Anyone who pays attention to the popular press knows that the
new media will soon make books obsolete. But predicting the
imminent demise of the book is nothing new. At the beginning of the
twentieth ...century, for example, some critics predicted that the
electro-mechanical phonograph would soon make books obsolete.
Still, despite the challenges of a century and a half of new media,
books remain popular, with Americans purchasing more than eight
million books each day. In How Books Came to America , John
Hruschka traces the development of the American book trade from the
moment of European contact with the Americas, through the growth of
regional book trades in the early English colonial cities, to the
more or less unified national book trade that emerged after the
American Civil War and flourished in the twentieth century. He
examines the variety of technological, historical, cultural,
political, and personal forces that shaped the American book trade,
paying particular attention to the contributions of the German
bookseller Frederick Leypoldt and his journal, Publishers
Weekly .
Unlike many studies of the book business, How Books Came to
America is more concerned with business than it is with books.
Its focus is on how books are manufactured and sold, rather than
how they are written and read. It is, nevertheless, the story of
the people who created and influenced the book business in the
colonies and the United States. Famous names in the American book
trade-Benjamin Franklin, Robert Hoe, the Harpers, Henry Holt, and
Melvil Dewey-are joined by more obscure names like Joseph Glover,
Conrad Beissel, and the aforementioned Frederick Leypoldt.
Together, they made the American book trade the unique commercial
institution it is today.
This thesis traces the influences of the Spanish, English, and German book trades upon social and economic structure of the developing American book trade from 1500 to 1876. By focusing on the ...business of making and selling books, rather than their cultural value, the thesis uncovers some of the causes of the systemic problems that plagued the American book trade throughout the nineteenth century. After establishing the importance of the book trade to the discovery and conquest of the Americas, the thesis analyzes the business models developed by early colonial book producers, such as Juan Pablos, Elizabeth Glover, William Bradford, Benjamin Franklin, Christopher Saur, and Conrad Beissel. From that foundation, it explores the technical, economic, and social forces that influenced the development of the book trade in the United States, paying particular attention to the contributions of Fredrick Leypoldt and his associates, Henry Holt, Richard Rogers Bowker, and Melvil Dewey.
Although Germans had been involved directly or indirectly in the colonial enterprise since the days of Columbus, German-speaking settlements in the New World began comparatively late. In the 1550s, ...German miners and smelters had been recruited to supervise work in the Spanish colonies, and in the early 1600s a number of German craftsmen settled in Jamestown, Virginia. There was, however, no German-speaking settlement in America until 1683. The Germantown settlement in Pennsylvania, founded that year, marked the beginning of a remarkable migration that would last until the beginning of the twentieth century and radically alter the course of American social,
Frederick Leypoldt’s earliest experiences in the American book trade had shocked him. American booksellers had to work without those “most indispensable tools, ” weekly trade journals and regular ...catalogs. Booksellers in the United States actually seemed unwilling to support the only monthly journal that they had. Even worse, most book publishers in the United States seemed to regard trade journalism as needless expense.
After Leypoldt became a book publisher himself, his shock turned to anger. When Leypoldt realized that booksellers in Philadelphia stooped to underselling, that the men who should have been his colleagues routinely violated the fundamental principles of
Frederick Leypoldt never seemed to get tired of telling American publishers and booksellers to behave more like German publishers and booksellers. Since 1863, he had been explaining the advantages of ...the German system to the members of the American book trade. He had chosen to live in the United States and to work in the American book trade, but he always wished that the Americans would behave a little bit more like the Germans. Above all, he wanted his colleagues in the American book trade to get organized and establish a few rules. Publishers’ Weekly gave Leypoldt just the soapbox
In his 1846 report to the German Börsenverein, Rudolph Garrigue depicted the book trade in the United States as an unstable business that reflected the unsettled character of a young and rapidly ...evolving nation. Garrigue stopped short of calling the American trade chaotic, but he was at once disturbed and fascinated by the frantic and ruthless book business that he encountered. In the report, he pointed out the features of the U.S. trade that surprised or disturbed him—the attitudes and practices that made the U.S. trade so completely unlike the European book trades he knew.
During his five-month tour,
