A History of the Book in America

Volume 1: The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World

Hugh Amory, Hugh Amory, David D. Hall, David D. Hall

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780807868003
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early American History
• Index: History

The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World carries the interrelated stories of publishing, writing, and reading from the beginning of the colonial period in America up to 1790. Three major themes run through the volume: the persisting connections between the book trade in the Old World and the New, evidenced in modes of intellectual and cultural exchange and the dominance of imported, chiefly English books; the gradual emergence of a competitive book trade in which newspapers were the largest form of production; and the institution of a "culture of the Word, " organized around an essentially theological understanding of print, authorship, and reading, complemented by other frameworks of meaning that included the culture of republicanism. The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World also traces the histories of literary and learned culture, censorship and "freedom of the press, " and literacy and orality. Contributors:
Hugh Amory
Ross W. Beales, The College of the Holy Cross
John Bidwell, Princeton University Library
Richard D. Brown, University of Connecticut
Charles E. Clark, University of New Hampshire
James N. Green, Library Company of Philadelphia
David D. Hall, Harvard Divinity School
Russell L. Martin, Southern Methodist University
E. Jennifer Monaghan, Brooklyn College of The City University of New York
James Raven, University of Essex
Elizabeth Carroll Reilly, Hardwick, Massachusetts
A. Gregg Roeber, Pennsylvania State University
David S. Shields, University of South Carolina
Calhoun Winton, University of Maryland

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• A History of the Book in America
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Contributors
• Preface to the Paper Back Edition
• Authors’ and Editors’ Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Chapter One: Reinventing the Colonial Book
• Chapter Two: The Chesapeake in the Seventeenth Century
• Chapter Three: Printing and Bookselling in New England, 1638–1713
• Chapter Four: Readers and Writers in Early New England
• Chapter Five: The Atlantic World
• Chapter Six: The Book Trade in the Middle Colonies, 1680–1720
• Chapter Seven: The Southern Book Trade in the Eighteenth Century
• Chapter Eight: The Middle Colonies, 1720–1790
• Chapter Nine: The New England Book Trade, 1713–1790
• Chapter Ten: Periodicals and Politics
• Chapter Eleven: Practices of Reading
• Chapter Twelve: Learned Culture in the Eighteenth Century
• Chapter Thirteen: Eighteenth-Century Literary Culture
• Afterword
• A Select Bibliography
• Appendix One: A Note on Statistics
• Appendix Two: A Note on Popular and Durable Authors and Titles
• Appendix Three: A Note on Book Prices
• Notes
• Index