| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

A History of the Book in America, vol. 3: The Industrial Book, 1840–1880. Ed. by Scott E. Casper, Jeffrey D. Groves, Stephen W. Nissenbaum, and Michael Winship. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. xx, 539 pp. $60.00, ISBN 978-0-8078-3085-7.)

The label "industrial book" underscores the famous innovations of the middle decades of the nineteenth century that revolutionized papermaking, printing, and binding, and reorganized labor. However, the increasingly technologized book capitalized as much on other contemporaneous revolutions—in commerce, education, and self-fashioning. Publishers, chiefly in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia, dominated continent-encompassing networks of production and circulation that rested on a vastly improved transportation infrastructure, dedicated local booksellers, energetic marketing techniques, and information exchange, culminating in 1873 with Publisher's Weekly. A robust publishing trade, the advent of new authorship cloaked in the language of professionalism, and a massive, voracious readership all epitomized the aspirations of an ascending middle class. Beyond the bourgeois "ideology of literacy," reading and writing were celebrated as aspects of American citizenship and national character (p. 33). Critics, authors, and publishers competed to define and canonize the "American book" (p. 4).

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