Book Reviews

Anyone who has conducted research in the extensive holdings of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania or the American Antiquarian Society has come across the odd book list or letter of an early Philadelphia book publisher and has wondered what to make of it. Rosalind Remer does not attempt to piece together such fragments for any single publisher's business history, but she does provide a long-needed aggregate view of a "transitional" period in the book trade (roughly from the 1780s through the 1820s, although exact periodization is sometimes blurred), using individual cases to illustrate the entrepreneurial initiatives and pitfalls of Philadelphia's prominent publishers. What the reader enjoys is a clear description of the evolution from printer to publisher, and the transformation of publishers into "men of capital" (p. 69). As she argues, these new entrepreneurs used "aggressive techniques" (p. 93) in their often futile attempts to establish personal success, including concentrating on retail, wholesale, and commission sales; participating in exchanges of books with other publishers; entering publishing partnerships with rivals; attempting to seize control of the ancillary businesses of ink making, papermaking, type-founding, and stereotyping; manipulating a complex system of debts and credits with printers, purchasers, and others; and seeking to turn distant, frontier markets to advantage through itinerant sales agents and branch stores. "Philadelphia's first publishers..." she argues, "had crossed an invisible line into a world of bourgeois solidity, leaving behind an eighteenth-century craft tradition for the new realm of the nineteenth-century entrepreneur" (p. 151). "If America's first publishers had remained 'meer mechanics," she concludes, "their impact upon the new nation would have been limited; but the American book trade, developing according to its own internal logic, was linked to the entrepreneurial spirit of the early republic" (p. 152). No work could more clearly reflect how we write history for our own time. For Remer, the book publishers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries are