Reviews of Books

The Book in America: Transatlantic Perspectives

The first of the five projected volumes of A History of the Book in America is a masterpiece of scholarship. Compared with its predecessor, the Histoire de l'édition française I edited with Henri-Jean Martin between 1982 and 1986 or with the parallel The History of the Book in Britain (of which publication began last year), the work co-edited by Hugh Amory and David D. Hall shows both resemblance and originality. These multivolume projects have a common purpose: "to provide a sustained description of book-trade practices" (p. 12), as The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World declares. But the American book trade was distinctive: it conducted a capitalistic activity in the framework of an imperial state system. Such a situation leads the contributors to this volume to give greater importance to the circulation of books in the British colonies, whatever their place of origin in the Atlantic world, than to the practice and diffusion of printing in North America itself. As Amory writes, "The 'colonial book' was what the colonists bought and read, as well as what they printed or reprinted, and no special importance was given to its place of manufacture" (p. 28).

1

Both qualitative statements by contemporary booksellers and statistical data compiled from the North American Imprints Program and from the Public Record Office in London demonstrate the long-lasting dependence of the American colonies on printing materials (presses, types, paper) provided by the metropolis and on books printed mainly in London. Indeed, far from declining as colonial presses spread and print production increased, American imports of books from England actually expanded. Colonial printers had the market to themselves only in the production of government documents, almanacs, and broadsides, all of which circulated in local markets. Excluding such items and considering books alone, Amory estimates that, in the period 1765–1772, average annual imports from England were about twice as many as the equivalent sales of colonial editions. The editors and their twelve collaborators have therefore eschewed a strictly antiquarian perspective valorizing American proto-typographers at the expense of the transatlantic book trade and colonial imprints over books printed abroad and read in America.

. . .