S teven C arl S mith . An Empire of Print

In his engaging book An Empire of Print: The New York Publishing Trade in the Early American Republic, Steven Carl Smith takes on the question of whether or not there was a national print culture before the invention of the steam press in the 1830s. Based on his study of New York City booksellers, Smith argues that there was a bustling book business from the middle of the eighteenth century on, accelerating in the early national era—all before industrialization. This agrees with the findings of early national scholars: that mass production of goods such as cabinet ware, shoes, and clothing were common in American cities prior to the advent of factories. Smith’s first portrait is of Samuel Loudon, a printer/newspaper editor who emigrated from Scotland to Manhattan in his mid-twenties. After opening a bookstore in 1773, he founded The New-York Packet, which took strides to take a compromising view in the growing conflict with Great Britain, only to come under harassment. After the war he returned to New York and won the job as state printer, which gave him a steady income and a peripatetic career. Ultimately, his most significant contribution came at the start of his career when as a bookseller he was a founder of the New York Society Library, an institution that is still functioning. This was one of several endeavors throughout the colonies that allowed books to circulate to subscribers. Loudon established it in 1773, advertising in James Rivington’s newspaper that the library’s catalogue was free to subscribers. It grew rapidly, and he published a new catalogue that same year. The library was particularly popular among the city’s women. Henrietta Maria Colden checked out forty books, including the works of Edward Gibbon and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, between 1789 and 1792. These circulating libraries made a significant contribution to the increased literacy of cosmopolitan America, especially the elite, toward the end of the eighteenth century

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