An Extensive Republic: Print Culture, and Society in the New Nation, 1790-1840

Abstract

An Extensive Republic: Print, Culture, and Society in the New Nation, 1790-1840 Edited by Robert A. Gross and Mary Kelley Chapel Hill: Published in Association with the American Antiquarian Society by The University of North Carolina Press, 2010. xix + 697pp. Figures, tables, graphs, notes, index. $60.00, ISBN 978-0-8078-3339-1The study of the history of ideas has benefited in recent years and in important ways, from an increased attention directed to material culture aspects of the intellectual past. To our understanding of the impact in limited circles of great thinkers and their thoughts, we have added much. For instance, we now have a better appreciation of the roles played by lesser-known figures including those involved at various points in the production and dissemination of ideas in their printed form. The volume under review here adds to this trend in no small way. An Extensive Republic is volume two in "A History of the Book in America," a series whose general editor is David D. Hall. The last of the five volumes to be published, the series - which began with The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World, and concludes with the story of The Enduring Book, 1945-1995- is now complete. Edited by Robert A. Gross and Mary Kelley, the volume comprises 12 chapters arranged in six sections. Several of the book's chapters are co-authored and others are divided into parts; there are 32 contributors in all. While this is a reference book, taken together the various contributions also constitute a narrative.The central plot of the story told here is the interplay between print culture and the nation's expanding population and geography. As Robert A. Gross writes in his general introduction, "Struggling to serve these teeming numbers scattered across avast terrain were the personnel and institutions of print - printers, binders, type founders, papermakers, manufactures of presses and stereotype plates, booksellers, editors, authors, illustrators, engravers, proof-readers, postboys, and others - whose innovations on colonial practice and aspirations to meet the demands of a rising nation form the leitmotifs of an extensive republic" (p. 1). As this passage hints, the volume is one with much to offer those whose interests encompass material culture. Sadly, a short review such as this can not do justice to such a massive undertaking. By sketching the book's dimensions and basic contents, however, one might hope to provide a sense of why readers of Material Culture should look closer.Section I. A Republic in Print: Ideologies and Institutions: In Chapter 1, "The Revolution's Legacy for the History of the Book," Richard D. Brown argues that from "the struggle for independence and the creation of the republic sprang unanticipated changes in how Americans produced, disseminated, and employed the printed word" (p. 58). Not least of these was a general "expansion of communications" (p. 60) which created "the material, political, and cultural bases for opening the republic of letters to competition as never before" (p. 74). That is an important point and one that the book's concluding chapter returns to. In Chapter 2, James N. Green traces "The Rise of Book Publishing," from its beginnings in the reprint trade with the likes of Robert Bell through to a national system of production and distribution. Along the way Thomas Dobson is considered, with attention given to his American edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, as is Mathew Carey, the American Company of Booksellers, and Henry Charles Carey 's editions of Sir Walter Scott. The trend lines developed by Green are fleshed out with case studies of Harper & Brothers (Scott E. Casper), urban printing (Karen Nipps), village printing and publishing (Jack Larkin), and journeymen printers (Williams S. Pretzer).Section ?. Spreading the Word in Print: In Chapter 3, "Government and Law," John L. Brooke argues for significant differences between North and South on the relationship between print and politics; Jeffrey L. …