An Empire of Print

Long before the big five publishers settled in Manhattan, New York's printers and booksellers were working out how to supply a young nation hungry for print. Steven Carl Smith follows the city's book trade from the years after the Revolutionary War to the Jacksonian era, using five case studies to show how local, regional and national distribution networks took shape, and how printers, booksellers and customers were bound together by money, politics and shared habits.

Smith argues that the economic interests and political loyalties of the people who made books explain much about how a major American industry emerged, and he shows these preindustrial tradesmen to be surprisingly modern in their methods. A thoughtful, scholarly account for anyone curious about the business behind early American books, and about how New York first became a publishing city.