Online Roundtable: A History of the Book in America

In the process, it redirected discussions of authorship and influence toward the social horizon of significant events in a publishing history that both America and England shared. [...]the on-again-off-again role of the 1662 Licensing Act in metropolitan publishing found its analog in a constant "tension between a licensed press and a commercially viable press" (201) in places like Philadelphia, where local printer William Bradford went the rounds with both the Quaker Meeting and local provincial authorities over whether his imprints were properly authorized. When it comes to delineating the counterpublics of the era, on the other hand, the volume is fuller and more focussed. [...]Joanne Dobson and Sandra Zagarell provide a strong account of how the "rapid expansion of print culture" (364) offered women "a secure power base for significant interventions in the public arena" (378), even as they found themselves increasingly tied to the rhetoric of domesticity, and Gundaker in turn engages with African American culture's fervent "association of literacy with freedom" (483) before concretely outlining how blacks used print to establish intellectual equality, historical pride, and vernacular continuity in the face of endemic racism. [...]in making this case, An Extensive Republic not infrequently manages to push Loughran's thesis in interesting new directions. [...]Nord brings religion back into the picture with his account of how poor distribution stymied the evangelical desire to ensure "universal circulation of the same message" (236), and Grodzins and Jackson intriguingly suggest that where a "national market" (325) for print did come about it was actually in the highly elite realm of college textbooks, since every institution stuck to the same archaic curriculum. Most contributors take a theme and explore its development across a timeframe roughly coterminous with Print in Motion's sixty-year span. [...]many discussions end in the 1930s, where they identify activities that seek to engage and expand book audiences, whether it be Langston Hughes's efforts to engage a reading public for The Negro Mother and Other Dramatic Recitations (1931), the work of William S. Gray and the other scholars who initiated the study of everyday reading practices, or the reintroduction by Pocket Books of cheap paperback editions in 1938.