hundred titles per year.28 Franklin made his printing shop profitable by limiting his book production and focusing on projects with little capital risk. He established a viable business as a “jobber,” a printer who produces the sort of forms, notices, and advertisements that Bradford solicited in his 1686 almanac. For most of his printing career, Franklin combined job work with more regular newspaper work, creating a model that was emulated by American printers for nearly a century. In some respects, Franklin’s diversified business followed the pattern established by William Bradford. Like Bradford, Franklin forged partnerships with his suppliers and even with his competitors. Unlike Bradford, however, Franklin launched his printing business without the support or the permission of any church or colonial government. As an unlicensed, independent entrepreneur, he had to forgo the institutional support that sustained official printers, but he also avoided most of the legal troubles that plagued Bradford. William Bradford had declared himself free to print whatever he liked. Benjamin Franklin made no such declaration, but he worked in comparative freedom, printing whatever he thought would bring him a profit. The freedom Franklin enjoyed was a consequence of his willingness to concentrate on small projects and to operate without official sanction. Regulating a single, official printer like Bradford had been fairly simple, but overseeing the new unofficial book trade was more difficult. As more printers set up shop, regulation became even more complicated. Franklin himself was responsible for much of the early growth of the print industry in the colonies. Through partnerships with a succession of apprentices, { 34 }

Creating Book Trades

printers, papermakers, typographers, and retailers, Franklin extended his influence over the domestic book trade. Beginning in 1731, Franklin established a series of partnerships with the journeymen he trained in Philadelphia. As his journeymen were ready to establish shops of their own, Franklin would set them up in distant markets. Franklin sent Thomas Whitmarsh to Charleston, South Carolina, in 1731 and financed James Parker’s move to New York in 1742.29 For a short time, most colonial printers had been trained by Franklin or were imitating his methods. Intentionally or not, Franklin was constructing a syndicate that regulated competition within the book trade by providing a career path for his apprentices. Printers train apprentices because it requires a group of skilled workers to run a press efficiently. As the apprentices learn their trade, they become journeymen, and they generally demand more money or leave to start competing businesses. Franklin apparently realized that it was better to form partnerships with his journeymen and help them establish new markets than to compete against them for a share of the existing market. We could think of Franklin’s syndicate as the first widespread media network in America. Franklin did not invent the idea of the book trade syndicate. Since the days of Gutenberg, printers had relied on informal syndicates to distribute their risks, broaden their commercial influence, and regulate competition. Syndicates spread printing throughout Europe and the Americas—some created by formal contract and some by ad hoc agreement. The Mexican press that Juan Pablos established for the house of Cromberger could be viewed as part of a syndicate that stretched from Mexico, through Seville, to the printing shops of Nuremburg, where the Crombergers started.30 Printing syndicates, which could be temporary or permanent, introduced a measure of cooperation into a competitive business. Franklin’s syndicate was part of a larger pattern of proliferation and distribution of book trades in the English colonies. Franklin’s pragmatic approach to the book trade took root in Philadelphia and spread through his network. His old competitor William Bradford had established a more traditional enterprise, based on the practices of the English book trade, in Philadelphia and New York. The Boston book trade became increasingly commercial, but it remained a strictly controlled enterprise. And in Virginia, the book trade encountered powerful resistance. Printing and public education were famously unwelcome in Virginia. In his report to the lords of the committee for the colonies, dated 1671, William Berkeley, the governor of the Virginia Colony, was blunt: “Thank God we have not free schools nor printing; and I hope we shall not have these hundred years. For learning has brought disobedience and heresy, and sects into the world; and { 35 }

How Books Came to America

printing has divulged them and libels against the government. God keep us from both.”31 In 1682, John Buckner imported both a press and a printer to run it. Soon after, his printer, William Nuthead, commenced publication of the laws enacted by the House of Burgesses. Berkeley’s successor, Thomas Culpeper, reacted immediately, ordering Nuthead and Buckner to cease production on the grounds that the press had no license. A year later, Berkeley got his wish, and printing was officially prohibited in Virginia from 1683 until 1730.32 Nuthead then removed himself to the town of St. Mary’s on the Maryland peninsula, where he continued printing almanacs and government documents until his death in 1695.33 The severe restrictions in Virginia were an exception to the rule, and American book trades grew with the population. When Joseph and Elizabeth Glover had set sail for Massachusetts in 1638, there were fewer than twenty thousand Europeans living in English America. By the time William Bradford established his New York printing house in 1693, the population had grown to more than two hundred thousand. By 1745, more than a million people would be living in the towns and cities scattered along a thousand miles of the North American coastline.34 In that same time, the number of printing firms would rise from one to twenty, and the annual rate of production in all of colonial America would rise from two to nearly two hundred titles.35 Not all the Europeans living in English America spoke English. For example, there was a growing German-speaking community in Pennsylvania that had come in response to William Penn’s invitation. Most of those first Germanspeaking settlers were Quakers and Mennonites, and they were soon followed by a variety of Anabaptists and Pietists seeking refuge from religious persecution. Most of the early German settlers in Pennsylvania intended to live in separate, German-speaking religious communities. They had their own customs, their own language, and they needed their own book trade.

{ 36 }

4 Creating German Books in the New World

So geh hin und iß dein Brot mit Freuden, trink deinen Wein mit gutem Mut; denn dies dein Tun hat Gott schon längst gefallen. Laß deine Kleider immer weiß sein und laß deinem Haupte Salbe nicht mangeln. Genieße das Leben mit deinem Weibe, das du liebhast, solange du das eitle Leben hast, das dir Gott unter der Sonne gegeben hat; denn das ist dein Teil am Leben und bei deiner Mühe, mit der du dich mühst unter der Sonne. Alles, was dir vor die Hände kommt, es zu tun mit deiner Kraft, das tu; denn bei den Toten, zu denen du fährst, gibt es weder Tun noch Denken, weder Erkenntnis noch Weisheit. Go, eat your bread with enjoyment, and drink your wine with a merry heart; for God has long ago approved what you do. Let your garments always be white; do not let oil be lacking on your head. Enjoy life with the wife whom you love, all the days of your vain life that are given you under the sun, because that is your portion in life in your toil at which you labor under the sun. Whatever your hand finds to do, do with your might; for there is no work or thought or knowledge or wisdom in the grave, to which you are going. —Ecclesiastes 9:7–10, Luther Bible, 1534 (my translation)

Although Germans had been involved directly or indirectly in the colonial enterprise since the days of Columbus, German-speaking settlements in the New World began comparatively late. In the 1550s, German miners and smelters had been recruited to supervise work in the Spanish colonies, and in the early 1600s a number of German craftsmen settled in Jamestown, Virginia. There was, however, no German-speaking settlement in America until 1683. The Germantown settlement in Pennsylvania, founded that year, marked the beginning of a remarkable migration that would last until the beginning of the twentieth century and radically alter the course of American social, political, and commercial history.1 { 37 }

How Books Came to America

Long before the first German-speaking settlement was established in Pennsylvania, however, the Germans and their book trade played a prominent role in shaping the European colonial enterprise in the New World. Columbus developed his scheme of sailing west to Asia using books produced by German printers. His copy of Pierre d’Ailly’s Imago mundi (1477–83) had been printed in Leuven by Johannes of Westphalia. Another of the books that Columbus used, Piccolomini’s Historia rerum ubique gestarum (1477), was printed in Venice by two German printers, Johannes of Cologne and Johannes Manthen. Germans dominated printing during the first fifty years of the European book trade. Even if they did not work in one of the many German states, most early European printers were German. Those who were not Germans themselves had learned their craft from a German printer, or from a printer who had been trained by Germans. Thus German printers spread the “art and enterprise” of printing from movable type throughout Europe.2 They established the network of print culture in the decades before Europeans began to colonize the New World. Although the book trade began in Mainz and Germans dominated the printing industry, there was no distinctly German book trade. Of course, there was no Germany in the modern sense of the term, or even in the same sense that there was an England or a France. Germany did not become a unified nation until 1871, and there is still some resistance to the idea that there is a German national identity. Before the nineteenth century, “German” and “Germany” were usually used to refer to one or more of the following: a shared language and culture; the territory east of the Rhine and north of the Alps, bordered on the west by the Vistula River; or the people who lived there. For centuries, the Holy Roman Empire imposed some unity on the region, but the empire was really a shifting collection of small states. Even if there had been a clearly defined Germany, a distinctly German book trade would have to wait until printers began to produce a significant number of books in German, since the book trade was still linguistically international. Before 1500, Latin was the dominant language of print culture in the Holy Roman Empire and throughout Europe. Vernacular printing—printing books in the languages that were in everyday use—did not become widespread until the first half of the sixteenth century. The ubiquity of Latin had profound consequences for the early development of the book industry. Because Latin tended to efface national and linguistic boundaries, it eased and thus accelerated the spread of printing. The book industry developed as an international enterprise. Despite linguistic internationalism, Germans still dominated the industry. According to Febvre and Martin in The Coming of the Book, more than half of { 38 }

German Books in the New World

the printers working in Lyon at the beginning of the sixteenth century were Germans.3 The number of Germans at work in Lyon was significant because the French city was then the commercial center of the European book industry and the site of the first international book fairs. Twice a year, the fair at Lyon became the primary distribution center of the European book trade. For the rest of the year, Lyon was a major center for book production, particularly for scientific publications.4 The German book trade, when it began to emerge as a distinct institution, took keen interest in the Spanish and Portuguese voyages. German printers issued three editions of the Columbus letter before 1500, including one of the earliest vernacular editions. Vespucci’s accounts of the New World were even more popular. German presses issued twenty-four separate editions of Mundus Novus and Four Voyages between 1504 and 1508, with about half of them printed in German. Between 1493 and 1526, German printers were responsible for nearly half of the published accounts of exploration, including twenty-six vernacular editions.5 German interest in the New World was not confined to the accounts of adventurers who had traveled there. Estimates vary, but German printers produced at least four hundred books about America between 1493 and 1618.6 Most of those German books about America would have been sold at the book fair in Frankfurt, which replaced Lyon as the commercial center of the European book trade during the sixteenth century. Frankfurt had become an important market city of the Holy Roman Empire long before Gutenberg began operating the first printing press in nearby Mainz. In 1240, Emperor Friedrich II granted an imperial privilege protecting visitors to the Messe Frankfurt (Frankfurt Trade Fair), and in 1372 Frankfurt became a Reichsstadt, a free imperial city administered by a town council that was answerable only to the emperor. Book-trade fairs became a part of the Messe Frankfurt in 1478 and were well established by 1530, when the first printing press began operation in the city.7 A variety of practices that developed at the Frankfurt fair gave a structure to the European book trade. The custom of bartering printed sheets predated the German fair, but it became a carefully structured practice in Frankfurt. The system was simple enough: instead of buying books to take back to their retail shops, book dealers traded their stock for the stock of another dealer. The practice had two principal virtues. First, it helped book dealers overcome the problems of market saturation by widening the retail distribution of a press run. Second, it reduced capital outlay, whether in cash or in bills of exchange.8 The main problem with the system was that book dealers were reluctant to barter their most popular books, and so the practice became a way to dispose of “remainders” (i.e., books that were not selling). { 39 }

How Books Came to America

Because Frankfurt was a free imperial city, the town council had broad powers to regulate the trade fair, which made it the de facto regulating body of the book trade. It was in that capacity that the Frankfurt town council created copyright 120 years before the famous Statute of Anne. Bookmen who wished to trade at the Frankfurt fair needed a license from the town council. In 1588, the council issued a series of ordinances that granted printers clear rights to their copy. Under the council’s rules, printers retained copyright even if the reprinter secured a legal privilege to issue the book.9 The council was able to enforce its rules and arbitrate conflicts between printers because it controlled access to the fair: anyone who violated the rules would be excluded from the next fair. The comprehensive trade catalog was another innovation of the Frankfurt book fair. Early in the 1540s, printers began to issue catalogs of the new books they were offering at the fair, which proved a boon to legitimate dealers. They were also very useful to less scrupulous individuals, however, who used the catalogs to guide their reprinting schemes. In 1590, Peter Schmidt took the first step toward eliminating the unauthorized use of the trade catalogs when he began publishing a comprehensive catalog of the books offered for sale at the Messe Frankfurt. The Frankfurt town council assumed responsibility for the Messe catalogs a few years later.10 The Frankfurt town council used the catalogs as part of their overall supervision of the book fair. For example, the catalogs were an effective mechanism to forestall copyright disputes. At the close of each fair, vendors were required to submit lists of books they intended to issue for sale in the coming year. If two or more printers listed the same title, the Bürgermeister had the power to negotiate an arrangement between the principals. No book could be listed in the catalog without the consent of the council, which gave them extraordinary power over the book industry.11 The catalogs of the semiannual Frankfurt book fairs were the most comprehensive bibliographies of the European book industry. They were crucial to the development of the European and German book trades, and they even found their way, with some difficulty, to the New World. A 25 November 1632 letter from F. Kirby to John Winthrop the Younger, governor of the Connecticut Colony and a member of the newly formed Royal Society, illustrated some of the problems of a transatlantic book transaction and the importance of the Frankfurt fair to a scholar like Winthrop. Kirby wrote, “For the Catalogue of bookes from Frankfort I have sent you that of the Autumnall mart 1631. The next is not to be had the third not yet come by reason of Contrary wind, but I shall send it God willinge by the next ship.”12 { 40 }

German Books in the New World

Latin was still the dominant language of the European print industry when the Frankfurt town council assumed responsibility for the Messe catalog, but vernacular printing was growing. The Frankfurt catalogs record 1,334 new titles issued between 1601 and 1605; of those new titles, 812 were printed in Latin and 422 were printed in German. The remaining 100 titles were divided between a handful of vernacular languages: French, Italian, Dutch, Czech, and Spanish. German was already the dominant vernacular language of the Frankfurt fair when it became a center for the trade in Protestant books, most of which were printed in German.13 Even though the percentage of German books offered at the Frankfurt fair continued to rise, the fair itself would fall victim to the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48). Before the war began, the Frankfurt book fair was recognized as the center of both the German and the international book trades. By the time the war finally ended, the internationalism that had once characterized the book trade was over, and Frankfurt was no longer an international book center. The Peace of Westphalia redrew the political and religious boundaries of northern Europe. The Holy Roman Empire now existed in name only, replaced by a profusion of quasi-independent German states. Italian states tied to the Holy Roman Empire gained formal independence. Spain lost its control over the Netherlands, while France and Sweden gained territories. The Peace of Westphalia also reaffirmed and extended the principle of cujus regio, eius religio (whose realm, his religion) set out in the 1555 Peace of Augsburg, giving each prince the right to determine the religion of his own state, the options being Catholicism, Lutheranism, and now Calvinism.14 Although the war ended in 1648, the political and religious conflicts that had caused the war continued. In application, the principle of cujus regio, eius religio meant that religious freedoms and restrictions were often markedly different from one principality to the next. The result was a renaissance of religious persecutions. In the states of the Rhineland, Quakers, Anabaptists, Pietists, and other radical Christians faced restrictions by German Lutherans on one hand and violent persecutions from French Catholics on the other. William Penn had long been sympathetic toward the radical Christians of the Rhine Valley, and he actively recruited European Quakers and Mennonites for his “Holy Experiment” in Pennsylvania. In 1681, a group of German Mennonites, Pietists, and Quakers led by Daniel Francis Pastorius accepted Penn’s offer and resolved to seek refuge across the ocean in America. The group of thirteen families landed in Philadelphia on 6 October 1683. They established the Germantown settlement on a 15,000-acre parcel of land { 41 }

How Books Came to America

northwest of Philadelphia that they had purchased from Penn.15 They had come to establish an autonomous German-speaking religious community in the New World. These first families were joined by a slow but steady stream of Germanspeaking immigrants, predominantly Anabaptists, Baptists (often called Dunkers), and Lutherans. The religious views of Germantown settlers were often very different from those of the Spanish Catholics, the English Anglicans, Separatists, Puritans, and the Dutch Reformed colonists who preceded them. Like most of the religiously motivated American colonists, however, they were generally literate people who were used to a highly developed print industry. Like the colonists who preceded them, the Mennonites, Dunkers, and Quakers of Germantown needed printed books to support their religious culture. They also needed German versions of the almanacs and legal forms that William Bradford printed for the Englishspeaking Quakers in Philadelphia. At first, the Germantown settlers satisfied their need for books through the same sort of direct, informal importation arrangements used by the Dutch settlers in New Netherlands. According to A. G. Roeber, the need for devotional books created an informal network that connected the German Mennonites of Pennsylvania and their Dutch counterparts in New York with the ecclesiastical book trade of Amsterdam.16 Private, individual arrangements for the importation of books were sufficient for the German-speaking population in and around Philadelphia during those first few decades. One nineteenth-century historian, Frank Diffenderffer, estimated that the German American population had grown to only two or three thousand by 1708—hardly enough to support a dedicated domestic book industry.17 The need for German-language books would increase dramatically when the second wave of German immigration, generally known as the Palatine migration, began in 1708. Following the unusually brutal winter of 1708–9, thousands of Germans from the Palatinate, Swabia, and the Vosges region of Alsace traveled up the Rhine Valley in the spring of 1709. Nearly twelve thousand German refugees arrived in London, apparently drawn by rumors that the English were offering aid to persecuted Protestants. The refugees claimed that they were the victims of religious persecution at the hands of the Catholic French. The disposition of the refugees was a matter of considerable debate in Parliament. In the end, two thousand of the refugees, mostly German Catholics who had joined the migration, were returned to Germany. An equal number died in England while waiting for the outcome of the { 42 }

German Books in the New World

parliamentary debates. The rest were transported to Ireland or the Americas. About 650 were sent to the Carolinas and 3,200 to rural New York. Distressed by their treatment in New York, many of the Palatinate migrants made their way to Pennsylvania beginning in 1723.18 The most famous among the New York “refugees” was Conrad Weiser, later a political and military leader in colonial Pennsylvania who acquired a reputation as an expert in Indian affairs. The Palatine migration was the second stage of what might be called the Rhine Valley exodus. Anabaptists, Pietists, Lutherans, Baptists, Huguenots, Schwenk­ felders, and many other reformed and radical Protestant groups seeking relief from religious persecutions made their way up the Rhine to Rotterdam; from there, they sailed to England and then to Philadelphia. By 1727, perhaps fifty thousand people from the Rhine Valley had settled in Pennsylvania. According to a 1733 account by one of those immigrants, an early glass manufacturer named Caspar Wistar, the voyage from Rotterdam to Philadelphia took as long as seventeen weeks. Adult passage cost six doubloons (about three years’ wages for a carpenter or bricklayer). In lieu of payment, passage could be had for a pledge of indenture lasting anywhere from three to eight years.19 The Rhine Valley migration created a highly literate German-speaking culture in eastern Pennsylvania. However, the German speakers in and around Philadelphia were radically fragmented by a multiplicity of regional and religious identities.20 To their English-speaking neighbors they were all Germans, but within the community the differences were often sharply defined. Although the differences between the groups identified as German probably diminished the political and economic power of the early German immigrants, they did not impede the creation of a domestic German-language book industry in America. In 1728, William Bradford’s son Andrew launched the trade when he printed an English translation of Mysterion Anomias (Mysteries of lawlessness), a defense of the Christian observance of the Jewish Sabbath, written by Johann Conrad Beissel. Beissel developed an interest in mystic Christianity while he was a young man traveling in Germany. He arrived in Boston in 1720, but he soon traveled to German­town, where Peter Becker baptized him into the Church of the Brethren. Beissel visited several utopian communities in the Pennsylvania wilderness. In 1732 he established the Camp of the Solitary, now known as the Ephrata Cloister, where he and his followers lived a semimonastic life and observed the Jewish Sabbath, as set out in Mysterion Anomias.21 Conrad Beissel became a recurring nexus of German-language printing for a generation. In 1730, Benjamin Franklin printed two German-language books for { 43 }

How Books Came to America

Beissel: one a collection of hymns, and the other a collection of mystical poems and aphorisms. The hymnal was expanded and reprinted as Vorspiel der Neuen Welt (Prelude to the New World) in 1732.22 Franklin actively pursued the new market for German publications. Between 1730 and 1743, he printed at least thirteen works in German. Although he was printing for German readers, Franklin used the roman type that is the standard in English printing (the kind of type used to print this book), rather than the black-letter type (sometimes called gothic or fraktur) that was more commonly used by German printers. His first five German imprints were all for Beissel and his Ephrata community. Then he began printing the work of Nicolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf for the Moravian Brethren who had recently founded the city of Bethlehem on the Lehigh River.23 In 1732, he launched the first Germanlanguage newspaper in the Americas, the short-lived Philadelphische Zeitung. A few years later, Franklin was faced with real competition for the Germanlanguage market. Christopher Saur, the first German to become a printer in the American colonies, launched his career by printing a German almanac in 1738. Saur (also spelled Sauer and Sower) was apparently self-taught. According to Isaiah Thomas, Saur was a tailor before he came to America in 1724. He tried his hand at a number of trades, including button making and casting iron stoves, before he chanced to become a printer. As Thomas told the story, Saur was able to simply take possession of a press and type that had been sent to Germantown to support the German Baptist community there but had never been used.24 In 1738, Saur obtained a stock of the German black-letter type that German printers favored long after other European printers had adopted roman typefaces. He first used the German type to set a book for Conrad Beissel and the Ephrata community: Zionitischer Weyrauchs-Hügel (Zion’s hill of incense). That project came to a sudden halt when Saur ran short of paper. At the time, Benjamin Franklin owned a monopoly on paper produced in Pennsylvania. Saur had to order more paper from Europe—or apply to Franklin for the paper he needed and ask for credit. Franklin refused to sell paper or extend credit to a man he viewed with some contempt, but he eventually accepted the pledge of his friend Conrad Weiser, who had become a member of the Ephrata Brotherhood. The project was completed in 1739.25 In the meantime, Saur commenced publication of a newspaper, the Germantauner Zeitung, and undertook a subscription printing of a German Bible based on the 1708 edition of Luther’s translation printed at Halle. The Saur Bible was the first European-language Bible printed in the New World.26

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German Books in the New World

Although he sometimes worked in partnership with Saur, Franklin was openly hostile toward him and the other German printers who served the growing German market. In a letter to his friend Peter Collinson in England, dated 9 May 1753, Franklin complained, “Few of their children in the Country learn English; they import many books from Germany; and of the six printing houses in the Province, two are entirely German, two are half German half English, but two are entirely English.”27 Despite his complaints, Franklin himself ran one of those half-and-half enterprises. A year after he wrote to Collinson complaining about German printers, Franklin formed a partnership with Anthony Armbruster, one of Philadelphia’s German printers.28 Over the years, Conrad Beissel sent an unusual amount of work to colonial printers like Franklin and Saur. In 1745, however, Beissel did a remarkable thing: he established his own ecclesiastical publishing enterprise in the remote Ephrata community. Ephrata was sixty miles from Germantown, and it took three days to make the journey through the wilderness that separated them. It is important to remember that in 1745 no more than a dozen American towns or cities had any sort of printing press, and most of those were primarily used to publish newspapers. One might guess that Beissel established the Ephrata press to print his own books, but he began by printing books for the German-speaking Mennonite community. The first books printed at Ephrata were Güldene Aepffel in Silbern Schalen (Golden apples in silver bowls) and Die Ernsthaffte Christen-Pflicht (The wholehearted Christian duty), both of which appeared in 1745. The cloister also published excerpts from the Dutch Mennonite text now popularly known as the Martyrs Mirror, translated into German by Alexander Mack, Jr.29 The Ephrata community was quickly becoming the publishing center for the German-speaking American Mennonites, who next commissioned Beissel and the brothers of the Ephrata cloister to publish a German edition of the entire Martyrs Mirror, which had been compiled nearly a century earlier by Thieleman Jansz van Braght, an elder of the Flemish Mennonite congregation of Dor­drecht.30 Like John Foxe’s earlier Book of Martyrs, van Braght’s immense book—The Bloody Theater; or, Martyrs Mirror of the Defenseless Christians who baptized only upon confession of faith, and who suffered and died for the testimony of Jesus, their Saviour, from the time of Christ to the year A.D. 1660—recounted hundreds of stories of horrific physical suffering, which were presented as examples of spiritual submission. For the Mennonites, the crucial difference between the two books was van Braght’s identification of the martyrs as “defenseless

{ 45 }

How Books Came to America

Christians who baptized only upon confession of faith,” which affirms the defining Anabaptist belief in nonresistance and adult baptism. Translating and printing the Martyrs Mirror was a massive undertaking— larger even than the Eliot Indian Bible. Fourteen brothers of the cloister worked for three years to produce the edition of 1,300 copies of the 1,512-page volume. Peter Miller, the prior of the Ephrata cloister, translated and edited the Dutch text. Six brothers manufactured paper for the project in the cloister’s paper mill. Four worked as typesetters, while another four printed the sheets. Still more members of the cloister worked to bind the books and support the more skilled workers. Although the project required enormous amounts of labor, that was not the biggest obstacle. The Ephrata cloister needed huge quantities of type and paper to complete the Martyrs Mirror. There are approximately sixty lines of type per page, set in two columns of about thirty-two characters each. The typesetters needed more than 3,800 individual pieces of type to set a single page of text, more than 15,000 pieces of type for both sides of a folio sheet, which makes nearly six million pieces of type to set the entire book. Of course, the book was probably typeset either two or four pages at a time—and all the copies of those pages were printed and stored until all 1,512 pages could be set and printed. The Ephrata cloister obtained their initial supply of type from Christopher Saur, who would have imported it from Germany. According to Christian Hege, they purchased matrices from Benjamin Franklin at some point in the project and began casting their own type.31 The purchase of matrices would have allowed the cloister to manufacture as much type as they wanted. To make a matrix, a steel punch that has been cut into the precise shape of a particular piece of type is hammered into a small block of copper, making a negative impression of the type. The stamped copper block, or matrix, is then fitted into a mold, into which type metal is poured. Cutting the steel punches and creating the copper matrices required skill and precision. On the other hand, any reasonably careful worker with a mold, a set of matrices, and a supply of type metal (an alloy made of lead, tin, and antimony) could cast the type. In his History of Printing in America, Isaiah Thomas relates a different story about the type supply for the Martyrs Mirror. Thomas credits the story to Francis Baily, a printer who had been trained at Ephrata. Baily claimed that the typesetters sometimes ran out of the most common sorts (“sort” refers to a particular letterform within a typeface, such as the e or the t). To solve the problem, one of the workmen devised a mold to make copies from the existing type: “The mold consisted of four quadrangular pieces of brass; two of them with mortices to { 46 }

German Books in the New World

shift to a suitable body, and secured by screws. The best type they could select from the sort wanted, was then placed in the mold, and after a slight corrosion of the surface of the letter with aquafortis to prevent soldering, or adhesion, a leaden matrix was cast on the face of the type.”32 The second-generation copies would not be as sharply defined as the originals, but they would serve. The method described by Thomas is ingenious, but the brothers would not have used it if they had owned proper matrices. Securing enough paper for the Martyrs Mirror project was a much bigger problem. Since each copy of the book required 378 sheets of paper (four pages are printed on each sheet), the total edition used nearly 500,000 sheets of paper. It is not clear how much of that paper was made at Ephrata, but to make that amount would require a phenomenal quantity of linen rag. It takes about two pounds of rag to make a single pound of paper, so the entire stock of paper for the Martyrs Mirror would have consumed something like ten thousand pounds of linen rag, much more than the remote community itself could have generated. Although the publication of the Martyrs Mirror was most likely a financial disaster, it was a monumental achievement. The story is so unlikely that it might seem like an exaggeration. The details of the undertaking were first recorded in the Chronicon Ephratense, written by Brother Lamech in 1786, and have been recounted by successive generations of historians, beginning with Isaiah Thomas and continuing through to Hellmut Lehmann-Haupt and E. Gordon Alderfer.33 Because so many copies were printed, the book itself is not particularly rare today—a copy can be had for about $3,000. In order to complete the enormous Martyrs Mirror project, Conrad Beissel and the members of the Ephrata cloister created something unique: a self-contained, comprehensive book publishing enterprise in the middle of the wilderness. At Ephrata, human labor and religious devotion powered a book-manufacturing model that would not be replicated until the middle of the nineteenth century, when steam power and iron presses made the book factory possible. At Ephrata, they wrote, translated, typeset, printed, and bound books—they even made their own paper and might have cast their own type. During the Revolutionary War, a large portion of the unbound sheets of Martyrs Mirror was confiscated by the Continental Army and used as gun wadding—an ironic fate for a book that was a testament to peaceful nonresistance. In addition to the Martyrs Mirror, the Ephrata publishing enterprise issued thirty known works between 1745 and 1793. While the cloister lasted another decade, its book production did not, and the only comprehensive book factory in the Americas faded into obscurity. Like most of the earliest American presses { 47 }

How Books Came to America

that preceded it, the Ephrata press was expressly ecclesiastical; unlike its predecessors, it never became a commercial venture. Christopher Saur’s descendants continued to build their German-language book business, printing German books and importing titles from Germany. That trade in German-language books—and, in fact, the entire book trade in the Americas—was disrupted as the growing tensions between the American colonies and the English government led to war.

{ 48 }

5 Re-creating the London Book Trade in the United States

The Sun never shined on a cause of greater worth. ’Tis not the affair of a City, a County, a Province, or a Kingdom; but of a Continent—of at least one eighth part of the habitable Globe. ’Tis not the concern of a day, a year, or an age; posterity are virtually involved in the contest, and will be more or less affected even to the end of time, by the proceedings now. Now is the seed-time of Continental union, faith and honour. The least fracture now will be like a name engraved with the point of a pin on the tender rind of a young oak; the wound would enlarge with the tree, and posterity read it in full grown characters. —Thomas Paine, Common Sense, 1776

In the years leading up to the American Revolution, the book trade in English America had become a moderately successful commercial enterprise. Between 1607 and 1776, domestic book production in the colonies had grown from zero to about 425 titles annually. By a peculiar twist of fate, as Thomas Paine was calling for separation from England and “Continental union,” the American book trades were becoming even more closely tied to the London book trade. There was a brief period when the book trades that had developed in a dozen American cities and towns could have asserted their independence, but the moment passed before the revolution began. The American book trades began as relatively isolated and more or less independent enterprises, maintaining only loose ties to the London trade. As the colonial book trades developed, the pattern of independence and isolation persisted. In 1638, that isolation was nearly absolute: there was one printing press, in one town, in one colony. Fifty years later, Boston had a small but recognizable book trade. When a London bookseller and author named John Dunton traveled to Boston in 1686, then a city of perhaps six thousand, he found four booksellers. According to Dunton, all four made their entire living from the book trade, but he was particularly impressed by the success of John Usher, the son of { 49 }

How Books Came to America

Boston’s first bookseller, Hezekiah Usher: “He is very rich; adventures much to sea; but has got his estate by Bookselling.”1 By 1765, the year that the Stamp Act imposed a tax on many items printed in the colonies, there were more than thirty printing presses, in thirteen cities and towns, in ten different colonies. There were booksellers in New York and Philadelphia as well as Boston. Twenty-five paper mills, most of which were in Pennsylvania, supplied some of the paper that the presses required, but most of the paper, type, and ink still came from England.2 Taken together, all those printing presses, booksellers, and paper mills constituted the colonial American book trade. Of course, they could not be “taken together.” Each colony, and sometimes each town, had its own book trade and its own regulations. The Boston book trade operated under the careful supervision of the colonial government, while the emerging book trade in New York had very little oversight. In Philadelphia, there were at least two distinct book trades— one conducted in English and the other in German—and they both enjoyed unusual freedom. The colonial American book trades operated within and between a patchwork of overlapping jurisdictions. There were thirteen separate colonial governments in English America, and there could be dozens of municipal and territorial authorities within each colony. Further, each colony fell under the jurisdiction of various corporate and Crown agencies in England. Any one of a hundred officials, from a local bailiff, to a corporate officer, to the king, could impose restrictions on the colonial book trades. The multitude of jurisdictions meant that regulation and restriction could come from almost anywhere at almost any time. It also meant that a printer or a bookseller who ran into trouble in one colony could simply move to another colony with more liberal laws. When, for example, William Nuthead ran afoul of the authorities in Jamestown for operating an unauthorized printing press, he moved to St. Mary’s City in the adjacent Maryland colony. Although the colonial book trades were subject to regulation by any number of individuals and agencies in London, American printers and booksellers actually worked with less official oversight than did their counterparts in England. The Stamp Act was the first parliamentary law that imposed any sort of restriction on the colonial book trades. The law was actually a tax: all legal documents, magazines, pamphlets, and newspapers in the British colonies in the New World had to be written or printed on paper that had been prepared in London and embossed with a revenue stamp. Although the Stamp Act gave officers of the Crown an effective tool to control printing and the book trade throughout the colonies, it was never used for { 50 }

Re-creating the London Book Trade

that purpose. In his History of Printing in America, Isaiah Thomas described a range of reactions to the Stamp Act: “Some of the more opulent printers, when the act was to take place, put their papers in mourning, and, for a few weeks, omitted to publish them; others not so timid, but doubtful of the consequences of publishing newspapers without stamps, omitted titles, or altered them, as an evasion.”3 The Stamp Act, which was repealed just fourteen months later, became a symbolic rallying point for the colonial book trade. It was, after all, the first official action that treated the colonial book trades as a single enterprise. Even as war with England became inevitable, the bond between colonial American booksellers and printers and their counterparts in London grew even stronger. It was largely the rapid growth of the colonial population, especially in Boston, Philadelphia, and New York, that cemented the relationship between London and the American book trades. Those ties to London continued after the revolution and persisted as the American trade expanded during the first half of the nineteenth century. On both sides of the Atlantic, America and its book trade were regarded as a provincial outpost of the London print industry, and the Americans worked in the shadow of London for another hundred years. Immigration was the engine that drove the rapid population growth in America, before and after the revolution. In 1620, there were 500 Europeans living in the English colonies. By 1660, that population had grown to 150,000. From then on, the non-indigenous population doubled every twenty-five years until, in 1775, it exceeded 2.5 million. When the first census was taken in 1790, the number reached 3.9 million.4 In the book industry, established markets grew or shifted, sometimes at remarkable speed. It took fifty-five years (from 1683 to 1738) for the Philadelphia book trade to grow large enough to support two printers. During the next twenty-five years (from 1739 to 1764), the entire American book trade grew from sixty-three to more than two hundred firms. On the eve of the American Revolution, Philadelphia was the second-largest city in England’s colonial empire, served by sixteen firms that manufactured or sold books. Twenty-five years later, Philadelphia had become the commercial center of the book trade, served by eighty-eight firms. Boston had slipped into third place with forty-one firms, and New York was emerging as a book trade center with fifty-six firms. Baltimore and Charleston each listed fifteen firms.5 The growth and the spread of the American markets outpaced the capacity of domestic book production. The domestic trade was unable to train enough new printers and booksellers to serve the rapidly growing market. If Benjamin Franklin had been able to maintain his early influence over the American print industry, the book trade might have developed very differently. By the time Franklin { 51 }

How Books Came to America

left his printing shop to become a politician, however, his syndicate had already been displaced by the steady stream of English printers and booksellers, trained in London, who came to America to make their fortunes.6 Ironically, the American Revolution made the American book industry less independent. In the aftermath of the war, the isolated American markets were more unified, but they were unified as a part of the transatlantic English book trade based in London. London set the standard for American print production and distribution. By training and inclination, American printers followed the customs and practices of their English counterparts, and American booksellers stocked their shelves with books produced in England. English books dominated the marketplace because domestic production could not keep pace with demand. Moreover, American book buyers demanded London imprints because they believed that books manufactured in America were inferior.7 Thus most Americans who engaged in the book business carried on as if they were English bookmen in exile: they followed English book-trade traditions; they endorsed English standards of taste and craftsmanship; and they freely pirated English material. Printers and booksellers in the new United States were caught in a paradoxical situation. They were trying to create an independent American book trade by closely imitating the English book trade; however, conditions in the United States were radically different from those in England. England was a small country with a single metropolitan center. The United States was a vast country with no metropolitan center—rather, it had three, or perhaps five, aspiring commercial centers. Becoming a single nation did not change the fact that America was a patchwork of competing major and minor markets scattered over hundreds of thousands of square miles. E pluribus unum might have been the goal, but it was not the reality. The disparate, regional, and competitive American book trades were trying to model their practices on the highly integrated, centralized, and cooperative English book trade. English book production and distribution was almost entirely confined to a single central marketplace: metropolitan London. With very few exceptions, anyone who hoped to publish or purchase a book in England had to travel to London and do business with the Stationers’ Company, an organization that both protected and regulated the manufacture and sale of books in England. Since the reign of Henry IV, the manufacture and sale of books had been a protected craft, largely confined to the City of London. Established in 1403, the Stationers’ Company was originally a guild that protected scriveners and booksellers. When William Caxton established the first English printing shop { 52 }

Re-creating the London Book Trade

in 1476, he introduced printing into that existing system of manuscript book production. As printing became the dominant method of manufacture, it, too, was protected. London had always been the center of book production and sales, and so, when printing arrived, London became the center of that industry. When the Crown granted the Stationers’ Company a royal charter of incorporation in 1557, it gained the power to regulate nearly every aspect of the book trades. The charter gave the members of the company a virtual monopoly on the manufacture and sale of printed matter. According to the terms of the charter, no one in the realm could exercise the “mystery or art of printing,” either himself, or through an agent, unless he was a freeman of the Stationers’ Company of London, or had specific royal permission to do so.8 As a result, the printers in London were partners in a unified and cooperative commercial enterprise. The charter also made the Stationers’ Company a regulatory agency of the Crown, giving it both the power and the responsibility to enforce royal policy. As the charter was granted by Mary I and her husband, Philip of Spain, it should come as no surprise that they hoped to use the company to restore the Roman Catholic Church to England. As the preamble declares, the king and queen, wishing to provide a suitable remedy against seditious and heretical books that were “daily published and printed by divers scandalous malicious schismatical and heretical persons,” gave certain privileges to their “beloved and faithful lieges,” the ninety-seven stationers, in addition to the normal rights of the company.9 The master and wardens of the company were authorized to search the houses and business premises of anyone engaged in any of the book trades, seize, confiscate, or destroy any contraband, and imprison anyone who resisted the search or who was illegally engaged in the trades.10 The regulatory power of the newly chartered Stationers’ Company served both the Crown and the book trade. The Crown believed that the “mystery or art of printing” had to be regulated because printed books circulated “schismatical and heretical” ideas. The trade welcomed regulation because it limited competition. Limiting competition had become even more important because printing changed the economic structure of book manufacture. The printing press was designed to produce large numbers of identical units. As the first engine of mass production, the press introduced problems of scale not found in traditional industries like carpentry or milling. Moreover, the book industry was shaped by its means of production. Printing, from Gutenberg on, required large capital investment before production could begin. Before the introduction of printing, the customer who paid for the book initiated the process of production. The book buyers of the manuscript era hired { 53 }

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scribes to produce copies of the books they wanted. The idea of producing a manuscript book as a commercial speculation probably never occurred to anyone. Neither would it have occurred to anyone to write a manuscript book in the hopes that it might be published for a retail market. That sort of publishing is a print phenomenon. Printing turned book production into a speculative undertaking. Because printing is mass production, it reversed the capital structure of the book business. In order to manufacture printed books, someone had to provide or guarantee the cost of production before production began, and that made financial speculation a necessary component of the industry. In the book trade, whoever provides or guarantees the cost of printing is the publisher. Printing also made it more difficult to calculate the cost of production, which made it more difficult to determine profits or losses. In order to realize a profit, the income from the sale of the product must exceed the cost of production. That was simple enough in most early industrial models. Carpenters could easily compute the cost of manufacturing a dozen chairs, or even a hundred. The same was true of scribes, who produced books using a pen and ink. Cost ought to be equal to time plus materials and a percentage of the overhead. Overhead is the cost of doing business (e.g., tools, a shop to work in, licensing fees). A carpenter or scribe gambled the cost of doing business against the probability of a steady stream of future work. In more heavily capitalized industries like milling or glassmaking, the risks were greater, but the principle remained the same. The fixed expenses of millers and glassmakers were very high. Building a mill was an enormous undertaking; in fact, the communities that these plants served often underwrote the building costs. Fortunately, a miller could count on a reliable workload, and that work could be scheduled efficiently. Glassmakers had extremely high operating costs, mostly because of the fuel their work required. Like millers, glassmakers could wait until they had orders for work before they began production. As an industry, printing combined the problems of milling and glassmaking with it own unique difficulties. The printing plant—the press, the type, and all the other accessories and tools—was a fixed cost, like a mill. Running the press generated huge operating costs, like a glassworks. Unlike millers and glassmakers, however, printers had to meet their fixed costs and their operating costs before they could even begin production. Moreover, the materials for the entire impression had to be on hand, or guaranteed, before production began. All the costs of printing had to be paid in advance, but there was no assurance that the book would sell. { 54 }

Re-creating the London Book Trade

Unfortunately, there has never been a practical way to test the market for a printed book before committing to production. Theoretically, a printing press could be used to make a single copy of a book, or even one hundred copies, as Henry Adams did when he had The Education of Henry Adams printed for his friends in 1907. However, printing a few copies of a book would be ridiculously inefficient. In the era of the hand press, it would have required two complete settings of type to produce a trial edition and then a full edition of the same book. The combined pressures of operating costs and the workflow of printing compel printers to commit to the size of the print run in advance. Printers had to estimate the market for each book they printed in order to calculate the size of a print run, which was usually measured in hundreds or thousands of units. Calculating the market was an inherently risky undertaking. Printers had to decide whether it would be better to produce a thousand copies that are sure to sell or two thousand copies at a much lower unit cost and take the risk that some or all of the second thousand would not sell. Underestimating the market was frustrating because the cost of printing 1,250 copies of a book is not much greater than the cost of printing 1,000—so long as they are all printed at the same time. Printing the extra 250 copies later would be much too expensive because it would require a complete resetting of the type. Simply printing more copies during the press run ought to make sense, since increasing the print run would reduce the unit cost of production. Unfortunately, any unsold copies would have to be counted against the unit cost.11 Remainders still terrify the book trade. Printers since Gutenberg have been looking for ways to limit the financial risks of print production. The Stationers’ Company helped limit risk by limiting the number of people who could engage in the “mystery or art of printing.” The company was a monopoly. Under the terms of the charter, book production in England was strictly limited to members of the company and to the City of London. The only exceptions were printers who had specific royal permission to produce books. The monopoly limited competition between printers by making them, in essence, partners in a wider enterprise. That partnership helped to offset the inherent financial risks of print production, and it also provided a unique solution to the distribution problems that printing had brought to book production. Distribution had been a relatively simple matter when books were produced one at a time: the purchaser went to the producer, the producer went to the purchaser, or they met at a marketplace. Printing created new distribution problems. Printers have always had to produce many more units than they could easily { 55 }

How Books Came to America

sell in their local market in order to justify the cost of production. Once the local market absorbed its share of the copies, something had to be done with the remainder. Those additional books were taken to markets like the one in Frankfurt, which added transportation costs and introduced new risks. Although some printers traveled to market towns to sell their books, it was more common to sell some portion of each press run to booksellers. The system that evolved was simple enough. Printers produced more books than they could sell in their local market. They sold as many copies as they could, and then they took the rest to a market town, or they sold them to booksellers for a reduced price. Booksellers then took responsibility for the business of transporting and reselling all those printed books. Printing effectively divided the book trade into wholesale and retail enterprises. Those divisions, however, were neither clear nor permanent. Printers generally acted as retailers, selling their own books directly to the public, but they also acted as wholesalers, selling books to retail booksellers. Booksellers generally acted as retail agents, but they also financed the production of books, which gave them a stake in the wholesale market. Printers and booksellers routinely competed against one another for the same retail customers. Although we are now quite used to the two-tiered, wholesale/retail structure, it has caused problems for the book business ever since printing made it necessary. The book business never has settled on a clear formula for dividing the risks and rewards between the wholesale and retail sides of the business. In England, the monopoly power of the Stationers’ Company helped minimize these competing wholesale and retail interests by virtually eliminating the problem of distribution. The charter imposed strict geographical limits on book production and sale, confining the book trade to London. The most vexing problems of distribution can be eliminated when the customer becomes responsible for locating and transporting the product. Confining the English book trade to a single physical location meant that London functioned as a mass market, which was a novel solution to the problem of distribution. The strategy required the cooperation of an entire industry, and the royal charter gave the stationers the authority to force that cooperation. The Stationers’ Company controlled the trade in London, but its authority was not absolute. As printing inevitably spread to smaller English cities, London’s printers complained about unauthorized or pirated editions that appeared in the regional press. Soon after the advent of print, some clever soul discovered a way to eliminate some of the risks of book production—wait until someone prints a successful book and then print a competing edition. { 56 }

Re-creating the London Book Trade

The regional printers, for their part, complained about the monopolistic power of the company. The 1710 Statute of Anne, which enacted copyrights in England, helped to resolve these conflicts. The English copyright law gave some protection to authors, but it was more practically a way to settle disputes between printers and booksellers.12 While the statute extolled the value of authors and gave them the right to sell or lease their work for publication, its major provisions protected printers against the illicit use of their copy.13 Moreover, English copyright protected printed work but did nothing to protect unpublished manuscripts. Copyright protection, like the charter of 1557, served the interests of the Crown by giving power to the Stationers’ Company.14 The regulatory power of the Stationers’ Company discouraged dissent and made the English book business unusually cooperative. Although the individual members of the company competed for business, membership made them partners. The interests of individual printers and booksellers were inextricably linked to the interests of the entire enterprise. The arrangement solved most of the problems of product distribution and encouraged printers and booksellers to share the extraordinary risks of mass production.15 Printers and booksellers working in American cities and towns had a long familiarity with the Stationers’ Company, although the company had no jurisdiction in America. During the colonial period, most of the printers in America received part or all of their training in London. Some printers who had been trained in London created their own ways of doing business once they came to America—notably, Benjamin Franklin. It was far more common for transplanted London-trained printers to reproduce the business culture fostered by the Stationers’ Company. As the transatlantic book trade evolved, the more powerful London trade exerted even greater influence over the American market. Although it did try to model itself on English principles and practices, the American book trade operated under conditions that were nothing like those that influenced the development of the English trade. The American book business had no central marketplace; instead, it developed from multiple, competing centers. Print production and distribution in the English colonies began as a series of geographically and intellectually isolated enterprises. As the book trades developed in English America, the isolation persisted and became institutionalized. The American trade was so fragmented that it did not become a unified network until the end of the nineteenth century. The American trade also enjoyed significant institutional and practical freedoms that were unknown in England. The American printers and booksellers { 57 }

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operated without the regulations and licensing restrictions that were a feature of the English trade. The U.S. Constitution established copyright as a protection for authors and guaranteed a free press. Unlike England, the United States had no licensing laws and no regulatory agency like the Stationers’ Company. Printers, booksellers, and publishers were left to operate as the market allowed. Although the American trade was fragmented geographically, the laws under which it operated were uniform and remarkably liberal. The First Amendment to the Constitution explicitly protected authors and printers from most institutional interference, whether governmental or religious. Of course, it is one thing to declare a free press and another to make it so. The most significant guarantee of a free press is the absence of any licensing laws. Without laws like those enforced by the Crown and the church in England and Spain, the American government has never had a workable mechanism to prevent publication. Neither the author nor the printer needs permission to publish, which means that the only official recourse is to outlaw certain kinds of publications and prosecute after they are produced. Over the years, the U.S. Congress has sought to limit the scope of the First Amendment protection, but most attempts to regulate the free press have failed. The Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 and the Sedition Act of 1918, for example, each made it a crime to print anything critical of the government, but neither act was particularly effective and both were subsequently repealed. Likewise, most efforts to outlaw objectionable material such as pornography have repeatedly failed on constitutional grounds. The long-standing geographical fragmentation of the American book trade complicated internal regulation. The book trade developed from multiple centers, and those centers persisted because of their relative isolation and their political and economic autonomy. Most American cities were served by some combination of retail and wholesale book trades. The largest markets—Philadelphia, New York, and Boston—supported independent and often antagonistic industries. The fragmentation was so severe that it might be more accurate to say that several competing book industries existed in the United States for most of the nineteenth century. The earliest efforts to organize trade associations reflected the state of the national industry. Boston had a booksellers’ association in 1801. Philadelphia and New York launched trade associations in 1802.16 None of those early associations attempted to unify the trade across markets, or even to unify the various parts of the trade within those markets. All of those early attempts to organize failed within a year, as there was no compelling reason to organize. Like the country { 58 }

Re-creating the London Book Trade

it served, the American book business began as a haphazard conglomeration of enterprises, and the new political union did nothing to change that. The country was united in name, but not in fact. Political union did nothing to ease the geographical and cultural problems of transporting goods. As partners in trade, Boston maintained closer ties with London than it did with Baltimore, for example. The cities that were important to the book business remained geographically and culturally isolated even after the railroads connected them. The lack of communication and cooperation between the urban centers of the early American book industry might be the single most significant factor in the industry’s subsequent development. America’s booksellers and printers might have had a better beginning if they had inherited their business model from a less unified industry. Unfortunately, most of the men and women engaged in America’s book business received what training they had in London, or from those who had been trained in London. They were hampered by their own habits and customs. Chief among those customs was the notion that the book trades were simultaneously competitive and cooperative ventures. In London, the Stationers’ Company limited competition for the benefit of everyone involved. American printers and booksellers had no guild to regulate their business, but they still expected their colleagues to behave as if the regulations existed. American book dealers extolled a principle called “the courtesy of the trade.” As Henry Holt would describe the custom, courtesy of the trade forbade one printer to poach another’s most successful publications and authors.17 Such unwritten rules dominated the American book industry. Everything from page costs to booksellers’ discounts was governed by custom and provisional negotiations. Following independence, states began to enact copyright laws, which were superseded when the U.S. Constitution guaranteed copyright to native authors.18 Copyright law could have given some structure to the industry, but its effects were slow to develop. Federal copyright protection was of little practical use to printers and booksellers, however, because it protected the author, not the printer. If they chose, American authors could negotiate to publish the same manuscript with any number of printers.19 Protecting American authors was hardly useful in an industry starved for copy but indifferent to domestic literature. American writers did not produce enough material to satisfy the domestic market, but even if they could have, there was not much demand for their work. Printers and booksellers looked elsewhere, usually to England. Most of the books sold in America were either English imports or pirated American editions of English imports. Of the 1,300 or so titles { 59 }

How Books Came to America

listed in the 1804 Catalogue of Books Printed in the United States, at least 1,000 were domestic reprints of books originally printed in England.20 Most of the domestic books in the catalog were historical or legal works treating American subjects. In order to keep their presses running, American printers “borrowed” copy from their overseas competitors or from colleagues working in other cities. If print production was piratical, the distribution and sale of those books was downright anarchic. Before rail transport, large-scale distribution was prohibitively expensive unless the markets were connected by a navigable waterway. In most cases, books were purchased no more than a day’s walk from the place where they were printed. As William Charvat explained in Literary Publishing in America, 1790–1850, “A writer published where he happened to live, and if he happened to live, say, in Walpole, New Hampshire, as did Royall Tyler, his work had little circulation.”21 Royall Tyler enjoyed a full life, but he did not live long enough to benefit from the technological discoveries and inventions that would soon revolutionize transportation and mechanize almost every process of book production.

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6 Revolutions in American Book Production Technology

Water, when elevated in temperature, becomes steam; and steam expands with prodigious power; this power, confined by muscular energy, exerted on metal, and directed by intellect, is capable of being converted into the steam-engine, the most efficient, yet humble servant of man. All this was clearly pre-arranged by the Creator; and man’s faculties were adapted to it; but still we see him left to observe and discover the qualities and relations of water for himself. —George Combe, The Constitution of Man, 1828

In January 1804, a group of Boston booksellers published the first catalog of books printed in the United States. The catalog, which listed about 250 works in nine categories, gave book buyers a good idea of what Boston booksellers had in stock or could obtain for them. A note on the title page of the catalog explained its real purpose: “This Catalogue is intended to include all Books of general sale printed in the United States, whether original, or reprinted; that the public may see the rapid progress of book printing in a country, where, twenty years since, scarcely a book was published.”1 The booksellers were justifiably proud of the growing U.S. book trade, and they planned to continue publishing catalogs. Both the United States and its book industry grew rapidly during the first half of the nineteenth century. Between 1790 and 1850, the population of the United States doubled every twenty-five years. The 1850 census counted more than twenty-three million inhabitants. Immigrants flocked to America, and as the population grew, more and more people settled in the West and the South. Domestic book production grew at an even faster rate. In 1820, U.S. book production was valued at $2.5 million; only thirty years later, it was valued at $12.5 million.2 The most famous and enduring American publishing houses—Ticknor and Fields, Houghton, Putnam, Harper, Appleton, Scribner, Carey and Lea, and Lippincott—were all founded during that period. Many more enterprises, { 61 }

How Books Came to America

begun with high hopes, foundered quickly. Much of the growth in the book industry was driven by rapid population growth and the westward migration of that population. More people in more cities and towns created a demand for more books and newspapers. An increasing demand for school textbooks, for example, created a fast-growing and contentious segment within the industry. The demand for printed goods grew faster than the production capacity. Unfortunately, that demand was ever more widely dispersed, which exacerbated the inherent distribution problems in the United States. As the population migrated westward, the transportation infrastructure became progressively less reliable. The book industry adapted by becoming even more attenuated. Presses appeared in frontier towns like Cincinnati and Kaskaskia, but the center of domestic book production remained in the industrial Northeast. As the 1804 booksellers’ catalog suggests, patrons of bookstores in Boston, New York, or Philadelphia might have been able to purchase a selection of books printed in other markets. Beyond those cities, however, the book industry was hamstrung by transportation costs. In Literary Publishing in America, 1790–1850, William Charvat reported that in 1826, it took thirty days to transport goods from Philadelphia to Columbus, Ohio, at a cost of five dollars per hundredweight. At the same time, the newly opened Erie Canal cut transport from New York to Columbus to just twenty days at half the cost; of course, that did not help the book trades in Philadelphia or Boston.3 While the industry tried to adjust to the changes in its markets, new industrial technology was finding its way into almost every part of the U.S. book business. The Industrial Revolution had a profound effect on book production and distribution. New developments in metallurgy, chemistry, and mechanical engineering revolutionized print production. When the network of railways began to connect American cities in the 1830s, it altered forever the patterns and costs of print distribution. The influence of the Industrial Revolution on the book trade was first felt in the printing shop. The basic processes of book production, from type foundry and paper production to printing and binding, had remained remarkably stable between 1450 and 1800.4 Metal was cast into molds to make type, and fibers were pressed in molds to make paper. Type was composed, imposed, locked into forms, and inked. Sheets of prepared paper were placed over the inked type, and pressure was applied with a flat platen driven by a hand screw. The sheets were folded into signatures, the signatures sewn together into books, and the books laced to boards, which might then receive decorative covers. Each step admitted almost infinite variation, but the basic process remained unchanged for nearly four hundred years, and it was all done by hand.5 { 62 }

American Book Production Technology

Over the centuries, artisans working in the constellation of crafts that contribute to the production of books introduced many improvements. Type founders, building on the basic letterforms and established foundry techniques, developed hundreds of typefaces. Many of the typefaces used on today’s computers are based on type developed before 1800. Papermakers developed their craft and refined their product for centuries without significantly changing the basic techniques. The printers who used that type and paper developed ever more precise and powerful presses without altering the basic design of the wooden hand press that had been used by Gutenberg and his contemporaries. In fact, Gutenberg would have felt perfectly at home with the press in Ben Franklin’s shop, for example, or even those used in most small printing shops before 1860. The tools and techniques of print production were fairly simple and remarkably efficient—a combination that made innovation seem superfluous. For most of the hand-press era, those tools and techniques were also trade secrets, protected by guilds like the Stationers’ Company. The conservative and cooperative guild system was designed to protect and perpetuate established trade practices, and it did little to encourage innovation. Like the wooden press, the printed book had proved itself a remarkably effective and durable object. The basic codex design of printed books (a sequential series of flat pages bound together) worked very well, which meant that there was no need to make changes. As it turns out, oil-based ink pressed onto vegetablefiber paper lasts almost indefinitely. The books that Columbus studied and annotated, for example, are as crisp and legible today as the day they were printed. Kept safe from extreme dangers like insects, fire, or little children, a book printed on a hand press was and is, for all intents and purposes, immortal. Although the technology of book production was about to change dramatically, the basic design of the book would remain stable. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the centuries-old technology of book production suddenly began to change. Iron presses dramatically increased productivity in the printing shop. Stereotyping, case binding, and machine presses streamlined or eliminated handwork in the printing shop and the bindery. New papermaking machinery turned out a cheaper, more uniform product that rendered handmade paper obsolete. The up-to-date printing shop of 1850—its equipment, its pace, and its noise— would have baffled and probably frightened printers who had learned their trade on a wooden hand press. At the heart of the new printing shop was the iron press. Replacing the wooden frame with iron meant the press could be stronger and more rigid, and thus able to withstand much greater forces. A printer operating a Stanhope Iron Press, introduced at the turn of the nineteenth century, { 63 }

How Books Came to America

could print a full nineteen-by-twenty-five-inch sheet in a single impression, cutting the press time for a sextodecimo, or 16mo, edition (sixteen pages printed on each side of a sheet of paper that will later be folded in half four times) by more than 50 percent.6 The Stanhope Iron Press was manufactured in England, where it enjoyed great success, but it was not a truly modern machine; rather, it was an old-style press built of cast iron.7 The iron press owed its advantages to stronger materials not to its design. In 1813, George Clymer of Philadelphia introduced the Columbia Press, which improved on the Stanhope design by eliminating the screw-pull mechanism altogether. Clymer used a compound lever assembly to apply pressure to the print bed, an innovation quickly adopted by Stanhope. The mechanical gain of the compound lever made it a genuine improvement over the older screw-pull press, because a printer using a compound-lever press could apply greater pressure with less effort (or print larger sheets with the same effort). Because of their clear advantages, compound-lever presses became the standard, first in Europe and then in the United States, but the transition was not instantaneous. Wooden presses were familiar. Any good joiner could build and maintain a wooden press, and a competent blacksmith could forge the few iron parts needed. The new iron presses had to be manufactured in foundries, which made them much more expensive. Given the initial cost of an iron press and the inevitable maintenance problems, only those printers who really needed the increased output could reasonably justify the expense.8 Adam Ramage built hybrid presses that combined the iron working parts of the new presses with the cheaper wooden frames of the traditional hand press. In America, the Washington Press made wooden presses obsolete. Designed by Samuel Rust and later manufactured by Robert Hoe, the Washington Press combined a series of innovations—like steel beam construction, with adjustable tensioning rods, and an improved high-torque knuckle-joint mechanism—in a single machine. A printer running a Washington Press could outproduce a printer with a wooden screw-pull press by more than four to one.9 Washington pattern presses dominated the American market throughout the nineteenth century, remained in use well into the twentieth century as proof presses, and are still used today by fine art printers. A remarkable new process called stereotyping augmented the efficiency that the new presses brought to print production. Introduced at about the same time as the iron press, stereotype (literally, solid type) solved two of the most vexing problems of book production: first, type was inevitably damaged by the wear and tear of printing, and second, there was no way to store a particular setting { 64 }

American Book Production Technology

of type. Short of resetting the type, there was no way to print more copies of a book. Book production usually required setting a form or two of type, pulling a set of impressions, tearing down the frame, cleaning and distributing the types, and composing the next set of pages. If everything was going well, a great percentage of the shop’s supply of type was literally tied up (for proofing) or locked up (for printing). Stereotype solved both problems by turning a form filled with hundreds of individual pieces of type into a single, solid printing plate. To create the plates, type would be set as it would be for printing. Then a cast, or matrix, was made of the type. At first, type was pressed into plaster to make the matrix. Later, the process used a specially formulated papier-mâché that was beaten into the setup type and allowed to dry. Once it was dry, the papier-mâché was carefully removed and the resulting positive impression was used as a mold for casting metal plates, which could be used in the same way as traditionally set type. Electrotype achieved a similar result through a more complicated electrochemical process developed by Luigi Brugnatelli.10 The cast stereotype plates had obvious advantages. They saved wear and tear on the type, preserved the setting, and could be used over and over or stored for later press runs. It was also possible to cast multiple, identical plates, which could be distributed to printers almost anywhere in the world for simultaneous or subsequent printings. Although they were comparatively delicate, the papiermâché molds themselves could be shipped or stored at even lower cost than the cast metal plates. Stereotyping also meant that typesetting and printing could become separate industries. The development of case binding brought the same sort of efficiency to bookbinderies.11 Before the development of case binding (also called edition binding), bookbinding proceeded entirely by hand, one book at a time. The binder would receive the printed sheets from the printer, either flat or already gathered and roughly folded. Once the sheets were properly folded, they were collated and beaten flat. The book was actually made of a number of subassemblies, groups of pages called quires, which were each sewn over bands or cords. Sewing the quires onto the bands created the characteristic ridges on the spine of a handbound book. The spine of the assembled book was then beaten with a flat-peen hammer to remove the bulge at the sewn edge. Next, the boards were attached to the bands. Technically, a book was bound once its boards were attached, but the boards and spine were usually covered with a thin sheet of leather. Once the leather was attached, lettering and decoration could be impressed into the cover using heated irons. { 65 }

How Books Came to America

Case binding did not really eliminate any of the steps, but it rearranged the process to eliminate the one-at-a-time schedule of hand binding. Casing-in, as it is called, turned binding into three separate procedures: building the case (the cover), sewing the book, and attaching the case. The case was, and still is, built of boards and a covering material, usually cloth. Because it was used to hold the boards and the spine together, the covering became an integral part of the case rather than a protective or decorative addition. Sewing remained a hand operation long after case binding became the norm, but the new system eliminated the need to beat out the spines by hand. Because many books were bound at the same time, the sewn-up books could be stacked up and flattened in steam or hydraulic presses.12 The cases were then attached to the sewn-up, flattened books with pasted-in paper hinges, and the outermost endpapers were pasted down to the case to reinforce the joint (all of which you can see if you look at the inside covers of any modern hardcover book). The product was not quite as strong as a hand-bound book, but case binding has proved a durable method of building books and is still the way we build hardcover books. Because it made sewing up and building the covers completely separate operations, case binding had several advantages over traditional hand binding. The cases could be made up at any time in the process of book manufacture. Because they were more or less flat objects, they could be lettered or decorated with a heated stamping press before they were attached to the books. Made-up cases could also be stored conveniently, waiting for the books that would fill them, and they could be mass produced in standard sizes. Case binding made the bindery nearly independent of the printer’s schedule. The chief advantage, however, was that casing-in allowed the binder to mechanize nearly every step of the process, from beating-out to stamping the title on the spine. The clear advantages of stereotyping and case binding could not be fully exploited, however, until the next big leap forward in book printing technology: the powered press. The impressive increases in production made possible by the Columbian and Washington presses were soon overshadowed by the production capacity of semi-automated presses. In the early 1820s, Daniel Treadwell of Boston experimented with a press powered by a horse walking around a circular track. Treadwell’s wooden-framed press did not look much like the familiar, upright Washington Press, but it worked in much the same way. The type form lay on the flat bed of the press and the platen pressed the paper onto the inked surface of the type. Treadwell’s press had a mechanical advantage over a hand press because a horse is much stronger { 66 }

American Book Production Technology

than a man and can apply more force. Treadwell’s design required a complicated series of gears and linkages to transfer the continuous horizontal circular movement of the unconventional power source to the intermittent vertical action needed to run the press.13 At about the same time, Friedrich Koenig demonstrated a radical new kind of press that used a cylindrical platen and type bed. It was a printing machine designed to take advantage of steam power. The principle of Koenig’s press was simple enough. The cylindrical platen works like a baker’s rolling pin, applying a great deal of pressure to one small area after another as it moves across the surface of the type bed. The cylinder press was designed to run continuously. As the parallel cylinders rotated, rollers applied ink to the curved type bed, and an attendant fed sheets of paper between the moving cylinders. The cylinder presses were too crude and unreliable even for newspapers, but they introduced ideas that were then used to apply steam power to flatbed presses. The most successful of the steam-powered flatbed presses was introduced by Isaac Adams in 1830 and improved in 1836. The general configuration of the Adams Press resembled Treadwell’s, but it was actually quite different. The frame of the press was made of iron, and it used a stationary platen and a moving type bed. The press used rollers to ink the type, and then the type bed was pushed up from below to make an impression. Adams designed the press to be operated by a single person, who fed sheets of paper into its mechanical and pneumatic feed system. The Adams Press became a standard for bookwork in the United States and remained in regular use until the late 1880s.14 Meanwhile, Robert Hoe, the manufacturer of the Washington Press, and his son Richard continued to work on the cylinder press. In 1847, the firm introduced the Hoe Type Revolving Press, which is widely regarded as the foundation of modern press technology.15 The Hoe Type Revolving Press was the first successful cylinder press that used a rotary type bed. Attended by a pressman and four boys, the press made between one thousand and two thousand impressions an hour. The rotary presses were fast, but book printers derided them as “type smashers.”16 There was simply no practical and reliable way to lock type into curved frames until a method for casting curved stereotype plates that fit the drums of cylinder presses was developed in the late 1850s. During the second half of the nineteenth century, cylinder presses would make flatbed printing obsolete. Cylinder presses would also reveal an unforeseen benefit of an innovation in paper manufacturing, although it took some time for the two technologies to mesh. In 1789, Nicolas-Louis Robert introduced a new papermaking machine { 67 }

How Books Came to America

that churned the paper pulp into slurry and then slowly poured the slurry onto a continuous moving belt of woven wire. The water drained away while the pulp was carried forward to a series of belts and rollers, which formed the pulp into a continuous sheet of paper, or web, that was taken up in one long roll. The paper was then cut into sheets that were dried and finished. A continuous wire papermaking machine was constructed in Delaware in 1817, and others soon followed.17 For most of the nineteenth century, printing presses for book production used the individual sheets cut from the continuous roll of paper produced in the new paper mills. Web presses (cylinder presses with curved printing plates that could use paper directly from an uncut roll) were introduced in 1865 and became the standard for book printing toward the end of the century.18 By 1850, the modern steam-driven printing plant was an emerging reality, while handwork was disappearing from the book trades. Handmade paper and hand binding, for example, were nearly obsolete by 1850. The next major print production innovations—typesetting and typecasting machines—were on the horizon. Steam drove the factories that manufactured the iron printing presses and the mills that produced the paper. It drove the machinery that made case bindings, and it powered the presses that churned out printed sheets. Beginning in 1830, steam drove both the railroads that carried books and the book industry itself to ever-widening markets. By 1850, America was still at the beginning of a transportation revolution. After twenty years of development, the rail network was almost ready to compete with the long-established watertransport network. The first fourteen miles of the Baltimore and Ohio rail line were completed in 1839. By 1850, nine thousand miles of track connected all the major cities of the Northeast and connected population centers in the South and the West. Passengers and freight could travel up and down the metropolitan corridor that included Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C. The journey was, however, anything but smooth. In his memoir Garrulities of an Octogenarian Editor, a very old Henry Holt described the journey from Washington to New York as he experienced it in 1845. Holt began his narrative in Baltimore, which was the second stage of the trip: “The locomotive from Washington had been left at the Western edge of Baltimore, and the cars drawn singly by horses towards the Eastern edge, where passengers for New York waited in other cars for the train to be made up. Spring coupling had not been invented, and the cars started off with a jerk that sent everyone’s body some inches in advance of the top of his head.”

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American Book Production Technology

The train continued toward New York until it reached the Susquehanna River at Havre de Grace, Maryland. There the passengers carried their baggage to the ferries that transported passengers and freight across the river. Once everything had been transferred to “the East side [of the river] of course, we had to carry ourselves and our baggage to a fresh train.” In Philadelphia, Holt, his fellow passengers, and any freight were loaded onto horse-drawn omnibuses and taken crosstown to the Delaware River docks opposite Camden. At that point, the passengers had a choice: “One was by ferry across to Camden, and thence by rail to Perth Amboy, and thence by boat to New York. The other was by boat to Tacony, thence by rail to Jersey City, and by ferry across.”19 The journey from Washington to New York took about fifteen hours in good weather and required four rail lines, three ferries, and five transfers. As clumsy and inconvenient as it was, that early system moved passengers at about fifteen miles per hour, at a cost of about three cents a mile. The early railroads moved people and goods twice as fast as any other land transit, and they went to places with no access to waterways. At midcentury, however, the railroad could not yet compete with waterborne transportation. Shipping freight on the Erie and the Ohio Canals cost a penny per ton-mile, while the competing railroads charged twice or three times that rate.20 The rates and the fares were high, but the railroad was fast and it ran all year long. The rail bed never froze and only occasionally flooded. Railroads that had been built to connect to established water routes began to compete against those same water routes. The Western Railroad, for example, completed in 1841, connected Boston to Albany and, in theory, to the Erie Canal. It was intended to siphon off some of the trade that went down the Hudson to New York. Writing nearly thirty years later in the North American Review, Charles F. Adams Jr. joked that the Western had originally been constructed on “the fallacy that steam could run uphill cheaper than water could run down.”21 Eventually, steam really would run uphill cheaper than water could run down, but that day was far in the future. The technology of book production and distribution changed dramatically in the first half of the nineteenth century. The market for books was also changing. The population of the United States was doubling every twenty years, and the demand for books was growing even faster than that. And that growth attracted the attention of the German book trade.

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7 Transplanting the German Book Trade to the United States

We advise against the emigration of German booksellers to America, for a well-educated class that would read or study German publications is just not to be found there. Although many rich Germans live in the United States, most of them by far are so ill disposed towards the German language that they will not even read let alone study it. Everyone who can and wants to read reaches for English books. Therefore, no German booksellers at all are to be found. —Ernst Ludwig Brauns, Ideen über die Auswanderung nach Amerika, 1827

The American Revolution created the United States, and the Industrial Revolution shaped the new nation. The early years of the United States were a time of political, cultural, and technological experimentation. Everything seemed to be changing at once, and the changes appeared to be coming faster and faster. Between 1790 and 1850, the only constants in the United States were change and growth. In 1790, the nation’s territory extended from Maine to Georgia and from the Atlantic coast to the Mississippi River. When California became the thirty-first state in 1850, the United States and its territories extended from coast to coast. During that same period, the index of total industrial production increased from 4.29 in 1790 to 102.38 in 1850, an increase of 96 percent.1 All of that new productivity was accomplished by a rapidly growing population. The first United States census in 1790 counted 3.9 million people; in 1850, the count reached 23 million.2 The growth of the United States attracted the attention of the European book trades. The English book trade had long regarded America as a secondary market. Even though America was no longer a colonial possession, it was not quite a foreign market either. The flow of English publications into the United States grew steadily after the war and continued throughout most of the nineteenth { 70 }

Transplanting the German Book Trade

century.3 The German book trade was also interested in the new United States. In the 1790 census, 270,000 people identified themselves as “German.” Most were the descendants of the Germans who had come to North America in the century following the founding of Germantown, but some would have been first-generation immigrants.4 They were the third-largest ethnic minority in the United States and the largest group that preserved a distinct linguistic tradition. Surely those American Germans needed German books. Just a few months after the Treaty of Paris settled the conditions of American independence, Karl Christoph Reiche, a former clergyman, author, and book dealer, published a scheme to use America as a secondary market for surplus German imprints. His plan appeared in the 5 February 1784 issue of Die Buch­ händlerzeitung, the German book industry’s first true trade journal. Reiche reasoned that “to dispose of all our published books in Germany is simply impossible. Even editions of good authors remain in large part unsold and must be pulped unless a way out is found, and markets [can be] fostered outside of Germany in heavily populated and cultivated lands and provinces.” Reiche’s solution to German overproduction was an early version of commodity dumping. He proposed “the vast lands of the Free States of America” as a suitable market for books that could not be sold in Europe.5 Reiche tried to put his scheme into practice, but he overestimated the demand for German books in America. He also underestimated the risks of the undertaking. He sailed to Philadelphia with a stock of donated books. Before he left Germany, Reiche was confident that the “multitudes of well-to-do Germans” living in America would gladly purchase his remaindered books. He died in Philadelphia six years later, unable even to find a buyer willing to take his books for pulp.6 The Germans living in America did want books, but they were not so hungry for books that they would buy just anything printed in the German language. Many of the Americans who identified themselves as German no longer spoke German, and many third- and fourth-generation German Americans viewed more recent immigrants as foreigners. Attempts to preserve German language and culture in an overwhelmingly English-speaking country were doomed to fail. Some separatist groups, notably the Anabaptists, maintained their German identity and language, but most Germans assimilated. Although it came too late for Karl Reiche, a second wave of Rhine Valley migration, motivated by economics rather than religion, would bring an additional twenty thousand Germans to the United States at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The new migration revived stories about the horrors of the { 71 }

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voyage and the difficulties that immigrants faced in America. In the decades before the revolution, many Germans came to America as redemptioners, sailing to America on credit. At the end of the voyage, either they were “redeemed” by family members, or the ship captain recovered the fare by auctioning the passengers to anyone who needed indentured servants. Among the Germans in America, the practice came to be known as “Dutch slavery.”7 Published accounts of the plight of the redemptioners circulated in Germany. Gottlieb Mittelberger’s Journey to Pennsylvania in the Year 1750 and Return to Germany in the Year 1754, published in Stuttgart in 1756, became quite famous. Mittelberger began with a detailed account of the length and duration of the journey from Stuttgart to Philadelphia. After six months, including fifteen horrifying weeks at sea, he arrived in America.8 There he witnessed the redemption sale: “When the ships have landed at Philadelphia after their long voyage, no one is permitted to leave them except those who pay for their passage or can give good security; the others, who cannot pay, must remain on board the ships till they are purchased, and are released from the ships by their purchasers. The sick always fare the worst, for the healthy are naturally preferred and purchased first; and so the sick and wretched must often remain on board in front of the city for 2 or 3 weeks, and frequently die, whereas many a one, if he could pay his debt and were permitted to leave the ship immediately, might recover and remain alive.”9 Mittelberger’s account of the redemption sale and the suffering of the immigrants helped create a lasting popular view of indenture as a kind of slavery. Redemption sales of German immigrants lasted until 1819, when the last passenger auction was held in Philadelphia.10 Nevertheless, stories about the horrors faced by immigrants persisted long after the practice of redemption died out. In 1817, Moritz von Fürstenwärther traveled to America to see if the stories were true. Although he was a gentleman, he attempted to recreate the experiences of the typical German immigrating to America. His influential report, Der Deutsch in Nord-Amerika, painted a bleak picture. He discovered that the conditions of the journey were often horrific, but he was much more troubled by the Germans he met in America. He discovered that life in English-speaking America was eradicating the immigrants’ German culture. Benjamin Franklin complained that the Germans refused to assimilate and that they persisted in speaking German. Fürstenwärther complained that the Germans were abandoning their language and culture. He wrote that the children of immigrants learned German, but “rarely well; in them a dislike for everything German is most evident and they are often ashamed of their origins. With grandchildren the German language is usually completely lost.”11 { 72 }

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The erosion of German culture and language was unwelcome news for every­one involved in the German American book business. A demand for German-language books was inextricably tied to a growing (or at least stable) German-speaking population. Reiche’s scheme had failed almost before it began; if German Americans stopped using German altogether, the dream of selling German books in America would die. Nevertheless, the idea of exploiting the American market still fascinated Germany’s printers and booksellers. Twelve years after the publication of von Fürstenwärther’s report, a new era of German migration began. Between 1830 and 1845, nearly a million Germans immigrated to America, mostly for economic or political reasons. The new immigrants came from all over Germany, although the largest contingents came from Mecklenburg and Prussia in the northeast and Bavaria in the south.12 It was the beginning of the mass migration that became known as the Auswanderung, and it inspired new plans to develop an American market for German books. In 1825, booksellers in Leipzig formed a central trade association called the Börsenverein der Deutschen Buchhändler (literally, trade association of German booksellers). The Börsenverein filled much the same role in the book trade that the Frankfurt town council had before the Thirty Years’ War. It had the power to settle trade disputes, and it soon became the regulatory body of the entire German book trade. It also ran a school for booksellers and set standards for the training of apprentices. Beginning in 1834, it began publishing a regular trade journal called Börsenblatt für den Deutschen Buchhandel. In 1845, the Börsenverein decided that it would back a more sophisticated version of Reiche’s earlier plan. In the new scheme, German printers and booksellers would buy shares in a joint-stock venture to establish a central depot in Philadelphia or New York, to be called Deutsche Vereinsbuchhandlung in Nordamerika.13 The idea was appealing, although there were people like Ernst Ludwig Brauns who had claimed that Germans in America were “so ill disposed towards the German language that they will not even read let alone study it.”14 According to the plan, the depot would be the wholesale distribution center for German publications in the United States, fronted by an elegant retail bookstore run on German principles.15 German publishers and booksellers imagined that they could recoup some of their losses at home by shipping their unsold books to America, where German-speaking readers would happily buy them. The commission charged with implementing the plan selected a young bookseller named Rudolph Garrigue to conduct a study of the potential market. Garrigue was a talented and ambitious young man, born to a well-to-do German Huguenot family in Copenhagen. He had learned the book trade as an { 73 }

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apprentice at the firm of Herold and Wahlstab of Lüneberg, Hanover. He was working for F. A. Brockhaus, the firm best known for its famous encyclopedia, when the Börsenverein chose him to study the American market. Garrigue’s tour of America was short—he arrived 31 October 1845 and returned home in April 1846—but he was able to measure the market quite shrewdly in that time. His findings were issued as a pamphlet, Bericht an die Commission für die Begründung einer deutschen Buchhandlung in den Vereinigten Staaten (Report to the commission for the founding of a German book market in the United States), presented at the Leipzig book fair in April 1846.16 The report’s conclusions were mixed. Garrigue visited Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C., and, wherever he went, he was appalled by the Germans he met. According to Garrigue, the German immigrants in the eastern United States were “very poor representatives of Germany’s intelligence. Seven-eighths of them belong to lower working classes. They are craftsmen, workers and farmers; people whose literary needs were limited in the homeland to a yearly almanac or at most a folktale. These are people who lived for the most part in conditions which permitted them no mental development.” Third- and fourth-generation descendants of German immigrants, he said, “are not Germans. Just as I am not French, even though my grandfather immigrated from France.”17 There were, of course, well-educated Germans in America—the sort of Germans who would welcome and support a bookstore. According to Garrigue, those Germans preferred to settle in the western states of Ohio, Illinois, and Missouri, and he advised the committee to consider the idea of a western bookstore. The uneducated Germans he encountered were more interested in becoming American than remaining German. They were learning English and they wanted to read American books if they read anything at all. In fact, they tended to be suspicious of all things German—even one another. “If a German finds that he must do business with a fellow German,” he wrote, “he is much more guarded and cautious than he would be with an American.”18 Neither German nor American, the immigrants he encountered were doubly alienated. As Ernst Brauns had predicted, they were unlikely to buy German books. Garrigue’s assessment of the German immigrants in America was perhaps a bit harsh. Poorly educated, unskilled German immigrants tended to work as day laborers or farm workers. Neither occupation encouraged linguistic (or any other) assimilation, but most German immigrants still learned at least some English. German was an important secondary language in the United States, but it was stigmatized.19 Further, Germans who immigrated to America during the { 74 }

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first half of the nineteenth century were generally more successful in finding a path to economic prosperity than were immigrants from other countries—especially the Irish.20 Although Garrigue criticized the Germans he met in America, he could barely contain his enthusiasm for America and Americans. He found Americans to be pragmatic, unsentimental people who had no use for theory or tradition. They were willing to embrace anything if they could see its practical value. According to Garrigue, that pragmatism had led Americans to study the German language. Educated Americans, he said, actually complained about the scarcity of German books.21 They would certainly support a German bookstore if it offered the right books at the right prices. American book buyers had peculiar habits. Garrigue pointed out that Americans did not build relationships with their booksellers as German book buyers did. Americans were impatient customers. They would not wait for a bookseller to order the book they wanted. If they wanted a book, they wanted it today. If the book was not available, the sale was lost forever. Americans also expected to pay far less for books than Germans did. They were used to cheap reprints. On the other hand, Americans paid cash: they never expected a bookseller to extend credit.22 Garrigue was also enthusiastic about the potential of the library market in the United States. His visit coincided with a period of growth for the public library movement in America. Large public libraries had already been founded in Philadelphia, New York, Boston, and Chicago, and the smaller mercantile and mechanics libraries were expanding rapidly. According to Garrigue, “no country in the world has as many libraries as the United States,” which was, and still is, true. He claimed that he had generated enough interest at the Library of Congress that they planned to form a German division within the year. He also claimed that the John Jacob Astor estate had set aside between $50,000 and $75,000 for the purchase of German books for the new Astor Library.23 Although he was optimistic about the potential of the American market, Garrigue was sharply critical of the German book dealers he encountered in America. He complained that they were not trained booksellers in the German mode. Garrigue was particularly critical of Wilhelm Radde, whose bookshop doubled as a homeopathic apothecary. According to Garrigue, Radde issued catalogs that were wildly inaccurate: only a fraction of the books listed were actually available for purchase, and special orders regularly took as long as eight months to fill.24 Garrigue was right about the German dealers in the United States. Most were merchants who ran variety stores that catered to a German American clientele; { 75 }

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books were simply another line of merchandise. Henry L. Reitz, for example, was a grocer in Baltimore who advertised his stock of books along with pickled herring and Limburger cheese.25 When German books were available for purchase, they were often prohibitively expensive by American standards. German booksellers made the situation worse by inflating their prices whenever they had a popular book and thought the market would stand it. Although Garrigue was less critical of American booksellers, he did caution the committee that American book dealers had no infrastructure, no tradition, and no rules. There were a few book trade journals, but they went in and out of business and could not be relied on. There were no trade catalogs, except for those put out by individual dealers. Booksellers had no training at all. Anyone could sell books—or suddenly abandon the business. There was no book trade association of any kind. The American trade was ruthless and unregulated: The American book trade is primarily an exchange-business. The publishers are, with few exceptions, retail booksellers. If they are about to bring out a new book, then they advertise the publication date in the newspapers. Their colleagues (or better American: their competitors) take their orders and offer an exchange at the same time. The exchange is taken into account and the balance is paid for in cash with a deduction of 30%. The consequence is that the buyer is in the position to sell the book much cheaper than the retail price, since he paid for it with his own products. As long as a book is doing well, the price remains stable. As soon as the sales rate slows, the booksellers begin to worry about the capital that they have tied up in the books. Then they are tossed off the shelves for any price, only to get the money out of the product and use it for other speculations. There is no guild law among booksellers to keep the prices stable. Everyone buys as cheaply as possible at prices that are set so that the seller does not lose out. When books are published without the retail price imprinted, they are sold at any price, since the rule there is to take as much as one can get. If the buyer appears gullible, then he is conned.26 Although Garrigue’s findings were almost entirely negative, he strongly recommended the idea of a German bookstore and distribution house in America. Garrigue suggested that New York would be a better location than Boston or Philadelphia. It was the commercial center and transportation hub of the United States, and it was also an international marketplace that attracted a steady stream of foreigners and international buyers. Moreover, it maintained a regular, reliable { 76 }

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shipping connection with Europe. Finally, New York was the city to beat. While Philadelphia and Boston “wanted to get New York’s market, New York would rather import from Europe than stoop to Philadelphia or Boston.”27 Garrigue’s report was well received, and the Börsenverein approved the plans for a German book center in New York. But the joint-stock venture failed to attract enough subscribers. A year after Garrigue had submitted his report, only half the shares had been sold. By April 1847, the plan was dead.28 Nevertheless, Garrigue was convinced that his own research was sound; he believed that he could sell German books to Americans. In June 1847, as political and social unrest was beginning to spread across Europe, Garrigue sailed for New York with sufficient credit and financial backing to launch his American career. He opened his bookshop at the corner of Barclay Street and Broadway in the arcade of the luxurious Astor House Hotel.29 In September of the same year, he married Charlotte Lydia Whiting, the daughter of a prominent Unitarian family in New York. The Whitings were proud to be direct descendants of the Mayflower notables William Bradford, John Alden, and Priscilla Rogers. According to Alice Garrigue Masaryk, her grandparents had become engaged while Garrigue was touring the northeastern United States on his fact-finding mission for the Börsenverein. Garrigue apparently met Charlotte while he was a guest in her parents’ home in Morrisania, a suburban village in the countryside west of New York City (now the South Bronx).30 Garrigue started his American venture with many advantages. He had made a good marriage that linked him to an old and influential American family. He had a good address; locating his shop in the Astor House allowed him to associate his name with John Jacob Astor, the most famous of German Americans. He had the support and cooperation of Heinrich Brockhaus, his former employer and the publisher of the most successful encyclopedia in Europe. He also had the respect of the trade, which he had earned while working for the Börsenverein. Garrigue also had a unique handle on the American market. He knew that he could not succeed simply by transplanting a German bookshop to America. As he had cautioned in his report, he would need to adjust his methods to suit the unstable and unregulated American market. Because Americans had none of the German reverence for the book trade, he would have to adapt and perhaps educate. When he arrived in New York, Garrigue already had an outline for a successful bookselling enterprise in the United States, accounting for everything from the cost of fire insurance to the types of bindings that Americans would { 77 }

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be willing to purchase. Garrigue simply needed to adjust the scale of the plan that he had included in his report to the Börsenverein to suit his own, much smaller venture. Garrigue thought the German book distribution center would require an initial capitalization of nearly $19,000. That figure assumed a large initial stock of books purchased on a three-year line of credit. He predicted an annual operating budget of $8,200, broken down into thirteen categories: Rent for a store $1,200.00 Rent for a warehouse 300.00 Furnishings for a store ($500 amortized over three years) 166.67 Fire insurance 300.00 Salary for the chief 2,000.00 Salary for an American assistant 800.00 Salary for a German assistant 900.00 Salary for an errand boy 300.00 Fire, light and office expenses 133.33 Advertising 600.00 Interest on credit 750.00 Travel and minor expenses 150.00 Commission fees in Germany 600.00 $8,200.0031 Garrigue had a sound plan. It is doubtful, however, that he had anything like $30,000 (nearly $800,000 in current dollars). Like almost everyone who has ever worked in the book industry, he was undercapitalized. He also had a family to support: in October 1848, Charlotte gave birth to Emilie, the first of their eleven children. Whatever his resources, he would have to sell a remarkable number of books to pay for his elegant business address and to maintain his growing family. Garrigue’s venture might have succeeded had he stuck to the business of importing and selling foreign books. Unfortunately, he decided to begin a program of publishing books for the American market. Garrigue started small: his first venture was The Black Aunt’s Stories and Legends for Children, a reprint of Charles A. Dana’s translation of Clara Fechner’s Tante Schwarze stories. In 1849, two years after he opened his shop, Garrigue obtained permission to publish an English-language edition of Bilder-Atlas zum Conversations-Lexicon, the famous Brockhaus encyclopedia, at his own expense. The first installment of the twenty-five-volume Iconographic Encyclopedia of Science, Literature, and Art Systematically Arranged by J. G. Heck appeared late in 1849.32 Volumes 2, 3, and { 78 }

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4 followed at irregular intervals. An American edition of the Brockhaus encyclopedia eventually made a respectable profit, but it succeeded for Appleton, not Garrigue. The idea of publishing English translations of popular German works was sound enough, but publishing costs ate up credit that Garrigue needed to run the bookshop. In his 1878 survey of the German American book trade, Friedrich Kapp suggested that Garrigue was a little reckless in his spending; still, all might have been well had it not been for a fire in 1852.33 Apparently Garrigue had not purchased fire insurance, despite his own advice to the Börsenverein. The fire and a growing family (he was now the father of four children) left him temporarily unable to pay his debts. After five difficult years, Garrigue decided that he needed a partner. He called on his old friend Friedrich W. Christern. At Garrigue’s urging, Christern had come to America in 1850 and settled in Philadelphia. Christern was running his own foreign-language bookstore there when Garrigue proposed the idea of a partnership in New York. Christern and Garrigue had both begun their careers in the book trade as apprentices to the firm of Herold and Wahlstab. Christern, who was a native of Lüneberg, began his training earlier than Garrigue, so he had probably finished his apprenticeship before Garrigue came to the firm. Garrigue had gone to America and Christern had gone to work in Munich. Christern had been planning to open his own bookstore there when Garrigue convinced him to abandon his plans and come to the United States, where it was possible for anyone to open a bookstore.34 The strictly limited opportunities in the German book trade, coupled with the economic uncertainty that followed the failed European revolutions of 1848, must have made America an appealing alternative. Germans who came to the United States soon after the failed German revolution of 1848, especially well-educated Germans like Christern, were often called “forty-eighters.” Strictly speaking, the term refers to political and intellectual leaders of the revolution who left Germany as refugees after the uprising failed. Forty-eighters were the aristocracy of German immigrants. They were widely regarded as well educated, industrious, socially responsible, and politically progressive. Admired by Germans and non-Germans alike, the forty-eighters became the model of the “good immigrant.”35 Christern emigrated in the company of these forty-eighters, but he was not a revolutionary. When Christern had arrived in America in 1850, he found a position in Philadelphia with John Weik, a bookseller and publisher whose specialties were books for children and panoramic prints.36 Christern arrived just in time to pick up the { 79 }

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pieces of Weik’s first business collapse. Weik was an enthusiastic speculator who went in and out of the book business many times in his career. At one point, he offered land options in America in lieu of cash payments to his German creditors.37 Christern spent a year as an assistant in Weik’s bookshop, and in March 1851 he bought the business from Weik. In all likelihood, Christern got the business for a bargain price. Christern had moved the business to a shop in the 200 block of Chestnut Street (now the 800 block). Christern’s bookstore rated a few paragraphs in Charles Godfrey Leland’s 1893 Memoirs. Although Leland is rarely read today, during his lifetime he was famous as the author of the “Breitmann Ballads,” comic poems written in a mock German dialect. He described Christern’s store as a kind of salon where he met with friends to read and practice German: “There was in Philadelphia at this time a German bookseller named Christern. It was the thought of honourable and devoted men which recalled him to mind. I had made his acquaintance long before in Munich, where he had been employed in the principal bookseller’s shop of the city. His ‘store’ in Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, became a kind of club, where I brought such of my friends as were interested in German literature. We met there and talked German, and examined and discussed all the latest European works.”38 Leland characterized Christern’s store as a meeting place for writers and European émigrés, a center for the cosmopolitan, international community in Philadelphia. Strangely, he mentioned very few Europeans. Instead, he recalled meetings with Frank Wells, a critic for the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, and George Boker, a poet, playwright, and later minister to Turkey and Russia. Leland apparently struck up a friendship with Christern’s assistant, Karl Rühl. He described Rühl as “a burly, honest, rather droll fellow” who had been a “Revolutionist” in Munich and became a refugee in America. In 1852, Christern sold the Philadelphia shop to Rühl and a second assistant, whose name was Correa, and moved to New York. In December 1852, Garrigue and Christern become partners in the bookstore at the Astor House. Garrigue had connections; Christern had cash. Together they tried to realize some of the ideas that Garrigue had proposed in his report to the Börsenverein. At 2 Barclay Street, they ran a proper German bookstore. They stocked what any German bookseller might: books, periodicals, art prints, maps, good advice, and perhaps cigars—but no pickled herring, no Limburger cheese, and no homeopathic cures. Garrigue and Christern made some effort to fill the need for regular catalogs and monthly bulletins. They sold copies of the Leipzig book fair catalogs and { 80 }

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Livres Curieux, a catalog of French publications that was printed in New York by G. B. Teubner. The European catalogs might have been useful for customers who wanted to place special orders and wait—exactly the sort of thing Garrigue had said in his report to the Börsenverein that Americans would not accept. In June 1853, they launched Garrigue & Christern’s Monthly Bulletin of German Literature. The first issue of the Bulletin began with a notice that explained its purpose: “Having experienced, for a number of years, the want of a medium for early and full communication, to the American Scholar, of the activity of the German Literary World, by which he might, in a measure, judge of the merits of its products, before concluding to send for them merely on the strength of the title, we intend to supply this want by a monthly classified report of new publications.”39 Garrigue and Christern helped their customers “judge the merits” of publications by providing descriptions, in English, of nearly every book listed in their catalog. They also published the prices of the books in American dollars. The notice in the first issue continued, explaining how Garrigue and Christern intended to run their business. They also provided a description, which they emphasized with italics, of the clientele that they meant to serve: The Monthly Bulletin will be prepared for the press by Rudolph Garrigue or F. W. Christern respectively, one of whom will always be at Leipsic, the centre of the German Book Market. For the present year Rudolph Garrigue is abroad. He has made arrangements to see all new publications as soon as they leave the press, and he will therefore report altogether from autopsy, making his selection on the strength of long experience, and guided by the friendly advice of a number of American Scholars, with whom he has conferred on the subject. We will thus endeavor to furnish our correspondents with such literary news as they actually care to receive, leaving out the vast amount of merely local literature, yearly issuing from the press, but, on the other hand, giving more minute information about All Works of either general interest to the Educated, or special interest to Students and Scholars, following particular pursuits, than is afforded, by the miscellaneous catalogues which have heretofore been the only source of information.40 Garrigue and Christern worked together for two years. In 1853, Garrigue returned from Germany, and in September of that year, Christern married Garrigue’s older sister, Emilie. One year later, a second fire destroyed everything that had been done for the Iconographic Encyclopedia: the printed sheets and { 81 }

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the stereotype plates of several finished volumes were destroyed, as was the English manuscript. It was a total loss, and, once again, Garrigue did not have fire insurance.41 After the fire, Garrigue and Christern left the Astor House. Garrigue continued for a while as a book importer, doing business at 178 Fulton Street. He also tried his hand at publishing again, issuing a volume of German poetry selected and translated by Alfred Baskerville. Christern continued as a retail bookseller at 763 Broadway. They issued the Monthly Bulletin as two related publications: Rudolph Garrigue’s Monthly Bulletin of German Literature and Fr. W. Christern’s Monthly Bulletin of French Literature. In March 1855, Garrigue and Christern formally announced the dissolution of their partnership.42 Garrigue left the book trade altogether and became the president of Deutsche Gesellschaft, the German Society of New York City. Garrigue proved a controversial figure. Unlike former presidents, from Baron von Steuben to Gustav Schwab, Garrigue was not a wealthy man, so the board of the society agreed to pay him a salary of $2,500. A paid president was unprecedented and unpopular—indeed, no president, before or since, has received a salary. As president, Garrigue was also an ex officio commissioner of immigration for the City of New York. During his tenure in both posts, he took part in the development of the Emigrant Landing Depot at Castle Garden, the forerunner of Ellis Island. Castle Garden provided much-needed protection for the masses of new immigrants arriving at the Port of New York.43 The docks of New York, never a gentle place, became particularly dangerous for German immigrants during the years before the American Civil War, when Tammany Hall boss Fernando Wood was mayor and anti-immigrant gangs acted with impunity. In 1858, Garrigue became a founding partner of the Germania Fire Insurance Society, converting his experience with disaster into profit. For the first time, Garrigue prospered. About a year before the birth of their tenth child, Alexander, in 1862, Charlotte and Rudolph Garrigue were able to move from Brooklyn to a large house in Charlotte’s hometown, Morrisania. Garrigue became president of Germania Fire in 1866 and held that post until his death in 1891. The year after Garrigue took over leadership of the firm, it became the center of a national scandal because of its anti-Semitic practices.44 Garrigue and his company survived the scandal and prospered. When he died suddenly in 1891, Garrigue was a nationally recognized leader of the insurance industry.45 After he ended his partnership with Garrigue, F. W. Christern continued as one of the most respected foreign-language booksellers in New York. Christern’s store on Broadway between Eighth and Ninth Streets was convenient to the { 82 }

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professors and students at Cooper Union and the University of the City of New York (later NYU). Just a few blocks from fashionable Washington Square, it was a perfect location for a bookstore that catered to scholars and upper-middleclass, university-educated Americans.46 In the span of four years in America, Christern had weathered more changes than most booksellers in Germany experienced in a lifetime. He arrived in Philadelphia in 1850 and went to work for John Weik. He then purchased Weik’s business, moved the business to a new location, and then sold it. He moved to New York in 1852 and entered into a partnership with Rudolph Garrigue. In September 1853, he married Emilie Garrigue. One year later, the partnership was over, and Christern was the sole proprietor of what would become the most important foreign-language bookstore in New York. For German book dealers working under the supervision of the Börsenverein, cycling through five businesses in four years would have been unimaginable. In the unpredictable American book trade, however, it was fairly common. In fact, Garrigue had said as much when he described the American way of doing business in his report to the Börsenverein.

{ 83 }

8 The Evolution of the American Book Business

It is impossible to understand America through even the most diligent study, for one is hardly finished and all the relationships have changed and everything learned in study is false. That is the secret flaw in every guide to America that has ever been written. The relationships are to blame, not the authors—why else would well-educated, hardworking people, who write excellent works about other states, be unable to portray the United States accurately and correctly? But they can’t! At least no one has done it. Any European living in America, or even an observant traveler, will confirm this. The foreigner, who reads and studies one hundred books before he goes to America, will still have formed an incorrect picture of the country. He realizes, soon after his arrival, that he has to strip away the opinions of others and see and judge for himself, if he doesn’t want to be consistently baffled. That’s the truth of all American relationships. Everything changes daily, hourly—nothing has stability, because the country is in the middle of its own evolution. —Rudolph Garrigue, Bericht an die Commission für die Begründung einer deutschen Buchhandlung in den Vereinigten Staaten, 1846

In his 1846 report to the German Börsenverein, Rudolph Garrigue depicted the book trade in the United States as an unstable business that reflected the unsettled character of a young and rapidly evolving nation. Garrigue stopped short of calling the American trade chaotic, but he was at once disturbed and fascinated by the frantic and ruthless book business that he encountered. In the report, he pointed out the features of the U.S. trade that surprised or disturbed him—the attitudes and practices that made the U.S. trade so completely unlike the European book trades he knew. During his five-month tour, Garrigue observed what he regarded as the underlying problems of the American book trade. The first problem was rooted in the American ethos. Book dealers in the United States—printers, booksellers, binders, stationers, newsagents—regarded one another as competitors rather { 84 }

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than as colleagues. They had no interest in trade cooperation or organization. The lack of organization meant that there was no way to regulate trade or resolve deputes. The lack of cooperation and organization also meant that the trade had no association, no catalogs, and no journals. Even more troubling, without organization, there was no way to build lasting business relationships. The book trade Garrigue found in the cities of the northeastern United States was not a coherent, cooperative national enterprise like those in Germany or England. In the United States, the book trades had developed from several distinct colonial roots. The colonial book trades, especially those in Boston, Philadelphia, and New York, did not suddenly become a single national book trade when the colonies became the United States. They continued to compete against one another. In fact, competition defined the book trades in the United States. Booksellers competed against one another. Booksellers competed against printers and publishers. Publishers competed against other publishers. Publishers and booksellers in Boston, for example, competed against their rivals in Philadelphia, New York, or Cincinnati. The book trades in the United States competed against the book trade in England. There were no permanent alliances and no rules. In America, as Garrigue wrote, “everything changes daily, hourly—nothing has stability.” In the book trades, business relationships were temporary, and the structure of the business could change from one transaction to the next. Perhaps the situation was caused by the competitive attitudes of the book dealers, or perhaps the unstable business conditions made the book dealers more competitive. In either case, the competitive attitude and the unstable business conditions made it very difficult for the Americans to establish a system that clearly differentiated the retail and wholesale sides of the trade. The wholesale and retail functions had evolved to meet the immediate demands created by printing. Printing introduced mass production, and the book trade had to invent ways to cope with hundreds or thousands of identical books. Printers were the center of the book trade. They arranged the financing, produced the books, and sold as many as they could. Printers then needed to travel to market towns, or they needed someone else to distribute all the books that they could not sell themselves. In short, they needed booksellers, which divided the book business into wholesale and retail. Unfortunately, there was no clear dividing line between the wholesale and retail functions of the book trade. Because printers did both, the two business functions overlapped, but not in any clear-cut pattern. Printers usually acted as wholesalers because they financed, or arranged financing for, the books they { 85 }

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produced. Printers were more clearly acting as wholesalers when they sold their books, at a reduced price, to booksellers. To confuse matters further, most printers also acted as retailers, because they sold the books they printed directly to the public. When they bought books from printers at a discount and sold them for a profit, booksellers were clearly retailers. As the book trade developed over time, however, it became increasingly common for booksellers to arrange the financing of book production, which meant that some booksellers were also publishers. When retail booksellers acted as publishers, they became part of the wholesale book trade. They would sell the books they had financed to other booksellers at a discount. In many cases, the bookseller/publisher would make a wholesale agreement with a printer/publisher, who then acted as a retail bookseller. The “system” made it difficult to know how to distribute the risks and rewards of the business. It also pitted printers and booksellers against one another for sales of the same product. Because wholesale and retail roles were never clearly defined, printers frequently complained about the underhanded practices of the booksellers, and the booksellers complained that printers were taking an unfair share of the profits. In the United States, the problems were exacerbated by conflicts between markets. Booksellers and printers in New York, for example, might complain about one another, but they were even more likely to complain about their common enemy in Philadelphia. With no one to arbitrate the conflicts, American printers and booksellers simply fought it out. The fierce, competitive ethos in the United States exposed structural problems within the book trades that the Europeans managed through organization and regulation. In England, Germany, and the rest of Europe, the book trades were regulated in one way or another. The European book trades had internal or external agencies that set rules and standards. That structure allowed the European trades to make a fairly smooth transition from the original printercentered book trade to an industry dominated by a new entity, the publisher. In the United States, the book trades made the same transition, but it happened later and was a more contentious process. For most of the history of print production, publishing was a provisional role rather than a permanent occupation. That was as true in London, Frankfurt, and Mexico City as it was New York, Philadelphia, or Boston. Whoever arranged or underwrote the financing of a printing project was the publisher. Early on, printers usually assumed the role of the publisher, but almost anyone could act as a publisher. For example, Bishop Zumárraga was a publisher in Mexico City, and Elizabeth Glover was, for a time at least, a publisher in Cambridge, Massachusetts. { 86 }

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Over time, it became more common for booksellers to arrange the financing of printing projects. Most of the major publishing houses that emerged in the United States between 1790 and 1850 had begun as booksellers, chief among them Carey and Lea, Wiley, Appleton, Ticknor and Fields, Scribner, Putnam, and Lippincott. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, publishing had replaced printing as the central role of the book trades.1 Of the major nineteenth-century American publishers, only Harper & Brothers began as a printing house. The Harpers continued to run a large printing plant, but they generally identified themselves as publishers. The house of Harper embodied the confusion within the U.S. book industry. The Harpers printed books that they published, but they also printed books for other publishers. In their bookstore, they sold their own books, books they had printed for other publishers, and books that had been printed or published by other firms. Publishing, manufacturing, and bookselling are the major functions of the book business, and they have competing interests. Nevertheless, people in the book trades were used to dividing or combining those competing functions to suit their immediate needs. The ad hoc combinations and divisions often became contentious because of the way the book trade traditionally determined the retail and wholesale prices of books. Early on, printers set the retail prices, which they frequently printed on the title pages of their books. As the business evolved, publishers assumed most of the financial risk, and so they set the retail prices of books. The book trade arrived at wholesale book prices through a convoluted system called discounting. Under the discount system, the retail price was set by the publisher, who retained the practice of printing the retail price right on the book. The wholesale price of a book was, and still is, that retail price, minus the discount rate. Publishers in the United States typically offered discounts ranging from 10 to 60 percent, depending on a range of criteria. Jobbers, in this case the intermediaries who buy books in large lots and then distribute them to retailers, traditionally received the biggest discounts—between 40 and 60 percent. Retailers who bought books directly from the publisher might receive discounts ranging between 15 and 30 percent, depending on the size of the individual order, the number of orders placed each year, the size of the edition, the type of book, or even the location of the retailer. Still other, more complicated criteria determined the discounts offered to institutional buyers like libraries and universities. The discount system was designed to put everyone who sold books on an even retail footing. The discount system meant that a book would have the same price no matter who was selling it. The system was supposed to prevent printers from { 87 }

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undercutting the price that retail booksellers were charging, and vice versa. Discounting worked well enough in the tightly regulated European markets, which had trade organizations that could force people to play by the rules. American retailers and wholesalers were happy enough to abide by the system, too—until the moment that sales of a particular book started to slow. Selling books has always been a little like the children’s game of “hot potato”—no one ever wanted to get caught holding unsold and unsellable books. Unsold books, or remainders, begin as a loss and never recover any value. The book trades have never really figured out what to do about remainders. For example, the German plan to build a book depot in America was little more than an elaborate scheme to get rid of remaindered books. In the United States, booksellers have preferred to think of the book as the printer’s property until the moment of sale—booksellers think that they ought to be allowed to return any unsold copies of a book to the publisher for a refund. Printers and publishers, on the other hand, have preferred to think of unsold books as the booksellers’ problem. In the United States, when sales of a book started to slow down, the book dealers cut their retail prices. This practice of “underselling” violated the unwritten rules of the book trade. Although competing on price points has become a nearly universal retail practice, it was once regarded as unfair and even underhanded. In the United States, where all the rules of the book trade were unwritten rules, there were plenty of people who assumed that meant there were no rules. Without rules, and without a trade organization to enforce rules, the book trades in the United States became the aggressively competitive enterprise that Garrigue described. The haphazard business structure of the American book trades worked well enough during the hand-press era, but the ad hoc structure became a problem as the technologies of book production improved dramatically during the first half of the nineteenth century. Iron presses, stereotyping, case binding, and machinemade paper boosted output and improved the efficiency of book manufacturers—and that increased capacity actually increased competition within the American book industry. Increased production meant that the retail book trades had many more books to sell, which made distribution even more important. Getting the books to the customers was a real challenge in the United States. There were more and more people to buy the books, but those people lived in towns and cities that were scattered across more than three million square miles. As the United States continued to add new territory, the population became more concentrated in { 88 }

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the East. It was also becoming more concentrated in the West, but in widely separated communities. The canal system made transportation somewhat easier between cities that were linked by water. By midcentury, rail transport was just beginning to make it easier and cheaper to transport books from one place to another. Although remarkable innovations in print production and transportation technology made the book trades more efficient, the new technology did not change the underlying structure of the business. The American book trade was really a multitude of competing regional book trades. Further, the business practices of the book trades were inherently unstable, as they were always subject to change. The combination of unstable business practices and large-scale, steampowered industrial production would create a rift between the printer/publishers and the bookseller/publishers. The most dramatic improvement in American industrial book production began with a disaster. On Saturday 10 December 1853, a fire broke out in one of the six buildings that housed Harper & Brothers, the largest printing and publishing firm in New York. The fire began at about one o’clock in the afternoon; by four o’clock, sixteen buildings, most of a city block, had been reduced to ashes and rubble.2 All that was left of the Harper printing plant was a single chimney rising above what the New York Times described as “a shapeless mass of mouldering ruins.”3 When the four Harper brothers—James, John, Joseph Wesley, and Fletcher—met later that night, they knew that their losses would approach $1 million. They also knew that three considerable assets had not been destroyed in the fire: the stereotype printing plates of their entire catalog of publications, valued at $400,000; enough cash to cover their losses, pay their outstanding debts, and rebuild the business; and the name of Harper & Brothers. After some deliberation, they sent a notice to the newspapers thanking the fire and police departments and announcing, “Business will be resumed at the earliest possible moment.” That same night, John Harper sent a telegram to the Adams Company of Boston, placing an immediate order for twenty steam-powered printing presses. He then began work on plans for new buildings.4 The fire was a disaster, but it gave the Harpers the opportunity to replace their original haphazard collection of buildings with something specifically designed for the manufacture and sale of books. The Harper brothers, who had suffered four previous fires, wanted their new plant to be totally fireproof, but they also wanted it to be efficient and handsome. After considering several alternatives, the Harpers decided to rebuild on Franklin Square (333 Pearl Street).5 { 89 }

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The new home of Harper & Brothers coupled recent advances in commercial construction technology with innovative industrial design. The result was a pair of six-story buildings framed entirely with structural iron and separated by a wide courtyard. The building that faced Franklin Square housed retail sales, warehousing, distribution, and business offices. The Cliff Street building was devoted to composing, electrotyping, printing, binding, and all the other processes of book manufacture. The Harper & Brothers buildings utilized new materials and used familiar materials in novel ways. The structures combined recently developed prefabricated cast and wrought iron elements to create a tough, graceful, and modular skeleton. The fireproof floors were constructed of poured concrete supported by cast iron columns and a system of wrought iron bow trusses and brick arches. To further reduce the danger of fire or explosion, the steam boilers that supplied power and heat to the buildings were installed in the courtyard that separated the two buildings. In an effort to prevent the spread of any fire that might start, the Harpers insisted that the architect eliminate internal staircases. In order to get from one concrete floor to another, workers had to leave the building, cross an open iron bridge to a central circular stairway, ascend or descend the stairs, and then cross another iron bridge back to the building. Heavy materials could be moved from floor to floor using a steam-powered freight hoist outside the Cliff Street building.6 The new buildings reflected the Harper brothers’ long-standing interest in innovation and efficiency. They were always ready to invest in new technology. In fact, they had launched their business in 1817 with the purchase of a pair of Ramage presses.7 Those first presses were advanced for their day, combining a traditional wooden frame with a steel and iron printing mechanism.8 During the course of the next three decades, the Harpers would see the technology of book production change more than it had in the previous three centuries. The Harpers had been thoroughly up-to-date before the fire: they were among the first to adopt innovations like steam-powered printing presses, stereo­type and electrotype printing plates, and case bindings.9 After the fire, they took the opportunity to organize all the processes of print production into an orderly, mechanized network, run by a central steam-driven power plant. In less than a year, the twenty new Adams presses that John Harper had ordered on the night of the fire (plus an additional twenty-four) were turning out a million units annually in an innovative new structure designed to integrate dozens of book manufacturing processes into a single efficient production stream.10 { 90 }

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The Harpers’ Cliff Street building was among the first fully realized massproduction factories in the United States. The structure was a vast machine for the manufacture of books housed within an iron framework. Words, paper, and ink came in, and tens of thousands of identical books and magazines went out. A cross section illustration that first appeared in Jacob Abbott’s instructive book for children The Harper Establishment; or, How Books Are Made shows a small army of women and men tending the machinery of print production in the new Cliff Street building.11 As in any modern factory, the workforce is divided into a series of interconnected departments, each performing a specific task as the product moves toward completion. The steam plant in the central courtyard powered the machinery in each department and provided heat for the building and for the drying rooms. As it did in other industries, steam power opened a wide array of manufacturing jobs in the book trade to women. A careful examination of the Cliff Street illustration reveals that several departments, notably the bindery and the printing floor, were staffed primarily by women. When the Franklin Square building that housed the business offices and retail bookstore was completed in the summer of 1855, Harper & Brothers held a grand opening celebration. The same construction techniques had been used for both buildings, but the public face of Harper & Brothers had an ornate cast-iron facade designed by James Bogardus. The delicate cast-iron columns and arches framing an enormous wall of window glass made the Franklin Square building something of a tourist attraction.12 Behind the ornate facade, the business offices in the Franklin Square building had little of the spirit of innovation that distinguished the Cliff Street factory. Although they were quick to embrace new technology and willing to reorganize their manufacturing processes, the Harpers were surprisingly reluctant to adopt new business practices. They ran a multimillion-dollar enterprise, but they did not use double-entry bookkeeping until 1857. Neither were they much interested in efforts to organize or reform the national book trade.13 The Harpers saw no reason to change a system that had made them rich men. While the Harpers were building their remarkable book factory, George Palmer Putnam, an important bookseller and publisher, was leading an effort to organize and reform the American book trade. He had launched three moderately successful book-trade journals, and he had played a central role in the formation of the short-lived Booksellers’ Association of New York.14 Putnam shared the Harpers’ enthusiasm for recent advances in book production, but he saw problems in the American trade that the Harpers did not. Putnam was not the only book dealer who was worried about the future of the book trade. His { 91 }

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new venture, the New York Book Publishers’ Association, had the support of many prominent book dealers. William H. Appleton was the president of the association, and Alfred S. Barnes, Charles B. Norton, and Charles Scribner acted as officers and directors. Soon after it was organized, the association voted to sponsor a trade journal, the American Publishers’ Circular and Literary Gazette. In an effort to generate public and trade interest in the new Book Publishers’ Association, Putnam revived an old idea. In 1837, he had organized a successful authors’ banquet for the Booksellers’ Association of New York; eighteen years later, he suggested another banquet to celebrate America’s literary achievements and to publicize his new organization. On the evening of 27 September 1855, more than seven hundred publishers, booksellers, politicians, ministers, scholars, and authors assembled in New York’s Crystal Palace exhibition hall (now the site of Bryant Park) for an event billed as the “Complimentary Fresh Fruit and Flower Festival.” Under a banner that read, “Honor to Genius,” they gathered to celebrate the accomplishments of America’s authors and its book trade. After a meal of “rich and varied fruits, cold meats, salads, jellies, teas, coffees, ices” and other light refreshments (no wine or cigars, as ladies were present), William H. Appleton gave a short speech welcoming the guests and dignitaries, including Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, Washington Irving, Samuel F. B. Morse, and Mayor Fernando Wood. Appleton then proposed that “under the guise of a light floral banquet, it is very possible that we may be inaugurating a new era in the history of that trade which ministers to the intellectual wants of a great and powerful people.” Appleton then explained the purpose of the new association, telling his audience that the operation and organization of “the bookselling trade” had “hitherto been left to chance or the narrow views of private interests.” He assured his listeners that the new Book Publishers’ Association had been formed “not to control or influence their brethren, but to accept the charge of such general interests as are usually confided to similar associations by all other trades, guilds and professions.” Appleton concluded with a congratulatory nod to the book trade for its “wholesome guardianship over the literature of the country.”15 Putnam’s speech focused on the astonishing growth of the American book trades since the last such banquet. The numbers he reported were staggering. In the eighteen years that separated the two events, the annual production of new American book titles had risen by 800 percent. During the same interval, he explained, the American population had increased just 80 percent. “If we compare the numbers printed of each edition,” he continued, “the growth is still greater;

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for, 20 years ago who imagined editions of 300,000, or 75,000, or 30,000, or even the now common number of 10,000?” Putnam cataloged the literary achievements of America’s authors in great detail before returning to his original topic: “the Mechanical aspects of our progress in book-making.” Sudden advances in the technology of print production made editions of ten thousand or more possible and perhaps necessary. Putnam singled out Harper & Brothers and J. B. Lippincott & Co. as examples of the new productivity in American book manufacture. He then praised “the Machinery for this great manufacture”—steam-powered presses, stereotyping, and the new mechanical compositors—before calling, obliquely, for international copyright protection.16 Although the banquet was billed as a celebration of American literary achievement, it was actually part of the battle between factions of the book business. The New York Book Publishers’ Association had been created to reform perceived abuses in the trade. The association was particularly interested in changing the practices of the semiannual trade sales, which were actually auctions. The biggest sales, held in New York and Philadelphia, were major trade events that lasted as long as a week. Printers, publishers, booksellers, and jobbers gathered to buy or sell new and remaindered stock, unwanted printing plates, and used equipment. Although the sales were useful, they had become a point of contention because of the way in which new stock was sold. Publishers were allowed to offer new books in very small lots—five or ten copies. If the bidding for a particular lot did not go high enough, the seller could simply withdraw that lot and wait for a better price on the next lot of the same book. The members of the Book Publishers’ Association argued that the sales were unfair to buyers and proposed an absolute auction that did not allow sellers to withdraw items. In a printed notice to the trade, Harper & Brothers countered that the status quo served the trade better than the reforms proposed by the Book Publishers’ Association.17 In the end, the association prevailed; sellers at the 1855 fall trade sale were required to accept the highest bid, even if it was less than they had hoped for. Putnam’s elaborate banquet, which had been timed to coincide with the conclusion of the fall sale, was more than a publicity event—it was a victory celebration. Although Putnam was careful to single them out for particular praise, the Harpers were conspicuously absent from the banquet. The members of the association may have been in a celebratory mood, but the battles were far from over. The Harpers retaliated by staging their own independent auction that fall.18

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The conflict over the trade sales was a symptom of systemic problems within the American book trade. As William Appleton said in his opening remarks at the banquet, the American book trade had developed haphazardly. It had centers, but no central organizing body and no mechanism for settling conflicts. Appleton had told his audience that the American book trade was entering a new era, but he condemned the “private interests” that influenced its development and prompted the formation of the association in the first place. There had been a revolution in the technology of book production and distribution. In Franklin Square, Harper & Brothers had built the most advanced book manufacturing plant in the United States (and perhaps the world). By integrating all the processes of book manufacture into one work stream, powered by a central steam plant, the Harpers pushed their annual book-production quantities into the millions. Steam also drove the growing railroad network, which promised fast, cheap, national distribution. When the members and guests of the New York Book Publishers’ Association assembled in the Crystal Palace, at what was then the northern limit of the city, they had gathered to celebrate their successful effort to reform the trade. Although the banquet was a victory celebration, the victory had been partial and would prove to be short-lived. In the end, the association did little to unify the trade. The effort to reform the trade sales had inspired heated debates within the American book trade, but so did other issues—underselling, copyright law, discounting, textbook sales, subscription selling, and republishing. The underlying structural problems of the American book trade, however, were not much discussed—it would require an outsider to help the American book trade establish a new way of doing business.

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9 Becoming a German Bookseller in the United States

The German[s] in America [have] not produced many great men, but [they have] filled this country with good men, which is infinitely better. The cause of the dearth of prominent GermanAmericans is due to the fact that they blend more quickly than any other foreigner (except the Scandinavian) with the nation’s life, especially if the German reaches any kind of eminence; and the effect which he has upon the life of the nation is difficult to trace just because of that. The coarse, the crude and the low, retain their national stamp, while the finer and better soon become part of us. —Edward A. Steiner, On the Trail of the Immigrant, 1909

In 1854, the Harper brothers were finishing their new book factory and George Palmer Putnam was organizing the New York Book Publishers’ Association. In January of that year, a young man named Jacob Friedrich Ferdinand Leypold applied for permission to leave his home in Stuttgart, Württemberg, and travel to America.1 He arrived at the Port of New York later that year, along with 178,968 other German immigrants. Like many immigrants, he changed his name when he landed in New York, becoming Frederick Leypoldt. Leypoldt arrived in New York as the Auswanderung, the massive nineteenthcentury exodus of Germans, was bringing unprecedented numbers of new immigrants to America. Leypoldt was just one of nearly two hundred thousand. Nevertheless, he represented a new kind of German immigrant. He was not a farmer with a family who came in search of land. He was not a skilled tradesman who hoped to build a new life in America. He was not a laborer desperate to find any sort of work. In fact, Leypoldt did not intend to settle in the United States. He was eighteen years old, bright and energetic, and he planned to make some sort of start for himself in New York City and then return to pursue a career in Germany. By choice or by chance, Leypoldt began his career in America as a clerk in the foreign-language bookshop of F. W. Christern. Adolph Growoll, Leypoldt’s { 95 }

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friend and colleague, constructed a lively, affectionate portrait of the young Leypoldt: He was born in Stuttgart, Würtemburg, November 17, 1835. His father was a prosperous butcher, who controlled an important part of the trade of the King’s household, and who took intense pride in his business, which he desired to see continued by his namesake—his younger son Frederick. The older son, who had a taste for his father’s career, was destined for a college life; the younger son, who had inherited from his mother a warm poetic, idealistic temperament, was forced to learn his father’s trade. This stern, unyielding father and his sensitive, high-spirited son caused each other great mutual unhappiness. In his hard-earned and restricted leisure hours Frederick Leypoldt had made the acquaintance of several kindred spirits of literary and dramatic aspirations, young men willing to brave all things and risk all things to live their own lives and to realize the ideals which then fired “Young Germany” in every strata of society. Frederick Leypoldt ran away from home and visited several cities of Germany offering a play he had written, in which he hoped to be allowed to play a part. Meeting only rebuff and failure, he invested his few remaining pennies in books, which he sold by the roadside, and finally worked his way home again, and once more tried to conform to his father’s wishes. But the taste of freedom had been too powerful. He at length gained his parents’ consent to go to America and earn his own living.2 Growoll completed his portrait of Leypoldt as a born bookman with an allusion to the most famous of American bookmen, Benjamin Franklin. “On his arrival in New York, without friends and almost without money,” Growoll wrote, “he suffered much, and finally started out to tramp the streets in search of any work he could pick up. His tastes inclined him to books, and seeing a sign ‘Boy Wanted,’ he entered the foreign bookstore of F. W. Christern, explained his position and obtained a situation.”3 Compare Growoll’s account of Leypoldt to Franklin’s story of his escape from Boston to New York: “So I sold some of my books to raise a little money, was taken on board privately, and as we had a fair wind, in three days I found myself in New York, near 300 miles from home, a boy of but 17, without the least recommendation to, or knowledge of any person in the place, and with very little money in my pocket.”4 Franklin might not have invented the American myth of the self-made man who arrives in a strange place without money or friends, but { 96 }

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the story had been an American cliché since the publication of his Autobiography in 1793. Growoll’s account also linked Leypoldt to “Young Germany” ( Junges Deutschland), a literary and intellectual movement that shared the political goals of the revolution of 1848. It was a roundabout way of claiming that Leypoldt was a “forty-eighter,” which would have made him just the sort of superior German immigrant that might appeal to a rigorously trained German bookseller like Christern. The poet Heinrich Heine was the central figure of the movement, which included Robert Schumann and Karl Marx. Leypoldt was too young to have been part of the movement, but he did share its liberal politics and Romantic aesthetics. Identifying Leypoldt with Young Germany set him apart from the mass of Germans who were pouring into the United States in the nineteenth century. Leypoldt, like Christern before him, was one of the “good” Germans—intelligent, industrious, literate, and politically progressive—who would soon assimilate and become good Americans. It was an important distinction, because Americans, even though they are all either immigrants or the descendants of immigrants, have always been suspicious of the newest immigrants. When immigration surged in the middle of the nineteenth century, suspicion turned into open hostility and violence, first directed toward the Irish. Leypoldt arrived in America just as the focus of anti-immigrant sentiment was shifting toward the Germans. By 1854, an anti-immigration “Know-Nothing” party was gaining real political power in American cities. Know-Nothing candidates won mayoral elections in Boston, Philadelphia, and Chicago, attracting radicals like Thaddeus Stevens and conservatives like former president Millard Fillmore. From its beginnings, the Know-Nothing movement supported a seemingly incompatible collection of causes, ranging from abolition, temperance, and public funding for railroads, to violent anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant nativism. Irish Catholics were the primary target of the nativists, who also warned against German skepticism and socialism.5 Ironically, the movement attracted second- and third-generation Irish Americans who favored restricted immigration, as well as recent German immigrants who were strongly anti-papist. In a history of the German book trade in America published by the Börsen­ verein in 1878, Friedrich Kapp wrote that Leypoldt completed an apprenticeship at Bach’s Bookstore in Stuttgart before coming to the United States.6 Unlike Growoll’s account, Kapp’s description of Leypoldt’s entry into the book trade does not engage in myth-making and is probably closer to the truth. { 97 }

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Perhaps Leypoldt happened to walk into the foreign-language bookstore at 763 Broadway, “explained his position,” and Christern engaged the young man on the strength of his character. On the other hand, Leypoldt might have been a qualified journeyman bookseller, as Kapp claimed. Whatever the case, Christern hired Leypoldt and, thus, gained an energetic and intelligent assistant. Leypoldt secured a job at a time when work could be hard to find, and he would learn the booksellers’ trade from one of the most respected German book dealers in America. German booksellers like Christern were products of a long-standing tradition. Germany had by far the most rigorous, highly regulated training, although similar systems were in place throughout Europe, including England. The German system first emerged in Leipzig after that city supplanted Frankfurt as the center of the German book industry. In fact, the influential Börsenverein replaced the old Leipzig booksellers’ guild in 1825. The Börsenverein became responsible for setting the standards of the trade, and it later established a school of bookselling in Leipzig. Aspiring booksellers served an apprenticeship that lasted between two and four years. During that time, they learned the skills of the trade, from cleaning the store and the proper handling of books, to the more complicated tasks of ordering, shipping, accounting, and cataloging. Eventually the apprentices learned the fundamentals of store management and salesmanship. Apprentices also learned, in great detail, the workings and the organization of the publishing business, which in Germany was, and is, clearly distinct from the booksellers’ business. In The Book in America: A History of the Making and Selling of Books in the United States, long the standard reference for the print history of the United States, Hellmut Lehmann-Haupt wrote that the most important aspect of the German bookseller’s training was in the “appreciation of literature and in bibliographical methods.” A bookseller in the German tradition was supposed to be equal parts scholar and merchant, fluent in French and German, and familiar with English, Italian, Latin, and Greek. “The old-time German bookseller,” according to Lehmann-Haupt, “considered himself a servant of literature, and he was proud of his training and his literary judgment.”7 Upon the successful completion of an apprenticeship, the bookseller-intraining ascended to the position of junior assistant and then, perhaps, to senior assistant. A talented assistant, with sufficient luck or financial backing, might one day be made a partner, or establish an independent store. The German system compelled those hoping for a career in any aspect of the book trade to begin as booksellers’ apprentices and slowly work their way up. { 98 }

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That rigid hierarchy and slow pace of advancement might explain why Christern decided, years earlier, to join Garrigue in America. Whatever the reason, Christern remained a thoroughly German bookseller. We should expect that he trained his employees much as he had been trained. If Leypoldt arrived at Christern’s door “without friends and almost without money,” as Growoll claimed, he would have begun at the bottom of the hierarchy as an elderly shop boy. If he worked as a shop boy, Leypoldt would have had many duties. Shop boys had little leisure in the age of coal stoves and oil lamps. Alfred S. Barnes, a publisher of schoolbooks, recalled his days as a shop boy in a slightly earlier era: I would open and sweep out the store before breakfast and remain until the next older [boy] came to relieve me. My next duty would be to go to the office and get the mail, and then get my breakfast—sometimes cold and sometimes hot—and, after family prayers, back again to the store, lay out orders, pack books, mark the packages and send them to the stage offices; generally I carried the packages, either on my back or in a wheelbarrow. We had no porters; the boys did that kind of work. There were no railroads in those days, but steamboats to New York and Springfield were the water travel from Hartford, and stage coaches by land. I remember the first thing I did in this bookstore was to unravel twine which came in packages, and wind it into balls for future use. The rule was to be busy. In writing, I copied letters and invoices into a copy or letter book (the copying press was not then known). Steel pens had not been introduced, and an immense amount of time was daily devoted to making and mending quill pens.8 Of course, if Leypoldt did serve his apprenticeship in Germany, Christern would not have given him chores that could be assigned to a twelve-year-old boy; rather, he would have continued Leypoldt’s more advanced training.9 As Christern’s apprentice, or assistant, Leypoldt would learn about literature, broadly defined, and business. In order to be a German bookseller in New York, Leypoldt would need to be fluent in German, French, and English and reasonably familiar with Italian, Latin, Greek, and perhaps Hebrew. Christern would have guided Leypoldt’s reading and taught him to make accurate bibliographic descriptions of the books he read and worked with every day. Leypoldt would also need to master the general principles of accounting and the complexities of retail book sales. He needed to understand discounting and learn how to guess which books to order and how many copies of each book his { 99 }

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customers might actually buy. As a foreign bookseller in New York, Leypoldt would need to learn about currency exchange, tariffs, and import regulations. In order to transact business with the German and French book trades, Leypoldt needed to learn the way those trades were structured. He also needed to know how the various parts of the trade interacted and communicated. Certainly, Leypoldt soon became thoroughly familiar with the catalogs of the German and French book industries and with the major European trade journals, the Börsenblatt and the Bulletin Mensuel. Leypoldt would also learn how to use the Monthly Bulletin that Christern continued to publish. The training that Leypoldt received in Christern’s bookstore was utterly unlike anything he might have learned in any American bookshop. The German book trade had been a highly structured, well-regulated affair for almost two hundred years, and it was organized on principles completely foreign to the American trade. German publishers, for example, rarely operated their own retail stores. In Germany, publishers manufactured books—booksellers sold them. German booksellers were also particular and exclusive about their stock. A German bookstore was designed to serve the needs of the serious reader. Books, magazines, maps, sheet music, and engravings or lithographs were considered the legitimate stock of a bookseller. The “old-time German bookseller”—who, Lehmann-Haupt tells us, considered himself a “servant of literature”—regarded stationery and notions as beneath him.10 By contrast, nothing was beneath the dignity of most American booksellers in the United States. In the colonies, and later in the republic, the notion of sustaining a bookstore by selling nothing but books, or even books and stationery, was ridiculous. The Philadelphia printer Andrew Bradford sold “whalebone, goose feathers, pickled sturgeon, chocolate, and Spanish snuff ” along with the books and pamphlets he printed.11 Signs in the window of Sparrow Horton’s Woburn Book Store in Woburn, Massachusetts, advertised newspapers and periodicals, picture frames, wallpaper, window shades, toys, insurance, steamship tickets, but no books. Horton’s store also doubled as the streetcar waiting room.12 Even in the largest markets—Philadelphia, New York, and Boston—booksellers needed to supplement their stock of books with a variety of wares simply to survive. As a trip to any modern bookstore will show, the American bookseller still relies on notions and food to make a profit. In the United States, books have been, and still are, most often a sideline— even in bookstores. According to the book historian William Charvat, “proper bookshops” were rare, even in cities, well into the nineteenth century. When Leypoldt was learning the book trade, books were often sold at newsstands and in { 10 0 }

Becoming a German Bookseller

general stores. Books could also be purchased in post offices, apothecaries, or even millinery shops.13 In a memoir of his life as an American stationery manufacturer’s traveling representative, Paul Wielandy described the state of his trade in the 1880s, when he was just starting out: “The leading items of a book and stationery store in the pioneer days were writing paper—envelopes—legal blanks—blank books— pencils—quills—pens—inks—slates—black boards—chalk crayons—copying books and copying presses. At the time there were no tablets and papeteries [note cards], or typewriter, mimeograph and carbon papers—all correspondence was written out in longhand. With few exceptions, every stationery store carried a general stock of books.”14 Little had changed in the status of books as merchandise in the century and a half that separated Andrew Bradford and Paul Wielandy. The “general stock of books” that Wielandy mentioned could be found alongside displays of chinaware, collar stays, or cigars. Dolls and alphabet blocks were at least as common as books in the sort of “bookstore” Wielandy served in the 1880s. Compared with steady sellers like copying books, books with the text already printed on the page were a great risk. Who could predict how a book would sell? Even best sellers like those written by the once-popular Timothy Shay Arthur might languish on the shelf. Selling books was an uncertain enterprise, and stocking general merchandise helped minimize the risks. Frederick Christern managed to maintain the standards he had learned during his apprenticeship with Herold and Wahlstab in Lüneberg. He never stocked the sort of notions that Wielandy talked about in his reminiscence. Although he lived and worked in New York, Christern remained a traditional German bookseller throughout his career. His bookstore served as “the rendez-vous of almost all scientific and literary men visiting this country, who almost invariably brought letters of introduction to Mr. F. W. Christern.”15 F. W. Christern was succeeding in a business that had nearly ruined Rudolph Garrigue, his friend and brother-in-law, so he made decisions carefully. In 1863, for example, he would acquire a foreign news agency from one of John Weik’s former partners, a man named Joseph Wieck, in lieu of payment for an outstanding debt. Christern then sold the agency to Ernst Steiger, who made the mistake of leasing it back to Wieck, who then embezzled funds from the agency. Only Christern made a profit on that series of transactions.16 Later on, Christern negotiated an exclusive, long-term contract with Justin Winsor of the Boston Public Library. The contract made Christern the purchasing agent for the library and gave him the authority to select newly published foreign books.17 { 101 }

How Books Came to America

Christern’s choices were rarely bold, but they were usually sound. Some part of his success must have been due to the phenomenal growth of New York, which was now the undisputed commercial center of the United States.18 As New Yorkers prospered, they sought the trappings of European culture, including university educations.19 Christern’s bookstore was a center of intellectual culture, a cosmopolitan outpost in a rough metropolis. Frederick Leypoldt had been working in Christern’s bookstore for two years when he decided to return to Germany. Apparently Leypoldt’s return home did not go as well as he had hoped—he came back to New York in the fall of 1857 and resumed his place in Christern’s shop. Henry Holt later said that Leypoldt had come back to New York because he found “that it was too slow for him over there.”20 Perhaps Leypoldt discovered that his experience in New York counted for little in the tightly regulated German trade. Leypoldt worked for Christern for another two years. During that period, the two men became close friends, according to Leypoldt’s daughter, Marian A. Osborne. She said that Christern received her father in his home, practically as a member of the family.21 Although they were close friends, Leypoldt and Christern did not always see eye to eye regarding the trade. Leypoldt apparently had ideas for improving the business—ideas that Adolph Growoll described as “unconventional experiments.” Christern encouraged and probably helped Leypoldt to establish a bookstore of his own in Philadelphia. In the fall of 1859, Leypoldt opened the Librairie Étrangère at 1323 Chestnut Street, “below the U.S. Mint.”22 His experiments in Philadelphia would eventually affect established American firms like Putnam and Harper & Brothers, changing the structure of the book trade in the United States.

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10 Creating a German Bookstore in Philadelphia

Amerika, du hast es besser Als unser Kontinent, das alte, Hast keine verfallene Schlösser Und keine Basalte. Dich stört nicht im Innern, Zu lebendiger Zeit, Unnützes Erinnern Und vergeblicher Streit. Benutzt die Gegenwart mit Glück! Und wenn nun eure Kinder dichten, Bewahre sie ein gut Geschick Vor Ritter-, Räuber- und Gespenstergeschichten. America, you have it better than our old continent: you have no fallen castles no stones. You are not inwardly torn, in your life, by useless memories and vain quarrels. Use the present well! And should your children make verses let fortune spare them tales of knights, robbers, and ghosts. —Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “Den Vereinigten Staaten” (The United States), 1831

When Frederick Leypoldt opened his German bookstore in Philadelphia, his timing was unfortunate. Philadelphia had been the center of all things German in America since the landing of the Germantown settlers in 1683. By the time Leypoldt launched the Librairie Étrangère in the fall of 1859, New York had { 10 3 }

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already overtaken Philadelphia as the center of German American life in the United States. William Penn’s City of Brotherly Love had many old German families, but nearly three million German immigrants had arrived at the Port of New York since 1850. Of course, Leypoldt had not opened his new bookstore for the benefit of the millions of Germans who were coming to America. His customers would be very much like the customers who bought books in Christern’s store in New York: well-educated, middle-class readers who had learned their German, or their French, in a classroom. In Philadelphia, Leypoldt could attempt his “unconventional experiments” without impinging on Christern’s business. If the experiments succeeded, Leypoldt and Christern could act as a tiny bookselling syndicate. If he failed, it would not affect Christern. Leypoldt’s connection with F. W. Christern must have smoothed his entry into Philadelphia’s small German book trade. It is likely that Christern maintained his contacts among the book dealers of Philadelphia, although few of the German booksellers from the early 1850s were still in business. John Weik, Christern’s first American employer, was still in and out of the book trade. As they had in Christern’s day, Ernst Karl Schäfer and Rudolph Koradi still ran the city’s largest and most prosperous foreign bookstore at the corner of Fourth and Wood, on the north side of the Old City. Karl Rühl, however, was no longer in business; he had not been able to make a success of Christern’s old location.1 The homeopathic bookstores were the only bookselling firms in Philadelphia that catered primarily to the Germans who lived there. In his 1891 memoir, Forty Years Among the Old Booksellers of Philadelphia, William Brotherhead had some harsh things to say about the German book trade in America. Of course, Brotherhead was an antiquarian, and his comments reflect that interest. Like Franklin before him, however, Brotherhead was none too fond of Germans: It is a most singular fact that in this city, with a German population of over 300,000, they sustain only one that deals in old books [Schäfer and Koradi], and this on a small scale. This fact reflects on the generally welleducated German but little credit. Why this should be so I do not know. I have asked well-educated Germans about this deplorable fact, but no good solution can be given. Some say that the educated German cannot be found here, or at least but few of them, their chief object in life is [to] work, smoke and drink lager beer, and only read their newspapers. I am sorry to say that there is a great deal of truth in this partial explanation.2 { 104 }

a German Bookstore in Philadelphia

Although Brotherhead was more impressed by the “foreign” offerings of antiquarian book dealers like John Pennington and Joseph Sabin, he had been able to say a kind word or two about F. W. Christern. Although it ought to have been a simple business proposition, establishing a new German bookstore in Philadelphia was remarkably complicated. In “Den Vereinigten Staaten,” Goethe imagined the United States as a place without tradition, free of Europe’s ruined castles and tales of ghosts. In reality, Leypoldt had to balance the customary and the new. Everything about the undertaking had at least two sides. Leypoldt was an independent businessman, but he was still associated with Christern and, willing or not, a representative of the German book trade. He had to fit his new enterprise into an established German community and a book trade that included both homeopathic bookshops like Radde’s and serious booksellers like Schäfer and Koradi. One of the most important decisions Leypoldt had to make was where to locate his store. Most of the German book dealers in Philadelphia were located in or near what is now called the Old City. Leypoldt chose to locate his Librairie Étrangère in the new commercial district surrounding Penn Square, the future site of City Hall. His bookstore at 1323 Chestnut Street occupied one half of a four-story commercial building at the northeast corner of Chestnut and Juniper. The United States Mint was on the other side of Juniper. Leypoldt’s building was part of a row of commercial buildings that backed up to the Philadelphia and Columbia Railroad freight depot. (The freight yard and the commercial buildings would all eventually be transformed into John Wanamaker’s Grand Depot, America’s first department store.)3 Leypoldt prospered at 1323 Chestnut Street. Soon after he opened the shop, he added a reading room for foreign periodicals and a lecture room. Leypoldt’s bookstore became a gathering place for Philadelphia’s scholars and writers. His customers included American literary scholars like Hiram Corson and Fanny Fuller, and the theologians Charles Porterfield Krauth, Rev. John Grigg, and the Rev. Dr. William H. Furness.4 Bayard Taylor, George Henry Boker, and Charles Leland were regular visitors. Leland, who had described Christern’s store as his “social club,” gave Leypoldt’s bookstore a favorable review in the Continental Monthly.5 Bayard Taylor was probably the most famous of Leypoldt’s clients. Taylor was already a literary celebrity and a respected scholar of German literature in 1859. He was the author of a popular 1846 collection of travel sketches called Views A-foot; or, Europe Seen with a Knapsack and Staff, and numerous novels, plays, and poems. Taylor’s friend George Boker was probably best known for his 1853 { 10 5 }

How Books Came to America

verse tragedy Francesca da Rimini and his Civil War poems, especially “The Black Regiment,” which Leypoldt translated into German. Leypoldt also welcomed the author and publisher Henry Charles Lea to his bookstore. H. C. Lea succeeded his father as a partner in the firm Blanchard and Lea, previously Carey and Lea. At the time of his acquaintance with Leypoldt, Lea was training himself to be a historian. Henry Lea and Charles Leland shared an interest in European witchcraft and pagan folklore. According to Leypoldt’s friend and colleague Richard Rogers Bowker, the bookstore was a “rendezvous of the musical and the dramatic profession, who frequently sought Mr. Leypoldt’s advice as to their rendering of certain parts, Mr. Leypoldt being a great lover of music and the drama.”6 Lucille Western, an actress who was famous for her portrayal of Lucretia Borgia, was a customer (her sister Helen later became a tabloid celebrity for her romantic involvement with John Wilkes Booth). Edwin Forrest, the Shakespearean actor whose feud with Charles Macready had sparked the Astor Place Riot in 1849, was another visitor. Everything seemed to be going as planned. Leypoldt had not yet launched any particularly daring experiments, but his bookstore was a popular place among writers, artists, and scholars. He was twenty-five years old, and it seemed that he was a successful businessman. Everything changed on 12 April 1861, however, when Confederate forces attacked Fort Sumter. The American Civil War did not become a national tragedy overnight. Nevertheless, it had an immediate effect on Leypoldt’s business. Importers like Leypoldt had to contend with higher duties and unprecedented inflation. The tariff acts of 1861 and 1864 significantly changed the cost of importing books. Bound books, which had been subject to a duty of 7 percent on bound volumes since the tariff reduction of 1857, were subject first to a 15 percent and then to a 25 percent import duty.7 Rates for unbound sheets, including newspapers, doubled and then tripled, which hurt the agencies that imported foreign newspapers.8 While the tariffs were skyrocketing, the real value of gold rose from 103 percent to 285 percent of its face value, which cut the purchasing power of gold currency by nearly two-thirds. Gold prices rose dramatically as soon as the war began, a situation that was exacerbated when the U.S. Department of the Treasury began printing paper money.9 The subsequent inflation hurt everyone, but the deflated value of gold currency was especially hard on importers like Leypoldt, who were required to use gold coin to pay for the goods they imported and the duties on those goods. Higher import duties and devalued gold, along with stagnation in the institutional market, brought the foreign book trade to a standstill. The unsettled { 10 6 }

a German Bookstore in Philadelphia

economic conditions made everyone cautious about spending, especially on discretionary purchases like books. Institutional buyers like libraries and schools postponed purchases. Leypoldt tried at first to weather the crisis by adding an English-language department, stocking books by popular American and British authors.10 In 1862, he became the American agent for the extensive Tauchnitz British authors series. Published in Leipzig, the paperbound reprint series was the forerunner of the modern paperback. Tauchnitz also reprinted American books, but they never sold their American reprints in the United States or their British reprints in Great Britain. He also launched a private circulating library in 1862. Administered by Marian M. Monachesi, the lending library eventually held more than six thousand volumes in several languages. The collection of French literature was particularly strong.11 In the nineteenth century, it was fairly common for booksellers, foreign and domestic, to maintain lending libraries. The bookstore charged patrons fees based on the popularity or scarcity of the book. Burnham’s Book Store of Boston, for example, distributed a broadside advertisement that offered its library customers books at “6–50¢ per Week | New Books 3 Days Only | Foreign, Classical, Law, Medical, and London Books Extra.”12 Foreign booksellers like Leypoldt could offer more specialized booklists to their subscribers, adding titles as they were requested. If the demand for a particular book began to taper off, it could then be sold at a discount. In order to save his business, Leypoldt was gradually entering a new world: he was becoming an American bookseller. Leypoldt soon realized that the book trade in the United States had none of the infrastructure that German booksellers took for granted. As he had learned it, the business of making and selling books required organization and cooperation, but the Americans had neither. There were no rules at all. To a German bookseller like Leypoldt, the American book trade was a lawless wilderness. Leypoldt realized that the American book trade had serious problems, and he wanted to help by explaining the advantages of the German way of doing business. He wanted his American colleagues to understand that the book trade required certain tools—primarily weekly trade journals and catalogs—that gave structure to the enterprise. The American book trade did have a trade journal, the American Publishers’ Circular and Literary Gazette. It was the same journal that George Putnam’s short-lived New York Book Publishers’ Association had sponsored back in 1855. In 1856, Charles Rode became the editor. Book-trade journals had never been { 107 }

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particularly successful in the United States, and when the Civil War began, Rode was forced to turn the weekly Publishers’ Circular into a monthly trade journal. Naturally, Leypoldt was a subscriber. In January 1863, Rode published a letter written by Robert Clarke, a prominent Cincinnati bookseller, who urged Rode to return to weekly publication and to an annual catalog. Clarke’s letter inspired Leypoldt to write his own letter to the Publishers’ Circular: Having commenced business as an importer of foreign books, I but lately—in consequence of “the really depressed state” of importing—paid more attention to the domestic book-market. But when commencing to work in this new branch, I soon felt, “very sadly” too, a deficiency of the book-seller’s most indispensable tools—a well-supported central organ and—good catalogues. I wondered for long, how it was, that in this country, where everything is offered to us so extremely practical and handy— especially timesaving tools and instruments—the booksellers have been neglected so much. I confess, I am a spoiled child in matters of book lists and catalogues, having been brought up in Germany—“the living catalogue of Europe!”13 German booksellers, he explained, had two dozen trade journals to choose from and several annual catalogs. In Germany, he said, it was a matter of too much information rather than too little, as was the case in the United States. “The soul of the German book-trade,” he continued, was the Börsenblatt, the trade journal founded in 1834 by the Börsenverein. The Börsenblatt, he explained, was issued three times a week throughout the year, and six times a week during the Leipzig book fair. As Leypoldt described it, the Börsenblatt contained everything: “Communications, complaints, suggestions from publishers and dealers, notices, news, etc.; an exact list of all books published since the issue of the last number; extra lists of works of art and of foreign publications; a register of all criticisms on books, as they appeared in recent periodicals; circulars of new establishments, and changes in business; announcements of books in press and in preparation; long columns of books wanted which are out of print, or sought for at reduced prices; also of books offered at conditional prices; quotations from the money market, etc.” More to the point, the journal was “filled with individual trade advertisements from all parts of Germany, and even from foreign countries. No German bookseller could do without the ‘Börsenblatt.’ ” It was those advertisements that made the journal a profitable concern.

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Leypoldt explained that the United States also needed accurate trade lists and catalogs. The German trade supported a variety of lists and catalogs for new publications: “A full weekly list, a semi-monthly, several monthlies (one of them forming a supplement to the ‘Börsenblatt’), a quarterly classified Catalogue, and a half-annual one, alphabetically arranged by the authors, with classified index. And all do pay!” German booksellers also had access to a record of the whole history of the trade, going back to 1590. The Börsenverein maintained a library of annual catalogs that began with the earliest catalogs of the Frankfurt book fair. As Leypoldt explained, Germany had a register of “every work, down to the smallest pamphlet, with the fullest exactitude as to the names of the publisher, place and date of publication, size, number of pages, price etc.” Leypoldt was not finished. Germany’s vast bibliographic enterprise might be beyond the reach of the American industry, but America’s publishers and booksellers could do better than they had thus far. Even the French and the English had better bibliographic aids. America had Orville Roorbach’s catalog, the Biblioteca Americana and its supplements and appendixes, which Leypoldt dismissed as “too carelessly compiled” and out of date. American booksellers also had the catalog of American imprints issued in London by Nicholas Trübner, but Leypoldt complained that it was “of a limited use to the American bookseller, as it excludes reprints, and gives the prices for England.” Leypoldt insisted that a good American trade journal like the Publishers’ Circular could succeed, if the trade supported it: “The more advertisements the ‘Circular’ will get from the publishers, the more subscribers it will gain, for the more indispensable it will be to the dealers; and again—the more subscribers the  more profitable advertising will become to the publisher.” He finished his letter by apologizing for his “broken English,” explaining that he “could not help saying a few words which—if not well said—certainly are well meant! I shall be happy if you will make some use of my letter in the ‘Circular,’ only I would advise you, before doing so, to expurgate it a little from its ‘Germanisms.’ ”14 Although Leypoldt appeared to be exasperated by the American book trade, he could no longer afford to remain a German bookseller. Selling Englishlanguage books and running a lending library were helping, but they were not enough to keep his business solvent. Leypoldt decided to start publishing books himself.

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11 The Evolution of an American Publisher

A dainty volume, truly, is this “Ice-Maiden, and other Tales,” and published in the best taste, with its clear print, red-edged leaves, particolored title-page, and choice binding. It is a gem in [a] gemlike setting. Four real stories from the fancy-dropping pen of the charming Danish tale-teller will send a ray of sunshine into many a young heart; and all of the elders who have a heart will enjoy it. —Review of Ice-Maiden, and Other Tales by Hans Christian Andersen, 1863

Frederick Leypoldt’s 1863 letter to Publishers’ Circular could have revolutionized the book trades in the United States. In the letter, he had outlined a time-tested cooperative business structure that could have transformed the business side of the American book trades as surely as steam had transformed production and transportation. Unfortunately, no one was interested. As Leypoldt was explaining the practices of the German book trade to his new colleagues in America, he was planning another experiment: he was getting ready to publish his own line of books. In Germany, it would have been impossible for a young bookseller to simply declare himself a publisher. As Rudolph Garrigue had discovered twenty years earlier, anything was possible in the United States. Garrigue had been surprised to find that the American business culture actually undermined any training that German immigrants, whatever their trade, might have had when they arrived. He reported that “the unrestricted freedom of trade [in the United States], which permits everyone to earn their bread however they want, makes it . . . a rarity . . . that a man remains with the same business he learned properly in Germany. He changes either completely or adds other branches to his business. If he wants to do that, then no vocational law prevents him [from beginning] practically without apprenticeship or preparation.”1 Leypoldt started his publishing venture without any preparation of the sort that Garrigue would have recognized. In that respect, at least, he was like most { 1 10 }

The Evolution of an American Publisher

of the book publishers in the United States. The majority of American publishers had begun their careers as booksellers and had become publishers when an opportunity arose. Well into the twentieth century, most book publishers in the United States also ran retail bookstores. By the middle of the nineteenth century, however, it had become rare for American publishers to manufacture their own books. Publishers selected books for publication. They arranged the financing of each project. They negotiated contracts with printers, stereotypers, and binders to manufacture their books. They also sold books—wholesale and retail. Harper & Brothers remained a notable exception to the pattern, because it combined all those functions under two connected roofs. The printer’s role in the book trades had changed in the years since John and James Harper opened their printing shop. In the early 1800s, printing was still the heart of the book trade. By 1860, iron presses and steam had transformed William Bradford’s “great Art and Mystery of Printing” into a manufacturing process. By the time Leypoldt began publishing books, printers generally did just that—they printed what they were paid to print.2 In order to become a book publisher in America, all Leypoldt really needed was a manuscript and enough money to hire a printer and a bookbinder. Leypoldt had a remarkable number of printers to chose from—nearly ninety printers were listed in the Philadelphia City Directory. Either L. Johnson and Co. or King and Baird printed most of the books that Leypoldt published in his first year. L. Johnson and Co. was especially convenient because it was one of a handful of printers in Philadelphia that also manufactured stereotype plates, a service Leypoldt would need to use before the end of his first year as a book publisher. Leypoldt also needed the services of a bookbinder, and he could choose from nearly fifty. Assuming that Leypoldt had the money to pay the printer and the binder, manufacturing the books was relatively simple. Selling the books, however, would be a much more complicated business. Leypoldt needed to establish a system of distribution. Naturally, he could not expect to sell the entire print run of any book he published through his Chestnut Street store, so he needed to negotiate wholesale arrangements with other booksellers. Leypoldt would have to negotiate all his distribution agreements with other booksellers on a case-by-case basis, because that was how the book trade worked in the United States. Only big publishers were able to create long-lasting distribution networks for their publications. Michael Winship’s study of the Boston publisher and bookseller Ticknor and Fields demonstrated that the firm built { 111 }

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a national distribution system for their books. Even so, the Ticknor and Fields network required dozens of private agreements. There was no overall system that applied to everyone in the book trade, and so Leypoldt simply had to build his own. Undoubtedly, the most important component of Leypoldt’s “network” was F. W. Christern’s bookstore in New York. Christern would have been a natural partner for Leypoldt even if they had not been friends. Christern and Leypoldt served the same kind of customers, but New York was a much larger market. To round out his distribution network, Leypoldt would also need to make arrangements with someone in Boston and in smaller markets like Cincinnati, Baltimore, and Rochester. Moreover, Leypoldt would need to sell a portion of his books to other booksellers in Philadelphia, but that would force him to compete for sales of his own books in his own market. As a publisher, Leypoldt negotiated wholesale prices for his books with booksellers. Because he also ran a bookstore, he then had to compete against those same booksellers for retail sales of his publications. There had never been a clear-cut distinction between wholesale and retail in the book trade, but the traditional system gave the publisher the right to set the retail price. Publishers offered their books to retail booksellers at a discount that had to be negotiated on a case-by-case basis. The discount system worked if everyone played by the unwritten rules of the book trade and sold the same books at the same retail price. The system fell apart if booksellers decided to ignore the retail prices established by the publisher, which is why underselling has long been considered a serious violation of the rules of the book trade. In Germany and England, no one would do business with a bookseller who sold below retail, a policy that the English trade eventually codified in the Net Book Agreement of 1900.3 Leypoldt would soon learn that unwritten rules meant nothing in the American book trade. The first book that Leypoldt published was The Ice-Maiden, and Other Tales, a collection of stories by Hans Christian Andersen that had been translated into English by Fanny Fuller.4 Subtitled New Tales and Stories, it included “The Butterfly,” “The Psyche,” “The Snail and the Rose-Tree,” and the title story in a slim volume, case bound in brown cloth embossed with a honeycomb pattern. Issued under the imprint “Philadelphia: F. Leypoldt,” the little book retailed for seventyfive cents, and it sold well enough to require a second edition before the end of the year. The Ice-Maiden was a modest critical success, garnering positive notices in several newspapers and literary magazines. Before publishers hit on the idea of { 112 }

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dust jackets and blurbs, it was common to print excerpts from the reviews of one book at the end of any subsequent books. Leypoldt reprinted the review that called The Ice-Maiden “a gem in [a] gem-like setting” in nearly all of his publications. Charles Leland also did his best to help Leypoldt, and his favorable review of the book appeared in Continental Monthly in May 1863.5 Leypoldt’s next book was Mendelssohn’s Letters from Italy and Switzerland, translated into English by Lady Grace Wallace. Originally published in London by Longman and in Boston by Oliver Ditson in 1862, the book was what nineteenth-century book dealers called a “steady seller.” Leypoldt’s authorized reprint edition sold well enough in its first year that he paid to have stereotype plates made for a second edition. Having these plates meant that Leypoldt could keep the book in his catalog for many years; by simply updating the title page, he could print a new “edition.” In 1865, Leypoldt and Ditson began issuing the book together, each listing the other as the secondary publisher. Mendelssohn’s letters were a popular commodity for Longman, Ditson, and Leypoldt, who each reissued the book several times during the next ten years. Next Leypoldt published a translation of Franz Liszt’s Life of Chopin. The translator, Martha Walker Cook, was a native of Bellefonte, Pennsylvania. Her brother, Robert J. Walker, had been secretary of the treasury under James Polk. In 1863, however, Robert Walker was half-owner of the Continental Monthly and his sister was a frequent contributor.6 Naturally, the book received a favorable notice in the Continental. There was no mention of Martha Walker Cook in the review, but “the enterprising publisher” was praised for risking the “publication of a work deemed by many too excellent to be generally appreciated by our reading community.”7 Fortunately, the book was excellent enough to warrant a second edition three months later, and so Leypoldt had stereotype plates made. Oliver Ditson became the Boston publisher of Life of Chopin beginning with the second edition. Leypoldt published his first four books—The Ice-Maiden, Mendelssohn’s Letters from Italy and Switzerland, Life of Chopin, and a translation of Karl Kortum’s mock-epic The Jobsiad—between April and June of 1863. None of Leypoldt’s first books could be called original, but each one introduced a European classic to a new audience. Those first four books were mainstays of Leypoldt’s catalog, generating several editions or stereotype reprintings over the next ten years. Leypoldt’s next few books were similarly successful, and they cemented Leypoldt’s professional relationship with Charles Godfrey Leland. The two men had known each other since Leypoldt opened his bookstore. Over the years, Leland had done Leypoldt a favor or two, and Leland was apparently happy to support { 1 13 }

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Leypoldt’s publishing enterprise. Leland had given The Ice-Maiden a good review, and it seems likely that he sent Martha Walker Cook to Leypoldt. In June 1863, Leypoldt published a “fourth revised edition” of Leland’s translation of Heinrich Heine’s Pictures of Travel. The book was a kind of travel diary made up of prose sketches and poems that detailed Heine’s physical, intellectual, and spiritual journeys through Europe. The first three editions of the book had been published by John Weik, F. W. Christern’s first American employer, beginning in 1855. Next Leypoldt published Leland’s translation of Heine’s Book of Songs, which was a great success for Leland and Leypoldt. It remained on Leypoldt’s list for more than a decade and generated reprint editions into the twentieth century. When it was first issued, however, the book was not to everyone’s taste. The owners of a bookstore in Rochester, New York, had purchased a few copies of the book through F. W. Christern. In a letter to Christern, dated 30 November 1863, they explained why they were returning the copies. “These books,” they wrote, “are too infamous and immoral as you may see by reading the next to last verse in the 17th page and we take the liberty of returning them, Adams and Ellis.”8 The offending verse was from one of the “Dream Pictures” that open the collection. The poem recounted a sort of vision or ghostly encounter at the tomb of a minstrel: “In his lecture-chair the professor muddled / And twaddled, and sent me to sleep,—the old quiz! / But I could have slept with more comfort, if cuddled / In bed with that beautiful daughter of his!”9 Adams, or perhaps Ellis, must have stopped reading at the mention of cuddling in bed with the old professor’s daughter, because that sort of “infamy” occurs throughout the book. Adams and Ellis returned their copies to Christern because Rochester was part of his “territory.” As the secondary publisher of the book, Christern was also acting as its New York distributor, using the western canal and rail network that made New York the commercial center of the country. Leypoldt, on the other hand, would have dealt with regional booksellers south and west of Philadelphia. By the end of the year, Ditson would be Leypoldt’s partner in Boston for a couple of projects. Adding agents in Cincinnati and Baltimore gave Leypoldt a comprehensive distribution network for his books. Leypoldt continued to publish one or two books each month throughout the summer of 1863. At first glance, there seems to be little pattern to his choices, but his books and the rate of publication show his commitment to his publishing enterprise. In fact, Leypoldt had a fairly clear idea of the sort of publisher he wanted to be, but he would need to work out a way to translate it into a successful business within the American book trade. { 1 14 }

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In October, Leypoldt published a small book that outlined the plan for his publishing venture. The book, little more than a pamphlet, was called Modern Essays No. 1: Heinrich Heine, which was a reprint of a critical essay by Matthew Arnold that had appeared in Cornhill Magazine in August. Leypoldt introduced the first version of his logotype—an owl perched on an opened book bearing the initials F. L.—on the title page of the little book. The owl and book symbol outlasted Leypoldt’s publishing venture and became famous as the mark of Henry Holt. Modern Essays No. 1 also included a fourteen-page catalog of Leypoldt’s publications, dated October 1863. Leypoldt devoted ten pages to the first five books that he had published, reprinting dozens of lengthy excerpts from reviews. The rest of the catalog outlined an ambitious publishing program, listing thirty-one titles. Leypoldt had a handful of new books to announce. All three Heine books were listed, plus a tiny book by Anna Jackson called The Art Principle and Its Application to the Teaching of Music, and a reprint of Alfred Baskerville’s Poetry of Germany, a book that Garrigue had published back in 1854. The catalog also listed two named series: Leypoldt’s Foreign Library, which was modeled on the Tauchnitz English Authors series, included five titles; and Standard Educational Works was a collection of textbooks, mostly French primers. Leypoldt filled out the catalog with a list of forthcoming titles, dominated by a series of books featuring Doré illustrations. Some of the titles listed as “forthcoming” actually appeared in 1863, others had to wait until the following year, and a few never made it into print. The cover of the catalog listed a total of five secondary publishers, booksellers or publishers whose names would appear on the title pages along with Leypoldt’s. Christern was there, of course. A. K. Loring and S. Urbino, both of Boston, were listed below Christern. Robert Clarke and Co. of Cincinnati and James Waters of Baltimore completed the list. Taken together, Leypoldt and his secondary publishers made up a distinguished and comprehensive distribution network. Secondary publishers were important to Leypoldt because they shared some of the risk. A secondary publisher might contribute money to a publishing project in exchange for a percentage of the profits or a better discount rate. Sometimes a secondary publisher simply agreed to take a certain number of copies of a book, giving the publisher a guaranteed sale. In some cases, they might offer a publisher access to an existing distribution network. Leypoldt listed one or more secondary publishers on all the books in his Foreign Library series. The secondary publishers represented Leypoldt’s entire { 1 15 }

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distribution system. Christern was the sole secondary publisher for three volumes of the series: Immen-see, Fanchon the Cricket, and Human Follies. For the remaining two volumes, the group of secondary publishers corresponded, more or less, to the group listed in Leypoldt’s catalog: James Miller of New York, A. K. Loring of Boston, and Rickey and Carroll of Cincinnati, the publishers of David R. Locke’s popular collection of dialect stories, Divers Views, Opinions, and Prophecies of Petroleum V. Nasby.10 The title of the first volume of the Foreign Library might have made the book sound foreign to Americans, but “Chi rompe—paga”; or, Who Breaks—Pays (Italian Proverb) was an English novel written by Henrietta Camilla Jackson Jenkin, a “lady novelist” who also wrote the third volume of the series, Skirmishing: A Novel. Neither book was “foreign” in the same sense as the other books in the series. Jenkin’s books were peculiar choices for something called a Foreign Library, but there was some logic to the designation. Leypoldt appears to have printed his editions of these novels from stereotype plates that he acquired as the Tauchnitz agent in the United States. Because tariffs on imported books remained high, it made better sense to import the plates and produce the books domestically. From a commercial point of view, it was smart to publish any version of Jenkin’s novels. Her books generated dozens of editions in England, France, Germany, and the United States for the next fifty years. Leypoldt’s editions of the novels may not have fit comfortably into the Foreign Library, but they sold well enough to justify several reprintings. The remaining volumes of the Foreign Library were demonstrably foreign. The second volume paired Theodor Storm’s Immen-see with a second German novella, Grandmother and Granddaughter by Louise Esche. Immen-see originally appeared in 1850, and the English translation by H. Clark had been published in Germany a few months before Leypoldt issued it in the United States.11 Caroline Rollin Corson’s translation of Grandmother and Granddaughter was probably done especially for Leypoldt’s edition. The book was not a great success. Fanchon the Cricket, the fourth volume of the series, was also a translation, but Leypoldt’s edition had a complicated past. It was actually the second American edition of the Matilda Hays translation of La Petite Fadette by George Sand. In 1851, Putnam had issued the book under the title Fadette: A Domestic Story. Leypoldt’s decision to issue the book under the title Fanchon the Cricket allowed him to capitalize on the popularity of a recent stage version of the story. In 1855 or 1856, Charlotte Birch-Pfeiffer had adapted Sand’s story for the theater; her

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German play, called Die Grille, was published in 1857. The German version was reworked for the American stage by August Waldauer in 1860, and it opened in New Orleans under the title Fanchon the Cricket.12 The book remained on Leypoldt’s list for many years. The final volume of the series, Human Follies, was George Marlow’s translation of the French novel La bêtise humaine by Jules Noriac. The book had been popular in France, but it failed in the United States. Unlike Fanchon, which generated dozens of American printings in its various forms, Human Follies never earned a second printing. The title remained in Leypoldt’s catalog for a decade, perhaps because the initial print run never sold out. The Foreign Library was a qualified success. Some of the books sold well enough to remain in print for a decade or more, but Human Follies failed utterly. Leypoldt had better luck overall with educational books. He published several histories intended for children and English translations of popular French and German children’s stories, but the core of his educational business was “cheap, neat, and correct editions, the most approved Text-books for the study of the French language and literature.”13 Curiously, Leypoldt never published any German textbooks. Leypoldt had promised four language textbooks in his 1863 catalog, but he published only two that year. One was a well-established exercise book written by Percy Sadler, Petit cours de versions; or, Exercises for Translating English into French. The other, Soirées littéraires, causeries de salon (Literary evenings, parlor conversations), was a less conventional textbook. Written by Caroline Rollin Corson, it presented a series of three conversations in French on contemporary literary topics, designed to engage the student’s natural interest in contemporary French literature. Leypoldt maintained a productive relationship with Corson for several years. In addition to Soirées littéraires and her translation of Grandmother and Granddaughter, she wrote notes for several of the French storybooks that Leypoldt published, including a French edition of the La Bédollière story Mother Michel and Her Cat. Before she arrived in Philadelphia, Corson had lived in Boston, where she produced a French translation of Longfellow’s Hyperion.14 It was in Boston that she had met her husband, Hiram Corson, who also became one of Leypoldt’s authors. Although it was not mentioned in the catalog, Leypoldt issued Hiram Corson’s first scholarly publication, an annotated edition of Chaucer’s Legend of Goode Women, late in 1863. When Leypoldt published Corson’s Chaucer edition,

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he was a private tutor and something of a local intellectual celebrity, lecturing at the Ladies’ Seminars and the Shakespeare Society. Corson later taught English literature at Cornell.15 About half the books Leypoldt published his first year were written or translated by friends or by the customers who frequented his bookstore—people like the Corsons. He also built relationships with a few of his authors. Fanny Fuller, for example, translated Andersen’s Ice-Maiden and Elise Polko’s Musical Sketches—both of which sold well for many years. She also produced the text for Leypoldt’s English edition of Mother Michel and Her Cat. Leypoldt took his biggest risks when he published the work of Charles Godfrey Leland. Leland had achieved some small national fame in the mid-1850s when the Knickerbocker magazine reprinted “Hans Breitmann’s Barty,” one of a series of comic ballads that Leland wrote in a mock German American dialect. The poem begins, “Hans Breitman gife a barty; dev hat biano blayin : / I fell in lofe mit a Merican vrau. her name vas Matilda Yane. / Her hair vas as prown as a pretzel bun, her eyes vas himmel bloo, / Und ven she lookit into mine, dey schplit mine heart in two.” Hans Breitmann’s Ballads became so popular that Leland complained that he was usually known only as “the author of Hans Breitmann.” Like David Ross Locke, the creator of Petroleum V. Nasby, Leland was so closely identified with his fictional character that the author and his character were often taken as one and the same.16 Frederick Leypoldt began his relationship with Leland by issuing an edition of Leland’s translation of Heine’s Pictures of Travel and, a couple of months later, bringing out Leland’s second book of Heine translations, Book of Songs. Leland’s translations of Heine were good choices for Leypoldt. Heine was hardly a household name in America, but his brand of Romanticism and his identification with Young Germany must have appealed to a generation of intellectuals raised on Alcott, Emerson, and Carlyle. Leypoldt was taking a calculated risk by publishing Leland’s translations of Heine: as the letter from Adams and Ellis of Roches­ ter to Christern had demonstrated, there were booksellers who were unwilling even to have his books in their shops. In addition to the Heine projects, Leland brought Leypoldt two small books of political satire he had written with his brother Henry. The books, Ye Sneak Yclepid Copperhead and Ye Book of Copperheads, were intended to rally proUnion sentiment by subjecting Copperheads, also known as “Peace Democrats,” to fierce ridicule. Leland and Leypoldt were both committed Unionists, and both men were volunteers in Pennsylvania regiments, although Leypoldt was never called on to fight.17 { 1 18 }

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Ye Sneak Yclepid Copperhead was issued under the names of its publishers, A. Winch, Willis P. Hazard, and F. Leypoldt. Leypoldt published Ye Book of Copperheads on his own. Leland claimed authorship readily enough when he wrote his Memoirs in 1893, but thirty years earlier he was quite willing to let the publishers accept whatever credit or blame the books might incite. Ye Sneak Yclepid Copperhead was a small, paperbound, illustrated pamphlet that played endlessly on the near rhyme of “snake” and “sneak”: I do not like ’em—sneaks, I mean; And I have liked ’em never: Nor striped, black, nor brown, nor green, Nor any sort whatever. They’ve mischief made e’er since “the Fall,” And I have learned to hate ’em all; But most of all, I hate, beded! Ye ugly sneak, with eyes so red— Ye Sneak yclepid Copperhead. The book made no particular argument beyond the simple, repeated association of Southern sympathizers with “snakes in the grass.”18 (“Yclepid” is nothing more than an old spelling of an archaic word meaning “called.”) Ye Book of Copperheads was a more sophisticated effort that made brutal fun of Northern Democrats who wanted a continuation of James Buchanan’s policies, in particular the doctrine of “popular sovereignty.” The Copperheads were primarily midwesterners with commercial or ideological ties to the agrarian South. In the urban Northeast, many of the same people who had supported the nativist position of the Know-Nothings before the war, including many Irish and German immigrants, supported the Peace Democrats during the war. For Republicans like Leland and Leypoldt, “Copperhead” had become a synonym for traitor. Leland used the term in that sense, ignoring entirely any of the issues that animated the Copperhead movement. Each panel of Ye Book of Copperheads featured a political cartoon, a short verse, and a quotation from Shakespeare. One panel, for example, depicted a devil reclining on an ottoman, holding a snake that was drawn to suggest a hookah. The devil sat surrounded by bubbles bearing the names of Copperhead papers, such as the Chicago Times, the New York World, and the Philadelphia Age. The caption read “The Pipe of Peace.” A verse below the illustration played on “bubble” as a slang term for nonsense: “There’s a character very well known / Who bubbles for ages has blown; / But { 1 19 }

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the best he has made / since at bubbling he played, / from a Copperhead pipe have been thrown.”19 Although he never listed the Copperhead books in his catalogs, Leypoldt believed in Ye Book of Copperheads enough to put his name on it. He also published, or at least planned to publish, a German translation of the book—two days after he filed his copyright for Copperheads, Leypoldt filed a copyright for Das Giftige Schlangenbuch (The venomous snake book).20 If Leypoldt published a German version of the book, no examples survived, nor do we know who provided the translation (Leland was certainly able, as was Leypoldt). Ye Book of Copperheads might seem an obscure little publication today, but it was quite popular in its time. President Lincoln was the book’s most famous reader. In his memoir, Leland recalled his literary connection to the president: “I also wrote and illustrated a very eccentric pamphlet, ‘The Book of Copperheads.’ When Lincoln died two books were found in his desk. One was the ‘Letters of Petroleum V. Nasby,’ by Dr. R. Locke, and my ‘Book of Copperheads,’ which was later sent to me to see and return. It was much thumbed, showing it had been thoroughly read by Father Abraham.”21 Leland made nothing more of the story, simply allowing Lincoln’s unspoken tribute to speak for itself. Leypoldt and Leland produced at least eight books together. Most were translations, but a few, like the Copperhead pamphlets, were original works. Leland cataloged his wartime publications in his Memoirs. The list picked up after Ye Book of Copperheads: I also translated Heine’s “Book of Songs.” Most of these had already been published in the “Pictures of Travel.” I restored them to their original metres. I also translated the “Memoirs of a Good-for-Nothing” from the German, and finished up, partially illustrated, and published two juvenile works. One of these was “Mother Pitcher,” a collection of original nursery rhymes for children, which I had writen [sic] many years before expressly for my youngest sister Emily, now Mrs. John Harrison of Philadelphia. In this work occurs my original poem of “Ping-Wing the Pieman’s Son.” Of this poem Punch said, many years after, that it was the best thing of its kind which had ever crossed the Atlantic.22 Leland ended the paragraph with, “I also translated the German ‘Mother Goose.’ ” Leypoldt published all of those books, and several more, but Leland never mentioned him.23 In fact, Leypoldt may be the only publisher of the day that Leland

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failed to mention in his Memoirs, perhaps because Leypoldt was never famous enough to add any luster to Leland’s reputation. Leypoldt’s professional association with Leland peaked in 1864. Leland was involved, in one way or another, in about a quarter of Leypoldt’s publications that year. Leypoldt published Leland’s third Heine translation and a lavishly illustrated edition of Leland’s Legends of the Birds. He also published Leland’s rendering of Mother Goose and the book of original nursery rhymes that made Leland so proud. Leland also wrote introductory essays for several of Leypoldt’s books. In 1864, Leypoldt also published An Artist’s Poems by Carl Heinrich Schmolze, which Leland translated. An Artist’s Poems was a portfolio of poems written and illustrated by Schmolze, a German artist and a genuine forty-eighter living and working in Philadelphia. Schmolze was famous in Philadelphia: he provided illustrations for a number of books published in the city, and he designed and executed the four large murals on the domed ceiling of the Academy of Music.24 The publication of An Artist’s Poems was one part of a larger collaboration involving Leypoldt, Leland, George Boker, and many other prominent Philadelphians to raise funds for the Great Central Fair, which in turn raised funds for the U.S. Sanitary Commission. The Sanitary Commission was the forerunner of the modern Red Cross.25 Organized in June 1861, the commission provided Union soldiers with sanitary hospital facilities and helped soldiers maintain at least minimal standards of hygiene and nutrition on the battlefield and in encampment, a task that became increasingly difficult as the war progressed. Beginning in Chicago in 1863, a number of Sanitary Fairs were held throughout the North to raise funds for the commission. Like its predecessors, the Great Central Fair raised money by charging an admission to the fair and to the various concerts and exhibitions held on the fairgrounds. Money was also raised by raffles, auctions, and the sale of items donated by celebrities and political figures.26 Leypoldt supported the fair in a variety of ways. He published the Schmolze portfolio to raise the money to stage the fair. He also provided office space for the organizers of the fair, or at least a mailing address: When John Welsh, chairman of the executive committee, sent a letter to President Lincoln dated 23 May 1864, the address of the “Office of the ‘Great Central Fair.’ U.S. Sanitary Commission” was 1323 Chestnut Street.27 Evidently the Great Central Fair was planned and organized in Leypoldt’s bookstore, perhaps in the reading room. By far, Leypoldt’s most famous contribution to the fair was a limited edition of the Emancipation Proclamation, signed by President Lincoln and Secretary

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of State William H. Seward, to be sold during the Philadelphia fair. Lincoln’s name and image were particularly valuable to the organizers of the Sanitary Fairs. Lincoln attended fairs in Baltimore and Washington, D.C., and he sent autographed cards for sale at others.28 Leypoldt’s broadside edition of the Emancipation Proclamation took full advantage of Lincoln’s valuable name. According to the description of a signed example held by the University of Delaware Library, Leypoldt published two editions of the broadside—a first edition of twenty-four copies printed late in May 1864, and a second edition of forty-eight copies dated 6 June. Lincoln and Seward signed the forty-eight copies of the second edition, and Lincoln’s private secretary, John G. Nicolay, witnessed the signatures.29 Leypoldt’s professional association with Leland continued after the Great Central Fair concluded. In 1864, Leypoldt published five books for Leland, including the Legend of the Birds and Mother Pitcher’s Poems for Little People, a book Leland had recalled with real pride in his Memoirs. He also issued a second printing of Leland’s translation of Heine’s Book of Songs. Leypoldt’s list for 1864 repeated many of the books that first appeared in 1863. He issued new printings of his best sellers: Mendelssohn’s Letters, Life of Chopin, and Elise Polko’s Musical Sketches. He also issued a second printing of Hiram Corson’s Chaucer edition. Most of his reprinted editions carried stereotype credits, usually for L. Johnson and Co., of Philadelphia. Stereotyping made reprinting simpler, but it added to the initial cost of the print run and created storage problems. Leypoldt’s decision to pay for stereotype plates reflected his intention to keep his list in print as long as possible. However, he rarely risked the cost of stereotyping. Leypoldt augmented his steady sellers with more books for children and students, both literature in translation and books intended for language study. Fanny Fuller translated The Root-Princess: A Christmas Story by the German painter and poet Robert Reinick. Leypoldt also issued Eia Popeia: Deutsche Kinderheimath in Wort und Sang und Bild, a book of nursery rhymes and lullabies collected by Franz Pocci and illustrated by Ludwig Richter. In his second year of publishing, Leypoldt continued as he had begun. He seemed to publish whatever came to hand, with little regard for commercial viability. Some of his publications, like the Doré series, were expensive to produce. Leypoldt finally issued the Dante album that he had promised in the 1863 catalog. He also added a portfolio of twelve illustrations for Chateaubriand’s Atala, and another of his illustrations from The Legend of the Wandering Jew, to his list of Doré publications, making five in all. In a similar graphic vein, he published two maps and an atlas that depicted the battles of the Virginia campaigns of the { 1 22 }

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Army of the Potomac, prepared by Gustavus R. Bechler, the topographer who later mapped much of Colorado, including Yellowstone and the Grand Tetons, for the U.S. Geological Survey. Leypoldt continued to publish translations and scholarly work. He brought out a second volume of Mendelssohn’s letters and an edition of Schiller’s poems, both translated by Lady Wallace. He also issued a collection of German poems translated by Lucy Hamilton Hooper, a friend of Leland’s and co-editor of Our Daily Fare, a newspaper published on the grounds of the Great Central Fair. She later edited Lippincott’s Magazine.30 Leypoldt also published Charles Dexter Cleveland’s popular edition of The Poetical Works of John Milton. One thing was a constant in Leypoldt’s early career: he always believed in using the periodical press to promote his books. He sent review copies to journals he thought might review his books favorably. He even sent review copies of books that he had not prepared for publication. One such book was briefly reviewed in the United States Service Magazine, a wartime journal by Henry Coppée: From Mr. Frederick Leypoldt, of Philadelphia, the publisher, we have received an extended essay, translated from the French of Charles Victor Bonstetten, and entitled “The Man of the North and the Man of the South, or the Influence of Climate.” It is an interesting investigation; and the author, after giving a clear comparison of “The Two Climates,” discusses the subject under various divisions, such as Agriculture, Liberty, Habit, Suicide, Drunkenness, Literature, Friendship, and numerous others. The illustrative references are chiefly European; but the great principles are the same everywhere, and we may find an interest in endeavoring to apply them to our own North and South.31 Leypoldt was in fact the secondary publisher of the book; Christern held the copyright and had the book printed in New York. The Man of the North had nothing to do with the issues that divided the United States. Bonstetten, a student of Rousseau and mentor to Johannes von Müller, wrote his celebration of northern virtue in 1824. Forty years later, readers in the United States were inclined to read the book as a philosophical and cultural defense of the Union, but only by tenuous analogy. As Germans and Unionists, Leypoldt and Christern probably found much to agree with in Bonstetten’s socio-climatological arguments. They were certainly “men of the north,” in the sense that Bonstetten meant, and in the way that Henry Coppée suggested in his review of the book. { 123 }

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Although Leypoldt was just a secondary publisher of The Man of the North, it was the kind of book he liked to publish. Leypoldt did not publish many “original” books, but he was often the first to publish a translation for the American market. Leland’s translation of Heine’s Book of Songs, for example, might not qualify as original or American, but it was nevertheless a significant publication. Leypoldt’s Dante Album, a portfolio of photographic reproductions of the Gustav Doré illustrations for Dante’s Inferno, was neither original nor American, but it introduced Doré and Dante to an American audience four years before Longfellow’s popular translation of the Divine Comedy reached the market. In his second year as an American publisher, Leypoldt continued to follow the course he had set in his 1863 catalog. The books he published reflected his interest in German and European literature, but they also showed his commitment to the scholars and artists who had supported him since he moved to Philadelphia. Leypoldt’s list of publications was idiosyncratic, revealing a clear interest in the arts and a willingness to take an occasional risk. Nevertheless, the American approach to the book trade was forcing him to rethink his business.

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When James T. Fields, of the then celebrated firm of Ticknor and Fields, of Boston, was on a visit to Philadelphia, he called at the store and inquired for Mr. Leypoldt. Upon Mr. Leypoldt introducing himself, Mr. Fields remarked, “I specially hunted you up to make your acquaintance, for I was curious to see the man who ventured to publish books that older and richer houses would be afraid of. I must say, however, that I am disappointed; I expected to see a man at least six or seven feet high.” —Adolph Growoll, Frederick Leypoldt, 1899

Frederick Leypoldt brought out forty books during the first two years of his publishing career. Most of his books were English translations of German or French titles that had first been published a decade earlier. The books were well made, but they were not the sort of thing that made a publisher rich or brought him renown. Leypoldt never managed to find a popular author like Timothy Shay Arthur, and he never had the opportunity to publish an important book by someone like Bayard Taylor. Leypoldt was publishing what he knew. He also published books that had been written or translated by his friends and customers. Leypoldt’s books sold well enough to keep him afloat, but the business was beginning to aggravate him. He thought that his competitors were taking advantage of him, and he seemed to be running out of new books to publish. If Leypoldt was going to continue as a publisher, he was going to have to make some changes in the way he ran his business. Leypoldt’s publishing business was not a failure. In fact, he was attracting the attention of some important people in the book trade. Leypoldt’s friend Growoll claimed that James T. Fields admired Leypoldt. At the time, Fields was one of the most important publishers in America and the single most important publisher in Boston. According to Growoll’s story, Fields sought out Leypoldt because he was “curious to see the man who ventured to publish books that older { 1 25 }

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and richer houses would be afraid of.”1 Unfortunately, neither Fields nor Growoll mentioned which of Leypoldt’s books might frighten a more established firm. A few literary translations were mildly controversial, but Fields was neither a prude nor a coward, and Leypoldt’s conversation guides and Doré portfolios would hardly elicit such a strong response. Perhaps Fields was reacting to Leypoldt’s war-related publications like Ye Book of Copperheads. The visit to Leypoldt’s bookstore occurred while Fields was in the midst of his own struggle to reconcile his business decisions and his political conscience. Fields had always considered himself a literary man and a businessman and had little genuine interest in politics. Fields had simply followed the Whig sympathies of his partner, William Ticknor, as a matter of convenience rather than strong conviction. Ticknor and Fields had developed one of the most sophisticated distribution networks in the American book trade. They had made important business contacts in a number of Southern cities well before the war began, and they hoped to maintain that business throughout the war years.2 Fields had advised Sara J. Lippincott, who wrote under the name Grace Greenwood, to delete portions of her book that would make it unsalable in the South. He had also accepted returns of Charles Kingsley’s Two Years Ago (1857) from booksellers in Charleston. Southerners took offense at Kingsley’s attitudes toward slavery and slaves. The love affair between an English gentleman, Freddie Scoutbush, and the runaway slave, Marie, was bad enough, but her eventual marriage to Tom Thurnall was beyond the pale.3 In order to prepare for the inevitable war, Ticknor and Fields had cut both its catalog and its production rate in half in 1861. That same year, Ticknor and Fields acquired the Atlantic Monthly and Fields replaced James Russell Lowell as the editor. Fields still had little interest in politics, and he tried to remain neutral as the editor of a respected literary magazine, treading carefully between the Whig sympathies of his partner and the more radical Republican politics of the Boston literati. The war, when it did come, was initially a business problem for Fields, since it made it impossible for his firm to maintain its trade in the South. Further, the initial uncertainty that accompanied the war triggered a broad economic recession. Although the outbreak of the Civil War caused a slump in the book trade that lingered for nearly two years, that downturn was followed by a vigorous rebound.4 Ticknor and Fields recorded its first net loss during the first year of the war, but the firm posted a profit the very next year.5

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By the end of the second year of the war, the Northern economy had not simply recovered—it was booming.6 In the urban North, real wages and the consumer price index rose at about the same rate throughout the war. Exclude imported luxuries from the calculation, and the cost of living in the urban North actually seems to have fallen during that period.7 While the domestic book trade actually did well during the Civil War, the wartime increases in tariffs and customs duties made it difficult for importers like Leypoldt to stay in business. Leypoldt’s entry into the domestic book trade, therefore, turned out to be perfectly timed to take advantage of the mid-war boom. Once business recovered, Fields became more interested in politics and in the conflicts that had drawn the country into war. He began to use his personal and professional friendships in England to lobby for the Union cause, and he became outraged when he discovered that many in England supported the South. Fields would have been well into his political conversion when he came to see Leypoldt. Perhaps Fields recognized boldness in Leypoldt at a time when strong, and often contradictory, ethical and economic pressures caused many publishers to seek safety. Or perhaps Fields was taken by the idea of a new publisher, and a foreigner in the bargain, who was willing to put out something as fiercely partisan as Ye Book of Copperheads. Fields admired Leypoldt for his willingness to publish controversial books. That same courage drew Leypoldt into a protracted struggle against the slipshod practices of the American book trade. Leypoldt believed that the book trade had rules, even if his American colleagues did not recognize them. He was particularly hostile toward any attempt to undermine what he saw as the publishers’ absolute right to set the retail prices of their own books. Leypoldt was appalled when he discovered that some Philadelphia booksellers were setting their own retail prices for his books. It was underselling, and Leypoldt regarded it as treachery. Leypoldt took another bold step. In September 1864, he issued a pamphlet addressed to the “Philadelphia Members of the Book Trade,” his second public statement to the trade. Leypoldt believed that underselling jeopardized the entire structure of the book industry and threatened the prestige of the trade, reducing it to mere commerce.8 Leypoldt was furious and he began with open hostility: “Since I have been dealing in American books, and publishing, I have, publicly and privately, protested against the pernicious system, or rather nonsystem, of underselling. This non-system was, as is well known, openly begun in this city by a petty Chestnut Street dealer, whose example was followed by a so-called ‘leading’ house, and, I am sorry to say, soon afterwards by many others.

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The latter, however, would still like to appear deserving the honorable name of bookseller.”9 “Honorable” book dealers, he continued, could halt the practice, but only if they acted together. Together, they had the power to “bring a faithless member back to his duty, by cutting off all connection with him.” Leypoldt continued, recounting the meetings, the resolutions, and the utter lack of effective action. He was particularly bitter about his treatment by the very people he imagined to be his allies. He complained of “having been even ridiculed for my vain efforts, and what is still worse, having been placed in a false position with my old customers, who have in more than one instance indignantly left me to purchase my own publications at a second-hand price, from that oldest and ‘most honorable’ firm.” Leypoldt thought that underselling was more than just a bad business practice. Underselling disregarded the principle of mutual interest and violated the honor of the trade. At its core, Leypoldt’s argument depended on the belief that books were more than just goods for sale: “A book is certainly not a production, the cost of which can be calculated like butter—so different from all other merchandise, so much depending on hundreds of contingencies, so much beset with difficulties of the nature of which the publisher alone can be fully cognizant, that it is the publisher alone who is capable of fixing a legitimate retail price.”10 Leypoldt never explained the contingencies and difficulties that made books unique among manufactured goods, perhaps because he had no good examples to offer. He was, nevertheless, sure of his position and willing to act. Leypoldt concluded that it would be “foolishly obstinate then for the youngest and least supported member of the Trade still to insist on the good old fashion of consulting mutual interests!” The only way he could defend himself from the cutthroat practices that prevailed in Philadelphia, he said, was to effect a kind of homeopathic cure—similia similibus curantur (let like be cured with like). Henceforth he would conduct his “city trade entirely on the wholesale basis (foreign publications excepted)” and continue to do so until the trade came to its senses. In the letter to the Philadelphia trade, Leypoldt offered no apology for his “Germanisms.” Instead, he ended with a promise “not to think the worse of any of my colleagues who, in consequence of the above statement, should in future refuse to sell me their books. I will, on the contrary, good naturedly accept their refusal, and, if I really want the books, get them from their neighbor.”11 No doubt, Leypoldt meant to shame his colleagues, but his manifesto had no chance of success. If anything, it must have alienated his friends and amused his foes. Philadelphia’s booksellers and publishers continued to ignore quaint European notions like mutual interest and the “courtesy of the trade.” { 128 }

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Leypoldt had hit on a dramatic solution to the problem of underselling. He was dividing his business into clearly differentiated wholesale and retail enterprises. He would continue to publish books, but he would only sell them on a wholesale basis. He would also continue as an importer and retail bookseller, but the books that he published would no longer be offered for sale in his retail bookstore. Soon after Leypoldt decided to divide his business into clear-cut wholesale and retail divisions, he made up his mind to leave Philadelphia and establish himself in New York. His first step was to take a lease on a second-floor office at the corner of Broadway and Bleecker Street in New York.12 The second step was the disposition of his lending library. Fortunately, he was able to sell his entire French library to the Mercantile Library Company of Philadelphia. Leypoldt’s collection of French books, 2,022 volumes in total, changed the character of the library in a single stroke. The acquisition was described in the Library Company’s annual report for 1865: “By the purchase of Mr. F. Leypoldt’s valuable French Library, an important deficiency has been supplied. Before this purchase was made, our collection of French books was very meagre, and almost devoid of the popular works of great modern authors; but now it is one of the best in the country, and certainly has no equal among the public libraries of this city.”13 The Library Company paid $1,800 for the entire collection, which made it the largest single acquisition in its history.14 Leypoldt must have sold the rest of his lending library, nearly 4,000 German and English volumes, but he left no record of the sale. His librarian, Marian M. Monachesi, was not dismissed when the library was sold; in fact, she relocated to New York and continued with Leypoldt for her entire working life. A few of the books that Leypoldt published during 1865 suggest that he meant to continue in both Philadelphia and New York. One such book was Our Year: A Child’s Book in Prose and Verse by Dinah Maria Craik. Macmillan had issued the children’s book in London in 1840, and Tauchnitz followed suit in 1860. Ley­poldt’s edition was a reprint of the Tauchnitz edition, but the title page read, “New York and Philadelphia, Fredrick Leypoldt,” although the owl and book logotype was missing. Another book that he published with the New York and Philadelphia notation was Gouttes de rosée: Petit trésor poétique des jeunes (Dewdrops: Little poetic treasures for children) by L. Pylodet. In fact, the book was written by Leypoldt, who would use “L. Pylodet” as a pseudonym for the rest of his career. Soon after Leypoldt returned to New York, he gave up the idea of maintaining a branch office in Philadelphia and abandoned the retail book trade altogether. Without a bookstore, he was no longer a bookseller-publisher. He was { 1 29 }

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trying something new. He would arrange financing, make contracts with printers and binders to manufacture his books, and then sell the books to retailers. Retail booksellers were welcome to cut one another’s throats, but no one would ever undersell him again. Leypoldt’s strategy was a radical departure for the American book trade, because publishing had never been an independent function in the United States. The experiment should have failed. Although the American book trade seemed lawless to Leypoldt, it had entrenched ideas about the proper way to do business. Leypoldt’s experiment ran counter to those ideas. The postwar industrial economy favored large-scale enterprises, and the book industry followed the trend. Putnam and Scribner developed into great industrial publishing houses after the war, while big houses like Appleton and Harpers prospered and grew even bigger.15 Harper & Brothers had set the standard for large-scale industrial book production with their modern factory that put almost every operation of book production and sales under their two connected roofs.16 Leypoldt, on the other hand, worked out of a loft above a small bank. He had an assistant and an errand boy. He intended to follow a business strategy based on a German model. His would be a small, independent enterprise, publishing books and selling them to the retail trade. Unfortunately, Leypoldt had nothing new to publish. In Philadelphia, Leypoldt had relied on the Tauchnitz list and the customers who came to his bookstore. In fact, Leypoldt’s bookstore customers had been the source of most of his best publications. In New York, Leypoldt was on his own. He continued to reprint his more reliable books, but he needed new books if he wanted his experiment to succeed. One the first new manuscripts that Leypoldt received in his New York office was a translation of Edmond About’s fantastic novel L’Homme à l’oreille cassée (The Man with a Broken Ear). It was the sort of book that Leypoldt might have published, but he had no money to risk and so he offered to publish the book if the translator, a young man named Henry Holt, paid the costs. Leypoldt rejected the book, but he hired Holt in November 1865. Two months later, they launched a fruitful partnership that was known, for a few years at least, as Leypoldt and Holt. Holt was the one who eventually turned Leypoldt’s quirky little experiment into a successful American publishing house. Many years later, in his rambling, episodic memoir, Garrulities of an Octogenarian Editor, Henry Holt recalled the path that took him to Leypoldt’s loft. After taking a degree from Yale, he had studied law at Columbia. Holt had literary ambitions, and while still in law school he decided to try his hand at the { 130 }

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book business. In his first venture, he helped underwrite an illustrated edition of Washington Irving’s Sketch Book, to be published by George Palmer Putnam for the Christmas market. Encouraged by the modest success of that project, Holt bought a one-third interest in The Rebellion Record, a wide-ranging collection of Civil War data edited by Frank Moore. Putnam was serving as a federal tax collector at the time, and so the administration of the project fell to Holt. But Holt bungled the project, and Putnam sold The Rebellion Record to David Van Nostrand, who made a success of the venture. Holt’s handling of The Rebellion Record ruined his chances of a career with Putnam. Writing much later, George Haven Putnam described Holt as he had been when employed by his father, G. P Putnam: “Young Holt had business ambition and a full measure of business capacity. He appeared, however, not prepared to believe in those earlier years that business success called for persistent application.” According to the younger Putnam, Holt had a “winning personality,” but he “possessed decided views on a number of questions, and possessed, also, an unwillingness, possibly an exaggerated unwillingness, to accept traditional beliefs or the conclusions arrived at by previous generations.”17 After his failure at Putnam, Holt was again a young man of many advantages and few prospects. Casting about for a career in the book business, Holt happened to call on a German publisher who specialized in translations of recent European authors. Holt described the event in his memoir, using his own idiosyncratic version of another of his enthusiasms, “rational spelling”: In ’64 I finisht the course in the Law School, and while waiting for something to turn up, or trying to turn something up, I translated About’s l’Homme à l’Oreille Cassée, and took it to “F. Leypoldt” (as he announced himself ), who had come over from Germany a few years before, and had already publisht in tasteful style translations of a few well-chosen books in continental literature. He would take my book only at my own risk, but our talk led to my going to work with him in November 1865, and six weeks later, on the first of January 1866, we went into partnership.18 When he presented himself at 644 Broadway, Holt must have reminded Leypoldt of Charles Leland. Like Leland, Holt was born into money, enjoyed a life of privilege, and had good social connections and academic credentials. Holt had asked G. P. Putnam for a letter of reference. Putnam provided a letter, dated 19 November 1865, that praised Holt’s character, ability, and education { 131 }

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without commenting directly on his actual work. Leypoldt preserved the letter and kept it among his few personal papers: Dear Sir, Learning from my esteemed friend Mr. Henry Holt that he has had formal conversations with you in regard to business arrangements,—it gives me much pleasure to say (although I am personally unknown to you) that my relations with Mr. Holt have been of the most agreeable and satisfactory character—that I consider him a gentleman of high character and ability—a man of business and integrity “whose word is his bond”—and that his talents for business as well as his literary ability and his education, render him a desirable and reliable associate.19 On 1 January 1866, “F. Leypoldt” became “Leypoldt and Holt.” The firm was housed in the second-floor loft where Holt first encountered his new partner. Holt described the place in a reminiscence he wrote in 1923. “Joe,” who was the subject of the sketch, was Joseph Vogelius, who had begun his career as Leypoldt’s assistant and continued as Holt’s assistant until 1919. Holt remembered him for the readers of Publishers’ Weekly: When, fifty years ago I entered the publishing house of “F. Leypoldt,” it consisted of a loft room about thirty feet square in a bank building on the northeast corner of Broadway and Blee[c]ker streets, and its occupants were Leypoldt—a fine scholar and a true gentleman; Joe, a boy of about twenty, who tho he was mainly occupied in making bundles, was in soul as good a gentleman as Leypoldt or anybody else, and Charlie Seyer, a boy of a dozen years or so, and the image of Edward Rowland Sill, the poet, which was the most poetical image I ever saw—three remarkable people.20 Neither partner was getting what he expected. Holt knew almost nothing about the book business when he began working with Leypoldt, since he had never actually worked for Putnam. More important, Holt was not as well off as he appeared. Holt brought enthusiasm, $6,000, and a wide acquaintance among intellectuals. On the other hand, Leypoldt was not quite the businessman he seemed to Holt. In January 1866, he possessed the rights to three European agencies (Tauchnitz, Didot, and Trübner) and $11,000 in debts.21 The publishing firm of

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Leypoldt and Holt was able to survive on Holt’s cash and Leypoldt’s backlist and agency books. The first book issued under the name “Leypoldt and Holt” was a holdover from Leypoldt’s association with Leland, a translation of Joseph von Eichendorff ’s Memoirs of a Good-for-Nothing. The book was the first to feature the logotype of the new partnership: Leypoldt’s owl was now perched on a stack of books. On the cover of the topmost book, the initials F. L. had been replaced by an L superimposed on an H. Many of the books published by Leypoldt and Holt in 1866 came from Leypoldt’s earlier lists. They reprinted five books from Leypoldt’s years in Philadelphia, including Leypoldt’s best seller, Mendelssohn’s Letters from Italy and Switzerland. Leypoldt and Holt began to exploit the Tauchnitz British Authors Series. They issued four books by Charles Kingsley, whose novel Two Years Ago had caused trouble for James Fields before the war. They also began issuing a uniform edition of the novels of William Makepeace Thackeray. The partnership did not have a distinguished first season. Other than merely surviving, their only real achievement of that year was a move to better offices. On 31 March 1866, Leypoldt and Holt signed a two-year lease for the first floor of a building at the corner of Broadway and Broome Street. The terms of the lease required them to pay W. Lee and Benjamin J. Morris $2,000 in twenty-four monthly installments and to repair all “defacements” before the end of the lease. The lease gave the partners a prime retail location at generous terms, no doubt because Holt’s wife, Mary, was the granddaughter of the man who owned the building.22 At the new offices, Holt entertained a steady stream of his friends from Yale and Columbia. In his memoir, Holt mentioned a number of friends who came to visit.23 J. R. Dennett, the literary editor of The Nation, was a frequent caller, although his visits were more than social calls: he sold Leypoldt and Holt a contract for advertisements in The Nation. Leypoldt and Holt signed a long-term contract, purchasing 1,500 lines per year at sixteen cents a line—the equivalent of three months’ rent. It was a sizable commitment, but it guaranteed prime space at the top of the page.24 Edmund C. Stedman and Richard Henry Stoddard were also frequent visitors. Stedman, who had been a hero to Holt at Yale, was working as a stock­ broker and writing poetry while Holt was attempting to establish himself in New York. Stedman had literary ambitions, but he is best remembered as a critic and as one of the earliest promoters of Poe and Whitman. Stoddard, another

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minor poet better remembered as a critic, helped Herman Melville secure a job as customs inspector, a favor that Hawthorne had earlier done for Stoddard. Holt also entertained Edward Youmans and John Fiske. Youmans, America’s great popularizer of science and scientific study, was then planning and promoting his “International Science Series.” A few years later, he founded Popular Science Monthly, which he edited until his death. Youmans and Fiske helped make Darwin and Spencer household names in the United States. Fiske devoted the first half of his career to the cause of Spencerian evolution and was particularly keen to forge a reconciliation between orthodox religious beliefs and a scientific understanding of human evolution. Although Holt’s friends may have gathered at the office, they seem not to have brought much business with them. Leypoldt and Holt published Fiske’s first book, Tobacco and Alcohol, in 1868, but Holt’s poet friends never placed anything with the firm. James T. Fields was already Stedman’s publisher, but Stoddard might have submitted manuscripts to his friend’s firm. Perhaps Leypoldt rejected Stoddard as too great a risk. Leypoldt was apparently reluctant to change his policies to accommodate Holt or his friends. He had built his business on three primary lines: good translations of established European works, with an emphasis on poets, playwrights, and composers; literature for children; and educational books, particularly primers for language study. Of course, Leypoldt had from time to time ventured outside those boundaries, but he was rarely reckless. As it turned out, Holt had excellent judgment. Once Holt’s taste began to win out over Leypoldt’s caution, the firm began to find its way. In 1867, Leypoldt and Holt issued twenty-seven titles, fifteen of them new works for the firm. A few books on the list were clearly Holt’s choices. Holt had idolized Edward Rowland Sill while they were at Yale, so it must have given him great satisfaction to publish Sill’s first book, The Hermitage, and Other Poems. Holt also brought the firm Critical and Social Essays, a collection from The Nation, which was probably part of the deal for advertising in that journal. Holt was also responsible for introducing Turgenev to American readers; he convinced Leypoldt to publish a translation of Fathers and Sons by Eugene Schuyler, another friend from Yale. As a partner, Holt was also able, finally, to publish his own book—the translation of The Man with a Broken Ear that he had tried to sell to Leypoldt two years earlier. The majority of the list for 1867, however, depended on Leypoldt’s editorial taste. Bayard Taylor’s scholarly edition of Frithiof ’s Saga and Eugene Richter’s examination of cooperative stores as they developed in Germany were exactly the sort of books that Leypoldt had published when he began in { 13 4 }

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Philadelphia. Beethoven’s Letters, 1790–1826 and Mozart’s Letters, 1769–1791 continued Ley­poldt’s music series, while The Journal of Maurice de Guérin, which a young Henry James reviewed favorably, was another translation of modern French literature.25 Leypoldt’s partnership with Holt survived its first year and prospered in its second. The business was doing well enough for Leypoldt to consider marriage to a young woman he had known since she was a child. During his frequent visits to the home of Fredrick Christern, Leypoldt had become acquainted with the family of Christern’s former partner and brother-in-law, Rudolph Garrigue. Garrigue was, by that time, the president of the Germania Fire Insurance Company and the father of eleven children, and seven of those children were daughters. On 24 September 1867, Leypoldt married one of those daughters, Augusta H. Garrigue. Frederick and Augusta Leypoldt were well suited to each other, as they were both hardworking, enthusiastic people. Leypoldt tended to let his enthusiasms cloud his judgment, but his wife had a more practical attitude toward business.26 Leypoldt began every project with passionate intensity, but when a project ran into trouble, he was subject to deep depressions.27 In a letter to Bowker, written about a year after Leypoldt’s death, Augusta noted her husband’s “fire and poetry and romance and his intense longing for, and dependence on, expressed sympathy.”28 Leypoldt’s “fire and poetry” did not always endear him to his wife, especially when it led him to the verge of bankruptcy. When Frederick and Augusta Leypoldt married, Leypoldt seemed ready to abandon literary publishing in order to concentrate on the educational market. Nearly a third of the books on the 1867 Leypoldt and Holt list were textbooks, mostly grammars and primers. The following year, they expanded their educational list even further. Leypoldt and Holt paid to have their list for 1868 published in the Publishers’ Uniform Trade List Directory, a compilation of publishers’ and booksellers’ price lists issued in Philadelphia by Howard Challen. The first page and a half of their list was filled with literary titles, like Holt’s translation of The Man with a Broken Ear and the Heine books. The rest of their six-page catalog, however, was devoted to educational titles.29 Textbooks were a fairly safe investment for a publisher. If a textbook caught on at all, it had remarkable longevity, which seemed to offer a small degree of safety in a chaotic marketplace. Holt reported that his friend and colleague Edwin Ginn, the educational publisher, estimated that the average life of a successful textbook was twenty years. Many of the educational books published by Leypoldt and Holt enjoyed a long life; Charlotte Yonge’s Landmarks of History { 135 }

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and Percy Sadler’s Petit cours de versions, for instance, each remained in print for many years, nearly reaching Ginn’s predicted twenty years. At least one of the textbooks published by Leypoldt and Holt remained in print for more than forty years. The Beginner’s French Reader by L. Pylodet was originally published in 1869. It sold between two and three thousand copies a year for many years, and it was still earning royalties for its author’s estate in 1914, when Holt sent Augusta Leypoldt a check for $1.29.30 L. Pylodet was, of course, Frederick Leypoldt, the firm’s most prolific author of language textbooks: between 1864 and 1875, Leypoldt wrote or edited fourteen textbooks. Although Holt wanted the financial security of the textbook market, his real interest was what he called “miscellaneous” publishing—literary works.31 Although Holt estimated that “miscellaneous” books seldom lasted much more than five years, he was determined to pursue the more prestigious literary market.32 He had introduced Turgenev, Sill, and Fiske to American book buyers, and he would soon publish work by major European and American scholars like Hippolyte Taine, Berthold Auerbach, and Raphael Pumpelly. Holt was showing signs of becoming a great and inventive American publisher. As Holt took more control of the publishing business, Leypoldt’s attention began to drift. In 1868, Leypoldt started editing the firm’s newsletter, Leypoldt and Holt’s Literary Bulletin. Leypoldt increasingly devoted his time and energy to the Literary Bulletin, leaving Holt free to run the business as he liked. They remained partners, but Leypoldt had almost nothing to do with the book publishing side of the business. In 1871, Holt brought Ralph Williams, yet another of his Yale classmates, into the partnership. That year Leypoldt, Holt, and Williams had its first major success, Hippolyte Taine’s monumental History of English Literature.33 A year later, in 1872, Holt launched the enormously successful Leisure Time series, which featured the distinctive spiderweb design on the binding. When Holt was an old man reflecting on the beginnings of his career, in Garrulities of an Octogenarian Editor, he had very little to say about Leypoldt and nothing at all to say about Williams. He thanked Leypoldt for starting him along the right path. Of the men he truly admired, men like himself, he said, “There now hang side by side in my office portraits of William Appleton, Joseph W. Harper, George P. Putnam and Charles Scribner, and I never contemplate them without thinking, ‘What a fine body of gentlemen you were!’ ”34 Holt regarded Leypoldt as “a fine scholar and a true gentleman,” but he never really thought of Leypoldt as a publisher. Holt’s estimation of Leypoldt was probably justified. Leypoldt was actively engaged in book publishing for only six { 136 }

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years. During that time, he managed to bring out fewer than a hundred titles, none of which was the sort that made a publisher famous. Fortunately for Leypoldt, publishers have always been able to make a living from undistinguished books. The firm of Leypoldt and Holt was becoming Henry Holt’s business, because Holt had a real genius for picking and promoting books that Leypoldt never had. Nevertheless, as Henry Holt developed into a major American publisher, the foundation he inherited from Leypoldt remained visible. Holt maintained and developed Leypoldt’s music and fine arts series, expanded the line of European literature in translation, and made the educational line his personal project. Throughout his long career, Holt continued as he had been taught—keeping the spirit of Leypoldt’s enterprise along with his owl logotype. Leypoldt’s most important legacy was independence. Leypoldt had been the first American publisher whose only business was publishing. Holt continued as an independent publisher: he never established a company bookstore or became a partner in a printing plant. Throughout his career, Holt followed the model that Leypoldt had created when he divided publishing and bookselling into separate enterprises. Although it took most of a century, all American publishers eventually followed Leypoldt’s example and moved out of the retail book trade. The Scribner Book Store, the last vestige of the publisher/bookseller system, closed for good in 1988.35 But Leypoldt was not finished. As Holt was becoming an important American publisher, Leypoldt was working on a new project.

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13 Imposing Order on the American Book Trade

In plain words, Chaos was the law of nature; Order was the dream of man. —Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, 1919

Frederick Leypoldt’s earliest experiences in the American book trade had shocked him. American booksellers had to work without those “most indispensable tools,” weekly trade journals and regular catalogs. Booksellers in the United States actually seemed unwilling to support the only monthly journal that they had. Even worse, most book publishers in the United States seemed to regard trade journalism as needless expense. After Leypoldt became a book publisher himself, his shock turned to anger. When Leypoldt realized that booksellers in Philadelphia stooped to underselling, that the men who should have been his colleagues routinely violated the fundamental principles of the book trade, he quit the retail side of the business and left Philadelphia. Leypoldt returned to New York, where he created a new kind of American publishing company with Henry Holt. As Leypoldt changed from a German bookseller into an American publisher, he became intent on reforming the American book trade. Leypoldt had changed, but so had New York. Leypoldt’s experiences in the book trade had changed him, and the Civil War had changed New York. New York had prospered during the American Civil War. New Yorkers had made sacrifices during the war, and many New Yorkers had died, but the fighting had remained far off. The four-day draft riot during the summer of 1863 was the only “battle” fought in New York. If anything, the war helped business, as it drove a booming economy that justified the expense of expanding industrial capacity in New York. The expansion of the rail network was probably the most important industrial development that occurred during the Civil War. In 1860, the nation’s railways { 138 }

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included more than thirty thousand miles of track. The network stretched from the industrial Northeast to the agricultural Midwest and South, but there was still no direct rail connection between the North and the South. By the time the transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869, the United States had fiftythree thousand miles of track.1 The expanding rail network connected one city to another across the United States, and it also connected one rail company to another, creating an institutional network that mirrored the physical network. The institutional network arose to coordinate and manage the running of hundreds of individual rail lines. In The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business, Alfred D. Chandler argues that the business network developed by the railroads was, in fact, an early step in the restructuring of American business from the traditional single-unit enterprise to the modern, multi-unit corporation.2 While the expansion of the railroads was viewed as a symbol of progress, America’s industrialists worried about a different consequence of the war—the sudden jump in the value of labor. Nearly 620,000 men had died in the war, and those who returned to civilian life were in a position to demand higher wages and better working conditions. After the war, workers began to organize on a scale unprecedented in the United States.3 Robert Hoe II, the heir to the largest printing-press manufacturing enterprise in the country, complained that “outside influences” incited workers to organize, which in turn “weakened our influence directly and indirectly over the minds of the men.”4 Manufacturers like Hoe were right to worry about organized labor. On the other hand, workers were right to worry about the practices of manufacturers like Hoe. For both sides, the postwar years were a time of increasing organization. In 1866, a congress of local labor unions meeting in Baltimore consolidated into the National Labor Union. The NLU was the first attempt to organize labor across a wide range of trades. It had some success in its campaign for the eight-hour workday, but the power of organized labor was more than matched by the increased concentration of capital in the hands of major industrial and financial firms.5 The increasing cost of labor prompted American manufacturers to invest in machinery that would minimize their dependence on that labor. Sometimes called the Second Industrial Revolution, the postwar shift to mechanized, steampowered manufacture in the United States was accompanied by a change in the structure of industrial production and finance.6 Theoretically, steam allowed industrial production to spread almost anywhere in the country; in fact, industry became even more concentrated around metropolitan centers, particularly in the Northeast. { 139 }

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Steam-powered machinery made it possible to manufacture on a scale that would have been unimaginable before the war, but that expansion required vast capital investment. Consolidation and incorporation became the guiding business principles of the era, which Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner dubbed the “Gilded Age.” Bigger enterprises were able to take advantage of economies of scale, and so they enjoyed preferential treatment from suppliers, distributors, bankers, politicians, and the courts. Factory owners like Hoe might complain that, following the war, workers were less dependable, or that they had been stirred up by “outside influences,” but his complaint ignored the fact that the structure of American commerce was changing. A gulf had opened between consolidated, incorporated capital and organized labor. Labor was on one side of the gulf, and a new entity called “management” was on the other. The labor-management divide was more pronounced in large manufacturing enterprises, but it also affected smaller businesses, making it more difficult to run small-scale manufacturing that relied on industrial production.7 During the era that followed the Civil War, organization became a national preoccupation. Labor began to organize into national unions. Commercial organizations, which before the war had been informal and usually local, were augmented or replaced by national associations. In the 1850s, organized action had been a secondary function of elite social clubs like the Century, the New York, and the Union. After the war, formal, national industrial organizations like the American Industrial League, the Free Trade League, and even the Pianoforte Manufacturers Society were established to protect the interests of manufacturers, financiers, and merchants.8 Americans were organizing everything from manufacturers’ associations and labor unions to temperance societies and drinking clubs like the “Jolly Corks” as national enterprises.9 Most of the leagues, unions, and associations began as local attempts to bring order or to consolidate power, but they soon merged into national organizations, complete with conferences, platforms, and journals.10 Naturally enough, the book trades in the United States followed many of the same trends that were shaping the rest of American business and society. Although the book trades operated on a much smaller scale than the railroad companies or industrial manufacturers, they were coping with many of the same structural problems that faced those bigger businesses.11 Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that industrial manufacturers were learning to deal with the same problems of capital speculation, overproduction, and distribution that had bedeviled the book industry since the advent of moveable type. Certainly, the American book trades had experimented with the idea of national trade associations long before they became a regular feature of business { 140 }

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in the United States. While most American industries, trade associations, and social groups were just beginning to form regional and national organizations, the book industry in the United States already had a long history of failed attempts to create lasting associations, trade journals, and industry directories. Attempts to organize the American book trade on a national level had invariably disintegrated along one or another of the industry’s many fault lines. Regional differences, conflicts between booksellers and publishers, copyright arguments, the continuous debate about underselling, or simple inertia eventually scuttled every attempt to organize the book business. The first attempt to organize the American book trade was the American Company of Booksellers, formed in 1801, which lasted nearly four years before internal disputes ended the venture. The group organized a few trade exhibitions modeled on the Leipzig fairs, complete with medals for excellence, but the association disbanded because it could reach no agreement on the perennial problem of underselling. Next came the New York Association of Booksellers, which was formed in 1802 and lasted less than a year. Again, the problem of underselling killed the association.12 In 1824, Henry C. Carey of Philadelphia also tried to launch a trade association. Carey’s effort came to nothing, but it led to the first of the annual trade sales. Carey and Lea’s trade sales were intended to help the American book trade by creating a central distribution system modeled on the German book fairs. Unfortunately, publishers used the sales to liquidate unsold and unsellable inventory. Remaindered books, obsolete stereotype plates, miscellaneous paper stock, and equipment—all of it was auctioned off. Booksellers and jobbers bought stock for pennies on the dollar.13 The trade sales gave rise to a long series of reform efforts. In 1855, George Palmer Putnam and William Appleton organized the New York Book Publishers’ Association in order to counteract the influence of the sales, but the group lasted for less than two years. The book trade was not discouraged by its long history of failed trade associations. Following a broader national trend, the book trades formed nearly twenty separate regional or national associations in the decade following the Civil War.14 From time to time, one group or another would coalesce, usually to combat some particular problem in the trade, but the resulting organizations never had much staying power. They certainly did not have the power to enforce any reforms. The trade sales, for example, persisted despite repeated reform efforts. One important result of the fashion for forming trade associations was a sharp rise in trade journalism. All the new associations needed journals, directories, and catalogs. The increased demand for trade publications occurred at just the right moment to take advantage of a new generation of steam-powered { 141 }

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rotary printing presses that used curved stereotype plates. The situation was mutually beneficial. On the one hand, printing had become cheaper and faster than it had ever been, which made trade journals relatively inexpensive. On the other hand, the increased demand for trade journals allowed printers to use some of the excess capacity of their steam-powered rotary printing presses. The American book industry also had a great deal of experience with trade journals, directories, and catalogs. The Boston booksellers had published Catalogue of Books Printed in the United States in 1804. There had also been several attempts to establish a national book-trade journal in the United States. None of those early attempts received any regular institutional support because there was no regular institution to provide it. The earliest American book trade journals were primarily sales tools for the firms that sponsored them. The New York booksellers J. & H. Langley, for example, published the United States Literary Advisor and Publishers’ Circular from 1831 to 1842. At about the same time, George Palmer Putnam, then a clerk for Jonathan Leavitt, began compiling his Booksellers’ Advertiser and Monthly Register of New Publications. Putnam began the journal in 1834 and it lasted through twelve years of nearly continuous publication. It also was the basis for a series of catalogs and trade lists, including the American Book Circular.15 Appleton also published a small journal called Appleton’s Literary Bulletin for a few years in the 1840s. Osgood & Co. published the Literary World: A Gazette for Authors, Readers, and Publishers in Boston. In its first incarnation, the Literary World was edited by George and Evert Duyckinck, who ran the journal for six years, from 1847 to 1853, before they turned their attention to the compilation of the Cyclopedia of American Literature. More interested in literature than they were in the trade, the Duyckinck brothers quickly turned the World into a literary review rather than a book trade journal. In 1851, Charles B. Norton launched Norton’s Literary Advisor as a newsletter for his retail customers who wanted to keep current with new publications. A year later, he changed the name to Norton’s Literary Gazette and Publishers’ Circular and began marketing it to people in the book trade. Along with the usual publishers’ display advertisements, it carried book-trade news, book reviews, and lists of new publications. Norton used the lists of new publications to compile two annual catalogs in 1853 and 1854.16 In 1855, C. B. Norton sold his journal to George Putnam’s New York Book Publishers’ Association. Putnam announced the formation of the Book Publishers’ Association in New York’s daily papers and in the first issue of the { 142 }

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association’s new official journal, the American Publishers’ Circular and Literary Gazette.17 The renamed weekly was launched 1 September 1855, two weeks before the fall sale. The APC, as it was known in the book trade, published a detailed account of the “Complimentary Fruit Festival” that followed the trade sale.18 Charles Rudolph Rode succeeded Norton as editor of the APC beginning in July 1856. Rode had more experience in trade journalism than he had in the book trade. A decade earlier, he had succeeded John Doggett as the editor and publisher of Doggett’s New York Directory, and he published the first United States Post Office Directory. According to Adolph Growoll, Rode agreed to take over financial responsibility for the journal in exchange for an assurance that the members of the Book Publishers’ Association would maintain their support by purchasing advertisements.19 Although the Book Publishers’ Association soon vanished, Rode continued to publish the APC as a weekly until the outbreak of the Civil War brought the book industry to a temporary standstill. In the panic that accompanied the onset of war, publishers simply stopped buying advertising space. Two months into the war, Rode announced that he could no longer continue as a weekly and switched to monthly publication.20 For the next two years, Rode issued the APC irregularly, fluctuating between monthly and weekly publication “depending upon the exigencies of the trade.”21 Rode’s health was already failing in February 1863 when he published a letter from a young German bookseller named Frederick Leypoldt, who exhorted his new colleagues in the American trade to support Rode. Leypoldt’s letter had no discernable effect, and six months later Rode announced that he had sold the APC to George W. Childs, a prominent Philadelphia bookseller and publisher.22 Childs brought new energy to the APC. He moved the journal to Philadelphia, changed the design of the masthead, and switched to a smaller format. The new design almost doubled the page count, which made the APC appear a little more substantial. Although the pages were about a third smaller, Childs maintained the same advertising rates that Rode had established in 1855: $20 for a full page, $12 for a half page, $6 for a quarter page, and $3 for an eighth page.23 After all, whatever profit the journal might generate would have to come from advertising. To help cover the cost of production, he also doubled the annual subscription rate to $2. In November, Childs rearranged the name; for the next nine years, he issued the monthly as the American Literary Gazette and Publishers’ Circular. Leypoldt and Holt supported the journal with a standing contract for monthly advertisements. { 14 3 }

How Books Came to America

Publishers in the United States never showed much interest in helping the editors of the trade journals. A few publishers, like Scribner, Appleton, Putnam, and Leypoldt and Holt, for example, sent regular press releases to the trade journals and bought contracts for monthly or weekly advertising space. Some publishers sent trade news when they thought they had a book with commercial potential. Many other publishers simply ignored the journals altogether. Publishers announced new books or sent review copies to newspapers or trade journals when and if they wanted to. After all, nothing forced a publisher to use the trade journals. Publishers could file for copyright protection, but they were not actually required to register their books with any agency. The Copyright Act of 1870 established a central registry for new publications, but the law had no mechanism to enforce compliance. Trade journalism was very different in Europe. German and English publishers were obliged by law and custom to provide timely information to trade journalists and catalogers. For three hundred years, German publishers had been required to provide the editors of the book fair catalogs with accurate bibliographic descriptions of the books they planned to publish; no book could be offered for sale at Leipzig or Frankfurt unless it was listed in the official catalog. In England, new books had to be licensed before they were sent to press, and they needed to be registered with the Stationers’ Company after they were issued. Publishers in Germany and England actively supported a host of journals and catalogs, not simply because they had to satisfy a legal obligation, but because they understood that widely available information was good for business. In America, the book industry usually had some sort of trade journal from 1831 on, although none of the journals lasted much more than a decade. Without any sort of institutional support, the life span of an American book-trade journal was often determined by the tenacity or the patience of the editor or publisher, who was forced to work with little support and less recognition. Facing indifference and sometimes hostility, neither the editors nor their journals lasted long enough to demonstrate that cooperation and mutual interest could benefit the whole trade. In 1868, Frederick Leypoldt decided that he would try another experiment: he would demonstrate the value of a good trade journal to his American colleagues. Perhaps he was inspired by the postwar proliferation of trade organizations. More likely, he realized that Holt was fully capable of running the publishing business. Certainly Holt was doing an excellent job of finding new books and authors for the firm. Leypoldt wrote several popular textbooks, but he was not attracting any new authors or translators. { 144 }

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As Holt took control of the business, Leypoldt needed something to do. Looking back on his early experiences in book trade journalism, Leypoldt said that he turned his attention to “the little circular” he prepared for the firm’s clients soon after he married Augusta H. Garrigue, in September 1867.24 A few months later, Leypoldt sold his interest in the book publishing business to Holt, although Leypoldt and Holt remained partners in some capacity for three more years. Leypoldt then bought the rights to A. K. Loring’s Literary Bulletin, which he meant to use as a foundation for an American equivalent of the Brockhaus Monthly Bulletin or the Reinwald and Bossange Bulletin Mensuel.25 As Leypoldt was working on his new journal, his wife gave birth to a son, who was named Rudolph after his grandfather, Rudolph Garrigue. After issuing an experimental Christmas issue that appeared in December of 1868, Leypoldt launched the first regular issue of Leypoldt and Holt’s Literary Bulletin, a Monthly Record of Foreign and American Books in January of 1869.26 As it first appeared, the Bulletin was not quite the trade journal Leypoldt intended it to be; rather, it was a ready-made substitute for the advertising circulars that nineteenth-century booksellers routinely compiled for their customers. Under the masthead, which featured a comical engraving of three bearded dwarves sorting through a heap of antique books and manuscripts, Leypoldt made a promise directed at the retail customers of the booksellers who were his clients: “All Books mentioned in the ‘Bulletin’ supplied at the shortest notice.” In the first issue, Leypoldt started a practice that he would continue throughout his career. Under the heading “nature and object of this publication,” he presented an ambitious categorical list of the information that would appear in the journal: A complete and classified list of all reputable books issued in the United States during the previous month, stating full title, size, style, publisher’s name, and retail price. What the reliable press says of the new books. Tables of contents of the principal American Magazines for the current month. Announcements of forthcoming American publications. American Literary News. European Literary News.27 In addition to those regular departments, the January issue also included a classified list of the “Principal American Publications” of the preceding year, “to meet, { 145 }

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partially at least, the long-felt need for an annual catalogue.” Set in brevier type (slightly smaller than modern eight-point type), that “complete and classified list of all reputable books issued in the United States” ran to nine pages, which pushed the first issue to a substantial forty-eight pages. The list of “Principal American Publications” was part of Leypoldt’s plan to create an annual index of American publications. Every year, the January issue would include a classified list of new books for the year, referenced to the issue that contained the original listing. Leypoldt explained that a complete set of the Bulletin from February through the following January could be used as a “catalogue raisonné for the year. It is therefore almost superfluous to advise our customers to retain their numbers and take pains to keep their sets complete.”28 If the trade cooperated, Leypoldt could simultaneously fill the need for timely book lists and an annual American trade catalog. Leypoldt was confident that his Bulletin would be valuable to booksellers and publishers alike. Booksellers were encouraged to use the Bulletin as a cheaper and more effective substitute for the in-house circulars most bookshops employed. Publishers could use the Bulletin as a precisely targeted advertising medium.29 In the perennial conflict between American booksellers and publishers, the Bulletin would be common ground. If all went according to plan, any book published or sold in America would be listed in Leypoldt’s journal. The scheme was well conceived. Leypoldt offered the Bulletin to booksellers at about the cost of production, as little as a halfpenny apiece for unbound sheets, without the booksellers’ imprint. After all, Leypoldt expected the booksellers to give copies of the Bulletin to customers free of charge. For a variety of extra charges, including the cost of stereotyping the cover sheets, Leypoldt offered to bind the Bulletin in covers to suit the needs of each subscriber. A bookseller in Cleveland, for example, could distribute, under his own name, a carefully compiled listing of recent publications—a plan that had “already been adopted by two leading firms,” according to Leypoldt. Forty-one firms bought advance subscriptions to the Bulletin, giving the journal an initial circulation of nearly twenty-five thousand copies.30 Leypoldt offered publishers two ways to profit by supporting the Bulletin. First, Leypoldt would print any publisher’s notices free of charge; he particularly solicited announcements of forthcoming or recently published books. Second, Leypoldt offered publishers advertising space at sliding rates based on the size of the print run. Terms for a full page were a little higher than publishers paid for an ad in Childs’s Circular—$25 for the first ten thousand copies and $1.25 for each additional thousand copies in the issue—but the ads reached a wide retail audience. { 146 }

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The Bulletin’s profits would depend entirely on advertisements. In the first issue, advertisements filled thirteen pages of the forty-eight. The bulk of those ads were unadorned publishers’ lists, including full-page listings from Hurd and Houghton, Lippincott, Putnam, Routledge, Scribner, and two pages from Harper & Brothers. Leypoldt’s Bulletin was a success. It began with, and maintained, a circulation of more than thirty thousand copies distributed throughout the country by book dealers great and small. The Bulletin was available from booksellers in Richmond, Indiana, Augusta, Georgia, and Muscatine, Iowa, as well as in recognized bookbuying centers like New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, New Orleans, and Cincinnati. F. W. Christern and G. P. Putnam’s Sons offered it to customers under their imprint, as did Loring, Short, and Harmon of Portland, Maine.31 The Literary Bulletin was largely a compendium of lists, either as announcements or as advertisements, augmented by a digest of opinion and literary news from around the world. Although he included a few brief opinion pieces, Leypoldt’s editorial policy was neutral—books were neither good nor bad, they were simply available for sale. No book was ever disparaged in the Bulletin, nor were particular books promoted except in paid advertisements. Fortunately for Leypoldt, approximately half of the pages over the course of a year’s run were paid advertisements, generating about $4,000 per year. Although the Bulletin was a commercial success, it fell short of Leypoldt’s expectations. It was primarily a promotional tool for booksellers, who subscribed to save the cost of producing their own flyers and catalogs. For publishers, it was a chance to advertise directly to retail customers as well as to book dealers. Providing booksellers with complete, up-to-date lists of books in print, however, was an important part of the task that Leypoldt had set for himself, and the Literary Bulletin did it as well as any of its forerunners. The Bulletin that Leypoldt was editing was a generalized retail catalog for booksellers to give to their customers. He was, however, more interested in creating a journal that would unite the entire trade, an American Börsenblatt. It would encourage publishers and booksellers to cooperate and coordinate their efforts. In September 1869, Leypoldt started issuing a second version of the Bulletin that he re-edited specifically for the trade. While it was not really a separate publication, the new Trade Circular and Literary Bulletin, later called the Trade Circular and Publishers’ Bulletin, declared itself a “Special Medium for Inter-Communication for Publishers, Booksellers, and Stationers.”32 The Trade Circular, as it came to be called, shared many features with its retail counterpart. After all, the core of both journals was the same: lists of new books and display ads for publishers and larger retailers. { 147 }

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Most of Leypoldt’s clients supported both journals. F.  W. Christern, Leypoldt’s mentor, faithfully bought a quarter-page ad in both the Bulletin and the Circular. Fields, Osgood, and Co., Harper & Brothers, Hurd and Houghton, and Routledge regularly bought space in both journals. The joint support was part of the design. Terms for advertising in the Circular were generous. While fifteen dollars bought a single full-page insertion, discounts were applied for continuing ads—10 percent for three months, 15 percent for six months, and 25 percent for a year. Clients were given the option of advertising in both the Bulletin and the Circular at the rates Leypoldt originally charged for the Bulletin.33 The Circular also offered a few features intended for the convenience of the trade. Leypoldt solicited trade correspondence, promising to publish any letters free of charge. He especially asked for news of proven novelties that booksellers might add to their stock and news of any legal matters that might be of special interest to the trade. He also offered a section of classified ads—“five lines inserted free of charge; ten cents for each succeeding one.” Leypoldt suggested several categories for the classified ads—goods for exchange, job lots, stereotype plates or woodcuts for sale, books wanted, and situations or help wanted. Dealers who wanted to advertise books for sale, “for the use of book-sellers who have become possessed of good or rare books, old volumes, etc., unsalable in their own localities,” paid ten cents per line. Aside from the classified ads and the letters section, the Trade Circular was identical to the Literary Bulletin. More a professional supplement than a separate journal, the Circular was sent free of charge to two thousand booksellers. As the first full year of the Bulletin and Circular was ending, Leypoldt was obliged to begin the task of compiling the promised annual index of books published in 1869. The previous August, he had compiled his first large-scale trade list, a special education number listing hundreds of books for the academic markets. The annual would be more difficult. Leypoldt had to prepare the annual index during the busiest season for the book trade. He had to compile special Christmas numbers of the Bulletin and the Circular in November and December before he could begin work on the annual. Leypoldt was able to devote all of his time to the task, as he no longer concerned himself with book publishing at Leypoldt and Holt. Even all of his time, however, would not be enough to meet the annual’s January deadline. In the first issue of the Bulletin, Leypoldt had promised that an index of books published during 1869 would appear the following January. By December, the list of publications had grown well beyond anything he imagined. Originally, he had intended to include the annual index in the Bulletin and the Circular for January, { 148 }

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which has always been a slow month in the book trade, a time to recover from the Christmas rush. Leypoldt planned for the index to fill out the otherwise scanty winter issues of his journals, but the list he accumulated for 1869 was much too large for inclusion in either journal. Leypoldt decided to issue the index as a separate bound volume, The American Catalog of Books for 1869, priced at $1. The resulting one-hundred-page catalog claimed on its title page to contain “complete monthly lists of all books published in the United States during the year 1869, with statement of size, price, place of publication, and publisher’s name. To which are prefixed An Alphabetical and Classified Index.”34 While it was as complete as Leypoldt could make it, that first catalog did not live up to its own description. As Leypoldt explained it, the problem was twofold: “Even those most interested in having their publications properly catalogued, rarely give information that is either accurate or complete; and even those to whom a catalogue is of most use, do not seem to find it of use enough to warrant paying for many copies.” On the theory that a “good catalogue is a good thing, no matter whose time and money pays for it, and a catalogue may be good without being ideally perfect,” Leypoldt was forced to take several money-saving shortcuts.35 Nevertheless, he did produce the first annual catalog of American publications since the last of Norton’s catalogs in 1856. The process of constructing the main body of the catalog was simple but methodologically suspect. Leypoldt had his printer run new sheets from the stereotype plates of the monthly lists that had already appeared in the Bulletin and Circular. In other words, Leypoldt reissued his twelve monthly lists in one volume, with no additions or corrections. Although simple and cheap, the result was not particularly useful. As Leypoldt explained in his preface, the catalog was “broken into twelve sections, corresponding to the monthly periods of its issue. For the reasons already hinted at there was nothing to warrant the manufacture of new plates which should include the whole in one sequence.”36 Reprinting the monthly lists was of little use to anyone. It must have been especially irritating to anyone who had followed Leypoldt’s advice at the beginning of the year and taken “pains to keep a set complete.” Leypoldt recognized the problem. “To compensate for this blemish,” he explained, “and to add a new feature of special and unique value, two indexes” arranged and cross-referenced short titles and authors’ names both alphabetically and categorically.37 Filling nearly twenty pages, the alphabetical and classified indexes made the catalog a useful reference tool. The alphabetical index offered a uniform list of all the titles and authors in the monthly lists. Guided by pragmatism, rather than { 149 }

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“any bibliographical ambitions,” Leypoldt simply listed authors alphabetically, by their most familiar names: Contrary to bibliographic rule, we have preferred to record the works of pseudonym authors—such as Eliot, Oliver Optic, etc.—under the adopted name which the author chooses to retain on the title-page. In the first place, hardly any bookseller will look for Eliot under Evans or Lewes; for Sand under Dudevant; or for Optic under Adams; why then detain him by unnecessary cross reference? Moreover, we really doubt the propriety of making prominent that name which the author—for some reason or other—(which no bibliographer should have a right to ignore merely to show off his knowledge), does not see fit to place on the title-page.38 Leypoldt’s penchant for thoroughness, however, compelled him to crossreference real names as well as the more familiar pseudonyms. The much shorter classified index divided the catalog into categories that reflected the standards of the day. Leypoldt used a scheme similar to that used in 1855 by Trübner for his Guide to American Literature. The twenty-eight categories demonstrated something of the tastes and the organizing principles of the era. His list began with works of reference, theology, and philosophy. Moving from the sacred to the secular, the next group of categories included law, government, economics, and political and social sciences. Next came the largest section, education, which Leypoldt divided into several subsections: education as a subject itself, primers and elementary textbooks, and the liberal and practical arts. The last few categories included the fine and performing arts, sport, and several subcategories of belles lettres, including “Literary Miscellany,” “Poetry,” “Drama,” “Humor, Satire, Facetiae,” “Juvenile and Sunday-School Books,” and, finally, “Novels and Tales.” Although it was meant to help booksellers locate works for their customers, the classified index revealed something about the way Leypoldt and his colleagues in the book trade organized the world as it appeared in print. The list included categories that might not appear in most modern categorized book lists—such as “mentalism” and “freemasonry”—but it was constructed from the same worldview that would be popularized by Melvil Dewey a few years later. Putting novels at the bottom of the list, after joke books and juvenilia, reflected the nineteenth-century prejudice against novels, which would later become an organizing principle of the Dewey Decimal System.

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The American Catalogue for 1869 was more than Leypoldt had promised and less than he had hoped for. Aside from the fact of its existence, the achievement of the 1869 catalog was the indexes. Even though the indexes were useful, they could not compensate for missing information. The completeness and the accuracy of the lists depended on the cooperation of publishers, but some American publishers were skeptical of the monthly journals and the annual catalogs, some were indifferent, and some were openly hostile. The lack of support irritated Leypoldt, and he let his displeasure show in the catalog. Leypoldt ended the preface with a conditional promise to make his annual catalog a “Trade Institution” if the trade would make some effort to support the venture. Moreover, he promised a catalog “on the plan of the French and German Catalogues—the full titles arranged in one alphabet, with an index classified in minute detail.”39 Leypoldt finished his first catalog a few weeks before his wife, Augusta, gave birth to their second child, a girl they named Marian Augusta. Leypoldt spent another year as a nominal partner in Leypoldt and Holt, while issuing the Literary Bulletin and the trade version, the Literary Bulletin and Trade Circular. When the year ended, Augusta was once again pregnant, and Frederick unaccountably decided to prepare a new sort of catalog. Leypoldt’s second catalog was a failure in almost every way. Like the first one, it was simultaneously more and less than Leypoldt intended. The second catalog was issued under the long, confusing title The Trade Circular Annual for 1871, Including the American Catalogue of Books Published in the United States During the Year 1870, with Their Sizes, Prices, and Publishers’ Names. The volume was a trade omnibus—a catalog overwhelmed by “features.” Leypoldt improved the catalog by eliminating the repetitious monthly lists. The catalog of new books for 1870 was reduced to just the categorical and alphabetical indexes. The list of entries occupied just sixty pages and the indexes added another ten. A seventy-page catalog must have seemed too slight to Leypoldt, because he appended something he called a “general summary of trade information.”40 The resulting Trade Circular Annual, as it was commonly known, ran to one hundred and seventy-five pages, which were augmented (and paid for) by an appendix containing the catalogs of twenty-six publishers. The appendix pushed the page count to nearly eight hundred pages. Leypoldt’s second attempt at an annual catalog was also marked by a mild subterfuge. As he explained several years after the fact, some publishers seemed reluctant to give their support to the Trade Circular because of its ties to the

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house of Leypoldt and Holt.41 Hoping to dispel fears of favoritism, Leypoldt dropped the name Leypoldt and Holt from the title page; instead, he listed the “Office of the Trade Circular and Literary Bulletin, No. 25 Bond Street,” as the publisher. Earlier in the year, Leypoldt and Holt had moved to 25 Bond Street, just around the corner from the loft rooms of 646 Broadway where Holt had first encountered Leypoldt. The Trade Circular Annual was a poorly conceived venture. In his eagerness to be helpful, Leypoldt came dangerously close to swamping his own project. The Annual for 1871 included “a list of the principal books published in England; a publishers,’ manufacturers,’ and importers’ directory; an alphabetical list of nearly eight hundred articles suitable for sale at the book, stationery, music, and fancy goods stores; a summary of American and English novelties; and miscellaneous literary and trade information.” Including hundreds of pages of miscellaneous information made the Annual too big for its own purposes. The various lists and articles were difficult to use and took both time and space from the catalogs of American books. The appendix of publishers’ trade lists, while simple to produce, ran counter to the organizing principles of the catalog. The trade lists included books that should not have been included in an annual catalog of American publications—forthcoming books, backlist books, and books that had been leased to several publishers by an agency that held the copyright. Furthermore, there was no way to index the titles in the trade lists. The result was unwieldy, but it did foreshadow a later Leypoldt institution, the Publishers’ Trade List Annual. Leypoldt’s second catalog was an anemic thing, little more than a price list that had been padded with hundreds of pages of extraneous matter. In fact, an annual price list was exactly what most of the trade really wanted, but it did not satisfy Leypoldt. He realized that the catalog itself was a qualified failure, but he seemed unable to recognize his own part in that failure. Leypoldt blamed the publishers. He began his preface to the 1871 Trade Circular Annual with a reference to the comments that Nicholas Trübner made in the introduction to his second Guide to American Literature. Trübner had declared American bibliography “almost untrodden ground.” America, he continued, “has disregarded the importance of an authentic record of her literary progress, and allowed the productions of her rising intellect and matured knowledge to be confounded with those of the great Anglo-Saxon family from which she sprang.” Without careful bibliographies, he explained, a nation’s literature was “like some huge pawnbroker’s warehouse,” in which anything of real value was lost in the great mounds of cheap trinkets.42 Leypoldt was forced to admit that little had { 152 }

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changed in the intervening decade: “Thousands of books are made; large sums are spent on advertisements; all is done for momentary publicity, but, with few exceptions, little or nothing for an accurate and permanent record.”43 Leypoldt continued his usual arguments in favor of the German way of doing business. Unfortunately, those who would most benefit from accurate and complete records of the trade refused to do the simplest tasks to further that end: No authentic title-record, still less a proper classification of books, is possible without examination of the books. In Germany, a copy of every book and pamphlet is deposited with the compiler of the official catalogues. Here the titles of books have to be obtained and verified in “ways that are dark.” Blanks are sent out, carefully ruled, and properly headed, for every item pertaining to the description of a book; but it is no exaggeration to state, that, out of one hundred, not ten come back properly filled. A complete title, if occupying more than one or two lines, is of rare occurrence. Without help from the publishers, Leypoldt explained, he was forced to sift through “circulars, newspaper advertisements and book notices .  .  . obtaining from one the title, from another the name of the author, from another, size, price, or number of pages, etc.” The “lack of encouragement” that he noted in the preface to the 1869 catalog continued to frustrate Leypoldt. Clearly surprised by the opposition he met, Leypoldt recounted an example of the inexplicable attitudes of American publishers: “Some publishers seem to believe that they were doing too much for us in contributing to an accurate record of their own publications. It was one of our ‘representative’ booksellers, who, when politely asked the question why he never returned our blanks, seriously replied to our assistant, ‘Why, you must not expect us to do your work!’ ”44 The prevailing attitude in the industry mystified and discouraged Leypoldt. Nevertheless, he remained determined to give the trade the tools it needed, even if the trade appeared not to want his help. Leypoldt was happy to announce one bright spot on the horizon: the new Copyright Act of 1870, which promised to force America’s publishers to adopt some of the discipline that marked the German trade. The act designated the Librarian of Congress the national “Copyright Officer” and required publishers to deposit two examples of each copyrighted work with the Library of Congress. Leypoldt anticipated that the Copyright Act would create a new era of bibliographic certainty. The law would force publishers to abandon their slovenly ways. Looking forward, he made a prediction: “In 1872, America for the first time { 15 3 }

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will possess, prepared by the able Librarian of Congress, an authentic annual record of American literature. Then it will be possible also to present some trustworthy statistics which now would be made only by guess-work.”45 The Librarian of Congress did prepare a report for 1872, but it did not list the titles that had been deposited, and the Library of Congress never issued catalogs of new publications.46 Leypoldt did his best to provide everything that the Copyright Act promised for the future. Nevertheless, the Trade Circular Annual for 1871 was obviously incomplete, even at 780 pages. It was also unconscionably late, appearing just a few days before the spring trade sale in April 1871.47 By the time the catalog was finally ready for sale, it was nearly obsolete. Although it failed in its stated purposes, the Annual brought together several ideas that formed the foundation of the complex bibliographic business that Leypoldt would eventually develop. It contained the first fully collated annual catalog of new American editions ever published. It also included Leypoldt’s first attempt at the sort of comprehensive directory and trade list that he later developed into the long-running Publishers’ Trade List Annual. Leypoldt spent the first half of 1871 getting the Annual into print and keeping up his monthly journals. He continued to issue progressively smaller versions of the Literary Bulletin for booksellers until late in 1872, when he replaced it with a serial called the Monthly Book Circular. The new venture had a number of formats, but for most of its life it was a four-page folio printed on paper “of a light texture [so] that it can be enclosed in books, newspapers, letters, etc., without adding to the necessary postage.” It could be purchased with the dealer’s imprint or with space left for hand stamps.48 Leypoldt’s primary interest was the Trade Circular, and he made a number of changes that signaled a new direction for the serial. First, he rearranged the name, making it the Trade Circular and Publishers’ Bulletin. Then he removed the name of Leypoldt and Holt from the masthead and returned to his old nom de guerre, “F. Leypoldt, Publisher.” In September 1871, Leypoldt dissolved what remained of his partnership with Holt and moved to new offices at 712 Broadway. In December, he announced that the Trade Circular and Publishers’ Bulletin would become a weekly book trade journal.

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I have an idea that some men are born out of their due place. Accident has cast them amid certain surroundings, but they have always a nostalgia for a home they know not. They are strangers in their birthplace, and the leafy lanes they have known from childhood or the populous streets in which they have played remain but a place of passage. . . . Sometimes a man hits upon a place to which he mysteriously feels that he belongs. Here is the home he sought, and he will settle amid scenes that he has never seen before, among men he has never known, as though they were familiar to him from his birth. —W. Somerset Maugham, The Moon and Sixpence, 1919

The first sign that Frederick Leypoldt’s renamed Trade Circular and Publishers’ Bulletin might do something more than simply survive came in July 1871. J. C. Barnes, a prominent New York textbook publisher, sent Leypoldt a letter announcing that the Publishers’ Board of Trade had voted unanimously to make the Trade Circular their official forum.1 The board had been formed a year earlier, largely through the efforts of Henry Ivison of Ivison and Phinney, to regulate some of the shadier marketing practices of educational book publishers.2 The endorsement of the Publishers’ Board of Trade gave some credence to Leypoldt’s claims that his publications represented the interests of the trade. The new role also made Leypoldt less of an outsider. He never stopped promoting German ways of doing business, but he and his journal were now officially recognized as representatives of at least part of the American book trade. As was so often the case in the American book industry, however, the support of the Publishers’ Board of Trade turned out to be mostly symbolic: they had selected Leypoldt’s journal as the public forum of the organization, but the honor was never reinforced with advertising revenue. Although the Trade Circular was gaining some favorable notice in the trade, Leypoldt seemed unsure of his future. His public statements ranged from { 15 5 }

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cautious optimism to gloomy resignation as he once again faced the task of producing a catalog from the miserable scraps of information he had collected during 1871. His third catalog, which he called the Annual American Catalogue (Third Year), filled just ninety-one pages, thirty of which were devoted to the categorical and alphabetical indexes. The little volume had none of the expansiveness of the previous year’s Trade Circular Annual. Even Leypoldt’s perennial complaint about the lack of trade support in the preface to the third catalog was uncharacteristically brief and dispirited: An Annual American Catalogue, of bibliographic accuracy, is something next to impossible, by reason of the indifference of the majority of our Publishers in regard to furnishing the required information. But a small portion of the hundreds of letters written [requests for information about new publications] are satisfactorily answered; and then the time spent in writing and in waiting for answers that are never returned, and in patching up fragments of titles derived from indirect sources, would seem incredible to the uninitiated. These facts must explain the absence of many titles, and the imperfect, and, in some cases, incorrect, record of many others that had to be inserted as they were found in newspapers, and in publishers’ and library lists which happened to be at the Editor’s disposal.3 Almost everything about the third catalog demonstrated the failure of Leypoldt’s effort to establish a comprehensive annual catalog. It was short, incomplete, and often incorrect. The only bright spot in the entire undertaking was a long essay enumerating and evaluating American literary production in 1871, written by an energetic young journalist named Richard Rogers Bowker. Leypoldt devoted less of his energy to the annual catalog because he had decided to consolidate his efforts and focus on the Trade Circular. In the December issue of the Trade Circular and Publishers’ Bulletin, Leypoldt announced that he was going to discontinue his free trade monthly and replace it with an expanded subscription weekly. The masthead for the new Weekly Trade Circular revealed that Leypoldt was taking a broad view of the book trade. His journal would be “A Special Medium of Inter-Communication for Publishers, Manufacturers, Importers, and Dealers in Books, Stationery, Music, Prints, and Miscellaneous Goods Sold at the Book, Stationery, Music and Print Stores.” Experience in the loosely defined American book trade forced Leypoldt to abandon some of the principles and prejudices he had learned from F. W. Christern. A German bookseller might be able to survive exclusively on book sales, but { 156 }

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no one in the broader American trade could afford to be so fussy. In the prospectus for the weekly version of the Trade Circular, he explained the “well-known fact that during the last ten years especially, competition and other causes have forced the trade into a variety of branch combinations in aid and support of the book business.” “Experience,” Leypoldt said, “has shown that innumerable articles can be brought before the book-buying public without in the least interfering with the sale of books.” He therefore promised to serve the interests of “all business combinations.” His weekly trade journal would include wallpaper, window shades, and musical instruments along with the more traditional goods of the American book trade—books, prints, stationery, and sheet music. Leypoldt was willing to loosen his definition of the book business, but he was determined to draw at least one line. Unlike several earlier book-trade journals, the Weekly Trade Circular would “confine itself strictly to the business interests of the trade,” avoiding “any pretension to be a literary paper.” Leypoldt offered the American trade, broadly defined, a “thoroughly representative medium of intercommunication” for $2.50 annually, postage paid.4 The first issue of the Weekly Trade Circular gave Leypoldt an occasion to expand on his mission statement: A prompt and full business record will always form the main feature of the “Weekly”; but it is the aim of the editor at the same time to make the trade circular a representative organ of the spirit of the trade, by admitting any exchange of views, or discussion on trade matters, that may lead to a reform of abuses, to a better understanding between publishers and dealers, and to a more congenial spirit among the trade in general. The editor also aims to make the trade circular an organ of trade education, by gathering from all available sources any material that may contribute to a more thorough business knowledge. He has in preparation a series of articles treating of the experiences, usages, and business management of the trade in foreign countries. In view of the new movement among the Publishers’ Board of Trade, to include miscellaneous as well as educational publishers, and thus to form a Union, which must finally become a general Booksellers’ Union, the editor will begin the series with an article on the German “Börsenverein,” the oldest and best organized Booksellers’ Union, of the world.5 In the next issue, Leypoldt announced that he had purchased the American Literary Gazette and Publisher’s Circular from George W. Childs.6 The merger { 157 }

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put Leypoldt in charge of the book trade’s sole forum, the Publishers’ and Stationers’ Weekly Trade Circular. Leypoldt retained the old-fashioned, unwieldy title for the rest of 1872, after which it became, simply, Publishers’ Weekly, or PW. The goals that Leypoldt set for his trade journals were obviously unrealistic. For more than forty years, American publishers and booksellers had been indifferent or even hostile to their trade journals. Only a few publishers bothered to submit review copies or even notices of new publications. Publishers who were unwilling to exert themselves for free publicity were unlikely to show much interest in “trade education” or a German-style “general Booksellers’ Union.” Leypoldt imagined that Publishers’ Weekly would encourage and then serve a national trade organization. Instead, Publishers’ Weekly itself became an organizing principle of the American book industry by simply persisting. With the help of Richard Rogers Bowker and a small, dedicated staff, Publishers’ Weekly survived. Over time, American booksellers and publishers learned to rely on it, and it eventually became an indispensable part of the book trade. During the first year of weekly publication, Leypoldt simply followed the established patterns of the book trade in the United States. He devoted two or three issues each to the spring and fall trade sales. Throughout November and December, Leypoldt focused almost entirely on the Christmas market. In June and early July, he turned his attention to the educational market. Leypoldt also insisted on inserting a fifth event into the book-trade calendar. Although the pressure of weekly publication made it impossible to continue the annual catalogs, he did compile an annual list of books published in the previous year, which he ran as a series in two or three issues in January and sometimes February. Although Leypoldt hated the trade sales, he could not afford to ignore them in PW. There was no way around the fact that, twice a year, in April and September, the various members of the book trade met at auction houses in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia for these semiannual trade sales. In the course of his career, Leypoldt published dozens of editorials that criticized the sales. As the editor and publisher of Publishers’ Weekly, however, he was an unwilling participant. He propped up a system he hated with editorial coverage and trade advertising. Leypoldt thought that the trade sales were a symptom of the larger problem of underselling. He opposed the trade sales because they undermined the book industry’s traditional discount system. In a pair of editorials, titled “Underselling” and “Unity of the Trade,” he connected underselling and the trade auctions. Leypoldt presented the position of a hypothetical bookseller: “An actual antagonism has sprung up between booksellers and publishers—’if he [the bookseller] { 15 8 }

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does not undersell, the publisher will undersell him,’ says the bookseller apologist; ‘the publisher sells his book to the retailer, and then endeavors to prevent him from selling to anyone else.’ And he adds, rightly, that this is a weakness of the publishing business alone, a branch of trade which as the most intelligent, should be most far-sighted.” Leypoldt concluded that publishers “must soon choose deliberately” between the traditional system of discounts and simple wholesale marketing, because “the retail trade cannot live against the competition of manufacturers, and either the competition or the retailers must cease to be.”7 Although he opposed the trade sales, Leypoldt was pragmatic enough to use the opportunity that the sales provided. Leypoldt asked Bowker, who was then splitting his time between the New York Evening Mail and PW, to write something for the editorial columns of a special issue of PW that was to “be freely distributed when sent to the Trade Sale Rooms.” Using the fall sale to distribute issues of the Publishers’ Weekly to publishers and booksellers was a clever idea, and it would save Leypoldt the penny for postage. He had to be careful—it would be suicidal to attack the trade sales or the publishers at the sale. Leypoldt cautioned Bowker to write “something appropriate for the sale room.”8 Leypoldt was not alone in opposition to the sales. In March 1872, T. B. Peterson and Brothers of Philadelphia took out a half-page ad in PW announcing that they would no longer participate in the trade sales; instead, they would sell their entire line at a 40 percent discount, with a further discount for cash. The firm insisted that they would sell only at regular discounts and that “there will be no alteration in the retail price of any of our books this year.”9 In the fall of 1873, Harper & Brothers opted out of the sales, taking a fullpage ad to announce the fact. Back in 1855, Harper & Brothers had held their own trade auction to protest the short-lived reforms imposed by the New York Book Publishers’ Association. Now the Harpers were adopting a strict wholesale policy. They offered set discounts ranging from 25 percent on orders of $100 to 35 percent on orders of $2,000, with an additional 5 percent for cash.10 Once the large houses like Harper & Brothers abandoned the sales, it became clear that the institution would eventually fold. Despite almost universal condemnation, the trade sales lasted, in some form, for another twenty years. They provided the only solution to some of the distribution problems within the trade, especially for slow-moving merchandise. Because they were a fact of the trade, Leypoldt covered them (and used them), but he never relented in his campaign against them. Long after the trade sales died, distribution problems continued to worry the industry. In a Publishers’ Weekly { 15 9 }

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article written in 1913, Bowker reminded the trade that it was still looking “for a publisher who will ‘discover or invent’ a new method which shall be both practical and effective for the distribution of books of general literature.”11 Leypoldt was less troubled by the other major events of the book-trade calendar. In May 1872, he announced his intention to publish an American Educational Catalogue as an independent serial. Under the banner headline “to all who have Anything to Sell to Schools,” Leypoldt solicited ads for his new catalog. The first Educational Catalogue, which was issued in both trade and retail versions, came out at the end of July—just in time for buyers and sellers who were finalizing their fall orders. Although he had hoped to include at least some editorial content, the first catalog was simply an assemblage of advertisements and trade lists. Leypoldt put his stamp on the new enterprise by compiling an alphabetical listing of schoolbooks, based on the index of the third Annual Catalogue. Publishers who wanted more than a short-title listing, in brevier type, had to buy advertising space at three times the rates they paid for space in PW. Leypoldt warned them, “As the immense material only admits of the insertion of the titles in the most condensed shape, publishers may find it to their advantage to pre­sent elsewhere in the same number, an advertisement giving their own account of their books, and showing at one glance, the entire range of their publications, at the same time facilitating the making up of orders, both to dealers and to teachers. Otherwise their books will, by the system of cataloguing, necessarily appear scattered through the whole number.”12 Leypoldt came close to admitting that the system practically forced publishers to buy ad space if they wanted buyers to know what they offered. Publishers who catered exclusively to the educational market and those who maintained special educational departments, like Appleton, Scribner, and Leypoldt’s former partner, Holt, needed the display ads because they had regular lines of textbooks that would be broken up in the alphabetical lists. The problem was especially acute for firms like Appleton and Harper, which marketed to their readers in series: the integrity of the series was lost in the massive alphabetical list. As the editor of the official journal of the Publishers’ Board of Trade, Leypoldt took it as his responsibility to congratulate the education sector of the trade when it did right and to condemn it when it did wrong. In an editorial promoting the Educational Catalogue, Leypoldt noted clear improvements in educational publishing. Textbooks were better made, using better materials and more careful construction than before. The content of textbooks was also improving. { 16 0 }

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Leypoldt noted that scholars of worldwide reputation, like Tyndall and Huxley, were now writing for the American market, but he warned buyers not to be overawed by great names.13 Leypoldt told buyers that although some schoolbook publishers, like the members of the Publishers’ Board of Trade, were working together to regulate the textbook market, teachers were responsible for the ultimate regulation of the trade: “It should be the aim of every conscientious teacher to reject any accidents of great names, or fine bindings, or offers of heavy personal discounts, and consider text-books solely as to their fitness for producing effective results on the mind of the child.” He also congratulated the Board of Trade for “stamping their disapproval upon the old, demoralizing devices for ‘introducing’ books.”14 The advice that Leypoldt was offering ignored the fact that teachers were no longer in charge of textbook selection. The success of the common schools movement and the proliferation of local school boards and state boards of education had changed the textbook business. In rural markets, local booksellers still filled orders for their local schoolteachers each August, while in urban areas publishers usually dealt directly with school boards, which bought books for their entire district. Textbook contracts with school districts and even with entire state systems were becoming more common and much more lucrative. The amount of money involved, the book trade’s traditional discount system, and human cupidity combined to create a corrupt and cutthroat business. Publishers began to use traveling agents to solicit contracts for their textbooks, authorizing them to offer special “introductory” discounts to schools or districts for adopting their books. Publishers would “introduce” a series free of charge if the buyer would abandon the use of a competitor’s books. The contracts frequently required the school board to surrender the old textbooks before they received the new books. In many cases, if a school board handed over their old books, the discount for the initial order became 100 percent.15 As the voice of the Publishers’ Board of Trade, Publishers’ Weekly campaigned for decades against the ruinous competition in the textbook market. In 1879, for example, Bowker wrote an editorial upbraiding textbook publishers for their “willingness to spend every cent of margin on agents’ expenses, to the exclusion of any at all for legitimate handling; to permit anything that will get somebody else’s books out and yours in, even if the books must be given away; to supply specimen copies and books at ‘introduction’ rates when books have been in use for years.”16 Ironically, the Educational Catalogue and the special educational issues of PW helped to undermine the reform movement. The catalog made it even easier for { 161 }

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textbook publishers to bypass the old local distribution system and market their books directly to school boards. Manufacturers of goods for the educational market, everything from pencils to desks to patent blackboards, could reach buyers without the expense of preparing and mailing individual catalogs. The catalogs were intended to help manufacturers and retailers, but, ironically, they helped make the local bookseller redundant by allowing purchasing agents for school districts to deal directly with the publishers and manufacturers. Serving the book trade pushed Leypoldt into a number of awkward compromises. When Bowker wrote an editorial condemning educational discounts, Leypoldt asked him to moderate the tone. Although he agreed with Bowker, Leypoldt asked whether “the form in which it is presented may be perhaps modified. If you could make it appear as a mere suggestion, say made to us, or as one of the possible remedies instead of as an absolute assertion, that only this and no other measure will meet the difficulties, I believe it would be better for the Trade Circular.” After asking Bowker to temper his editorial, however, Leypoldt told him that he would print it as it stood if Bowker insisted.17 Leypoldt hoped to avoid offending his readers, but he would not force Bowker to abandon his principles. While supporting the educational market was complicated and morally ambiguous, Christmas was a straightforward retail event for the American book trade. Leypoldt’s treatment of the Christmas market always reflected the retail spirit of the season. In 1872, he launched a pair of special numbers designed for the holiday: once again, he published a Circular for the whole trade and a Bulletin for retailers. The Christmas Trade Circular was a special issue of PW that appeared toward the middle of November. It contained descriptive price lists compiled by Leypoldt, but it was dominated by publishers’ display ads. Leypoldt sold ads for the special number at the regular rates, but most of his regular advertisers took larger ads, and many included elaborate artwork. The Christmas Trade Circular was issued as early as possible to allow dealers to make up their orders in plenty of time for the holiday market. The Christmas Bulletin was a retail version of the Christmas circular, which booksellers could distribute to their customers. The Christmas Bulletin could be ordered with the bookseller’s imprint for five cents per copy, with a minimum order of one hundred copies and a sliding scale for larger orders. Like its cousin, the Literary Bulletin, the Christmas Bulletin was intended to make the booksellers’ job much easier. Rather than guessing which holiday items might strike the public fancy, booksellers could give the Christmas Bulletin to their customers and { 162 }

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then take orders. The advertising terms for the Christmas Bulletin were roughly triple what they were for the trade version.18 After the disappointments of the third annual catalog, Leypoldt had been forced to suspend the series. The task was too difficult and too expensive without the cooperation of the trade. For a time, he tried to sell subscriptions to underwrite the cost of another annual catalog, but the response was discouraging. After a year of actively soliciting backing, he had raised less than half the money he needed to proceed.19 Although he was unable to issue annual catalogs for many years, Leypoldt maintained his practice of compiling an annual book list for the January issues of PW. While there was little support for a catalog, publishers were willing to back another trade annual. The Trade Circular Annual for 1871 had been a failure as a catalog, but it had appealed to publishers. The trade annual gathered the publishers’ individual trade lists in a single volume. Booksellers who were looking for a particular title would find it difficult to use. Publishers, who simply wanted another way to distribute their trade lists, had no interest in indexing or cross-referencing. Leypoldt issued the first Publishers’ Trade List Annual, or PTLA as it came to be known in the trade, in the fall of 1873. Like the Trade Circular Annual that preceded it, PTLA was cobbled together from a variety of sources. Leypoldt asked American publishers to send him a sufficient number of copies of their trade lists, which were then collated, trimmed to size, bound together into a single volume, and distributed to booksellers. Leypoldt wanted to index each issue of PTLA, but that task was often left undone. The size of each Annual varied according to the number and the size of the trade lists that it collected. By the end of the century, the volumes became massive things held together by threaded steel posts. PTLA for 1898, for example, was fully a foot thick. In 1948, PTLA became a fully indexed book-industry catalog called Books in Print—Leypoldt would have been delighted. Leypoldt issued the first PTLA through an entity that became the hallmark of book-trade journalism in the United States: the Office of the Publishers’ Weekly, 37 Park Row. “The Office of the Publishers’ Weekly” was a brand name of sorts, intended to inspire confidence the way that the names of European book trade institutions did—in particular, the German Börsenverein. Leypoldt established his comprehensive book-trade publishing enterprise in the old Potter Building on Park Row, across from City Hall Park and the Astor House Hotel, where Leypoldt’s father-in-law, Rudolph Garrigue, had opened his bookstore twenty years earlier. Park Row, also known as “Newspaper Row,” { 163 }

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was the most concentrated print-manufacturing district in the world. It was the home to the World, the Post, the Mail, the Herald, the Times, the Staats-Zeitung, and a diverse collection of magazine, book, and specialty publishers. From the outset, the Office of Publishers’ Weekly was something more than a place to do business. Leypoldt was trying to create a bibliographic “bureau” that would supply the American book industry with the same range of trade publications available in the German trade. The Office of PW issued hundreds of thousands of pages of trade information annually—a dizzying array of weeklies, monthlies, annuals, catalogs, guides, and bulletins—in an attempt to provide a center for the sprawling American book business. Leypoldt gathered a small, dedicated staff to realize his vision for a bibliographic bureau. Marian Monachesi was his first assistant. She had already devoted nearly ten years of her working life to Leypoldt’s various projects. She had supervised Leypoldt’s lending library in Philadelphia, and in New York, she managed his accounts and wrote book notices before becoming the de facto bibliographic editor at Publishers’ Weekly.20 Leypoldt meant to give the book trade some sort of annual catalog, whether it wanted one or not, and Miss Monachesi, as she was known in the office, had the task of compiling and verifying all the weekly, monthly, and yearly book lists. Richard Rogers Bowker was the literary editor for the Evening Mail when he started to write articles for Leypoldt, beginning with a long review of new American publications for 1871. In the essay, Bowker focused most of his attention on the literary merits of the new American publications and the bright future of American literary production. Leypoldt divided the essay between the first and fourth issues of the Weekly Trade Circular and used it as an introduction to the third, and apparently final, annual catalog. For three years, Bowker continued at the Evening Mail while he worked as Leypoldt’s assistant at PW. Like Henry Holt before him, Bowker was a welleducated, energetic, and sociable young man with a surprising knack for business. Bowker also deserves most of the credit for the eventual success of Publishers’ Weekly, which became R. R. Bowker Company in 1899. Not all of Leypoldt’s employees were so devoted. He made the mistake of hiring Miss Monachesi’s brother, Nicolo di Rienzi Monachesi, to sell advertising space in PW. In 1874, he ran off with several thousand dollars. To the consternation of his employees and his wife, Leypoldt never even noticed the theft, and when it was brought to his attention, he did nothing to recover the money. William Stewart and Adolph Growoll were much better choices. Stewart replaced Nicolo Monachesi and spent the rest of his working life at the Office { 164 }

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of PW. In 1877, Adolph Growoll became the assistant editor of PW. Before he joined the staff, Growoll had supervised the production of Leypoldt’s educational catalog series at Waldron and Payne, the firm that printed all of Leypoldt’s publications. Bowker, Growoll, and Leypoldt became close friends during their long professional association. More than once, Bowker stepped in to rescue Leypoldt from the consequences of a bad business decision. Growoll became truly devoted to Leypoldt. He was also fond of an unofficial member of the staff, Augusta Leypoldt. In the early days of PW, “Mrs. L,” as Growoll referred to her in his office correspondence, occasionally helped with the work. As the enterprise grew and her children became more self-sufficient, she became an important member of the staff. Over time, the steady persistence of the Office of Publishers’ Weekly began to influence the book trade. As an industry journal, PW was not radically different from its predecessors, but its editor was devoted to his self-appointed task and unusually tenacious. Because he rarely varied his editorial schedule, everyone in the trade knew what to expect in each issue. Eventually, publishers and booksellers learned to use the schedule to their own advantage. It was, for example, more effective to submit a notice of a new publication the month before a major booktrade event than the week after. It took time, however, for the trade to understand that the Office of Publishers’ Weekly worked according to a system. A month before the 1873 fall trade sale, Leypoldt limited the list of new publications to those that had arrived in the office complete and on time—he listed just three titles on an otherwise blank page.21 The ledger sheets for 1879, however, showed five distinct spikes in advertising revenue corresponding to the five events of Leypoldt’s editorial calendar.22 After years of steady lobbying, many publishers were finally using PW as Leypoldt had intended—it was beginning to look like Leypoldt had found the home he sought in the American book trade.

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15 Celebrating the Book Trade in the New World

The exhibits of goods in books, stationery, and kindred departments, are much more extensive and important than was at first supposed; indeed, the visitor can get no idea of how generally these divisions are represented until he has sought out the exhibits themselves—or permitted us to do it for him. Books are to be found in Class 306, Department III. (Education and Science), defined, somewhat promiscuously, to include “school and text books, dictionaries, encyclopaedias, gazetteers, directories, indexvolumes, bibliographies, catalogues, almanacs, special treatises, general and miscellaneous literature, newspapers, technical and special newspapers and journals, illustrated papers, periodical literature.” . . . Four of the book exhibits are collective—that is, made under the auspices of the trade; these especially present favorable opportunity for comparison and instruction. But this is to be said all through. Of individual exhibitors, there are probably no less than six hundred in books and three hundred in stationery—it is a sufficiently serious undertaking to visit all. —“Book and Stationery Features at the Centennial Exhibition,” Publishers’ Weekly, 22 July 1876

Frederick Leypoldt never seemed to get tired of telling American publishers and booksellers to behave more like German publishers and booksellers. Since 1863, he had been explaining the advantages of the German system to the members of the American book trade. He had chosen to live in the United States and to work in the American book trade, but he always wished that the Americans would behave a little bit more like the Germans. Above all, he wanted his colleagues in the American book trade to get organized and establish a few rules. Publishers’ Weekly gave Leypoldt just the soapbox he needed. Leypoldt launched an irregular series of articles to educate his colleagues about the German book trade.1 According to Leypoldt, the Börsenverein, or Booksellers’ Union, was itself the real accomplishment of the German system.

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The Börsenverein gave the German trade a mechanism for resolving problems, which made the book business better for everyone. Leypoldt believed that the American book trade could solve most of its problems if it would just create a national trade organization. As Leypoldt explained, “Questions are daily arising which can be settled in no other way. The great difficulty of underselling, the ‘breakers ahead!’ of the book trade in this country is but one example of many toward the practical solution of which organization could do very much. There are questions, of course, in this as in any other business, upon which the only agreement can be agreement to disagree—as that of international copyright— but these are few in comparison to those which come legitimately and profitably before a National Book Trade Association for discussion or decision.”2 Without a national organization, Leypoldt argued, there would be no way to move forward. Trade disputes would continue unresolved, or they could grow and become trade wars that hurt everyone. Leypoldt tried to explain that the American trade was losing opportunities simply because no one was willing to organize. The Publishers’ Board of Trade had been a step in the right direction, but it was limited. In Leypoldt’s mind, the United States needed a general Booksellers’ Union—something that could bring together every individual and business that had any part in the book trade. Leypoldt thought that a comprehensive national organization guaranteed the success of the entire trade in “a country where forty million inhabitants are almost universally readers of books.” As he pointed out, “The demand is good for almost any supply, provided proper channels of supply are in successful operation.” Such an organization, he claimed, would also support certain “indispensable tools” of the book trade—the journals and catalogs that he produced, for example. With organization and the proper tools, the American book trade would surely prosper, because “the interest of the entire trade is essentially one.”3 Although it took some time, booksellers and publishers began to respond to Leypoldt’s call for organization. The first was a group of booksellers from Ohio, Indiana, and Kentucky, led by J. W. Gunn, Abel Low, Pugh and Brothers, and C. Anthony. In October 1873, amid a worldwide financial panic, they met in Cincinnati to form the Bookseller’s Protective Union. That first meeting led to a larger and better-organized convention five months later. In February 1874, book trade representatives from West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, Michigan, Iowa, and Missouri met, once again, in Cincinnati. The Publisher’s Board of Trade sponsored a simultaneous convention in New York. The major items on each agenda were, as usual, trade sales and

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underselling. Perhaps the most notable outcome of the conventions was the idea of coordinating efforts between New York and the western cities. The Book­seller’s Protective Union also changed its name to the American Book Trade Union.4 The early regional meetings paved the way for the first national book-trade convention in July 1874. The meeting was held at Put-in-Bay, a Lake Erie resort island about fifteen miles north of Sandusky, Ohio. It was a turning point, not because of the particular business arrangements that were established, but because it was truly a national meeting. Most of the 120 delegates came from the western states, but representatives from firms in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and even New Orleans attended.5 Moreover, publishers as well as booksellers attended the convention, and R. R. Bowker attended as a journalist covering the convention for PW.6 For the first time, American publishers and booksellers met to discuss the overall conduct of the book trade. The centerpiece of the convention was a resolution creating a regular national system of discounts known as the “20 percent rule,” which set the discount rate for large buyers who were not regular members of the trade—libraries, universities, and other institutional buyers. They also made resolutions on behalf of their customers, declaring it “right and for the best interests of book-buyers to make their purchase of, and to sustain, the local bookseller, that the business of the locality may be developed for the common good.” The reason? “The business of selling books is not among the profitable kind of commercial enterprises, and yields but a fair living, and requires unusual intelligence to successfully prosecute it.”7 Before they adjourned, the representatives at Put-in-Bay recognized Publishers’ Weekly as the “established organ of the entire trade,” and encouraged publishers to submit announcements of forthcoming books and to send in full bibliographic descriptions of all books upon publication.8 The American Book Trade Union met again the following summer at Niagara Falls. The second meeting was larger than the first, but it transacted no significant new business. In a nod to rising anti-union sentiment in the country, the name of the organization was changed to the American Book Trade Association. The ABTA reaffirmed its stances on discounts, underselling, and the trade sales. It also made plans for a bigger convention the following summer in Philadelphia.9 The third national book trade convention would be one of nearly a hundred conferences and conventions held at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia during the summer of 1876. Committees and subcommittees had been formed soon after the end of the American Civil War to begin planning the celebration. The centerpiece of the celebration was to be an “International Exhibition of Arts, { 168 }

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Manufactures and Products of the Soil and Mine” on the banks of the Schuylkill River in Philadelphia. Ten million people would visit Philadelphia to see everything from cannons to coffee beans, but American industry and commercial culture, including the book industry, were the stars of the show. The exhibition was a celebration of American industrial innovation. Visitors to the fair saw the first commercial typewriter and Alexander Graham Bell’s new telephone, but the most popular attraction, and the unofficial emblem of the fair, was the astonishing Corliss Double Steam Engine. Two massive steam-driven pistons turned a fifty-six-ton flywheel that measured thirty feet in diameter. Attended by a single operating engineer, the Corliss Engine produced 1,400 horsepower, enough to drive all the exhibits in Machinery Hall. The engine stood in the center of Machinery Hall, surrounded by smaller machines. Most were powered by steam or hydraulics, but a few demonstrated the potential of newer power sources like electricity and internal combustion. A courtyard connected Machinery Hall to the Main Exhibition Hall, which held displays of furniture, glassware, photographs, copper wire, cigars, rugs, watches, rifles, shirt collars, children’s toys, and books—a vast array of merchandise, most of it manufactured using the sorts of machines displayed in the adjacent building. The two enormous steel and glass galleries enclosed nearly thirty-five acres of machinery and manufactured goods, most of which were produced in the United States. Including the connecting courtyard, the complex extended nearly three-quarters of a mile along the southern border of the fairgrounds. Most visitors to the fair arrived in the rail coaches that stopped at the new Pennsylvania Railroad Depot opposite the main entrance. Fairgoers could board a train in New York, Boston, or even Chicago and step down to a platform that opened onto the courtyard that connected Machinery Hall to the Main Exhibition Hall. A smaller rail line circled the fairgrounds. Everywhere, the exhibition emphasized technology, industry, and organization; agriculture took a distant second place to manufacturing. America was still overwhelmingly rural, but there was little evidence of rural life at the fair. From the design of the grounds to the exhibits on display, the fair reflected most clearly the social and commercial values that had shaped the industrial North and the increasingly urban Midwest. Although it was the centennial celebration, there was little in Philadelphia to remind visitors of the past, especially the war and the defeated South. The American and European book industries made a good showing at the Centennial Exhibition. According to the description in Publishers’ Weekly, more than six hundred individual exhibitors represented the book trades and another { 169 }

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three hundred represented the stationery trades. Exhibitors from France, Germany, the Netherlands, Great Britain, and a host of other countries joined the book trades of the United States to display the latest in a wide array of products: “School and text books, dictionaries, encyclopaedias, gazetteers, directories, index-volumes, bibliographies, catalogues, almanacs, special treatises, general and miscellaneous literature, newspapers, technical and special newspapers and journals, illustrated papers, periodical literature.”10 As the description in Publishers’ Weekly pointed out, “Four of the book exhibits are collective—that is, made under the auspices of the trade; these especially present favorable opportunity for comparison and instruction.” The American Book Trade Association exhibit in the Main Hall featured ninety-five firms. The big New York publishers—Scribner, Putnam, Harper, and Appleton—displayed their work, as did smaller specialty firms like D. M. Dewey, a Rochester, New York, printer who produced color plates for seed and plant catalogs. The Office of Publishers’ Weekly displayed all nine bound volumes of PW and a variety of other publications at a small kiosk in the center of the ABTA exhibit.11 The meeting of the American Book Trade Association at the fair was less successful than the displays in the Exhibition Hall. In his opening speech, Anson D. F. Randolph, president of the ABTA, set a tone of guarded optimism: And now, gentlemen, coming to the contemplation of the objects and the affairs of our association, I admit at the outset that we have not yet fully accomplished all its aims. We have suffered some disappointments and delays arising from the want of a hearty co-operation on the part of some, or a positive indifference on the part of others. With all other branches of trade and industry we have to bear the pressure of the times. Overstocked markets and urgent necessities have doubtless led here and there to the violation of essential rules. The publisher has had more than once just cause for complaint against the dealer, as the dealer has had his against the publisher. But what then? Has there been no progress? Are we no better off than we were a year or two ago? Are these reported violations to be taken as a confirmation of the prophecies of its enemies that the reform movement has failed? I tell you, gentlemen, that it has not failed! I tell you as [you are] its friends, I tell its enemies, if there be any here, that whatever is true and just and honest can not fail.12 For three days in mid-July, during an extraordinary heat wave, publishers and booksellers discussed the same problems that had plagued the American book { 170 }

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trade since the American Company of Booksellers formed in 1801. The discussions were sometimes volatile, but the hot weather discouraged lengthy debate. In the end, the only real business transacted was the election of officers, after which the members of the trade embarked on an excursion to Atlantic City to escape the heat wave that killed more than one hundred people.13 As the Centennial Exhibition was ending, another group with an interest in the book trade gathered in Philadelphia for a national conference. In October 1876, the American Library Association assembled on the fairgrounds for its first meeting. The Centennial Exhibition was seen as a symbolic occasion for national conferences, conventions, and congresses, and the ALA was one of about a dozen professional associations that were launched during the fair. Some were established organizations, like the American Society of Civil Engineers, which had been founded in 1852; others were brand-new, like the National League of Professional Baseball Clubs, which was formed at the fair. Although it might seem unlikely, the founding of the ALA was a spur-ofthe-moment decision. The idea was the result of a meeting that took place in the Office of Publishers’ Weekly on May 17—just eleven days after President Grant opened the fair and threw the lever that started the Corliss Steam Engine. The librarian Melvil Dewey had come to see Frederick Leypoldt and R. R. Bowker to discuss some business ideas. Among the topics they addressed was an idea for a new publication that would serve librarians much as Publishers’ Weekly served the book trade. They would call it the American Library Journal. The library conference and association came into the conversation primarily as marketing strategies for the new publication. The meeting between Dewey, Leypoldt, and Bowker was apparently impromptu. Dewey was in New York to attend a meeting of the American Meteorological Society. The AMS meetings would not begin until the afternoon, so he stopped in at the Office of Publishers’ Weekly.14 Dewey had apparently come to see if he could interest Leypoldt in his marketing ventures, but Leypoldt had no interest in Dewey’s merchandise or his schemes. Dewey was an enthusiast, and he had been casting about for a venture that could unite his many interests. After graduating from Amherst College, he had secured a job as an assistant librarian at the college. The job allowed him sufficient time to pursue a number of interests, including shorthand techniques, “rational” spelling, standardized measurement, educational reform, and the library classification system that would make his a household name. In April 1876, Dewey set up an enterprise in Boston that he called the “Hub.” From the Hub, Dewey ran his various reform campaigns and a confusing mixture { 17 1 }

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of business ventures and marketing schemes. Dewey kept the Hub afloat by selling everything from textbooks and cataloging slips to metric scales and tape measures.15 Although Leypoldt had no interest in Dewey’s many schemes, he was keenly interested in a journal for the library market. Before Dewey left the Office of PW that afternoon, he and Leypoldt had made an agreement in principle: Leypoldt would publish an independent journal for librarians at his own risk, and Dewey would edit the journal for a salary of “$500 a year and 20% of gross receipts for advertising and subscriptions.”16 Leypoldt, Bowker, and Dewey must have discussed the idea of a librarians’ conference at their meeting, because Leypoldt had a conference prospectus drawn up and printed the same day. Before the end of business, Leypoldt had sent the prospectus, headed “Call for a Library Conference,” to Justin Winsor, the superintendent of the Boston Public Library, and several other prominent librarians.17 Leypoldt included short letters asking the librarians to endorse the proposed meeting. Although the conference was primarily a marketing scheme, there was no mention of the American Library Journal in the initial wave of letters and telegrams. The first hint that Leypoldt planned to publish a librarians’ journal appeared a few days later in the 20 May issue of PW.18 The decision to proceed with the American Library Journal and the conference might have seemed a sudden and peculiar tangent for an enterprise that served the interests of the book trade, but Leypoldt had already prepared the foundations for the venture. Although most publishers and booksellers in the United States thought that libraries hurt book sales by providing free copies, Leypoldt firmly believed that libraries were good for the book business. It was, apparently, an opinion that was more common in the German book trade: when Rudolph Garrigue wrote his report for the Börsenverein in 1846, he had clearly been pleased to report that “no other country has more libraries than the United States.”19 Leypoldt’s support of libraries became a regular feature of Publishers’ Weekly. In October 1872, he had issued a special “library number” of the Weekly Trade Circular. Leypoldt included a digest of reports from prominent American librarians, a selection of “Useful Hints” for librarians, and a nine-page catalog of “Works of Reference for the Use of the Librarian, Editor, Literary Student, Book-Collector, and Bookseller.”20 The idea failed to interest either librarians or the book trade; nevertheless, Leypoldt persisted. In January 1874, he launched a semi-regular feature called “The Library Corner.” Leypoldt’s interest in libraries probably mystified his colleagues in the trade. He thought of libraries as a complement to the book trade; { 172 }

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librarians, he explained, needed “the same information as the bookseller, in book lists and the like, and are to some extent subscribers.”21 Furthermore, libraries bought thousands of books, and they got people into the habit of reading. Library patrons eventually became book buyers as they built their own personal collections. Both publishers and booksellers viewed libraries with suspicion, since customers who might have purchased a particular book could borrow it from a library instead. Even more troubling, libraries expected the same discounts that were usually reserved for “legitimate” members of the trade. Negotiating discount rates was always contentious, but the negotiations between libraries and booksellers were especially acrimonious because book dealers considered libraries as outside the trade. When the American Book Trade Union adopted the “20 percent rule” for library discounts at the Put-in-Bay convention, it was a measure directed against librarians. Some booksellers claimed that 20 percent for libraries was too generous—one book dealer suggested a rate schedule that allowed a discount of 33 percent to jobbers and 25 percent to retail booksellers, while limiting libraries and other institutional buyers to a 15 percent discount.22 Leypoldt once again invoked the doctrine of mutual interest. He thought that the book trade, the libraries, and the Office of PW would all benefit through cooperation. If all went well, booksellers and librarians would build markets for each other. They would also subscribe to Publishers’ Weekly and the Library Journal and buy ads in both journals. Some publishers did sign contracts to buy advertising in both journals, but the book trade remained skeptical. The American Library Journal—later known as the Library Journal, or LJ— made its debut at the Centennial Exposition library convention. Arguably, the founding of the American Library Association was the most important result of the meeting. Although the conference in Philadelphia was not the first national library meeting, the ALA was the first national library organization. The ALA selected Justin Winsor as its first president, Melvil Dewey as its first secretary, and the Library Journal as its official forum. Although the convention had been a great success, the Library Journal nearly ruined Leypoldt and the Office of Publishers’ Weekly. Dewey had no talent for running a journal, and his business practices were worse than Leypoldt’s. Dewey routinely took funds from one venture to shore up another, and LJ was no exception. Bowker shared Leypoldt’s enthusiasm for libraries, but he regarded Dewey as a self-serving charlatan. He was outraged that Leypoldt continued to pour money into the Journal and that he continued to associate with Dewey.23 { 17 3 }

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Augusta Leypoldt, who never had any faith in the Library Journal, famously characterized Dewey as a “miserable specimen of a gabbling idiot.”24 Leypoldt’s dedication to the LJ appeared quixotic to his friends and colleagues, but, like most of Leypoldt’s ventures, it eventually succeeded. The Centennial Exhibition seemed to be almost everything Leypoldt had hoped it would be. The American Book Trade Association had hosted a third convention. The ABTA’s display had shown the world that the book trades in the United States were healthy and that they supported at least one national organization. The launch of the American Library Journal had also been a clear success (although Melvil Dewey would later do his best to run it into the ground). One project that Leypoldt had planned for the centennial, however, was not a success: the release of a new American Catalogue. Leypoldt had announced the new catalog in September 1873. The American Catalogue was going to be an accurate, systematic reference, with full bibliographic information, of every American book in print on 1 July 1876. The catalog would include separate alphabetical and categorical finding lists for all books in print and for sale, cross-referenced by author, title, and subject. When work on the catalog finally began in 1875, Leypoldt neglected every other project in an effort to get it finished in time for the Centennial Exhibition. Looking back on the experience, Augusta Leypoldt wrote that the work progressed in the office by day and in her home at night. She reported that her neighbors were amazed to see the tables in her house “strewed with papers and the makings of catalogues,” and that she spent her time making “paste for the work and dinners for the workers.”25 Leypoldt continually reassured the book trade that the catalog was nearly ready. Two weeks before the ABTA convention at the Centennial Exhibition fairgrounds, Leypoldt ran a full-page notice claiming that “work upon the American Catalogue is now so well advanced that it is hoped shortly to complete the compilation of titles, and to enter upon the final arrangement and revisions of the accumulated material, preparatory to sending it to the printer.”26 The catalog was nowhere near finished. In fact, it would not be finished until 1880. The American Catalogue, when it was finally published, listed seventy thousand separate publications from nine hundred different publishers and had cost $27,622 to produce. It was a very good catalog, but it was a commercial disaster. Augusta Leypoldt remembered the catalog fondly in 1909—though in 1880, she was less generous. In a letter to Bowker, she was brutally frank about the American Catalogue and several of Leypoldt’s other projects:

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I disapproved of the management of the American Catalogue; I denounced the borrowing of money on false pretenses, for any fool could see that the Catalogue would take much longer to bring out than was stated to the Publishers that gave the money. The Index Medicus I thought was a Literary Medical Paper and I had been told Mr. Leypoldt had been guaranteed against loss, so I said nothing until I saw the first number, and when I found it was merely an index, consequently only of use to writing doctors, I opposed that and have quarreled that it should be given up for many months. “Shopping Guides,” and “Coney Island Guides,” etc. etc. I have always fought tooth and nail.27 Augusta Leypoldt saw that her husband might undo everything he had achieved because his enthusiasms were stronger than his business sense. She was very nearly right.

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16 The End of the Beginning

The book-trade of this country has sustained an irreparable loss in the death in New York on Monday morning of the bibliographer and trade journalist, Mr. Frederick Leypoldt. Unknown out of the regular trade channels and personally known to but a few even within them, the untiring work of his life in the interest of good literature and the more intelligent classification of all the minute details of the publishing and sale of books has been an inestimable service to the systematic diffusion of book Knowledge in this country. He literally died working. —Obituary in the Brooklyn Times, 5 April 1884

When the Centennial Exposition ended in November 1876, the Educational Catalogue was the one unqualified success. Publishers’ Weekly and the Publishers’ Trade List Annual appeared to be sound, but they depended on the continued support of the trade. The Library Journal had the moral support of the newly formed American Library Association but no financial backing. Hundreds of publishers and booksellers had paid their subscription fees for the American Catalogue, but it was not finished. For the next four years, Leypoldt spent his days and nights trying to keep the Office of Publishers’ Weekly in business. Unfortunately, Leypoldt had never been very good at the business of staying in business. He had an experimental turn of mind. He liked to launch projects, but he had almost no talent for maintaining a business. His few successful ventures could not compensate for the many projects that were losing money. Although the American Catalogue was not yet losing money, it was the albatross of the Office of Publishers’ Weekly. Throughout the project, Leypoldt sent publishers pre-printed bibliographic forms, which had spaces for title, author, size, price, and genre. Leypoldt expected the publishers to fill out the forms, one for each book on their list, and send them back. Most publishers simply ignored them. Despite the lack of cooperation, Leypoldt was determined to publish a { 176 }

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complete, accurate catalog. In the end, Leypoldt, his wife, and an assortment of PW staffers had to comb through publishers’ lists and press releases to assemble the information. The project ate up everyone’s time and resources. In a letter to Bowker, Adolph Growoll complained that his work on the American Catalogue was the equivalent of a second job, and he worried that the strain was affecting “Mr. L.”1 Leypoldt’s poor management and the demands of the American Catalogue began to compromise Publishers’ Weekly. Leypoldt put whatever money PW and the educational catalogs made into his other projects. By the end of 1878, he had spent all the subscription revenue from the American Catalogue, even though the project was only half finished. Bowker claimed that Leypoldt had spent nearly $15,000 for the privilege of publishing the American Catalogue, Library Journal, and a new project, Index Medicus, a medical bibliography.2 Leypoldt was facing bankruptcy, and in December 1878, Bowker bought Publishers’ Weekly for $5,000 in cash.3 Although Bowker owned it, Leypoldt continued to edit PW, and he retained ownership of the American Catalogue, Publishers’ Trade List Annual, Index Medicus, and the Library Journal. The Library Journal was more of a liability than an asset. Under Melvil Dewey’s management, it had been losing money from the start. By the end of the first year, LJ had lost $1,800, which Leypoldt covered. The next year, Bowker took charge and the journal finished $200 in the black. A year later, it became clear that Dewey was using revenue from the Library Journal to fund his other enterprises.4 And yet Leypoldt did nothing to control Dewey. Bowker did his best to contain the Library Journal disaster. He had taken direct control of LJ in 1878, and he continued to monitor Dewey’s actions. Dewey tried several times to regain full control of the Library Journal. First, he threatened to simply take the journal to a new publisher. Next, he threatened to set up a competing journal. Finally, he threatened to withhold copy.5 In the spring of 1880, Bowker convinced Leypoldt to fire Dewey, discontinue the Library Journal as an independent publication, and fold it back into Publishers’ Weekly. Leypoldt agreed and the decision was announced in the June issue of Library Journal. Leypoldt and Bowker tried to explain their position: It should be pointed out that the support for such a journal must come chiefly from its subscribers. It was here that the miscalculation was made in the original planning. The Library Journal reaches the largest bookbuying class, to the extent of its circulation, of any periodical, except the booktrade organs proper. But book publishers commonly meet appeals { 177 }

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for the advertising support of a publication which presents quality rather than quantity of circulation in this direction, by the objection that the close [tightly budgeted] buying of libraries makes the margin of profit on library purchases so small that there is not sufficient profit in that business to cover advertising outlay; while the entire business of library supplies, from which it was supposed some income could be drawn, is now fully and admirably covered by the arrangements of the Supply Department of the Association. The Association itself has not been of pecuniary advantage to the Journal, since the transactions have all been printed without compensation.6 For a short time in the summer of 1880, Publishers’ Weekly became the Publishers’ Weekly and Library Journal. Although the American Library Association had been unwilling to offer the Library Journal any financial support beyond the $5 subscription price, they freely condemned both Leypoldt and Bowker. Leypoldt soon recanted the decision to let the Library Journal die, and in August he announced that it would return as a separate periodical. Leypoldt’s explanation for resuming LJ was typically idealistic and optimistic: “[The editor’s] devotion to the cause represented [by the Library Journal], together with the satisfaction derived from the warm protestations of the true friends of the Journal, reduce, morally at least, the resumed burden. Should this action be productive of renewed efforts of others on behalf of the Journal, it is still possible that this sacrifice may prove a reward. Both editors and publishers will not fail in turning the new lease of life to good purpose.”7 In a long letter to Bowker, then in England, Leypoldt apologized for the reversal: “I know you are shaking your fist at the latest perjury of your incorrigible renegade. But I could no more help it than a cow jumping over the moon.” Leypoldt first blamed his reversal on overwork, and then admitted that, “worried to death by the letters of discontented librarians, also feeling rather mean at the sudden wind up in the middle of a volume, I staggered. And Miss Sophistry, watching her opportunity, kept on pushing me gently with her whisper, it ‘won’t cost you a cent more,’ until I accepted the situation.”8 Resurrecting the Library Journal renewed the pressure on Leypoldt and the Office of PW. Leypoldt was now the editor. Melvil Dewey’s name remained on the masthead, but he was gone, which was a relief. Nevertheless, Leypoldt and his staff now had to manage separate advertising and subscription departments for LJ and PW. The American Library Association never did contribute to the maintenance of the journal. Publishers’ Weekly itself was fairly safe. Bowker now owned the journal, which made it nearly impossible for Leypoldt to use revenue from PW to fund his { 178 }

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other projects. Purchasing the journal had been an act of kindness rather than a business decision. Bowker did believe in Publishers’ Weekly, but buying it meant that Leypoldt could continue his work. Bowker had never wanted to make booktrade bibliography a career. His real interest was literary publishing, and he took a position representing Harper & Brothers in London.9 Adolph Growoll replaced Bowker as the unofficial general manager of the Office of PW. The other publications of the Office of PW were a mixed bag. The educational catalogs and the Publishers’ Trade List Annual made money. The 1876 American Catalogue was finally finished in 1880. In all, the project had cost $27,622.46. Total revenue from the sales of the catalog was $27,321.21, which left Leypoldt with a loss of $301.25. Nevertheless, the idea of the annual American Catalogue would survive. Index Medicus continued to lose money. In August 1881, Leypoldt wrote a long letter to Bowker in London. In the letter, Leypoldt promised that he had controlled his susceptibility to “ ‘new ideas’ and sanguine hopes,” even as he revealed the extent of his troubles: “I have passed the first ‘trial year’ in which I did not try and venture something new and that I seem to have managed to confine myself to legitimate ‘links.’ Yet there is still some danger ahead and it is well to be prepared for the worst. I have been driven to death financially . . . I have done some figuring over my accounts and the lesson is terrible! My total losses in the end of 1880 on the Ind. Med, Lib J. and for minor ‘illegitimate’ ventures is a sum of fully $10,000.”10 Leypoldt’s tone was apologetic, but he then proposed to solve the problem by mortgaging Publishers’ Weekly, if Bowker would agree to surrender his interest in the journal.11 Fortunately, Bowker did not allow Leypoldt to mortgage PW, and so the whole unwieldy collection of businesses known as the Office of PW staggered on. In 1882, Leypoldt wrote Bowker once again. His tone was less desperate, but the news was no better than it had been the year before—too much work and not enough money. Throughout his many troubles, and despite his promises to Bowker, Leypoldt continued to launch new projects. In 1880, he resurrected the little retail newsletter from his days with Henry Holt as The Literary News. The next year, he published his Reading Diary of Modern Fiction, which was a list of recommended books followed by blank pages for reader comments. Between 1882 and 1884, Leypoldt published The Books of All Time by L. E. Jones, Books for Children by Caroline Hewins, and several reference books for librarians. Frederick Leypoldt died suddenly on 31 March 1884. The cause of death was listed as “brain fever,” probably a form of meningitis, but Leypoldt’s friends and colleagues blamed overwork and financial strain. He left his wife, Augusta, with nearly $10,000 of debt. His death also left the future of all of Leypoldt’s { 179 }

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projects—Publishers’ Weekly, Library Journal, Publishers’ Trade List Annual, the American Catalogue, the Literary News, and Index Medicus—in doubt. When Leypoldt died, R. R. Bowker was still working for Harper & Brothers. He had returned from London in 1882 and become an assistant to H. M. Alden, the editor for Harper’s Magazine.12 Bowker opted to leave the security of Harper’s and take charge of Publishers’ Weekly. In an amazing gesture of goodwill, he leased all of Leypoldt’s various journals and catalogs from Augusta Leypoldt. Bowker kept Publishers’ Weekly and the Office of Publishers’ Weekly alive, and he made them profitable. By taking charge of all of Leypoldt’s projects, Bowker insured that the American book trade would get the comprehensive bibliographic bureau that Leypoldt had envisioned when he began. Bowker also kept Leypoldt’s family out of the poorhouse. In two years, Bowker did what Leypoldt had never been able to do— he made a profit. On the second anniversary of her husband’s death, Augusta Leypoldt wrote a letter of thanks to Bowker: “Little did I think two years ago today that Mr. L’s name would be entirely clear from debt and his children would be sure of a comfortable existence. And under Heaven, I owe it all to you.”13 Under Bowker’s guidance, the Office of PW prospered. He was able to keep all of Leypoldt’s major projects going and make money. Like Henry Holt, Bowker was able to translate Leypoldt’s “ ‘new ideas’ and sanguine hopes” into a profitable business. Bowker was a brilliant organizer. He was also a public man. Bowker’s interest in politics and social reform served him well in the book trade. He not only ran the bibliographic enterprise that Leypoldt started, but he served on dozens of committees and directly lobbied the men who dominated the business. Bowker commanded the attention of the American book trade in a way that Leypoldt never had. Bowker was a better businessman than Leypoldt; nevertheless, he made very few changes to the enterprise that Leypoldt had established. Publishers’ Weekly, Publishers’ Trade List Annual, and the American Catalogue continued as they had under Leypoldt’s management. Bowker even kept Leypoldt’s name on the masthead of PW. Bowker also honored Leypoldt’s commitment to publish the Library Journal, which continued to flounder even after Charles A. Cutter became the editor. Bowker made only one major change to the staff that Leypoldt had assembled: he brought Augusta Leypoldt into the office as a full-time editor. While Bowker pursued his other interests, including a long stint as a vice president at the Edison Electric Illuminating Company of New York, Mrs. L and Adolph Growoll supervised the day-to-day business of the bibliographic enterprise.14 { 180 }

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Augusta Leypoldt was an active and vocal manager. In a letter to Bowker dated 23 March 1886, she observed, “There is nothing that the undeveloped female capacity cannot manage.”15 Another early letter to Bowker began, “Do not be frightened. This is nothing à la Dewey!” In that letter, she urged Bowker to make some staffing changes and to add both a “type-writing lady” and a stenographer.16 After many years in the office, Augusta Leypoldt began to tell Bowker when, and even if, he was needed at the Office of PW. Adolph Growoll worked to make sure that Publishers’ Weekly remained “an organ of trade education” and he did his best to realize Leypoldt’s dream of a “general Booksellers’ Union.” In 1891, Growoll launched a regular column called “Hints to Booksellers.” Growoll compiled and published a series of book trade handbooks, including The Booksellers’ Library and How to Use It (1891) and The Profession of Bookselling: A Handbook of Practical Hints for the Apprentice and Bookseller (1893). He also compiled a number of bibliographic references for scholars and bibliophiles. Well into the twentieth century, the Office of Publishers’ Weekly continued almost as it had been when Leypoldt died. In addition to Augusta Leypoldt, Bowker had brought in a young woman named Helen E. Haines to help Adolph Growoll, Marian Monachesi, and William Stewart oversee a staff of about ten. As Mrs. L once observed of the staff, “We are all rather ill-tempered which makes us quiet and is rather conducive to work.”17 Miss Monachesi, who had begun her career with Leypoldt when he was a bookseller in Philadelphia, was the first of the old guard to die. She supervised the monthly and annual book lists until a few days before her death in July 1909.18 When Adolph Growoll died in December of the same year, Publishers’ Weekly was about to mark thirty-seven years of continuous service to the book trade. Bowker’s success with Leypoldt’s ventures, limited as it was, had attracted competition. In 1895, the American Library Association announced that it would support a new journal called Public Libraries. At about the same time, Halsey W. Wilson was making plans to launch an enterprise that would compete with the American Catalogue. The H. W. Wilson Company of Rochester, Minnesota, launched the United States Catalog and the Cumulative Book Index in 1898. Two years later, Wilson began the Readers’ Guide to Periodical Literature. The competition troubled and irritated Bowker, ultimately pushing him to make more radical changes to the business. He felt betrayed by the ALA and harassed by Wilson. Despite his long and troubled history with Dewey and the ALA, Bowker continued to support the library movement and publish the Library Journal.19 Bowker was forced to acknowledge that simply continuing the { 18 1 }

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business as Leypoldt had created it was not enough. In 1910, he signed a cooperative agreement with Wilson: Bowker would cease publication of the American Catalogue in favor of Wilson’s United States Catalog. In January 1911, Bowker finally abandoned his other enterprises and incorporated the Office of Publishers’ Weekly as the R. R. Bowker Company. The new corporation continued all the Leypoldt publications except the American Catalogue. Bowker made himself president and managing editor and Augusta Leypoldt vice president.20 From that point forward, their roles seemed to have reversed: Bowker became the acting manager of the entire enterprise, reporting by frequent letters to Leypoldt. She maintained an active interest in the business, although she did so from Scranton, Pennsylvania, where she had moved to be near her daughter. Augusta Leypoldt died in Scranton on 7 June 1919. After Augusta Leypoldt died, Bowker was the only living link to the enterprise that Frederick Leypoldt had created. As it turned out, Bowker was better at Leypoldt’s work than Leypoldt had been. Like Henry Holt, Bowker built on a foundation that Leypoldt had first imagined and then created. Unlike Holt, Bowker shared Leypoldt’s knack for attracting remarkable protégés. In 1918, Bowker hired Frederic G. Melcher, a remarkable editor and manager who directed the course of Publishers Weekly (without the apostrophe) and the R. R. Bowker Company for forty-five years. When Bowker died in 1933, the R. R. Bowker Company was the organizing center of the American book trade that Leypoldt had envisioned; Frederic Melcher insured that R. R. Bowker would remain at the center of the American book trade for another fifty years. The American book trade that Leypoldt had encountered in Philadelphia was fractious and fragmented, and it regarded the idea of trade cooperation with a skeptical eye. Twenty years later, the book trade was still fractious and fragmented. The controversial topics had changed from trade sales and underselling to postal rates and copyright. In the same span of twenty years, the size, scope, and pace of the American book trade had increased dramatically. Fortunately, during the same twenty years, the industry had learned to rely on the publications of the Office of Publishers’ Weekly, and then the R. R. Bowker Company, for “a prompt and full business record.”

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“Lord!” he said, “when you sell a man a book you don’t sell him just twelve ounces of paper and ink and glue—you sell him a whole new life. . . . Even the publishers, the fellows that print the books, can’t see what I’m doing for them. Some of ’em refuse me credit because I sell their books for what they’re worth instead of for the prices they mark on them. They write me letters about price maintenance—and I write back about merit maintenance. Publish a good book and I’ll get a good price for it, say I! Sometimes I think the publishers know less about books than anyone else! I guess that’s natural, though. Most school teachers don’t know much about children.” —Christopher Morley, Parnassus on Wheels, 1917

When Frederick Leypoldt died in 1884, the future of the American book trade was uncertain. The technologies of book production and distribution, which had undergone a series of dramatic shifts throughout the nineteenth century, were still in flux. The major functions of the book trade—publishing, production, and distribution—were still being combined or divided on an ad hoc basis. The book trade had begun in several competing commercial centers and still had no central organization. After a strong start in the mid-1870s, the American Book Trade Association had evaporated. Leypoldt’s Office of Publishers’ Weekly had established independent book trade journals and catalogs, but their survival was by no means certain. The future of the United States was also uncertain. The nation appeared to be in the business of big business. The multi-unit corporation described by Alfred Chandler in The Visible Hand had come to dominate American industry.1 Stockholder corporations emerged to finance and manage ever-larger manufacturing enterprises; workers responded to the consolidated power of the corporations by organizing unions. Government at all levels served the interests of

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big business. Tariffs protected American business from foreign competition, and armed troops protected American business from labor organizers. It was an era of unchecked growth, widespread corruption, fabulous wealth, and crushing poverty. The population and the inhabited area of the United States had grown so much that the calculations for the 1880 census could not be completed until 1887. Government was, for the most part, in the deep pockets of big business. The so-called robber barons of the Gilded Age built mansions in New York and “cottages” in Newport, while tens of thousands of new immigrants crowded into tenements on the Lower East Side. In the West, agriculture disasters followed one another with sickening regularity. It was also an era of reform. Grover Cleveland ran as a reform candidate and became the first Democrat since James Buchanan to win the White House, thanks to the support of liberal Republican “mugwumps” like R. R. Bowker. Labor organized and agitated to protect workers. The Grange movement lobbied for agricultural reform and relief from the railroad monopolies. Even the railroad tycoons instituted reforms of their own. In 1883, the railroads lobbied for and won approval for standardized time zones to reduce the problems of coordinating national rail service. By the end of 1886, every railroad in the country had converted to standard gauge track. The railroad was finally a single comprehensive network with nearly 140,000 miles of track. Leypoldt died just as America was entering a new era. The United States was becoming more unified. A uniform rail system connected nearly every city and town in the country. The uniform rail system needed standardized time, and so the clocks in Boston, Buffalo, and Battle Creek were synchronized. A network of telegraph offices and the new telephones provided almost instantaneous communication across the country. Even the process of counting the population became more uniform. When it came time to begin the 1890 census, the Census Bureau was ready with standardized, machine-readable punch cards and tabulating machines. The report of the 1890 census declared that the United States was finally settled; the country no longer had frontiers.2 The transformation of America from an aggregation of semi-autonomous colonies to a single unified nation was nearly complete. Technology and population growth were slowly erasing regional differences. Despite the uncertainty and unrest, a bright future seemed possible. When Edward Bellamy imagined the future of America in his 1888 novel Looking Backward: 2000–1887, he saw a utopia. Bellamy did not see noble savages living in a natural socialist paradise as Thomas More had in 1516. Instead, he saw nineteenth-century Christian Americans living in a technological socialist paradise. { 184 }

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In Bellamy’s American utopia, electricity transmitted sound, light, heat, and power with the turn of a switch. Pneumatic tubes unified commercial life. Civic life was connected by telephones. Although books and newspapers would still exist in Bellamy’s vision of the future, telephone lines would allow people to listen to concerts, sermons, and even news reports in their own homes. The electrical world Bellamy envisioned was still a few years in the future. In December 1879, Thomas Edison had demonstrated a small practical electric lighting system in Menlo Park, New Jersey. In May 1893, hundreds of thousands of Americans would travel to the Columbian Exposition in Chicago to see the “White City,” a neoclassical vision of America powered by electricity. The displays at the Columbian Exhibition made it clear that electricity was about to replace steam as the power source of the future. Just seventeen years earlier, steam power had been the centerpiece of the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, where it had represented industrial might and independence. Steam set industry free. Because factories no longer had to rely on the running water of rivers and streams for power, it was possible to build a factory anywhere. And steam had made it possible to build the railroads that transported people and goods to places that had no rivers or canals. The 1893 Columbian Exhibition celebrated electrical power as part of its celebration of Christopher Columbus and his discovery. Electricity was a very different sort of power. Steam had made it possible for industry to move away from the network of rivers and canals—electricity once again tied industry to a network, not of waterways, but of transmission lines. Steam had allowed industry to spread out across America, and electricity would connect it all back together. Electricity brought with it the technologies that were supposed to make books obsolete. In Looking Backward, Bellamy predicted that telephones would form a broadcasting network for concerts and sermons. It was a short leap to the idea that it would be possible to broadcast audible books. The year after the Columbian Exhibition, Octave Uzanne predicted in his essay “The End of Books” that “Gutenberg’s invention” would soon give way to the electromechanical phonograph.3 As it turns out, electricity posed no immediate threat to the book trade. People around the world continued to buy printed books. Nevertheless, the future of the book trades in the United States was far from certain in the 1880s. Production and distribution became increasingly industrial. Publishers still maintained retail bookstores. While the two businesses were becoming more distinct, conflicts over discounts and underselling persisted. The book trade still had no permanent organization. { 185 }

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The revolution in book production technology that had begun early in the nineteenth century continued as the century drew to a close. By the 1880s, the Adams presses that Harper & Brothers had installed in their book factory had become obsolete. The faster rotary presses had once been derided as “type smashers,” but thirty years of refinement had made them the new standard for book printing. New typesetting machines eliminated the last hand operation of book production. The Mergenthaler Linotype, which made its commercial debut in 1886, was not just a new mechanized way to set type: it eliminated moveable type altogether. Instead of picking individual pieces of type out of wooden cases, typesetters now punched out their copy on a keyboard. Using keystrokes, the typesetters were actually assembling matrices that were used to cast entire lines of type in continuous bars. The bars were then assembled into pages, printed, and then melted down to be used again. Standing type became a relic of the past.4 By the end of the century, book production was a comprehensively mechanized industry—typesetters sat at keyboards, and printers tended massive rotary presses. Publishing had also changed. The great American publishers who battled over the trade sales in the 1850s were gone, although their publishing houses continued. William Appleton had retired. George Palmer Putnam, Charles Scribner, the Harper brothers, and James T. Fields had all died years before Leypoldt’s death in 1884. The new generation of American publishers entered a business that no longer worked on the exchange system that Rudolph Garrigue had criticized back in 1846. Wholesale and retail agreements were not standardized, but the era of ruthless and reckless competition seemed to be over. Although a certain measure of cooperation had developed, the American book trade still had no real center. New York dominated the business, but there was no central marketplace or clearinghouse in America. Likewise, the American book trade never had an enduring regulating body like the German Börsenverein or the English Stationers’ Company. Instead, the American trade had the Office of Publishers’ Weekly—an independent, commercial enterprise that encouraged, but had no power to compel, cooperation. Under Bowker’s direction and management, Publishers’ Weekly, Publishers’ Trade List Annual, and the American Catalogue became the “indispensable tools” of the American book trade, while Library Journal and Index Medicus served their respective fields. For most of the twentieth century, the name “R. R. Bowker” remained a touchstone of the entire American book business. The Office of Publishers’ Weekly and its successor, R. R. Bowker Company, imposed a kind of order on the book trade. Between them, Leypoldt and Bowker { 18 6 }

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were so persistently in the middle of things that the book trade eventually came to rely on their bibliographic services. If you needed information about books or the book trade in the United States, you turned to PW or the Publishers’ Trade List Annual, or later, Books In Print. It was a uniquely commercial solution to the problem of trade organization. After Richard Rogers Bowker died in 1933, Frederic Melcher directed and expanded the bibliographic enterprise that Leypoldt started. The company, known simply as “Bowker,” no longer owns Publishers’ Weekly or Library Journal, both of which were sold and resold in the last years of the twentieth century. Bowker remains an important bibliographic bureau, maintaining BooksInPrint.com, a digital successor to Leypoldt’s American Catalogue. Bowker also assigns International Standard Book Numbers for all books produced in the United States, since the American book industry still has no official regulatory agency. The entire American book trade shared the same fate that fragmented R. R. Bowker Company and cast its publications adrift. The names Scribner, Harper, Putnam, and Holt still appear on book covers and title pages, but they are now divorced from the great nineteenth-century American publishers who made those names famous. Now they are brand names owned by media corporations or holding companies. It seems a further irony that book history emerged as a field of study as the American book trade was becoming a relatively small, marginalized component of the international media industry. Even as late as 1979, when Cambridge University Press published Elizabeth Eisenstein’s The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, the American book trade seemed to be a stable industry that might continue as it was for another century—but then the world changed. After the era of corporate takeovers shook the book trade, the dawn of the digital age raised real doubts about the future of the printed book. Publishers Weekly survived the changes, but the kind of American book trade that it was supposed to foster began to disappear soon after PW celebrated its centennial year. In a 2005 New York Times article titled “The Winds of Change Are Felt at Publishers Weekly,” Edward Wyatt explains the problems facing PW: “After decades of enjoying a near monopoly on coverage of the book publishing business, Publishers Weekly in recent years has often lagged in competition with Internet sites, e-mail newsletters and daily newspapers. The consolidation of the publishing business and the demise of many independent booksellers has eaten into the magazine’s pool of potential subscribers. Its paid circulation of 25,000 is down about 3,000 from the peak in recent years. Perhaps worst of all for a publication focused on a single industry, even subscribers are not certain about where the { 187 }

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magazine is aiming.”5 In Wyatt’s article, even the editors of PW wonder about the purpose of a book trade journal in the digital world. In Technics and Civilization, Lewis Mumford wrote that “the printed book released people from the domination of the immediate and the local.” As print culture developed, he said, “learning became book learning and the authority of books was more widely diffused by printing.”6 Writing early in the twentieth century, Mumford could not have known that he was also describing a similar shift that would happen as the century ended. He was trying to explain how printed books created a virtual world that suddenly replaced direct experience— he could not have imagined that, within three generations, another virtual world would suddenly reshape our ideas of authority and reality. If, in the modern world, to exist is to exist online, then what do we mean when we talk about the book trade in the digital world? Not quite a century after Mumford wrote Technics and Civilization, the future of ink-and-paper books seems doubtful. A book trade will continue to produce and distribute books, in one form or another, as long as people keep buying them, and so far, people are buying more books than ever. But the fact that BooksInPrint.com has no physical counterpart seems like a sign of the times. For more than a century, people like Edward Bellamy and Octave Uzanne and my fourth-grade English teacher (who hated and feared television) predicted that electromechanical and electronic media would soon put an end to the book. First, it was the telephone, then the phonograph, then the movies, radio, and television—each spelled the certain death of the book. Those audiovisual technologies had an effect on the book and book trade, but they did not make books obsolete. We continued to buy books even as we embraced successive waves of new media in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Digital media, however, may be something entirely different from the new media of the past. The old “new media” used electricity to transmit sound and images. Digital media, as we now experience it through the Internet, cell phones, e-readers, and other electronic devices, represents a new technology for the transmission of text. It is too early to know, but the digital text that we read on electronic screens seems to be as revolutionary as text printed from movable type was in 1450. Movable type was not just a new means of reproducing a book; it radically altered the production of the text. In a manuscript culture, a text was composed of pen strokes applied one at a time. An individual pen stroke could be part of a letter r or a petal of a rose. Printing from movable type meant that a text was composed of letters, and that an r was an r was an r.

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Digital media returns us to something like manuscript composition. When we read online, we process the text as if it was composed of letters, but we are actually pretending. The letters on our screens are composed of dots. Those dots could be combined to be an r or a rhinoceros—and that rhinoceros could be moving. The letters on our keyboards hide something even less tangible. When I type r, I am sending a digital code—a sequence of numbers that could be an r if everything on down the line agrees to show us an r somewhere. When we use digital media, we are creating text out of elements that are not really letters. Oddly enough, creating text with pixels on a screen is really no different from creating text with ink on paper. Digital media and the Internet seem to act as a single, vast, constantly changing manuscript of the sort that existed before Gutenberg began to tinker with movable type. We already know that digital media changes the business rules that were developed to regulate the print book trade. What does copyright mean in the digital world? What is a publisher? What does it mean to sell a digital book? We can only wonder if digital culture will change us as dramatically as print culture did. And perhaps some young person will decide that it all needs to be organized.

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Notes

Preface 1. Octave Uzanne, “The End of Books,” Scribner’s Magazine Illustrated 16 (August 1894): 223–24. 2. Book Industry Study Group, Inc., Quantity of Books Sold and Value of U.S. Domestic Consumer Expenditures: 2005 to 2010 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Census Bureau, 2010), available at http://www.info chimps.com/sources/book-industry-study-group-inc-new-york-ny; R. R. Bowker, Bowker Industry Report, New Book Titles and Editions, 2002–2009 (New Providence, N.J.: R. R. Bowker, 2010), available at http://www.bowker.com/index.php/book-industry-statistics. 3. Pablo Neruda, Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada: Cien sonetos de amor (New York: Vintage Español/Random House, 2010). 4. William Charvat, Literary Publishing in America, 1790–1850 (1959; repr., Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993), 7. 5. Roger Darnton, “What Is the History of Books?,” in The Kiss of Lamourette: Reflections in Cultural History (New York: Norton, 1990), 107–8. 6. Ludwig von Bertalanffy, General Systems Theory: Foundations, Development, Application (New York: George Braziller, 1968). See also Herbert Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1969). 7. Thomas P. Hughes, Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, 1880–1930 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), 5–6. 8. Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (1934; repr., New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1963). 9. Alfred D. Chandler, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1977).

Chapter 1 1. See Greg Prickman et al., The Atlas of Early Printing (Iowa City: University of Iowa Libraries, 2009), available at http://atlas.lib.uiowa.edu/index.html, for a dynamic graphical demonstration of the spread of printing in Europe. 2. Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (1934; repr., New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1963), 136. 3. Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus: The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdröckh in Three Books, ed. Rodger L. Tarr and Mark Engel, Norman and Charlotte Strouse Edition of the Writings of Thomas Carlyle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 30. 4. Philip Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972). 5. Paul Needham, “The Paper Supply of the Gutenberg Bible,” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 79, no. 3 (1985): 303–74. 6. Novisima recopilación de las leyes de Espana (Madrid, 1805), 4:8.15.1; Vicente G. Quesada, Legislation in Old Spain and the Indies on Printing and the Book Trade, trans. Gustavo E. Archilla (New York: Works Progress Administration/Columbia University, 1938), 1–2. 7. Fernando Colón and Benjamin Keen, The Life of the Admiral Christopher Columbus by His Son, Ferdinand (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1959), 15–17; Christopher Columbus and John G. Cummins, The Voyage of Christopher Columbus: Columbus’s Own Journal of Discovery (New York: St. Martin’s, 1992), 31–34; Henry Harrisse, The Discovery of North America (Amsterdam: N. Israel, 1961), 397.

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notes to pages 9–14 8. Christopher Columbus, Leandro di Cosco, and Frank Egleston Robbins, Epistola de insulis nuper inventis, March of America Facsimile Series 1 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Microfilms, 1966). 9. George Young, The Columbus Memorial: Containing the First Letter of Columbus Descriptive of His Voyage to the New World, the Latin Letter to His Royal Patrons, and a Narrative of the Four Voyages of Amerigo Vespucci (Philadelphia: Jordan Brothers, 1893), 17. 10. Matthew H. Edney and Harold L. Osher, Columbus’s First Letter: Bibliographical Summary (Portland: Osher Map Library, University of Southern Maine, 1996), available at http://www.usm.maine .edu/~maps/columbus/bibliography.html; Samuel Eliot Morison, The European Discovery of America: The Southern Voyages, A.D. 1492–1616 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), 90–91. 11. Rudolf Hirsch, “Printed Reports on the Early Discoveries and Their Reception,” in First Images of America: The Impact of the New World on the Old, ed. Fredi Chiappelli, with Michael J. B. Allen and Robert Louis Benson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 538. 12. Frederick Julius Pohl, Amerigo Vespucci, Pilot Major (New York: Octagon, 1966), 14, 207–9n. 13. Pohl characterizes both Mundus Novus and the Four Letters as forgeries, which seems to overstate the case, since both documents clearly derive from sources Pohl accepts as authentic. See ibid., 147–67. 14. Henry Raup Wagner, with Helen Rand Parish, The Life and Writings of Bartolomé de las Casas (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1967), 199. 15. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Centenary Edition: The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin/AMS Press, 1903), 5:152. 16. Morison, European Discovery of America, 294, 297. 17. Amerigo Vespucci, Mundus Novus: A Letter to Lorenzo Pietro di Medici, trans. George Tyler Northup, Vespucci Reprints and Translations 5 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1916), 1. 18. Hirsch, “Printed Reports on the Early Discoveries and Their Reception,” 554–55. 19. Ibid., 554–59. 20. William Brandon, New Worlds for Old: Reports from the New World and Their Effect on the Development of Social Thought in Europe, 1500–1800 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1986), 9–10; Arthur J. Slavin, “The American Principle from More to Locke,” in Chiappelli, First Images of America, 145–46. 21. Elizabeth Harris, “The Waldseemüller Map: A Typographic Appraisal,” Imago Mundi 37 (1985): 32–33. 22. Carol Urness, Maps and Mapmakers: Three Views of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1999–2001), available at http://www.lib.umn.edu/apps/bell/map/. 23. Martin Waldseemüller, The Cosmographiae introductio of Martin Waldseemüller, trans. Joseph Fischer and Franz von Wieser, ed. Charles George Herbermann (Ann Arbor: University Microfilms, 1969), 34. 24. Ibid., 70. 25. Harris, “Waldseemüller Map,” 30–31. 26. Quoted in Isaiah Thomas, The History of Printing in America, with a Biography of Printers and an Account of Newspapers, 2nd ed., Archaeologia Americana: Transactions and Collections of the American Antiquarian Society (Worcester, Mass.: American Antiquarian Society, 1874), 1:2. 27. Lyle N. McAlister, Spain and Portugal in the New World, 1492–1700, Europe and the World in the Age of Expansion 3 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 74–75; Justin Winsor, Narrative and Critical History of America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1884), 1:13, 592. 28. McAlister, Spain and Portugal in the New World, 109; see also Richard Konetzke, ed., Colección de documentos para la historia de la formación social de Hispanoamérica, 1493–1810 (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientâificas, 1953), 6–7. 29. Juan Friede and Benjamin Keen, eds., Bartolomé de las Casas in History: Toward an Understanding of the Man and His Work (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1971), 142. 30. Clive Griffin, The Crombergers of Seville: The History of a Printing and Merchant Dynasty (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988), 52. 31. Ibid., 168–70. 32. Ibid., 65. 33. Lawrence Sidney Thompson, Printing in Colonial Spanish America (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1962), 12.

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notes to pages 14–26 34. Griffin, Crombergers of Seville, 85. 35. Thompson, Printing in Colonial Spanish America, 12–14. 36. Fernando Peñalosa, The Mexican Book Industry (New York: Scarecrow, 1957), 48; Quesada, Legislation in Old Spain and the Indies on Printing and the Book Trade, 2–3. 37. Zephyrin Engelhardt, “The Earliest Books in the New World,” in Juan de Zumárraga, The Doctrina Breve: In Fac-simile, ed. Thomas Francis Meehan (New York: United States Catholic Historical Society, 1928), 10–11; Thompson, Printing in Colonial Spanish America, 13. 38. Griffin, Crombergers of Seville, 127–28. 39. Quesada, Legislation in Old Spain and the Indies on Printing and the Book Trade, 18. 40. Peñalosa, Mexican Book Industry, 15–17. 41. The terms “book trade” and “book trades” can be confusing. In the singular, the book trade usually means the whole industry—all of the people and processes that work together to produce and sell books. When we refer to the book trades in the plural, we usually mean one of two things: the individual trades and industries—printing, binding, papermaking, bookselling, publishing, and so on—that make up the book trade, or the book trades of various nations or regions when it is important to note that they are related but distinct enterprises.

Chapter 2 1. James Alexander Williamson, The Voyages of the Cabots and the English Discovery of North America Under Henry VII and Henry VIII (London: Argonaut, 1929). 2. Henry Percival Biggar, The Precursors of Jacques Cartier, 1497–1534: A Collection of Documents Relating to the Early History of the Dominion of Canada (Ottawa: Government Printing Bureau, 1911), 7–8. 3. Ibid., 8. 4. Jonathan Locke Hart, Representing the New World: The English and French Uses of the Example of Spain (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 18–27. 5. L. A. Vigneras, “The Cape Breton Landfall: 1494 or 1497: Note on a Letter from John Day,” Canadian Historical Review 38 (1957): 219–28. 6. Hart, Representing the New World, 34–35; Arthur J. Slavin, “The American Principle from More to Locke,” in First Images of America: The Impact of the New World on the Old, ed. Fredi Chiappelli, with Michael J. B. Allen and Robert Louis Benson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 146–47. 7. Thomas More, Utopia, ed. and trans. Edward L. Surtz (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964), cxxv–cxciv. 8. Quoted in John Parker, Books to Build an Empire: A Bibliographical History of English Overseas Interests in 1620 (Amsterdam: N. Israel, 1965), 24–28. 9. Letters Patent to Sir Humfrey Gylberte, June 11, 1578 (New Haven: Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School, 2008), available at http://avalon.law.yale.edu/16th_century/humfrey.asp. 10. Henry R. Wagner, Sir Francis Drake’s Voyage Around the World: Its Aims and Achievements (San Francisco: John Howell, 1926), 348. 11. William Bradford, Bradford’s History of the Plymouth Plantation, ed. William Davis (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1920), 46–47. 12. John Smith, A True Relation of Such Occurrences and Accidents of Note as Happened in Virginia (London: John Tappe, 1608), 4, 7. 13. Quoted in Edward Arber, ed., The Story of the Pilgrim Fathers, 1606–1623 (London: Ward and Downey, 1897), 499–501.

Chapter 3 1. William S. Powell, “Books in the Virginia Colony Before 1624,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 5, no. 2 (1948): 180–81.

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notes to pages 26–30 2. John Smith, “A Description of New England” (1616): An Online Electronic Text Edition, ed. Paul Royster (Lincoln: University of Nebraska–Lincoln, 2006), available at http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/ cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1003&context=etas. 3. Felicia Hemans, “The Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers in New England,” in Records of Women, with Other Poems (Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1828), 264–66. 4. John Winthrop, A Model of Christian Charity (1630; Auburn, Calif.: Winthrop Society, 2003), available at http://www.winthropsociety.com/doc_charity.php. 5. Charter of the Massachusetts Bay Company (4 March 1628/9; Auburn, Calif.: Winthrop Society, 2003), available at http://www.winthropsociety.com/doc_charity.php. (The date of the charter reflects a peculiarity of the Julian calendar, which was then in use in England. Because the new year in that calendar fell on March 25, dates between January 1 and March 25 were recorded with both years to avoid confusion.) The charter created and authorized the Massachusetts Bay Company, which was formed to create the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Creating and running the colony was the sole purpose of the company. Most, but not all, of the early colonists were shareholders of the company. All of the company members were Puritans, but not all of the people who settled in the colony were members of the company or even Puritans. Still, the terms Massachusetts Bay Company and Massachusetts Bay Colony are used almost interchangeably.   For a thorough discussion of the similarities between the Spanish and English justifications of claims in the Americas, see Jonathan Locke Hart, Representing the New World: The English and French Uses of the Example of Spain (New York: Palgrave, 2001). 6. The Cambridge Agreement (26 August 1629; Auburn, Calif.: Winthrop Society, 2003), available at http://www.winthropsociety.com/doc_cambr.php. 7. Isaiah Thomas, The History of Printing in America, with a Biography of Printers and an Account of Newspapers, ed. Marcus A. McCorison (1810; repr., New York: Weathervane, 1970), 4–5; Samuel Eliot Morison, The Oxford History of the American People (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), 64–66; The Confessions of Augustine of Hippo, trans. Edward Bouverie Pusey (Adelaide: University of Adelaide, 2004), available at http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/a/augustine/a92c/. 8. Hugh Amory, “Printing and Bookselling in New England, 1638–1713,” in The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World, ed. Hugh Amory and David D. Hall, A History of the Book in America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 86–87. 9. For the history of the Cambridge presses, see Hugh Amory, First Impressions: Printing in Cambridge, 1639–1989 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989); Robert Roden, The Cambridge Press, 1639–1692: A History of the First Printing Press Established in English America, Together with a Bibliographical List of the Issues of the Press (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1905); George Parker Winship, The Cambridge Press (1638–1692): A Reexamination of the Evidence Concerning the Bay Psalm Book and the Eliot Indian Bible as Well as Other Contemporary Books and People (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1945). 10. Leona M. Hudak, Early American Women Printers and Publishers, 1639–1820 (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1978), 10–11; John Tebbel, A History of Book Publishing in the United States (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1972–81), 1:6. 11. Hudak, Early American Women Printers and Publishers, 14. 12. Ibid., 11. 13. Thorp L. Wolford, “The Laws and Liberties of 1648,” in Essays in the History of Early American Law, ed. David H. Flaherty and the Institute of Early American History and Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969), 176–77. 14. Hellmut Lehmann-Haupt, The Book in America: A History of the Making and Selling of Books in the United States, 2nd ed. (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1951), 7. 15. Hudak, Early American Women Printers and Publishers, 14. 16. Thomas, History of Printing in America (1810), 53. 17. Frances Hamill, “Some Unconventional Women Before 1800: Printers, Booksellers, and Collectors,” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 49 (1955): 311.

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notes to pages 30–39 18. Amory, “Printing and Bookselling in New England,” 87; Hudak, Early American Women Printers and Publishers, 17–18. 19. Amory, “Printing and Bookselling in New England,” 87. 20. Ola Elizabeth Winslow, John Eliot, Apostle to the Indians (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1968). 21. David D. Hall, “Introduction,” in Amory and Hall, The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World, 15– 21; Tebbel, History of Book Publishing in the United States, 1:36; Thomas, History of Printing in America (1810), 5. 22. Amory, “Printing and Bookselling in New England,” 89. 23. Ibid., 89–90; Thomas, History of Printing in America (1810), 75–79. 24. Samuel Atkins, Kalendarium Pennsilvaniense; or, America’s Messinger; Being an Almanack for the Year of Grace (1686), Early English Books, 1641–1700 (Ann Arbor: University Microfilms, 1980), [3]. 25. James N. Green, “The Book Trade in the Middle Colonies, 1680–1720,” in Amory and Hall, The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World, 200–214; Thomas, History of Printing in America (1810), 340–60. 26. James N. Green, “English Books and Printing in the Age of Franklin,” in Amory and Hall, The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World, 248; Thomas, History of Printing in America (1810), 355, 457–61. 27. Green, “English Books and Printing in the Age of Franklin,” 248–59. 28. Hugh Amory, “A Note on Statistics,” in Amory and Hall, The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World, 504–15. 29. Green, “English Books and Printing in the Age of Franklin,” 270–71; Tebbel, History of Book Publishing in the United States, 1:103–4. 30. Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 404. 31. Quoted in Thomas, History of Printing in America (1810), 550; George Bancroft, History of the United States from the Discovery of the American Continent, 15th ed. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1854), 2:192. 32. David D. Hall, “The Chesapeake in the Seventeenth Century,” in Amory and Hall, The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World, 62. 33. Lehmann-Haupt, Book in America, 44. 34. Herbert S. Klein, A Population History of the United States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 37–68. 35. Amory, “A Note on Statistics,” 505–6.

Chapter 4 1. Peter Bakewell, A History of Latin America: C. 1450 to the Present, 2nd ed. (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2004), 185. 2. Lucien Paul Victor Febvre and Henri Jean Martin, The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing, 1450–1800, trans. David Gerard (London: Verso, 1998), 167. 3. Ibid., 228. 4. Curt F. Bühler, “The Statistics of Scientific Incunabula,” Isis 39, no. 3 (August 1948): 163–68; Henri Estienne, The Frankfort Book Fair: The Francofordiense Emporium of Henri Estienne (1574), ed. and trans. James Westfall Thompson (New York: Burt Franklin, 1968), 54n. 5. Rudolf Hirsch, “Printed Reports on the Early Discoveries and Their Reception,” in First Images of America: The Impact of the New World on the Old, ed. Fredi Chiappelli, with Michael J. B. Allen and Robert Louis Benson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 549. 6. Harold Jantz, “Images of America and the German Renaissance,” in Chiappelli, First Images of America, 106; A. Gregg Roeber, “The Middle Colonies, 1720–1790: German and Dutch Printing,” in The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World, ed. Hugh Amory and David D. Hall, A History of the Book in America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 299. The standard bibliographic reference is Joseph Sabin, Wilberforce Eames, and R. W. G. Vail, A Dictionary of Books Relating to America: From Its Discovery to the Present Time (Amsterdam: Bibliographical Society of America and N. Israel, 1961).

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notes to pages 39–47 7. Estienne, Frankfort Book Fair, 228–29. 8. James Westfall Thompson, “Introduction,” in Estienne, Frankfort Book Fair, 81. 9. Estienne, Frankfort Book Fair, 83–85. 10. Thompson, “Introduction,” 81–83. 11. Estienne, Frankfort Book Fair, 85. 12. Quoted in Robert E. Cazden, A Social History of the German Book Trade in America to the Civil War (Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1984), 3; Thomas Goddard Wright, Literary Culture in Early New England, 1620–1730, ed. Mabel Hyde Wright (1920; repr., New York: Russell & Russell, 1966), 33. 13. Thompson, “Introduction,” 87–90. 14. Geoffrey Parker, ed., The Thirty Years War, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 1997), 157–60. 15. J. C. Wenger, Glimpses of Mennonite History and Doctrine, 3rd ed. (Scottdale, Pa.: Herald Press, 1959), 101–4. 16. Roeber, “Middle Colonies,” 301. 17. Frank R. Diffenderffer, “The German Exodus to England in 1709,” in German Immigration to America: The First Wave, ed. Don Heinrich Tolzmann (Bowie, Md.: Heritage Books, 1993), 265. 18. Ibid., 341; Henry Eyster Jacobs, “The German Emigration to America, 1709–1740,” in Tolzmann, German Immigration to America, 134–42. 19. Jacobs, “German Emigration to America,” 142–43. 20. Don Yoder, “Pennsylvania Germans: Three Centuries of Identity Crisis,” in America and the Germans: An Assessment of a Three-Hundred-Year History, ed. Frank Trommler and Joseph McVeigh (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 43–45. 21. E. Gordon Alderfer, The Ephrata Commune: An Early American Counterculture (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1985); Jeff Bach, Voices of the Turtledoves: The Sacred World of Ephrata, Pennsylvania German History and Culture Series 3 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003), 18–20; Christoph E. Schweitzer, “The Challenge of Early German-American Literature,” in Trommler and McVeigh, America and the Germans, 294–305. 22. Early American Imprints, Series I: Evans, 1639–1800 (Worchester, Mass.: American Antiquarian Society, n.d.), nos. 3253, 3252, 3503. 23. Ibid., nos. 3986, 4836, 5105, 4964, 5104, 5108, 5013, 5103, 5106, 5126. 24. Isaiah Thomas, The History of Printing in America, with a Biography of Printers and an Account of Newspapers, ed. Marcus A. McCorison (1810; repr., New York: Weathervane, 1970), 405–7. 25. John Samuel Flory, Literary Activity of the German Baptist Brethren in the Eighteenth Century (Elgin, Ill.: Brethren Publishing House, 1908), 58–61. 26. John Wright, Early Bibles of America: Being a Descriptive Account of Bibles Published in the United States, Mexico, and Canada, 3rd ed. (New York: T. Whittaker, 1894), 24–31. 27. The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, ed. Leonard W. Labaree (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), 4:484. 28. Thomas, History of Printing in America (1810), 382. 29. Mack’s translation was titled Das Andencken einiger heiligen Martyrer oder: Die Geschichten etlicher Blut-Zeugen der Wahrheit; nebst ihren Briefen, welche sie kurz vor und in der Gechgenschaft geschrieben; wie solches in dem Blutigen Tooneel zu finden. Aus dem Holländischen gründlich und treulich übersetzt durch Theophilum (The memorial of the holy martyrs or: stories of the blood witnesses of the truth; together with their letters, written shortly before they were imprisoned, as they may be found in the bloody theater. Thoroughly and truly translated from the Dutch by Theophilum). Early American Imprints, Series I: Evans, 1639–1800, no. 5703. 30. Ibid., no. 6256; Alderfer, Ephrata Commune, 128. 31. Christian Hege, “Miller, Peter (1710–1796),” Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online (n.p.: Mennonite Historical Society of Canada, 1957), available at http://www.gameo.org/encyclopedia/ contents/M5485.html. 32. Thomas, History of Printing in America (1810), 288n. 33. Alderfer, Ephrata Commune, 127–30, 54–55, 64–70; Hellmut Lehmann-Haupt, The Book in America: A History of the Making and Selling of Books in the United States, 2nd ed. (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1951), 40; Roeber, “Middle Colonies,” 304; Thomas, History of Printing in America (1810), 424–26.

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notes to pages 50–62

Chapter 5 1. John Dunton and J. B. Nichols, The Life and Errors of John Dunton, Citizen of London: With the Lives and Characters of More Than a Thousand Contemporary Divines and Other Persons of Literary Eminence (London: J. Nichols, 1818), 1:95. 2. John Bidwell, “Printers’ Supplies and Capitalization,” in The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World, ed. Hugh Amory and David D. Hall, A History of the Book in America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 163–83. 3. Isaiah Thomas, The History of Printing in America, with a Biography of Printers and an Account of Newspapers, ed. Marcus A. McCorison (1810; repr., New York: Weathervane, 1970), 16–17. 4. Daniel Scott Smith, “The Demographic History of Colonial New England,” Journal of Economic History 32, no. 1 (1972): 165–83. Census figures available through the “History” section of the U.S. Census Bureau website, http://www.census.gov/history/ www/through_the_decades/. 5. John Tebbel, A History of Book Publishing in the United States (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1972–81), 1:55. 6. James N. Green, “English Books and Printing in the Age of Franklin,” in Amory and Hall, The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World, 270–83. 7. Adolph Growoll, Book-Trade Bibliography in the United States in the Nineteenth Century, Bibliography and Reference 89 (1898; repr., New York: Burt Franklin, 1939), xi–xii. 8. Edward Abner, ed., A Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers of London, 1554–1640 A.D. (New York: Peter Smith, 1950), 1:10b; Philip Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), 174–75. 9. Abner, Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers of London, 10b. 10. Cyprian Blagden, The Stationers’ Company: A History, 1403–1959 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1960), 20, 40. 11. Gaskell, New Introduction to Bibliography, 176. 12. Hugh Amory and David D. Hall, “Afterword,” in Amory and Hall, The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World, 5; Blagden, Stationers’ Company, 175–77. 13. The Statute of Anne: April 10, 1710 (New Haven: Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School, 2007), available at http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/anne_1710.asp. 14. Blagden, Stationers’ Company, 146–48. 15. Gaskell, New Introduction to Bibliography, 180–82. 16. Growoll, Book-Trade Bibliography in the United States in the Nineteenth Century, iii–x; Hellmut Lehmann-Haupt, The Book in America: A History of the Making and Selling of Books in the United States, 2nd ed. (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1951), 134–35. 17. Henry Holt, Garrulities of an Octogenarian Editor, with Other Essays Somewhat Biographical and Autobiographical (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1923), 97. 18. Lehmann-Haupt, Book in America, 99–110. 19. Amory and Hall, “Afterword,” 477–79; Rollo G. Silver, “Prologue to American Copyright,” Studies in Bibliography 11 (1958): 259–62. 20. Growoll, Book-Trade Bibliography in the United States in the Nineteenth Century, 4–79. 21. William Charvat, Literary Publishing in America, 1790–1850 (1959; repr., Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993), 25.

Chapter 6 1. Quoted in Adolph Growoll, Book-Trade Bibliography in the United States in the Nineteenth Century, Bibliography and Reference 89 (1898; repr., New York: Burt Franklin, 1939), 1. 2. Hellmut Lehmann-Haupt, The Book in America: A History of the Making and Selling of Books in the United States, 2nd ed. (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1951), 123. 3. William Charvat, Literary Publishing in America, 1790–1850 (1959; repr., Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993), 19.

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notes to pages 62–71 4. Robert Hoe, A Short History of the Printing Press and of the Improvements in Printing Machinery from the Time of Gutenberg up to the Present Day (New York: R. Hoe, 1902); Lehmann-Haupt, Book in America; Douglas C. McMurtrie, A History of Printing in the United States (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1936). 5. Frank J. Ball, “The Printing Press,” in The Building of a Book: A Series of Practical Articles Written by Experts in the Various Departments of Book Making and Distributing, ed. Frederick H. Hitchcock (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1929), 98; Richard-Gabriel Rummonds, Nineteenth-Century Printing Practices and the Iron Handpress, 2 vols. (New Castle, Del.: Oak Knoll Press, 2004); Richard-Gabriel Rummonds, Printing on the Iron Handpress (New Castle, Del.: Oak Knoll Press, 1997). 6. John Tebbel, A History of Book Publishing in the United States (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1972–81), 1:257. 7. Lehmann-Haupt, Book in America, 72. 8. Philip Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), 198–200; Printing in America (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Display, 2001). 9. Printing in America. 10. George A. Kubler, A New History of Stereotyping (New York: n.p., 1941), 75–94; Lehmann-Haupt, Book in America, 80–81. 11. E. W. Palmer, “The Binding,” in Hitchcock, Building of a Book, 218–26; Joseph W. Rogers, “The Rise of American Edition Binding,” in Bookbinding in America: Three Essays, ed. Hellmut Lehmann-Haupt (Portland, Maine: Southworth-Anthosen, 1941), 131–85. 12. Palmer, “Binding,” 211. 13. Hoe, Short History of the Printing Press, 11. 14. Lehmann-Haupt, Book in America, 77. 15. Printing in America. 16. Ball, “Printing Press,” 107; Gaskell, New Introduction to Bibliography, 262–63. 17. Gaskell, New Introduction to Bibliography, 219–20; Henry Morris, Louis-Nicolas Robert and His Endless Wire Papermaking Machine (Newtown, Pa.: Bird & Bull Press, 2000). 18. Hoe, Short History of the Printing Press, 41. 19. Henry Holt, Garrulities of an Octogenarian Editor, with Other Essays Somewhat Biographical and Autobiographical (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1923), 153–54. 20. John F. Stover, American Railroads, 2nd ed., Chicago History of American Civilization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 32. 21. Charles Francis Adams, Jr., “Boston II,” North American Review 106, no. 219 (1868): 564.

Chapter 7 1. National Bureau of Economic Research, Davis Industrial Production Index, 1790–1915 (Cambridge, Mass.: National Bureau of Economic Research, 2004), available at http://www.nber.org/data/industrial-production-index/ip-total.html. 2. “Fast Facts, 1850,” U.S. Census Bureau website, http://www.census.gov/history/www/through_ the_decades/fast_facts/1850_fast_facts.html. 3. Hugh Amory, “A Note on Statistics,” in The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World, ed. Hugh Amory and David D. Hall, A History of the Book in America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 514; Michael Winship, “The International Trade in Books,” in The Industrial Book, 1840–1880, ed. Scott E. Casper, Jeffrey D. Groves, Stephan W. Nissenbaum, and Michael Winship, A History of the Book in America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 150–51. 4. A. G. Roeber, Palatines, Liberty, and Property: German Lutherans in Colonial British America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), xi. 5. Quoted in Robert E. Cazden, A Social History of the German Book Trade in America to the Civil War (Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1984), 12–13. 6. Ibid., 13–14.

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notes to pages 72–79 7. Frank Reid Diffenderffer, The German Immigration into Pennsylvania Through the Port of Philadelphia from 1700 to 1775, and The Redemptioners (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing, 1977); Farley Grubb, “Babes in Bondage? Debt Shifting by German Immigrants in Early America,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 37, no. 1 (2006): 1–34; Farley Grubb, “Redemptioner Immigration to Pennsylvania: Evidence on Contract Choice and Profitability,” Journal of Economic History 46, no. 2 ( June 1986): 407–18. 8. Gottlieb Mittelberger and Karl Theodor Eben, Gottlieb Mittelberger’s Journey to Pennsylvania in the Year 1750 and Return to Germany in the Year 1754 (Philadelphia: J. J. McVey, 1898), 13–18. 9. Ibid., 25. 10. Friedrich Kapp, Immigration, and the Commissioners of Emigration of the State of New York, American Immigration Collection (New York: Arno Press, 1969), 12. 11. Moritz Fürstenwärther and Hans Christoph Ernst Freiherr von Gagern, The German in North America, trans. Siegmar Muehl (Iowa City: privately printed, 2001), 72. 12. Mack Walker, Germany and the Emigration, 1816–1885, Harvard Historical Manuscripts 56 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964), 42–57. 13. Publishers’ Weekly (hereafter cited as PW) 40 (3 October 1891): 534. 14. Ernst Ludwig Brauns, Ideen Über Die Auswanderung Nach Amerika (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck, 1827), 729. Translated and quoted in Cazden, A Social History of the German Book Trade in America, 53. 15. Friedrich Kapp, “Der Deutsch-Amerikanische Buchhandel,” Deutsche Rundschau 14 ( January 1878): 50. 16. Rudolph Garrigue, Bericht an die Commission für die Begründung einer deutschen Buchhandlung in den Vereinigten Staaten (Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus, 1846); PW 40 (3 October 1891): 534; Cazden, Social History of the German Book Trade in America, 159–65; Kapp, “Der Deutsch-Amerikanische Buchhandel,” 50–51. 17. Garrigue, Bericht an die Commission für die Begründung einer deutschen Buchhandlung in den Vereinigten Staaten, 1, 7. 18. Ibid., 5. 19. Cazden, Social History of the German Book Trade in America, 33–37. 20. For a discussion of the economic success of German immigrants, see Joseph P. Ferrie, “The Entry into the U.S. Labor Market of Antebellum European Immigrants, 1840–1860,” Explorations in Economic History 34 ( July 1997): 295–330. 21. Garrigue, Bericht an die Commission für die Begründung einer deutschen Buchhandlung in den Vereinigten Staaten, 16. 22. Ibid., 11–12, 29. 23. Ibid., 16–17. 24. Ibid., 32–33. 25. Cazden, Social History of the German Book Trade in America, 85. 26. Garrigue, Bericht an die Commission für die Begründung einer deutschen Buchhandlung in den Vereinigten Staaten, 29. 27. Ibid., 44. 28. Cazden, Social History of the German Book Trade in America, 163. 29. Rudolph Garrigue and F.  W. Christern, Catalogue of Books Published in Germany (New York: [Garrigue and Christern], 1853). 30. By a strange coincidence, Rudolph Garrigue and the Whitings were both related to some of the same Mayflower notables. Alice Garrigue Masaryk, Ruth Crawford Mitchell, and Linda Vlasak, eds., Alice Garrigue Masaryk, 1879–1966: Her Life as Recorded in Her Own Words and by Her Friends (Pittsburgh: University Center for International Studies, University of Pittsburgh, 1980), 7–10; Charles S. and Winifred C. Garrigus, The Garrigues Family in North America (Knoxville: Tennessee Valley Publishing, 2000). 31. Garrigue, Bericht an die Commission für die Begründung einer deutschen Buchhandlung in den Vereinigten Staaten, 38. 32. Rudolph Garrigue, Prospectus (New York: Rudolph Garrigue, 1849). 33. PW 40 (3 October 1891): 534; Kapp, “Der Deutsch-Amerikanische Buchhandel,” 53.

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notes to pages 79–91 34. PW 39 (2 May 1891): 631. 35. James M. Berquist, “The Forty-Eighters: Catalysts of German-American Politics,” in The GermanAmerican Encounter: Conflict and Cooperation Between Two Cultures, 1800–2000, ed. Frank Trommler and Elliott Shore (New York: Berghahn Books, 2001), 22–36; A. E. Zucker, ed., The Forty-Eighters: Political Refugees of the German Revolution of 1848 (New York: Russell & Russell, 1950). 36. Börsenblatt (27 April 1852): 544. 37. Cazden, Social History of the German Book Trade in America, 196–98; Heinrich Heine, Heine’s Sämmtliche Werke, 6 vols. (Philadelphia: J. Weik, 1856–59). 38. Charles Godfrey Leland, Memoirs (New York: Appleton, 1893), 222. 39. Rudolph Garrigue and F.  W. Christern, “Publishers’ Advertisement,” Garrigue & Christern’s Monthly Bulletin of German Literature 1, no. 1 (1853): 2. 40. Ibid., 2–3. 41. PW 40 (3 October 1891): 534. 42. Rudolph Garrigue’s Monthly Bulletin of German Literature 1 (March/April 1855): 1. 43. PW 40 (3 October 1891): 534; Klaus Wust, Guardian on the Hudson: The German Society of the City of New York, 1784–1984 (New York: German Society of the City of New York, 1984), 34–41. 44. Rudolph Glanz, “German Jews in New York City in the 19th Century,” YIVO Annual of Jewish Social Science 11 (1956/57): 32–33; Rudolph Garrigue Memorial, Germania Fire Insurance Company, Growoll Collection. The Growoll Collection, a series of nineteen large scrapbooks assembled by Adolph Growoll while he worked at Publishers’ Weekly, now exists as a set of microfilm reels held by the T. C. Wilson Library at the University of Minnesota. The Library of Congress holds a photocopy of the micro­film set. 45. PW 40 (3 October 1891): 534. 46. Börsenblatt (17 February 1854): 294; PW 39 (2 May 1891): 631.

Chapter 8 1. Philip Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), 170–85. 2. J. Henry Harper, The House of Harper: A Century of Publishing in Franklin Square (New York and London: Harper & Brothers, 1912), 95–96. 3. New York Times, 12 December 1853, 1. 4. Eugene Exman, The House of Harper: One Hundred and Fifty Years of Publishing (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), 41–46; Harper, House of Harper, 97–98. 5. Harper, House of Harper, 104–6. 6. Jacob Abbott, The Harper Establishment: How Books Are Made (1855; repr., New Castle, Del.: Oak Knoll Press, 2001), 13–54; Margot Gayle and Carol Gayle, Cast-Iron Architecture in America: The Significance of James Bogardus (New York: Norton, 1998), 136–49. 7. Exman, House of Harper, 3. 8. Gaskell, New Introduction to Bibliography, 200. 9. Harper, House of Harper, 91. 10. “Complimentary Fruit Festival of the New York Book Publishers’ Association,” American Publishers’ Circular and Literary Gazette (hereafter cited as APC) 1 (29 September 1855): 68. 11. Abbott, The Harper Establishment, 42; see also the sectional view of the Cliff Street Building, reproduced opposite the table of contents in this volume. 12. Gayle and Gayle, Cast-Iron Architecture in America, 148–49. 13. Exman, House of Harper, 46–47; Adolph Growoll, Book-Trade Bibliography in the United States in the Nineteenth Century, Bibliography and Reference 89 (1898; repr., New York: Burt Franklin, 1939), vii–x. 14. Ezra Greenspan, George Palmer Putnam: Representative American Publisher, Penn State Series in the History of the Book (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), 46–51, 67; Growoll, Book-Trade Bibliography in the United States in the Nineteenth Century, xxv–vi.

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notes to pages 92–102 15. “Complimentary Fruit Festival of the New York Book Publishers’ Association,” APC 1 (29 September 1855): 66–67; Gerard R. Wolfe, The House of Appleton: The History of a Publishing House and Its Relationship to the Cultural, Social, and Political Events That Helped Shape the Destiny of New York City (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1981), 58–59. 16. “Complimentary Fruit Festival of the New York Book Publishers’ Association,” APC 1 (29 September 1855): 65–68. 17. “The New York Publishers’ Association,” APC 1 (1 September 1855): 1; Exman, House of Harper, 46; Wolfe, House of Appleton, 58–59. 18. “Harpers’ Views on Trade Sales: Our Reasons for Contributing to This Sale,” APC 1 (8 September 1855): 17.

Chapter 9 1. “Passenger Lists of Vessels Arriving at New York, New York, 1820–1897,” in National Archives Microfilm Publication M237 (Washington, D.C.: National Archives, n.d.), record group 36, Records of the U.S. Customs Service; Trudy Schenk, Ruth Froelke, and Inge Bork, Wuerttemberg Emigration Index (Salt Lake City: MyFamily.com, 1998), vol. 7, record number 849658. 2. Adolph Growoll, Book-Trade Bibliography in the United States in the Nineteenth Century, Bibliography and Reference 89 (1898; repr., New York: Burt Franklin, 1939), lxvii–lxviii. 3. Ibid. 4. Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, 2nd ed., ed. Leonard W. Labaree, Ralph L. Ketcham, Helen C. Boatfield, and Helene H. Fineman, Yale Nota Bene (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 71. 5. Frederick Rinehart Anspach, The Sons of the Sires: A History of the Rise, Progress, and Destiny of the American Party, and Its Probable Influence on the Next Presidential Election (Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo, & Co., 1855), 50. 6. Friedrich Kapp, “Der Deutsch-Amerikanische Buchhandel,” Deutsche Rundschau 14 ( January 1878): 66. 7. Hellmut Lehmann-Haupt, The Book in America: A History of the Making and Selling of Books in the United States, 2nd ed. (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1951), 241–42. 8. Quoted in John Barnes Pratt, A Century of Book Publishing, 1838–1938: Historical and Personal (New York: A. S. Barnes, 1938), 1–2. 9. Adolph Growoll, The Profession of Bookselling: A Handbook of Practical Hints for the Apprentice and Bookseller (New York: Office of Publishers’ Weekly, 1913), 1:143, 69. 10. Lehmann-Haupt, Book in America, 241–42. 11. John Tebbel, “A Brief History of American Bookselling “ in Bookselling in America and the World: Some Observations and Recollections in Celebration of the 75th Anniversary of the American Booksellers Association, ed. Charles B. Anderson (New York: Quadrangle/New York Times, 1975), 7. 12. Toni Lassiter, “Imagery of Woburn,” Ye Olde Woburn, http://www.yeoldewoburn.net/Image.htm. 13. William Charvat, Literary Publishing in America, 1790–1850 (1959; repr., Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993), 36. 14. Paul J. Wielandy, The Romance of an Industry: A Retrospective Review of the Book and Stationery Business (St. Louis: Blackwell, Wielandy, 1933), xxiv. 15. PW 39 (2 May 1891): 631. 16. Robert E. Cazden, A Social History of the German Book Trade in America to the Civil War (Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1984), 335. 17. Contract dated 24 September 1868, Growoll Collection. 18. Sven Beckert, The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850–1896 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 47; Robert Ernst, Immigrant Life in New York City, 1825–1863 (New York: Kings Crown Press, 1949), 20; Benson John Lossing, History of New York City: Embracing an Outline Sketch of Events from 1609 to 1830, and a Full Account of Its Development from 1830 to 1884 (New York: G. E. Perine, 1884), 603.

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notes to pages 102–112 19. Beckert, Monied Metropolis, 46–65. 20. PW 25 (5 April 1884): 441. 21. Jay W. Beswick, The Work of Frederick Leypoldt, Bibliographer and Publisher (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1942), 7. 22. Business card, Growoll Collection.

Chapter 10 1. Robert E. Cazden, A Social History of the German Book Trade in America to the Civil War (Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1984), 195–96, 733–35. 2. William Brotherhead, Forty Years Among the Old Booksellers of Philadelphia, with Bibliographical Remarks (Philadelphia: A. P. Brotherhead, 1891), 69. 3. Pennsylvania Railroad Board of Directors, Inspection of Physical Property: Items of Historic Interest Pertaining to Lines En Route (Rails and Trails, 1948), available at http://www.railsandtrails.com/ PRR/BOD1948/history.html; The Changing Heart of the City: Building and Rebuilding Western “Wash West” (Philadelphia: Library Company of Philadelphia, 2000), available at http://www.brynmawr.edu/ iconog/washw/images/C/C13e.jpg. 4. PW 25 (5 April 1884): 435–40; Adolph Growoll, Frederick Leypoldt: Biographical and Bibliographical Sketch, Dibdin Club Leaflet 2 (New York: Dibdin Club, 1899), 6. 5. [C. G. Leland], “[Review of Ice-Maiden],” Continental Monthly 3, no. 4 (1863). 6. PW 25 (5 April 1884): 435–40; Growoll, Frederick Leypoldt, 6. 7. F. W. Taussig, The Tariff History of the United States, 5th ed., rev. ed. (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1910), 118, 256. 8. Richard Rogers Bowker, “Frederick Leypoldt,” PW 25 (29 March 1884): 435; John Tebbel, A History of Book Publishing in the United States (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1972–81), 1:223. 9. Reuben A. Kessel and Armen A. Alchian, “Real Wages in the North During the Civil War: Mitchell’s Data Reinterpreted,” in The Economic Impact of the American Civil War, ed. Ralph Andreano (Cambridge, Mass.: Schenkman, 1967), 16–22; Irwin Unger, The Greenback Era: A Social and Political History of American Finance, 1865–1879 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), 14–16. 10. Bowker, “Frederick Leypoldt,” 436. 11. PW 99 (1 January 1921): 9; [Leland], “[Review of Ice-Maiden],” 500; Essay on the Growth and History of the Mercantile Library Company of Philadelphia (Philadelphia: Mercantile Library, 1867), appendix. 12. Broadside advertisement, 1862, American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts. 13. Frederick Leypoldt, Letter to Editor of the APC, 2 February 1863, quoted in PW 25 (5 April 1884): 443–44. 14. Ibid.

Chapter 11 1. Rudolph Garrigue, Bericht an die Commission für die Begründung einer deutschen Buchhandlung in den Vereinigten Staaten (Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus, 1846), 5. 2. For a detailed account of the business relationships between the various manufacturers involved in book production after 1850, see Michael Winship, American Literary Publishing in the Mid-Nineteenth Century: The Business of Ticknor and Fields, Cambridge Studies in Publishing and Printing History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 94–147; Michael Winship, “Manufacturing and Book Production,” in The Industrial Book, 1840–1880, ed. Scott E. Casper, Jeffrey D. Groves, Stephan W. Nissenbaum, and Michael Winship, A History of the Book in America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 53–59. 3. Philip Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), 306–7.

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notes to pages 112–122 4. Copyright receipt for The Ice-Maiden, Henry Holt Collection, Box 184, Princeton University. 5. [C. G. Leland], “[Review of The Ice-Maiden],” Continental Monthly 3, no. 4 (May 1863). 6. John Blair Linn and J. Thomas Mitchell, History of Centre and Clinton Counties, Pennsylvania (Philadelphia: L. H. Everts, 1883), 186. 7. Continental Monthly 3 no. 5 (May 1863): 630. 8. Adams and Ellis to F. W. Christern, 30 November 1863, Growoll Collection. 9. Heinrich Heine, Book of Songs, trans. Charles Godfrey Leland (Philadelphia: F. Leypoldt, 1863), 17. 10. John Tebbel, A History of Book Publishing in the United States (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1972–81), 1:486–87. 11. John S. Andrews, “ ‘ Immensee’ and Victorian England,” Modern Language Review 54, no. 3 (1959): 407. 12. John Bouvé Clapp and Edwin Francis Edgett, Plays of the Present (New York: Dunlap Society, 1902), 106–7; George Sand, Le Petite Fadette (Paris: Michel Lévy, 1850); August Waldauer, Fanchon the Cricket; a Domestic Drama, in Five Acts, from a Tale of George Sand, French’s Standard Drama 334 (New York: Samuel French, 1860). 13. Frederick Leypoldt, New Publications (Philadelphia: F. Leypoldt, 1863), 13. 14. Corson’s translation was the subject of four letters received from Longfellow between November 1854 and June 1855. See Nancy Dean, Guide to the Hiram Corson Papers, 1842–1956 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library, 2004), available at http://rmc.library .cornell.edu/EAD/htmldocs/RMA00449.html. 15. John H. Selkreg, ed., Landmarks of Tompkins County, New York, Including a History of Cornell University by Prof. W. T. Hewitt (Syracuse, N.Y.: D. Madison, 1894), 45–48. 16. Charles Godfrey Leland, Memoirs (New York: Appleton, 1893), 327, 427–28. 17. PW 25 (5 April 1884): 440. 18. [Charles G. Leland and Henry P. Leland], Ye Sneak Yclepid Copperhead (Philadelphia: A. Winch, Willis P. Hazard, and F. Leypoldt, 1863), 12; Joseph Sabin and Wilberforce Eames, eds., Biblioteca Americana: Dictionary of Books Relating to America from Its Discovery to the Present Time, 29 vols. (New York: Bibliographical Society of New York, 1868–1936). Sabin attributed Ye Sneak Yclepid Copperhead to the Reverend I. J. Stine. 19. [Charles Godfrey Leland], Ye Book of Copperheads (Philadelphia: F. Leypoldt, 1863), 11. 20. Copyright receipt for Das Giftige Schlangenbuch, Henry Holt Collection, Box 184, Princeton University. 21. Leland, Memoirs, 250–51. 22. Ibid., 251. 23. Copyright receipts for Mother Goose and Mother Pitcher’s Poems for Little People, Henry Holt Collection, Box 184, Princeton University. 24. Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham, The Poetical Works of Robert Burns, with Critical and Biographical Notices (Philadelphia: Porter and Coates, 1876); Oliver Goldsmith and Thomas Babington Macaulay, The Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith (Philadelphia: Butler, 1857); John Francis Marion, Within These Walls: A History of the Academy of Music in Philadelphia (Philadelphia: Restoration Office, Academy of Music, 1984), 13, 33. 25. United States Sanitary Commission, The Sanitary Commission of the United States Army: A Succinct Narrative of Its Works and Purposes, Medicine and Society in America (New York: Arno Press, 1972); William Quentin Maxwell, Lincoln’s Fifth Wheel: The Political History of the United States Sanitary Commission (New York: Longmans, Green, 1956). 26. Elizabeth Milroy, “Avenue of Dreams: Patriotism and the Spectator at Philadelphia’s Great Central Sanitary Fair,” in Making and Remaking Pennsylvania’s Civil War, ed. William Alan Blair and William Pencak (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001) 23–58. 27. Glenna Schroeder-Lien, “Lincoln and the Great Central Sanitary Fair,” Lincoln Editor 2, no. 3 (2002): 1–3. 28. Ibid. 29. Emancipation Proclamation (Newark: University of Delaware Special Collections, 2006), available at http://www.lib.udel.edu/ud/spec/exhibits/treasures/03_hist.html.

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notes to pages 123–135 30. Biographical note in Osborn Hamiline Oldroyd, The Poet’s Lincoln: Tributes in Verse to the Martyred President (Boston: Chapple, 1915), 175. 31. Henry Coppée, “Literary Intelligence,” United States Service Magazine 1 (1864): 82–83.

Chapter 12 1. PW 25 (5 April 1884): 441. 2. Michael Winship, American Literary Publishing in the Mid-nineteenth Century: The Business of Tick­nor and Fields, Cambridge Studies in Publishing and Printing History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 148–69. 3. W. S Tryon, Parnassus Corner: A Life of James T. Fields (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1963), 250. 4. Ibid., 253, 268; Gerard R. Wolfe, The House of Appleton: The History of a Publishing House and Its Relationship to the Cultural, Social, and Political Events That Helped Shape the Destiny of New York City (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1981), 115. 5. Winship, American Literary Publishing in the Mid-nineteenth Century, 186. 6. Emerson David Fite, Social and Industrial Conditions in the North During the Civil War, American Classics (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1963), 105–50; Tryon, Parnassus Corner, 267. 7. Sven Beckert, The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850–1896 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 135–37; Reuben A. Kessel and Armen A. Alchian, “Real Wages in the North During the Civil War: Mitchell’s Data Reinterpreted,” in The Economic Impact of the American Civil War, ed. Ralph Andreano (Cambridge, Mass.: Schenkman, 1967), 16–22; Wesley C. Mitchell, “The Production and Consumption of Wealth,” in Andreano, The Economic Impact of the American Civil War, 3–10. 8. Frederick Leypoldt, To the Philadelphia Members of the Book Trade (1864), Growoll Collection, 3. 9. Ibid., 1. 10. Ibid., 3n. 11. Ibid., 2. 12. PW 25 (5 April 1884): 436 13. Annual Report, 43d (for 1865) (Philadelphia: Mercantile Library, 1866), 10. 14. Essay on the Growth and History of the Mercantile Library Company of Philadelphia (Philadelphia: Mercantile Library, 1867), appendix. 15. John Tebbel, A History of Book Publishing in the United States (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1972–81), 2:186–226; Wolfe, House of Appleton, 127–44. 16. Jacob Abbott, The Harper Establishment: How Books Are Made (1855; repr., New Castle, Del.: Oak Knoll Press, 2001). 17. Quoted in Charles A. Madison, The Owl Among Colophons: Henry Holt as Publisher and Editor (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966), 4. 18. Henry Holt, Garrulities of an Octogenarian Editor, with Other Essays Somewhat Biographical and Autobiographical (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1923), 96. (Holt’s memoirs are peppered with his idiosyncratic spellings of certain words—he was always a rational spelling enthusiast.) 19. G. P. Putnam to F. Leypoldt, 19 November 1865, Growoll Collection. 20. Holt, Garrulities of an Octogenarian Editor, 107. 21. Madison, Owl Among Colophons, 6. 22. Lease, 31 March 1866, Henry Holt Collection, Box 185, Princeton University; Holt, Garrulities of an Octogenarian Editor, 107. 23. Holt, Garrulities of an Octogenarian Editor, 108. 24. Contract for advertisements, 16 January 1867, Henry Holt Collection, Box 185, Princeton University. 25. Henry James, “Matthew Arnold,” in Literary Criticism, Library of America 22 (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1984), 440.

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notes to pages 135–141 26. [Richard Rogers Bowker], “Augusta H. Leypoldt, 1849–1919,” PW 95 (14 June 1919): 625; A[ugusta] H[enrietta] Leypoldt, “Some Memories,” PW 76 (8 March 1909): 325. 27. Edward McClung Fleming, R. R. Bowker: Militant Liberal (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1952), 40. 28. A. H. Leypoldt to R. R. Bowker, 31 March 1885, Bowker Collection, Box 109, New York Public Library (NYPL). 29. Howard Challen, ed., Publishers’ and Stationers’ Uniform Trade List Directory (Philadelphia: Howard Challen, 1868), 445–50. 30. Madison, Owl Among Colophons, 9; royalty statement to Mrs. A. H. Leypoldt, 25 April 1914, Holt Collection, Box 184, Princeton University. 31. Madison, Owl Among Colophons, 9. 32. Holt, Garrulities of an Octogenarian Editor, 105. 33. Madison, Owl Among Colophons, 11. 34. Holt, Garrulities of an Octogenarian Editor, 97. 35. Herbert Mitgang, “Scribner Book Store, 75, Will Close Next Month,” New York Times, 7 December 1988, Metro.

Chapter 13 1. United States Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970, bicentennial ed. (Washington, D.C.: United States Bureau of the Census, 1975), 2:731–32. 2. Alfred D. Chandler, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1977). 3. Sean Dennis Cashman, America in the Gilded Age: From the Death of Lincoln to the Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, 3rd ed. (New York: New York University Press, 1993), 100–134. 4. Quoted in Sven Beckert, The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850–1896 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 177. 5. Cashman, America in the Gilded Age, 100–105. 6. Ibid., 6–13. 7. Beckert, Monied Metropolis; Chandler, Visible Hand; Jon C. Teaford, The Unheralded Triumph: City Government in America, 1870–1900, Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984); Victoria C. Woodhull, A Speech on the Great Social Problem of Labor and Capital: Delivered at Cooper Institute, New York City, Monday, May 8, 1871, Before the Labor Reform League (New York: Journeymen Printers’ Co-operative Association, 1871). 8. Beckert, Monied Metropolis, 157–65. 9. Jeffrey A. Charles, Service Clubs in American Society: Rotary, Kiwanis, and Lions (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 21. 10. Clarence Elmore Bonnett, History of Employers’ Associations in the United States (New York: Vantage, 1956); Robert H. Wiebe, Businessmen and Reform: A Study of the Progressive Movement (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1989); Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877–1920, The Making of America (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967). 11. Bruce Laurie, “Labor and Labor Organization,” in The Industrial Book, 1840–1880, ed. Scott E. Casper, Jeffrey D. Groves, Stephan W. Nissenbaum, and Michael Winship, A History of the Book in America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 70–89. 12. Adolph Growoll, Book-Trade Bibliography in the United States in the Nineteenth Century, Bibliography and Reference 89 (1898; repr., New York: Burt Franklin, 1939), v–x. 13. Hellmut Lehmann-Haupt, The Book in America: A History of the Making and Selling of Books in the United States, 2nd ed. (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1951), 258–63; John Tebbel, A History of Book Publishing in the United States (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1972–81), 2:215–17. 14. Growoll, Book-Trade Bibliography in the United States in the Nineteenth Century, viii–x.

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notes to pages 142–157 15. Ibid., xxvl. 16. Ibid., xii–xliv. 17. Ezra Greenspan, George Palmer Putnam: Representative American Publisher, Penn State Series in the History of the Book (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000); Growoll, BookTrade Bibliography in the United States in the Nineteenth Century. 18. APC 1 (1 September 1855): 1–3. 19. Growoll, Book-Trade Bibliography in the United States in the Nineteenth Century, xxviii, xliv–xlv. 20. APC 7 (22 June 1861): 213. 21. APC, n.s., 1 (15 January 1863): 1. 22. George William Childs and Melville Phillips, Recollections (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1890). 23. APC, n.s., 1 (15 January 1863): 1. 24. “The New Year,” PW 9 (1 January 1876): 10. 25. Leypoldt and Holt’s Literary Bulletin 1 (February 1869): 2. 26. Growoll, Book-Trade Bibliography in the United States in the Nineteenth Century, xxi. 27. Leypoldt and Holt’s Literary Bulletin 1 ( January 1869): 1. 28. Ibid. 29. Leypoldt and Holt’s Literary Bulletin 1 ( January 1869): 48. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid. 32. Trade Circular and Literary Bulletin 1 (September 1869): 32. 33. Ibid. 34. Frederick Leypoldt, ed., The American Catalogue of Books for 1869 (New York: Leypoldt and Holt, 1870). 35. Frederick Leypoldt, “Preface,” in Leypoldt, American Catalogue of Books for 1869, i. 36. Ibid., ii. 37. Ibid. 38. Ibid., iii. 39. Ibid. 40. Frederick Leypoldt, “Preface,” in The Trade Circular Annual for 1871, Including the American Catalogue of Books Published in the United States During the Year 1870, with Their Sizes, Prices and Publishers’ Names, ed. Frederick Leypoldt (New York: Office of the Trade Circular and Literary Bulletin, 1871), iii. 41. “The New Year,” PW 9 (1 January 1876): 10. 42. Nicholas Trübner et al., Trübner’s Bibliographical Guide to American Literature: A Classed List of Books Published in the United States of America During the Last Forty Years (London: Trübner, 1859), vi. 43. Leypoldt, “Preface” (1871), 1. 44. Ibid. 45. Ibid., 2. 46. Ainsworth Rand Spofford, Annual Report of the Librarian of Congress (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1872). 47. APC, octavo series, 16 (1 April 1871): 242. 48. PW 2 (28 November 1872): 566.

Chapter 14 1. Jay W. Beswick, The Work of Frederick Leypoldt, Bibliographer and Publisher (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1942), 19. 2. John Tebbel, A History of Book Publishing in the United States (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1972–81), 2:560–62. 3. [Frederick Leypoldt], “Preface,” in The Annual American Catalogue (Third Year) (New York: Office of the Publishers’ and Stationers’ Weekly Trade Circular, 1872). 4. “Prospectus,” Trade Circular and Publishers’ Bulletin 5 (26 December 1871): 1–2.

{ 20 6 }

notes to pages 157–173 5. Publishers’ and Stationers’ Weekly Trade Circular (hereafter cited as WTC) 1 (15 January1872): 3. 6. PW 1 (25 January 1872): 35. 7. PW 2 (1 August 1872): 113–14; PW 2 (8 August 1872): 129–31. 8. F. Leypoldt to R. R. Bowker, 6 September 1872, Bowker Papers, Box 36, NYPL. 9. PW 1 (28 March 1872): 262. 10. PW 2 (29 August 1872): 212. 11. PW 83 (26 April 1913): 1493. 12. PW 1 (23 May 1872): 476. 13. Ibid. 14. PW 1 (25 July 1873): 48. 15. Tebbel, History of Book Publishing in the United States, 2:559–71. 16. PW 16 (26 July 1879): 85–86. 17. F. Leypoldt to R. R. Bowker, 16 July 1872, Bowker Papers, Box 36, NYPL. 18. WTC 2 (14 November 1872): 524. 19. Adolph Growoll, Book-Trade Bibliography in the United States in the Nineteenth Century, Bibliography and Reference 89 (1898; repr., New York: Burt Franklin, 1939), lxxiv. 20. F. Leypoldt to R. R. Bowker, 16 July 1872, Bowker Papers Box 36, NYPL; Edward McClung Fleming, R. R. Bowker: Militant Liberal (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1952), 44. 21. PW 2 (9 August 1873): 434. 22. Ledger, 1879–82, Bowker Papers, Box 109, NYPL.

Chapter 15 1. PW 1 (15 February 1872): 136–37. 2. PW 1 (28 March 1872): 268. 3. Ibid. 4. PW 5 (3 January 1874): 16, 403. 5. Adolph Growoll, Book-Trade Bibliography in the United States in the Nineteenth Century, Bibliography and Reference 89 (1898; repr., New York: Burt Franklin, 1939), vii. 6. PW 6 (23 July 1874): 180–82; Edward McClung Fleming, R .R. Bowker: Militant Liberal (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1952), 48. 7. PW 10 (1 July 1876): 10. 8. PW 6 (23 July 1874): 180–82. 9. PW 8 (28 July 1875): 195–242. 10. PW 10 (22 July 1876): 13. 11. PW 10 (1 July 1876): 16–27. 12. PW 10 (22 July 1876): 169. 13. New York Times, 15 July 1876, 1. 14. Wayne A. Wiegand, Irrepressible Reformer: A Biography of Melvil Dewey (Chicago: American Library Association, 1996), 36. 15. Ibid., 14–36. 16. Edward G. Holley, Raking the Historic Coals: The ALA Scrapbook of 1876 ([Pittsburgh]: Beta Phi Mu, 1967), 26. 17. Ibid., 26–38. 18. PW 9 (20 May 1876): 632–33. 19. Rudolph Garrigue, Bericht an die Commission für die Begründung einer deutschen Buchhandlung in den Vereinigten Staaten (Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus, 1846), 15. 20. PW 3 (24 October 1872): 403–49. 21. PW 4 (10 January 1874): 33. 22. PW 4 (21 March 1874): 483–84. 23. Fleming, R. R. Bowker, 63–66.

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notes to pages 174–188 24. Augusta Leypoldt to R. R. Bowker, 18 September 1880, Bowker Papers, Box 36, NYPL. 25. PW 74 (25 December 1909): 1943. 26. PW 10 (1 July 1876): 66. 27. A. H. Leypoldt to R. R. Bowker, 18 September 1880, Bowker Papers, Box 36, NYPL.

Chapter 16 1. A. Growoll to R. R. Bowker, 12 August 1878, Bowker Papers, Box 35, NYPL. 2. Edward McClung Fleming, R. R. Bowker: Militant Liberal (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1952), 53. 3. R. R. Bowker to C. Cutter, 3 January 1879, Bowker Papers, Box 4, NYPL. 4. Wayne A. Wiegand, Irrepressible Reformer: A Biography of Melvil Dewey (Chicago: American Library Association, 1996), 57–58. 5. Ibid. 6. LJ 3 ( June 1880): 168–69. 7. PW 18 (7 August 1880): 157; LJ 5 ( July/August 1880): 207. 8. F. Leypoldt to R. R. Bowker, 11 August 1880, Bowker Papers, Box 35, NYPL. 9. Fleming, R. R. Bowker, 175–76. 10. F. Leypoldt to R. R. Bowker, 5 August 1881, Bowker Papers, Box 35, NYPL. 11. Ibid. 12. Fleming, R. R. Bowker, 179. 13. A. H. Leypoldt to R. R. Bowker, 2 April 1886, Bowker Papers, Box 35, NYPL. 14. Fleming, R. R. Bowker, 227–39. 15. A. H. Leypoldt to R. R. Bowker, 23 March 1886, Bowker Papers, Box 35, NYPL. It is important to note that Leypoldt was not criticizing women when she talked about “undeveloped female capacity.” She actually meant that women were capable of almost anything—that they were an untapped or neglected business resource. 16. A. H. Leypoldt to R. R. Bowker, 9 December 1886, Bowker Papers, Box 35, NYPL. 17. A. H. Leypoldt to R. R. Bowker, 23 March 1886, Bowker Papers, Box 35, NYPL. 18. R. R. Bowker to A. H. Leypoldt, 20 July 1909, Bowker Papers, Box 35, NYPL. 19. Fleming, R. R. Bowker, 190. 20. R. R. Bowker to A. H. Leypoldt, 5 January 1911, Bowker Papers, Box 35, NYPL.

Chapter 17 1. Alfred D. Chandler, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1977). 2. Robert Porter, Henry Gannett, and William Hunt, “Progress of the Nation,” in Report on the Population of the United States at the Eleventh Census: 1890, Part 1 (Washington, D.C.: Bureau of the Census/Government Printing Office, 1895). 3. Octave Uzanne, “The End of Books,” Scribner’s Magazine Illustrated 16 (August 1894): 221–32. 4. Philip Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), 276–77. 5. Edward Wyatt, “The Winds of Change Are Felt at Publishers Weekly,” New York Times, 5 January 2005, available at http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C04EED91339F936A35752C0A 9639C8B63. 6. Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (1934; repr., New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1963), 136.

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Index

A. K. Loring Publishers, 116 Abbott, Jacob, 91 abecedarios, in New Spain, 14 About, Edmond, 130, 134 ABTA. See American Book Trade Association Adams, Charles F., Jr., 69 Adams, Henry, 55 Adams, Isaac, 67 Adams and Ellis, booksellers, 114, 118 Adams press, 67, 89, 90, 186 advertising of books in Leypoldt publications, 146–47, 148, 151, 160, 162–63 in 19th century, 112–13, 145 review copies as, 123 age of organization, after Civil War, 139–40 agricultural reform, calls for, 184 Ailly, Pierre, 38 ALA. See American Library Association Alderfer, E. Gordon, 47 Alexander VI (pope), 13 Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, 58 An Almanack for the Year 1639, 30 America. See also New World as creation of book trades, ix, 3, 8, 11, 24 definition of, ix discovery of, book trades and, 8–11 first book printed in, 30 first printer in, 29 first printing press, ix, 29–31 first professional printers, 32 first publisher in, 30 first use of name in English work, 20 naming of, 11–12 American book buyers, Garrigue on, 75 American Book Circular, 142 American bookstores, characteristics of, 100–101 American Book Trade Association (ABTA), 168, 174, 183 American book trades colonial period: expansion of, 34–35, 36; first printing press in, ix, 29–31; as fragmented,

independent markets, 49–50; Germanlanguage trade, 43–48; growth of, 49–50, 51; Jamestown colony, 25–26; market growth, 51; Maryland, 36, 50; Massachusetts Bay Colony, 28–32; Philadelphia, 32–35; Plymouth Colony, 26–27; regulation of, 32–36, 50–51; syndicates, 35; ties to London book trade, 49, 51, 52; Virginia, 35–36 copyright law and, 58 definition of, viii–ix and digital media, impact of, 187–89 disarray of, before late 19th century, x, xii in early United States: book pricing in, 76; competition as defining feature of, 85–86, 88; distribution as issue in, 59; as fragmented, independent markets, 52, 57–58, 60, 76; German views on, 76, 84–85; growth of, 92–93; printers as center of, 86; as recreation of English book trade, 52, 57, 59; reform efforts, 91–94, 107–9; regulation of, 57–59, 91–93, 108–9; retail and wholesale market, blurred distinction between, 85–86; trade associations, efforts to establish, 58–59, 140–43; as volatile and unstable, 76, 83, 84–85, 89, 94, 107 and era of organization, after Civil War, 140 growth of, 49–50, 51, 61–62, 92–93 origin: in beginnings of print culture, ix; multiple points of, xii regulation of. See regulation of book trades American Book Trade Union, 168, 173 American Catalogue of Books, ix for 1869, 148–51 for 1876, 174–76, 179, 181–82 under Bowker, 180 demise of, 182 Internet successor to, 187 American Company of Booksellers, 141 American Educational Catalogue, 160–62, 165, 176 American Library Association (ALA), x founding of, 171, 173

{ 20 9 }

Index American Library Association (continued) and Library Journal, 176, 178 Public Libraries and, 181 American Library Journal, 171–72, 173, 174. See also Library Journal (LJ) American Literary Gazette and Publishers’ Circular, 143, 157–58 American Publishers’ Circular and Literary Gazette (APC), 92, 107–8, 109, 142–43 Anabaptists, 71 Andersen, Hans Christian, 110, 112–13 Anglo-Spanish War (1585-1604), 22 Annual American Catalogue (Third Year), 156 antiquarian bookstores in Philadelphia, 104–5 APC. See American Publishers’ Circular and Literary Gazette Appleton, William H., 92, 94, 136, 141, 142, 186 Appleton publishing house, 130, 144, 160 Appleton’s Literary Bulletin, 142 apprenticeship program for booksellers, in Germany, 98–100 Armbruster, Anthony, 45 Arnold, Matthew, 115 The Arte of Navigation (Cortés), 21, 22 Arthur, Timothy Shay, 101 association(s). See trade association(s) Astor, John Jacob, 75, 77 Astor Library, 75 Atkins, Samuel, 33 Atlantic Monthly, 126 auction sales, efforts to reform, 93–94 Avery, William, 31 backlists, in Leypoldt’sTrade Circular Annual for 1871, 152 Bacon, Francis, 20 Baltimore, colonial, book trade in, 51 bands, in binding, 65 Bargrave, Thomas, 26 Barnes, Alfred S., 92, 99 Barnes, J. C., 155 bartering of printed sheets, in early European book trade, 39 Baskerville, Alfred, 82 The Bay Psalm Book (The Whole Book of Psalms), 30 Bechler, Gustavus R., 123 Becker, Peter, 43 Beecher, Henry Ward, 92 The Beginner’s French Reader (Pylodet), 136 Beissel, Conrad, 43–44, 45, 47 Bell, Alexander Graham, 169 Bellamy, Edward, 184–85, 188

Bericht an die Commission für die Begründung einer deutschen Buchhandlung in den Vereinigten Statten (Garrigue), 74–77, 84–85, 110 Berkeley, William, 35–36 Bertalanffy, Ludwig von, xi Bible Algonquin, 14 German, 44 of Gutenberg, 5–6 bibliographies. See also trade catalogs Frankfurt catalogs, 41–42 Trübner on importance of, 152–53 Biblioteca Americana, 109 Bilder-Atlas zum Conversations-Lexicon, Englishlanguage edition, 78–79, 81–82 binding, case, 65–66 Birch-Pfeiffer, Charlotte, 116–17 black-letter (gothic; fraktur) type, 44 The Bloody Theater; or Martyrs Mirror (van Braght, ed.), 45–47 Bogardus, James, 91 Boker, George Henry, 80, 105–6, 121 Bonstetten, Charles Victor, 123–24 book(s). See also printed books bookseller bartering of, in early Europe, 39 definition of, viii future of: history of threats to, vii–viii, 185, 188; new threats to, vii, 188 as generic commodity in American shops, 100–101 as generic commodity in German-American shops, 75–76 ongoing popularity of, vii–viii as technology, excellence of, viii book factory. See also manufacturing of books Ephrata Cloister press as, 47 modern introduction of, 89–91 book history economics approach to, x–xi, 2 history of discipline, 3, 187 literary approach, as standard, x and print culture, study of, 3 subjects encompassed by, xi The Book in America (Lehmann-Haupt), x, 98 The Book of All Time ( Jones), 179 Book of Songs (Heine), 114, 118, 120, 122, 124 book reviews as advertising, 113 booksellers bartering of printed sheets, in early Europe, 39 in colonial Boston, 31, 49–50 as division of book trade, viii, 87, 183

{ 2 10 }

Index

English, in colonial America, 52 German, in America, 77–82 (see also Christern, Friedrich W.; Leypoldt, Frederick) in Germany, training for, 98–100 and libraries, concerns about, 173 as library purchasing agents, 101–2 licensing of, in 16th century Frankfurt, 40 in London book trade system, 56 modern demise of, 187 as publishers, 86, 87 Booksellers’ Advertiser and Monthly Register of New Publications, 142 Booksellers’ Association of New York, 91, 92 booksellers’ discounts, in early U.S. book trade, 59, 76 The Booksellers’ Library and How to Use It (Growoll, ed.), 181 Bookseller’s Protective Union, 167–68 Booksellers’ Union German. See Börsenverein der Deutschen Buchhändler Growoll’s efforts toward, 181 Leypoldt on trend toward, 157 Books for Children (Hewins), 179 Books in Print, ix–x, 163, 187 BooksInPrint.com, 187, 188 bookstores American, characteristics of, 100–101 circulation libraries in, 107 Civil War and, 106–7 German, characteristics of, 100 German-American, Garrigue on, 75–76 book trade(s) categorization of, viii characteristics vs. hand-copying of manuscripts, 3–8, 54–55 as complex of interrelated businesses, viii concern with commercial aspect of books, viii definition of, 3 demise, history of predictions about, vii major divisions of, viii, 87, 183 origin, in invention of printing, 3 book trade exhibitions at Centennial Exhibition, 166, 169–70 early efforts, 141 book trade fairs in Frankfurt, 39–41, 144 in Leipzig, 74, 108, 144 in Lyon, 39 book trade syndicates, early efforts at, 35, 104 Bordman, William, 29 Börsenblatt für den Deutschen Buchhandel (periodical), 73, 108

Börsenverein der Deutschen Buchhändler, 73, 77, 98, 108–9, 157, 166–67 Boston book trade associations, efforts to establish, 58 book trade in, 61 colonial: book trade in, 49–50, 51; first booksellers in, 31; first printing press in, 32 Bourne, William, 22 Bowker, Richard Rogers and American Library Journal, 171–72 correspondence, 135, 174–75, 181 death of, 187 on Leypoldt’s bookstore, 106 Leypoldt’s influence on, x and Library Journal, 173, 177 politics of, 184 and Publishers’ Weekly: assumption of control of, 180; financial problems of, 177, 178–79; management of, 180–82; purchase of, 177, 178–79; as staff, 156, 158, 159–60, 161, 162, 164, 165, 168; time away from, 179, 180–81 Bradford, Andrew, 43, 100 Bradford, William, 23, 26, 32–34, 35, 42 Brauns, Ernst Ludwig, 73, 74 Breve y más compendiosa doctrina christiana en lengua mexicana y castellana, 15 brevier type, 146, 160 broadsides, in Massachusetts Bay Colony, 30 Brockhaus, Heinrich, 77 Brotherhead, William, 104–5 Brugnatelli, Luigi, 65 Buckner, John, 36 Bulls of Donation, 13, 18, 21 Burnham’s Book Store (Boston), 107 Cabot, John, 18–19 Cabral, Pedro Álvares, 10 calendar of book trade, Publishers’ Weekly publication schedule and, 158, 160, 165 Cambridge Agreement of 1629, 27 Cambridge press, 28–31 Camp of the Solitary. See Ephrata Cloister Candide (Voltaire), 20 Carey, Henry C., 141 Carey and Lea publishers, 141 Carlyle, Thomas, 3 Carpenter, Samuel, 33–34 Cartier, Jacques, 19 case binding, 65–66 casting off, 5 casting of type, 46–47, 62, 68

{ 211 }

Index Castle Garden Emigrant Landing Depot, 82 catalogs. See trade catalogs Catalogue of Books Printed in the United States, 60, 142 categorical publication lists, in Leypoldt’s publications, 151, 156 Catherine of Aragon, 19 Caxton, William, 52–53 censorship English regulation of publishing, 32, 53 in 15th century Spain, 8 in Massachusetts colonies, 32 unofficial, 126 Centennial Exhibition (Philadelphia, 1876), 185 American Library Association meeting at, 171, 173 book trade convention at, 168, 170–71, 174 book trade exhibition at, 166, 169–70 exhibits at, 168–69 central distribution system, efforts to create, 141 chains of causation, difficulty of mapping, xi Challen, Howard, 135 Chandler, Alfred D., Jr., xiii, 139, 183 Charles I (king of England), 27, 28 Charleston, colonial, book trade in, 51 Charles V (king of Spain), 14 Charvat, William, x–xi, 60, 62, 100 children’s books by 19th century publishers, 78, 79, 91, 117, 120, 122, 129, 134 Childs, George W., 143, 157 Christern, Friedrich W. American views on, 105 business dealings of, 101 and German bookseller training, 98–100 German bookshop of, 79–83, 101, 102 Leypoldt as assistant for, 95–96, 97–100 and Leypoldt’s distribution network, 111–12, 114, 116 and Leypoldt’s Philadelphia bookstore, 104 and Leypoldt’s trade journals, 147, 148 Christmas Bulletin, 162–63 Christmas market, Leypoldt’s publications for, 162–63 Christmas Trade Circular, 162 Chronicon Ephratense (Lamech), 47 circulation libraries, in bookstores, 107 Civil War age of organization following, 139–40 and growth of New York City, 138 impact on bookstores, 106–7 impact on publishers, 126–27 and railroad network, 138–39 Clarke, Robert, 108

Cleveland, Grover, 184 Clymer, George, 64 codex design of books, 63 Coelho, Gonçalo, 9–10 Collinson, Peter, 45 Columbian Exposition (Chicago, 1893), 185 Columbia Press, 64 Columbus, Christopher, 8–9, 10, 17, 18, 19, 38, 39 The Coming of the Book (Febvre and Martin), 2–3, 38–39 common schools movement, and educational book trade, 161–62 communication by print, as focus of book history, xi Compagnie des Cent-Associés, 19 competition as defining feature of U.S. book trade, 85–86, 88 in educational book trade, 161–62 regulation of in English book trade, 57 regulation of in European book trade, 86 Complimentary Fresh Fruit and Flower Festival (1955), 92–93, 143 composition, in manuscript vs. print production, 4 compound lever printing press, 64 comprehensive bibliographic service, Office of Publishers’ Weekly as, 164, 180, 182, 183, 186–87 consumer price index, in Civil War, 127 Continental Monthly, 105, 113 continuousire papermaking machine, 68 conventions, national at Centennial Exhibition, 168, 170–71 establishment of, 168 Cook, Martha Walker, 113, 114 cooperation in book trade in England vs. early U.S., 52–53, 56, 57, 59 lack of, in U.S. book trades, 85 Coppée, Henry, 123 copyists, book production by, 3–5, 54–55 Copyright Act of 1870, 144, 153–54 copyright law as aid to bibliographic catalog, 153–54 digital media and, 189 in England, 57 international protection, calls for, 93 as issue, 182 Leypoldt on, 167 in 16th century Frankfurt, 40 in United States, 58, 59 Corliss Double Steam Engine, 169, 171 corporations, modern

{ 212 }

Index consolidation of after Civil War, 139–40 development of, 139 dominance of American economy, 183–84 takeover of book trade, 187 Corson, Caroline Rollin, 117 Corson, Hiram, 105, 117–18 Cortés, Hernando, 14 Cortés, Martín, 21, 22, 24 Cosa, Juan de la, 9 Cosmographiae introductio (Waldseemüller), 11–13 cost of living, in Civil War, 127 “courtesy of the trade” principle, 59, 128 Craik, Dinah Maria, 129 Cromberger, Jacobo, 14, 16 Cromberger, Juan, 14–15 cujus regio, eius religio principle, 41 Culpeper, Thomas, 36 cultural gathering places, bookstores as, 105–6 Cumulative Book Index, 181 Cunningham, Richard, xi Cushman, Robert, 24, 26 Cutter, Charles A., 180 cylinder press, 67 Dante Album (Doré), 124 Darnton, Roger, xi Day, John, 19 Day, Stephen, 29, 30 decades, 21 Decades of the Newe Worlde or West India (Eden, tr.), 21, 23 demand for books, growth of, in early United States, 62 Dennett, J. R., 133 “Den Vereinigten Staaten” (Goethe), 103, 105 De Orbe Novo (Martyr), 21 Der Deutsch in Nord-Amerika (Fürstenwärther), 72 Description of New England (Smith), 26 Deutsche Gesellschaft, 82 Deutsche Vereinsbuchhandlung in Nordamerika, 73 Dewey, Melvil and ALA, founding of, 171–72 and American Library Association, 173 character of, 173–74 early career of, 171–72 Leypoldt and, x and Library Journal, 173–74, 177 Dewey Decimal System, 150 Die Buchhändlerzeitung (periodical), 71 Diffenderffer, Frank, 42

digital media, impact on book industry, 187–89 discounts, introductory, in educational book market, 161 discount system, 87, 112 collapse of in America, 87–88 for institutional buyers, 168 libraries and, 173 trade sales and, 158–59 20 percent rule, 168, 173 distribution bookseller bartering, in early Europe, 39 increased production and, 88–89 as issue, 7, 55–56, 159–60 in London book trade, 55–56 railroads and, 68–69, 94 and transportation costs, in early U.S., 59, 60, 62, 88–89 Western migration and, 62 distribution networks lack of, in mid-19th century, 111–12 of Leypoldt Publishing, 111–12, 114–16 of Ticknor and Fields, 111–12, 126 distribution of type, 6 Ditson, Oliver, 113, 114 Doctrina breve muy provechosa de las cosas que pertenecen a la fe catholica y a nuestra cristianidad, 15 Doggett, John, 143 Doggett’s New York Directory, 143 Drake, Francis, 22 Dudley, Thomas, 28 Dunkers, 42 Dunster, Henry, 30, 31 Dunton, John, 49 Dutch slavery, 72 Duyckinck, George and Evert, 142 ecclesiastical publishing enterprises in colonial America, 16, 45–48 in New Spain, 14–16 economic structure of book manufacture and printing, 53–55 economies of scale corporate consolidation and, 140 mass production and, 53–54 economy, U.S. after Civil War, and rise of industrial publishing enterprises, 130 Civil War and, 106–7, 126–27 Eden, Richard, 21, 22, 23, 24 Edison, Thomas, 185 edition binding, 65–66 editions, cost-effectiveness of, viii, 4–5, 7, 53–54

{ 2 13 }

Index education in colonial Virginia, 35–36 in Massachusetts Bay Colony, 29 educational publications. See also textbooks Civil War and, 107 Leypoldt’s American Educational Catalogue, 160–62, 165, 176 regulation of trade in, 161 The Education of Henry Adams (Adams), 55 Eichendorff, Joseph von, 133 Eisenstein, Elizabeth, 2–3, 187 electric power, introduction of, 169, 185 electromechanical phonograph, and demise of the book, vii electronic media, impact on book industry, 187–89 electrotyping, 65 Eliot, John, 31 Elizabeth I (queen of England), 21–22 Emancipation Proclamation, Leypoldt’s limited edition of, 121–22 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 10 “The End of Books” (Uzanne), vii, 185 England. See also London book trade claims to New World lands, 18 conceptions of New World from written accounts, 17, 19–24 copyright law in, 57 exploration of New World, 18–19, 21–22 as maritime power, 19, 21 and Spain, relations between, 19, 22 English books in early United States: American pirating of, 52; domination of market, 52, 59–60 U.S. sales, in 19th century, 70–71 English colonies advocates for establishing, 21 arguments to justify, 27 book trade: expansion of, 34–35, 36; first printing press in, ix, 29–31; as fragmented, independent markets, 49–50; Germanlanguage trade, 43–48; growth of, 49–50, 51; Jamestown colony, 25–26; market growth, 51; Maryland, 36, 50; Massachusetts Bay Colony, 28–32; Philadelphia, 32–35; Plymouth Colony, 26–27; regulation of, 33, 34, 35–36, 50–51; syndicates in, 35; ties to London book trade, 49, 51, 52; Virginia, 35–36 characteristics vs. Spanish colonies, 25 as collection of semiautonomous settlements, 25 delay in establishing, 18–19, 21

early eyewitness accounts from, 23 establishment of, 22 population growth in, 36 re-creation of English life as goal of, 26, 28 English Traits (Emerson), 10 Ephrata Cloister (Pennsylvania) establishment of, 43 press at, 45–48 works printed for, 44 Epistola de insulis nuper inventis (Columbus), 9, 17, 18, 38, 39 Erasmus, 20 Erie Canal, 62 Espinar, Alonso de, 14 European book trade. See also German book trade early: book trade fairs, 39–41; German dominance of, 38; international nature of, 38; and Latin as lingua franca, 39, 41 interest in U.S. market, 70 expositions Centennial Exhibition, 168–71, 174, 185 Columbian Exposition, 185 Fanchon the Cricket (Sand), 116–17 Farnum, Joseph, 31 Febvre, Lucien, xi, 2–3, 38–39 Ferdinand II (king of Aragon), 8, 13, 18 Fields, James T., 125–26, 127, 134, 186 Fillmore, Millard, 97 financial issues in publishing for early American presses, 16 for first New World press, 15 investment for moveable type printing, 6–7, 53–54 mass production, and cost-effectiveness of printing runs, viii, 4–5, 7, 53–54 remainders, 7, 55, 85–86, 88 fireproof designs for production plants, 89–90 First Amendment, 58. See also freedom of the press Fischer, Joseph, 12 Fiske, John, 134 Forrest, Edwin, 106 forty-eighters, 79, 97, 121 Forty Years Among the Old Booksellers of Philadelphia (Brotherhead), 104–5 Foucault, Michel, xii The Four Elements (Rastell), 20–21 The Four Voyages (Vespucci), 10, 11, 20, 24, 39 Fox, George, 33 Fr. W. Christern’s Monthly Bulletin of French Literature, 82, 100

{ 2 14 }

Index fraktur (black-letter; gothic) type, 44 Frame of Government of Pennsylvania (1682), 32 France, New World land claims, 19 Frankfurt as book trade center, 39–41 book trade fair in, 39–41, 144 Franklin, Benjamin competition for, 51–52 on German immigrants, 72 and German-language market, 43–46 and myth of self-made man, 96 and paper production in colonies, 44 partnerships in book industry, 35 printing operations of, 34–35, 57 printing press used by, 63 freedom of the press. See also regulation of book trades in colonial Philadelphia, 32 congressional efforts to limit, 58 lack of in colonies, 34 U.S. guarantees of, 58 Friedrich II (Holy Roman Emperor), 39–41 Frobisher, Martin, 21–22 frontiers, closing of, 184 Fuller, Fanny, 105, 118, 122 Furness, William H., 105 Fürstenwärther, Moritz von, 72 Garrigue, Charlotte Lydia Whiting, 77, 78, 82 Garrigue, Emilie, 81, 83 Garrigue, Rudolph bookstore ventures in America, 77–82 family of, 135 later career, 82 publishing ventures, 78–79, 81–82 report on American book market, 73–77, 84–85, 110 Garrigue & Christern’s Monthly Bulletin of German Literature, 81 Garrulities of an Octogenarian Editor (Holt), 68–69, 136 Gaskell, Philip, x Gati, Giuliano, 9 Gemantown, Pennsylvania, 41–42 The General Historie of Virginia, New England, and the Summer Isles (Smith), 26 geography of U.S., and distribution of books in early America, 59 Germantauner Zeitung (newspaper), 44 German-American book dealers, Garrigue on, 75–76 German bookstores, characteristics of, 100 German book trade



in America (see also Christern, Friedrich W.; Garrigue, Rudolph; Leypoldt, Frederick): American views on, 104–5; colonial period, 43–48; Philadelphia bookstores, 104; publishers, 78–79, 81–82 in Europe, 19th century: bookseller training, 98–100; center of, 98; interest in U.S. market, 70–77, 88 in Europe before 1650, 38–41; book trade fairs, 39–41; works published by, 38, 39 regulation of, 73, 98, 100 Germania Fire Insurance Society, 82 German immigrants anti-immigrant sentiment and, 82, 97 Arizona Territory, 74 arrivals and settlement patterns, 37, 41–43, 71–72, 73, 79, 95, 102–3 assimilation of, 71, 72–73, 74, 95 the Auswanderung, 73, 95 demographic characteristics of, 74 erosion of German-American culture in, 71, 72–73, 74 experience of, works on, 72 and German language book trade, 43–48, 71 importation of books to, 42 literacy rates, 42, 43 Palatine migration, 42–43 redemptioners, 72 religious diversity in, 43 German-language newspapers, 44 German revolution of 1848 79, 97 German Society of New York City, 82 German (gothic; black-letter; fraktur) type, 44 Germany, before 19th century, 38 Gilbert, Humphrey, 21–22 Gilded Age, 140, 184 Ginn, Edwin, 135 Glover, Elizabeth, 29–30, 86 Glover, Joseph, 29 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 103, 105 gothic (black-letter; fraktur) type, 44 Gottlieb Mittelberger’s Journey to Pennsylvania in the Year 1750 and Return to Germany in the Year 1754 (Mittelberger), 72 Gouttes de rosée (Pylodet), 129 grammars of Indian languages, 14, 31 in New Spain, 14 by 19th century publishers, 135 Grange movement, 184 Grant, Ulysses S., 171 Great Central Fair, 121 Green, Samuel, 31–32

{ 2 15 }

Index Griffin, Clive, 15 Grigg, John, 105 Growoll, Adolph on American Catalogue, 177 death of, 181 on Leypoldt, 95–96, 97, 99, 102, 125 as PW staff member, 164–65, 179, 180, 181 on Rode, 143 Guide to American Literature (Trübner), 150, 152 guild system in Europe, 52, 63 lack of, in U.S., 59, 76 Gutenberg, Johannes, 1, 5–6, 7–8 The Gutenberg Galaxy (McLuhan), 2–3 H. W. Wilson Co., 181–82 Haines, Helen E., 181 Hamill, Francis, 30 hand binding, 65–66 hand-copying of manuscripts, introduction of printing and, 3–8, 54–55 Hans Breitmann’s Ballads (Leland), 118 Harper, John, 89–91, 186 Harper, Joseph W., 136, 186 Harper & Brothers and educational market, 160 fire at (1853), 89 growth of, 130 modern book factory of, 89–91, 93, 94 origins as print house, 87 as publisher and manufacturer, 111 and trade sales, 93, 159 The Harper Establishment; or, How Books Are Made (Abbott), 91 Harvard, John, 28 Harvard College, founding of, 28 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 134 Hays, Matilda, 116 Hege, Christian, 46 Heine, Heinrich, 97, 114, 118, 122, 124 Hemans, Felicia, 27 hemispheres, global, origin of concept, 12–13 Henry IV (king of England), 52 Henry VII (king of England), 18 Henry VIII (king of England), 19 The Hermitage, and Other Poems (Sill), 134 Hewins, Caroline, 179 Historia rerum ubique gestarum (Piccolomini), 9, 38 History and Art of Printing (Luckombe), 13 A History of Book Publishing in the United States (Tebbel), x

History of English Literature (Taine), 136 History of Printing in America (Thomas), x, 51 history of the book. See book history A History of the Book in America (Amory and Hall), xi Hoe, Richard, 67 Hoe, Robert, 64, 67 Hoe, Robert II, 139 Hoe Type Revolving Press, 67 Holland, New World land claims of, 19, 26 Holt, Henry character of, 131 on courtesy of the trade, 59 early career of, 130–31 and educational market, 160 Garrulities of an Octogenarian Editor, 68–69, 136 interest in literary publishing, 136 on Leypoldt, 102, 136 Leypoldt logotype and, 115 Leypoldt’s influence on, x, 137 partnership with Leypoldt, 130–32 (see also Leypoldt, Holt, and Williams; Leypoldt and Holt) publishers admired by, 136 on train travel, 68–69 Holy Roman Empire print culture in, 38 Thirty Years War and, 41 homeopathic bookstores, German, 104, 105 Horton, Sparrow, 100 The Hub, 171–72 Hudson, Henry, 19, 26 Hughes, Thomas Parke, xi–xii, xiii The Ice-Maiden, and Other Tales (Andersen), 110, 112–13 Iconographic Encyclopedia of Science, Literature, and Art Systematically Arranged by J, G. Heck, 78–79, 81–82 Imago mundi (Ailly), 9, 38 immigrants. See also German immigrants anti-immigrant movements, 82, 97 indenture of, 72 imposing, 5 impressions on early wooden presses, 6 in printing, 5 indenture, German immigrants and, 72 Index Medicus, 175, 179 industrial and cultural expositions Centennial Exhibition, 168–70, 174, 185 Columbian Exposition, 185

{ 2 16 }

Index industrial organizations, national, rise of after Civil War, 140 industrial publishing enterprises, rise of after Civil War, 130 Industrial Revolution and advances in print technology, 62 Second, 139 inflation, Civil War and, 106 Inquisition, restricted books under, 15 interest of the trade. See mutual interest principle International Standard Book Numbers (ISBNs), 187 Internet, impact on book industry, 187–88 Introduction to Cosmography (Waldseemüller), 11–13 introductory discounts, in educational book trade, 161 Irish Catholics, and anti-immigrant sentiment, 97 iron press, development of, 63–64 Irving, Washington, 92 Isabella (queen of Castile), 8, 13 ISBNs (International Standard Book Numbers), 187 Ivison, Henry, 155 J. B. Lippincott & Co., 93 J. & H. Langley, publishers, 142 James I (king of England), 25 Jamestown colony, 25–26, 37, 50 jobbers Franklin (Benjamin) as, 34 role of, 87–88, 93 The Jobsiad (Kortum), 113 Johannes of Cologne, 38 Johannes of Westphalia, 38 Johnson, Marmaduke, 31–32 Jones, L. E., 179 Jugge, Richard, 21 Kalendarium Pennsilvaniense (Atkins), 33 Kapp, Friedrich, 79, 97 King and Baird, printers, 111 King Philip’s War, 31 Kingsley, Charles, 126 Kirby, F., 40 knowledge, impact of printing technology on, 2 Know-Nothing party, 97 Koenig, Friedrich, 67 Koradi, Rudolph, 104, 105 Kortum, Karl, 113 Krauth, Charles Porterfield, 105 L. Johnson and Co., 111, 122

labor, value of, and mechanization of production, 139 labor costs, Civil War and, 139 labor-management divide, development of, after Civil War, 140 labor unions, growth of, 139, 183–84 Lamech, Brother, 47 “The Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers in New England,” 27 Landmarks of History (Yonge), 135–36 las Casas, Bartolomé de, 10 Latin, as lingua franca, and European book trade, 38, 41 law. See copyright law; regulation of book trades Lea, Henry Charles, 106 Lee, W., 133 Legends of the Birds (Leland), 121, 122 Lehmann-Haupt, Hellmut, x, 47 Leipzig as book trade center, 73, 98, 144 book trade fair in, 74, 108, 144 Leisure Time series (Leypoldt, Holt, and Williams), 136 Leland, Charles Godfrey on Christern’s bookstore, 80 Copperhead books of, 118–20 and Hans Breitmann’s Ballads, 118 and Leypoldt’s bookstore, 105, 106 Leypoldt’s publishing ventures and, 113–14, 120–21, 122, 133 Leland, Henry, 118 Lettera di Amerigo Vespucci della isole novamente trovate in quattro suoi viaggi (The Four Voyages; Vespucci), 10, 11, 20, 24, 39 letter punches, 46 letters of marque, 22 letters of patent, 18, 22 Leypoldt, Augusta H. Garrigue on American Catalogue for 1876, 174–75 character of, 135 children of, 145, 151 death of, 182 debt of, after Leypoldt’s death, 179–80 on Dewey, 174 on Leypoldt, 135, 174–75 marriage, 135 as Publishers’ Weekly staff, 165, 177, 180–81, 182 royalties from Leypoldt’s estate, 136 Leypoldt, Frederick and American book trades, efforts to organize, 107–9, 138, 144, 153–54, 158–59, 166–67

{ 2 17 }

Index Leypoldt, Frederick (continued) American Catalogues of, ix, 148–51, 174–76, 179, 181–82, 187 and American Educational Catalogue, 160–62 arrival in America, 95 background of, 96, 97 as bookstore assistant, 95–96, 97–100 books written by, 129, 136 business acumen of, 174–75, 179 character of, 135, 182 death of, 176, 179, 183 family of, 145, 151 financial problems of, 173–79 and Holt, 136, 137 (see also Leypoldt, Holt, and Williams; Leypoldt and Holt publishers) and Leypoldt and Holt’s Literary Bulletin, 136, 144–48, 151, 154 and Library Journal, 171–72, 173–74, 177–78 marriage of, 135, 145 and Monthly Book Circular, 154 move to New York, 129–30 Philadelphia bookstore of: circulation library in, 107, 129; and Civil War, 106–7; closing of, 129–30; as complement to publishing efforts, 130; as cultural gathering place, 105–6; customers for, 104; opening of, 102–3; transition to American bookstore, 107, 109 and public libraries, support for, 172–73 as publisher, 110–24 (see also Leypoldt, Holt, and Williams; Leypoldt and Holt publishers; Office of Publishers’ Weekly; Publishers’ Weekly); books published by, 112–24, 125–26, 127, 129, 130; campaign against underselling, 127–29; catalog of, 115; distribution network, 111–12, 114–16; limited success of, 125, 136–37; reputation of, 125–26, 127; wholesale publishing, turn toward, 128–30 return to Germany, 102 role in book trade: as issue, ix–x, xi; systems requirements, fulfilling of, xiii and Sanitary Commission, support for, 121–22 support for American Publishers’ Circular, 143 and trade catalog: efforts to create, 146–54, 160–61, 163; Publishers’ Trade List Annual (PTLA), 163 and trade journals (see also Publishers’ Weekly): Index Medicus, 175, 179; Leypoldt

and Holt’s Literary Bulletin, 136, 144–48, 151; Trade Circular and Literary Bulletin, 147–48, 151, 154; Trade Circular and Publishers’ Bulletin, 147, 154, 155, 156; Weekly Trade Circular, 156–58 and trade sales, campaign against, 158–59 as translator, 106 Leypoldt, Holt, and Williams, 136 Leypoldt, Marian Augusta, 151 Leypoldt, Rudolph, 145 Leypoldt and Holt publishers assets of, 132–33 books published by, 133, 134–35, 135–36 establishment of, 130–32 financial success of, 133, 135 Holt’s assumption of control of, 135, 136, 137, 144–45, 154 Holt’s social connections and, 133–34 support of book trade journals, 143, 144 Leypoldt and Holt’s Literary Bulletin, 136, 144–48, 154 Leypoldt’s Foreign Library, 115–17 L’Homme à l’oreille cassée (About), 130, 134 Libellus vere aureus (More), 19–20 liberal Republican mugwumps, 184 Librairie Étrangère (Philadelphia) circulation library in, 107, 129 and Civil War, 106–7 closing of, 129–30 as complement to publishing efforts, 130 as cultural gathering place, 105–6 customers for, 104 opening of, 102–3 transition to American bookstore, 107, 109 libraries as book buyers, Civil War and, 107 book dealers as purchasing agents for, 101–2 discounts for, 173 as market for German-language books, 75 public library movement, 172–73 Library Journal (LJ), ix–x. See also American Library Journal under Bowker, 180 Bowker Co. sale of, 187 financial problems of, 173–74, 176, 177–78 as official ALA forum, 173 Licensing Act of 1662, 32 Life of Chopin (Liszt), 113, 122 Lincoln, Abraham, 120, 121–22 linen rag, 47 Lippincott, Sara J., 126 Lippincott’s Magazine, 123 Liszt, Franz, 113

{ 2 18 }

Index The Literary News, 179 literary publishing, Holt’s interest in, 136 Literary Publishing in America, 1790-1850 (Charvat), x–xi, 60 literary reviews, vs. trade journals, 142 Livres Curieux, 80–81 LJ. See Library Journal Locke, R., 120 logotype of Leypoldt and Holt, 133, 137 of Leypoldt publishing, 115, 129 London, as metropolitan center, 52 London book trade competition, regulation of, 57 distribution of books in, 55–56 early United States book trade as recreation of, 52, 57, 59 and regional printers, conflicts with, 56–57 regulation of, 52–53, 144 Stationers’ Company and, 55 ties to Colonial book trade, 49, 51, 52 Looking Backward (Bellamy), 184–85 Loring, A. K., 145 Lowell, James Russell, 126 Luckombe, Philip, 13 Lyon, and European book industry, 16th century, 39 Mack, Alexander, Jr., 45 making ready, 6 management-labor divide, development of, after Civil War, 140 The Man of the North and the Man of the South (Bonstetten), 123–24 Manthen, Johannes, 38 Manual des adultos (1540), 15 manufacturing, new model of created by Second Industrial Revolution, 139–40 manufacturing of books. See also mass production; technology of printing in colonial America, 34 and cost-effectiveness of editions, viii, 4–5, 7, 53–54 costs of printing, difficulty of estimating, 54–55 digital media, impact of, 188–89 as division of book trade, 87, 183 modern book factory, introduction of, 89–91 moveable type printing and, 7–8 production facilities, fireproof designs for, 89–90 production lines, introduction of, 90–91 separation from publishing, 111

manuscript copies of books, characteristics of, 3–5, 54–55 market for books in America, fragmented nature of, 49–50, 52, 57–58, 60, 76 in colonial America, rapid growth of, 51 difficulty of estimating, 54–55 in early America, 52 estimation of edition size, 7, 54–55 Marlow, George, 117 Martens, Thierry, 20 Martin, Henri-Jean, xi, 2–3, 38–39 Martyr, Peter, 21, 24 Martyrs Mirror (van Braght, ed.), 45–47 Marx, Karl, 97 Mary I (queen of England), 53 Maryland, colonial, book trade in, 36, 50 Masaryk, Alice Garrigue, 77 Massachusetts Bay Colony book trade in, 28–32 establishment of, 27–28 missionary work, 31 regulation of publishing industry in, 32 mass production book trade as earliest example of, xii–xiii, 16 and cost-effectiveness of printing runs, viii, 4–5, 7, 53–54 and economic structure of book manufacture, 53–54 problems of, in book trade, viii–ix, 8, 53–56 and remainders as issue, 85–86 and standardization, 4–5 matrices in stereotyping, 65 in type casting, 46 typesetting machines and, 186 McLuhan, Marshall, 2–3 mechanization of manufacturing, after Civil War, 139 media industry, publishing houses as brand names of, 187 Medici, Lorenzo de Pierfrancesco de’, 9 Melcher, Frederic G., 182, 187 Melville, Herman, 134 Memoirs (Leland), 80 Memoirs of a Good-for-Nothing (Eichendorff ), 133 Mendelssohn’s letters from Italy and Switzerland. (Mendelssohn), 113, 122, 133 Mendoza, Antonio de, 14, 15 Mennonites, 42, 45–46 Mercantile Library Company, 129 Mercator, Gerardus, 12–13 Mergenthaler Linotype, 186

{ 2 19 }

Index Messe Frankfurt (Frankfurt Trade Fair), 39–41 metropolitan center, U.S. lack of, 52 Miller, James, 116 Miller, Peter, 46 Modern Essays No. 1: Heinrich Heine (Arnold), 115 molds, for type casting, 46, 62 Monachesi, Marian M., 107, 129, 164, 181 Monachesi, Nicolo di Rienzi, 164 monopoly, Stationers’ Company as, 55, 57 Monthly Book Circular, 154 morality play, 20 Moravian Brethren, 44 More, Thomas, 11, 19–20, 21, 22, 23, 24 Morison, Samuel Eliot, 10 Morris, Benjamin J., 133 Morse, Samuel F. B., 92 Mother Pitcher’s Poems for Little People (Leland), 122 Mourt’s Relation (A Relation or Journal of the Beginning and Proceedings of the English Plantation Settled at Plimoth in New England), 26 moveable type printing and edition size, estimation of, 7, 54–55 financial investment required for, 6–7, 53–54 impact of, 1–3, 188 invention of, 1 and mass production, problems of, viii–ix, 53–56 new manufacturing model created by, 7–8 process of, before Industrial Revolution, 62–63 replacement by typesetting machines, 186 mugwumps, 184 Mumford, Lewis, xii, 1–2, 11, 188 Mundus Novus (Vespucci), 10, 39 Münster, Sebastian, 21, 24 mutual interest principle American publishers’ failure to adopt, 128 and public libraries, support of, 173 and trade association, need for, 167 Mysterion Anomias (Beissel), 43–44 National Book Trade Association, proposal for, 167 National Labor Union (NLU), 139 nativism, 82, 97 Natural History of the Indies (Ovieda), 21, 23 Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, 1880-1930 (Hughes), xi–xii, xiii New Atlantis (Bacon), 20 New Book Agreement of 1900, 112

A New Interlude and a Mery, of the Nature of the Four Elements (Rastell), 20–21 A New Introduction to Bibliography (Gaskell), x new media, and demise of the book, vii New Spain first printing press in, 13–16 regulation of printing in, 15 newspapers German-language, 44 imported, Civil War and, 106 as work for printers, in colonial America, 34 New World concept of, as creation of Vespucci, 10–11 English conceptions of from written accounts, 17, 19–24 English exploration of, 18–19, 21–22 first book printed in, 15 first printer in, 14–15 first printing press in, ix, 13–16 New York book trade associations, efforts to establish, 58 German immigration to, 102–3 German interest in book market in, 76–77 growth of, 102, 138 New York, colonial book trade in, 50, 51 royal printers for, 34 New York Book Publishers’ Association, 92, 93, 94, 107, 141, 142–43 Nicolay, John G., 122 Nonconformist tracts, English suppression of, 32 Northwest Passage, search for, 21–22 Norton, Charles B., 92, 142 Norton’s Literary Advisor, 142 Norton’s Literary Gazette and Publishers’ Circular, 142 Novisima recopilación de las leyes de Espana (1480), 8 Nuthead, William, 36, 50 The Oath of a Free-man (1639), 30 Office of Publishers’ Weekly Bowker’s assumption of control, 180 as brand name, 163–64 Centennial Exhibition exhibit, 170 competition and, 181–82 as comprehensive bibliographic service, 164, 180, 182, 183, 186–87 financial problems, 173–79 operations under Bowker, 180–82 staff, 179, 180–81

{ 220 }

Index

transition into R. R. Bowker Company, xiii, 164, 182 Of Plymouth Plantation (Bradford), 23 Ojeda, Alonso de, 9 organized labor, growth of, 139, 183–84 Osborne, Marian A., 102 Osgood & Co., publishers, 142 Our Year: A Child’s Book in Prose and Verse (Craik), 129 Ovando, Nicolás de, 13 Ovieda, Gonzalo, 21, 23, 24 Pablos, Juan, 14–15, 16 Paine, Thomas, 49 Palatine migration, 42–43 paper making of, before 19th century, 47, 62, 63 making of, 19th-century innovations in, 67–68 mill, in colonial Pennsylvania, 33–34 Stamp Act and, 50–51 supply of, in colonial America, 33–34, 44, 47, 50 papier-mâché molds, in stereotyping, 65 Parker, James, 35 Pastorius, Daniel Francis, 41–42 Peace of Augsburg (1555), 41 Peace of Westphalia, 41 Penn, William, 32, 41 Pennington, John, 105 Pennsylvania, colonial book trade in, 32–35 German migration to, 41–42 Peter, Hugh, 30 Petit cours de versions (Sadler), 117, 135–36 Philadelphia book trade associations, efforts to establish, 58 colonial, book trade in, 32–35, 50, 51 Philadelphische Zeitung (newspaper), 44 Philip of Spain, 53 photographic reproductions, publication of, 124 Piccolomini, 38 Pictures of Travel (Heine), 114, 118 Pilgrims colonies of, 26–28 views on America, 23 pirating of books and American “courtesy of the trade” principle, 59 in early United States, 52 by English regional publishers, 56 Planck, Stephen, 9

Plymouth Colony, 26–27, 30 Popham Colony, 25 Popular Science Monthly, 134 popular sovereignty, 119 population growth in U.S. and European interest in U.S. market, 70 and growth of book trade, 61–62 pornography, First Amendment and, 58 Portugal, claims to New World lands, 13, 18 postal rates, as issue, 182 Powell, William, 21 price of books. See also discount system underselling and, 88, 112, 127–29 wholesale and retail, determination of, 87–88, 111–12 primers, publication of, 115, 134, 135 print culture books on, 2 complex factors in creation of, 3 modern culture as, 1, 3 origins of American book trades in, ix printed books and economic structure of book manufacture, 53–54 effectiveness and durability of, 63 as political danger: and English regulation of publishing, 32, 53; in 15th century Spain, 8; in Massachusetts colonies, 32 printers and printing industry. See also technology of printing as center of early book trade, 86 as division of book trade, viii, 183 English, in colonial America, 52 first American professional printers, 32, 33 newspaper work for, in colonial America, 34 in Philadelphia, number of, 111 separation from publishing, 111 print history, U.S., standard works of, x printing plants, steam-driven, 68, 90–91 printing press(es). See also technology of printing Adams press, 67, 89, 90, 186 compound lever, 64 cylinder/rotary, 67, 141–42, 186 first in Boston, 32 first in New World, 13–16 iron, 63–64 in Massachusetts Bay Colony, 28–32 19th-century advances in, 63–68 steam-powered, 66–68, 89 web presses, 68 wooden hand, printing process on, 6, 62–63 The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (Eisenstein), 2–3, 187

{ 22 1 }

Index printing syndicates, 35 production. See manufacturing of books professional associations, Centennial Fair and, 171 The Profession of Bookselling (Growoll, ed.), 181 PTLA. See Publishers’ Trade List Annual Public Libraries, 181 public library movement, Leypoldt’s support for, 172–73 publishers and publishing industry bookstores run by, 111 definition of, 54, 86 digital media and, 189 as division of book trade, viii, 87, 183 first in America, 30 independent, first in U.S., 130, 137 industrial publishing enterprises, rise of after Civil War, 130 and libraries, concerns about, 173 rise to center of book trade, 87, 111 Publishers’ and Stationers’ Weekly Trade Circular, 157 Publishers’ Board of Trade, 155, 157, 160, 161, 167 publishers’ book series, 107, 115–17 Publishers’ Trade List Annual (PTLA), ix, 152, 154, 163, 179, 180 Publishers’ Uniform Trade List Directory, 135 Publishers’ Weekly (PW). See also Office of Publishers’ Weekly and American Library Journal, 172 under Bowker, 180 Bowker Co. sale of, 187 as brand name, 163–64 Christmas Trade Circular and Christmas Bulletin, 162–63 contents of, 158, 159, 162 coverage of Centennial Exhibition, 166, 169–70 digital age challenges faced by, 187–88 founding of, 157–58 impact on American book trade, ix–x, xi, xiii, 158, 164, 165, 180, 182, 183, 186–87 Leypoldt’s goals for, 164 under Melcher, 182 offices of, 163–64 as official forum of Publishers’ Board of Trade, 160 as official organ of book trade, 168 publication schedule, calendar of book trade and, 158, 160, 165 Put-in-Bay convention coverage, 168 special education issues of, 161–62 staff of, 164–65 success of, 165

support for public libraries, 172–73 Publishers’ Weekly and Library Journal, 178 publishing houses, American establishment of, 61 modern, as corporate brand names, 187 origins in bookselling, 87, 111 punches, letter, 46 Puritans English suppression of publications by, 32 missionary work, 31 New World colonies of, 26–30 Put-in-Bay convention (1874), 168, 173 Putnam, George Haven, 131 Putnam, George Palmer, 91–93 and book trade journalism, 142 death of, 186 Holt and, 131–32, 136 and New York Book Publishers’ Association, 141, 142–43 Putnam publishing house growth of, 130 and Leypoldt and Holt’s Literary Bulletin, 147 support of book trade journals, 144 PW. See Publishers’ Weekly Pylodet, L., 129, 136 Quakers, 42 quarto, 30 quires, 65 R. R. Bowker Company as comprehensive bibliographic service, 182, 186–87 current operations of, 187 under Melcher, 182, 187 Office of Publishers’ Weekly, incorporation as, xiii, 164, 182 Radde, Wilhelm, 75, 105 railroads and book distribution, 68–69, 89, 94 monopolies, 184 national network, growth of, 138–39, 184 and time zones, 184 Ramage, Adam, 64 Ramage presses, 90 Randolph, Anson D. F., 170 Rastell, John, 20–21 Ratcliff, John, 31 rational spelling, 131, 171 Readers’ Guide to Periodical Literature, 181 Reading Diary of Modern Fiction, 179 reading guides for adults and children, 179

{ 222 }

Index Reasons and Considerations Touching the Lawfulness of Removing out of England into the Parts of America (Cushman), 24 The Rebellion Record (Moore), 131 recession, in early Civil War years, 126 redemptioners, 72 reform era, late 19th century as, 184 reform of American book trade efforts toward, 91–94, 170–71 Leypoldt’s efforts toward, 107–9, 138, 144, 153–54, 158–59, 166–67 A Regiment for the Sea (Bourne), 22 regionalism, in early U.S. book trades, 52, 57–58, 60, 76 regional publishers in England, relations with London book trade, 56–57 regulation of book trades. See also censorship; copyright law; freedom of the press and American “courtesy of the trade” principle, 59 in colonial America: fragmented jurisdiction and, 50; in Massachusetts Bay Colony/ Company, 32; Pennsylvania, 33; Stamp Act, 50–51; Virginia, 35–36 Copyright Act of 1870, 144 in early United States, 57–59, 91–93, 108–9 economic pressures on publishers and, 32, 33 in educational trade, 161 in Europe, 86, 112, 144 in 15th century Spain, 8 and fragmented jurisdictions in U.S., 58–59 in Germany, 73, 98, 100 history of, 16 Inquisition and, 15 lack of central control, xii, xiii, 85, 94, 183, 185, 186 in London book trade, 52–53 in New Spain, 15, 16 Office of Publishers’ Weekly and, ix–x, xi, xiii, 158, 164, 165, 180, 182, 183, 186–87 private companies responsible for, xiii Publishers’ Board of Trade and, 155 in 17th century England, 32 in 16th century Frankfurt, 40 underselling and, 112 Reiche, Karl Christoph, 71, 72 A Relation or Journal of the Beginning and Proceedings of the English Plantation Settled at Plimoth in New England (Mourt’s Relation), 26 religious persecutions, in Europe, 17th century, 41 Religious Society of Friends, and regulation of printing, 33

remainders bookseller bartering of, in early Europe, 39 German plans to sell in U.S. Market, 71–77 as issue, 7, 55, 85–86, 88 pulping of, 71 trade sales and, 93, 141 reprints and copyright laws, in 16th century Frankfurt, 40 of English books in colonies, 31–32 import duties and, 116 by 19th century American publishers, 113, 114, 115, 129, 130, 133 retail book trade blurred distinction between retail market and, 85–86 evolution of, 85 price determination in, 87, 112 and risk management, 56 standardized agreements in, 186 underselling and, 88, 112, 127–29 revenue stamps, 50 review copies, 123 Richelieu, Cardinal, 19 Richter, Eugene, 134 Rickey and Carroll Publishers, 116 risk management in book trade and chaotic boundary between retail and wholesale markets, 86 in England, 57 mass production and, 55–56 wholesale-retail balance and, 56 Rittenhouse, William, 33–34 Robert, Nicholas-Louis, 67–68 Robinson, Ralph, 20 Rode, Charles Rudolph, 107–8, 143 Roeber, A. G., 42 roman type, 44 Roorbach, Orville, 109 rotary press, 67 royal printers, for colonial New York, 34 Rudolph Garrigue’s Monthly Bulletin of German Literature, 82 Rühl, Karl, 80, 104 Rust, Samuel, 64 Sabin, Joseph, 105 Sadler, Percy, 117, 135–36 Sand, George, 116–17 Sanitary Commission, U.S., benefits for, 121–22 Sartor Resartus (Carlyle), 3 Saur [Sauer], Christopher, 44–45, 46, 48 Saur Bible, 44

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Index Schäfer, Ernst Karl, 104, 105 schools, as book buyers, Civil War and, 107 Schuyler, Eugene, 134 scribes, book production by, 3–5, 54–55 Scribner, Charles, 92, 136, 186 Scribner publishing house, 130, 144, 160 Scribner’s Magazine, vii secondary publishers, 113, 114, 115–16, 117, 123–24 second editions, 112, 113, 122 second-hand book sales, 128 Second Industrial Revolution, 139 secular printing, rise of, 41 Sedition Act of 1918, 58 separatist religious groups, and German book trade, 71 Seward, William H., 121–22 sewn binding, 65–66 sextodecimo editions, press time for, 64 Shakespeare, William, 22–23, 24 shop boys, 99 Shumann, Robert, 97 signatures, 62 Sill, Edward Rowland, 134 Silva, Nuno da, 22 similia similibus curantur, 128 Smith, John, 23, 26, 28 social clubs, as informal professional organizations, 140 social injustice of late 19th century, 183–84 Soirées littéraires (Corson), 117 sorts definition of, 46 print technology and, 4 Sower, Christopher. See Saur, Christopher Sowle, Andrew, 32–34 Spain claims to New World lands, 13, 18 New World missionaries, printing press of, 13–16 Spanish Armada, 22 speciality publishers, 170 Stamp Act of 1765, 50–51 Standard Educational Works series, 115 standardization, and book production process, 4–5. See also mass production Stanhope Iron Press, 63–64 Stationers’ Company, 52–53, 55–57, 59, 63, 144 Statute of Anne, 40, 57 steady sellers, 113 steam power and increased output, 140 showcasing of at Centennial Exhibition, 169

and spread of industrial production, 139, 185 steam-powered printing plants, 68, 90–91 steam-powered printing presses, 66–68, 89 Stedman, Edmund C., 133, 134 Steiger, Ernst, 101 stereotype plates, 64–65, 67, 113, 116, 122 Stevens, Thaddeus, 97 Stewart, William, 164–65, 181 Stoddard, Richard Henry, 133–34 Sutton, Edward, 21 systems requirements of book trade, Publishers’ Weekly, xiii systems theory, xi–xii T. B. Peterson and Brothers, 159 Taine, Hippolyte, 136 tariffs and import duties and book importers, 116, 127 Civil War and, 106, 127 as servant of big business, 184 Tauchnitz British authors series, 107, 115, 133 Taylor, Bayard, 105, 134 Tebbel, John, x Technics and Civilization (Mumford), 1–2, 11, 188 technological advances Centennial Exhibition displays of, 169 and unification of United States, 184 technology of printing. See also mass production book factories, introduction of, 89–91 early wooden presses, printing process on, 6 guild system to protect secrets of, 63 before Industrial Revolution, 62–63 making ready, 6 19th-century advances in, 63–68, 186; and cost of trade journal publication, 142; and distribution, as issue, 88–89; and growth of printing industry, 92–93 production planning and, 5–6 stages of production process, 5–6, 7 standardization, 4–5 typesetting, 4, 5, 6, 46, 65, 68, 186 The Tempest (Shakespeare), 22–23, 24 textbooks competition for sales of, 161–62 demand for, 62 as good investment for publishers, 135 publishers of, 115, 117, 135–36 Thirty Years’ War (1618–48), and European book trade, 41 Thomas, Isaiah, x, 30, 44, 47, 51 Ticknor and Fields Civil War and, 126

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Index distribution network of, 111–12, 126 trade association(s). See also American Book Trade Association; New York Book Publishers’ Association; Publishers’ Board of Trade German, 73 (see also Börsenverein der Deutschen Buchhändler) regulatory role of, 88 in U.S.: history of efforts to create, 58–59, 140–43, 167–68, 181; lack of, 85; Leypoldt’s efforts toward, 157, 167–68 trade catalogs American Educational Catalogue, 160–62 copyright law as aid to, 153–54 Cumulative Book Index, 181 early American catalogs, 61, 109, 142 efforts to establish, 108–9 first fully collated, 154 in Germany, 40–41, 144 lack of, 85 Leypoldt’s American Catalogues, ix, 148–51, 174–76, 179, 181–82, 187 Leypoldt’s efforts to create, 146–54, 156, 158, 160, 163, 167 of Leypoldt titles, 115 publishers’ failure to cooperate with, 151–53, 156, 176–77 in 16th century Frankfurt, 40–41 United States Catalog, 181–82 Trade Circular and Literary Bulletin, 147–48, 151, 154 Trade Circular and Publishers’ Bulletin, 147, 154–56. See also Trade Circular and Literary Bulletin The Trade Circular Annual for 1871, 151–54, 163 trade education as Leypoldt’s goal, 166–67 Leypoldt’s Weekly Trade Circular and, 157 trade journalism in Europe, 144 growth of, 141–42 publishers’ failure to support, 138, 144 trade journals cost of printing, 142 German, 71, 108 in U.S. (see also Publishers’ Weekly): book trades’ failure to support, 138, 158; early lack of, 85; efforts to establish, 91, 92, 107–9, 141–44; Leypoldt and Holt’s Literary Bulletin, 136, 144–48, 151; need for trade association to support, 167; Trade Circular and Literary Bulletin, 147–48, 151, 154; Trade Circular and Publishers’ Bulletin, 147,

154, 155, 156; Weekly Trade Circular, 156–58 trade sales efforts to reform, 93–94 ending of, 159 as issue, 167–68 Leypoldt’s campaign against, 158–59 national, efforts to establish, 141 traditional craft economy distribution in, 7 manuscript production and, 4–5 mass production of books within, xii–xiii transatlantic book trade, in early United States, 52 translations American publication of, 112–17, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 134 of Spanish texts on New World, 21 transportation railroads, and book distribution, 68–69 by water, cost effectiveness of, 69 Treadwell, Daniel, 66–67 Treaty of Tordesillas, 13 A Treatyse of the Newe India (Münster), 21 Trübner, Nicholas, 109, 150, 152 A True Relation of Such Occurrences and Accidents of Note as Happened in Virginia (Smith), 23, 26 Twain, Mark, 140 20 percent rule, 168, 173 Two Years Ago (Kingsley), 126 Tyler, Royall, 60 type black-letter (gothic; fraktur), 44 casting of, 46–47, 62, 68 digital, characteristics of, 188–89 distribution of, 6 roman, 44 setting of, 4, 5, 6, 46, 65, 68, 186 stereotyping of, 64–65 type cases, 6 typecasting machines, 68 typefaces, 63 type metal, 46 type punches, 46 typesetting, development of as separate industry, 65 typesetting machines, 68, 186 underselling, 88, 112 impact on book trade cooperation, 141 as issue, 167–68, 185 Leypoldt’s campaign against, 127–29, 167

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Index underselling (continued) trade sales and, 158–59 United States government, as servant of big business, 183–84 growth of, 61–62, 70, 74 unification, completion of, 184 United States Catalog, 181–82 United States Literary Advisor and Publishers’ Circular, 142 United States Service Magazine, 123 Universal Cosmographia (Münster), 21 unofficial book trade, in colonial America, difficulty of regulating, 34 Usher, Hezekiah, 31, 50 Usher, John, 49–50 Utopia (More), 11, 19–20, 21, 23, 24 utopian communities, in colonial Pennsylvania, 43. See also Ephrata Cloister Uzanne, Octave, vii, 185, 188 van Braght, Thieleman Jansz, 45 Van Nostrand, David, 131 vellum, 6 vernacular printing, rise of, 38 Verrazzano, Giovanni da, 19 Vespucci, Amerigo, 9–11, 20, 21, 24, 39 Virginia colony, book trade in, 35–36 Virginia Companies, 25–26 virtual media, impact on book industry, 187–89 The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Chandler), xiii, 139, 183 vocabularies, in New Spain, 14 vocational law vs. free trade, 110 Voltaire, 20 Vorspeil der Neuen Welt (1732), 44 Waldauer, August, 117 Waldseemüller, Martin, 11–13 Walker, Robert J., 113 Wallace, Lady Grace, 113, 123 Warner, Charles Dudley, 140 Washington Press, 64 web presses, 68 Weekly Trade Circular, 156–58, 172 Weik, John, 79–80, 83, 104, 114 Weiser, Conrad, 43, 44 Wells, Frank, 80 Welsh, John, 121 Western, Lucille, 106 Western Railroad, 69

westward expansion and distribution problems, 62 and German migration, 74 and growth of book trade, 61–62 “What Is the History of Books?” (Darnton), xi White, Hayden, xii Whiting, Charlotte Lydia, 77, 78 Whitmarsh, Thomas, 35 The Whole Book of Psalms (The Bay Psalm Book), 30 wholesale book trade blurred distinction between retail market and, 85–86 distribution agreements and, 111–12 evolution of, 85 price determination in, 87–88, 111–12 and risk management, 56 standardized agreements in, 186 wholesale distribution center for German publications, efforts to establish, 73 Wieck, Joseph, 101 Wieland, Paul, 101 Williams, Ralph, 136 Wilson, Halsey W., 181–82 “The Winds of Change Are Felt at Publishers Weekly” (Wyatt), 187–88 Winship, Michael, 111–12 Winslow, Edward, 26 Winsor, Justin, 101, 172, 173 Winthrop, John, 27, 28, 29 Winthrop, John, the Younger, 40 Wistar, Caspar, 43 women as laborers in print production, 91 in management of Publishers’ Weekly, 180–81 Wood, Fernando, 82, 92 workers, organization of, 139, 183–84 Wyatt, Edward, 187–88 Ye Book of Copperheads (Leland and Leland), 118–20, 126, 127 Ye Sneak Yclepid Copperhead (Leland and Leland), 118–19 Yonge, Charlotte, 135–36 Youmans, Edward, 134 Young Germany movement, 96, 97 Zinzendorf, Nicolaus Ludwig von, 44 Zionitischer Weyrauchs-Hügel, 44 Zumárraga, Juan de, 14, 15, 86

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