A Companion to the History of the Book (47 page)

But censorship legislation in the Netherlands was less severe than, for example, in France where between the years 1659 and 1789 a total of 942 people connected to the book trade landed up in the Bastille. The royal censors had to approve each and every manuscript before the printer could begin his task. Before 1700, this was a maximum of four hundred manuscripts per year; around 1750, it was some five hundred manuscripts; and by 1780 it had exceeded a thousand. The percentage of rejected manuscripts varied, despite self-censorship, from 10 to 30 percent. This system of prior restraint included general privileges that gave a publisher the monopoly on a book for a specific period of time, and tacit permissions
(permissions tacites)
for books that could not be suppressed but could also not be approved (Chartier and Martin 1990: 88–94, 99–109). Comparable censorship was generally practiced in countries with an absolute monarchy, especially in those where the Catholic Church had great censorship powers through the Inquisition; for instance, in Italy and Spain. The
Index
would not begin to lose its power until the nineteenth century.

The French physician La Mettrie discovered to his grief just how far the power of orthodoxy reached. He had fled France in 1747 because of his writings about the materiality of the soul. This idea directly opposed Church doctrine about the dualism of body and soul. In the Netherlands, his writings were not welcome either. That very year, his
l’Homme machine
was published anonymously by the young bookseller Elie Luzac. Luzac, however, had ostentatiously placed his publisher’s name on the title page. The Church and, in its wake, the secular government immediately took action against him. The entire print-run was confiscated and a large fine was imposed upon him. This did not appear to upset him much. He assisted La Mettrie in getting out of the country while his presses printed the subversive work anew. Because the book was forbidden far beyond the borders of Holland, it was in great demand. Luzac made a substantial profit on it (van Vliet 2005: 68–73).

But that was not the only reason he took the risk of printing
l’Homme machine.
Luzac was convinced that truth could only be discovered in debate, and that potentially incorrect ideas could only be refuted through argument and not through censorship. He recorded these opinions in his
Essai sur la liberté de produire ses sentimens
(1749). The debate about the freedom of the press was pursued internationally but did not, just yet, lead to the abolition of censorship. Sweden was the first country to make this move, in 1767, although the possibility of censoring works that were Spinozistic or atheistic was maintained. Denmark followed suit in 1770, and here no restrictions to the legislation were added (Laursen and van der Zande 2003).

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, many works were published with false imprints. Sometimes this was done to give the customer the impression that he or she was dealing with a domestic publication, whereas the edition originated, for example, from Amsterdam. Usually these books concerned dangerous ideas. According to their title pages, many controversial works were published in London which had no censorship legislation and thus de facto freedom of the press from 1695 onward. The Amsterdam bookseller Marc-Michel Rey published many works by Baron D’Holbach, controversial because of their materialism, with an imprint mentioning only London. Other fictitious imprints contained the names of virtual publishers, such as Pierre Marteau of Cologne who, if we rely on his name, must have worked for 340 years. In 1670, Spinoza’s
Tractatus theologico-politicus
appeared in Amsterdam, published by the non-existent Hamburg printer “Henricus Kunraht.” A fictitious imprint which stands out immediately is, for example, “Alethobathopseudopolis, chez Bold Truth, rue du Mock,” belonging to the
Traité des dissensions entre nobles et le peuple
(1733) by Jonathan Swift.

In France in the eighteenth century, separate catalogues dedicated to these forbidden bestsellers circulated. The way in which they were transported, too, required a certain level of resourcefulness to prevent them from being confiscated. Guillaume Bergeret, from Bordeaux, ordered eleven hard-core “philosophical” titles from the Société Typographique de Neuchâtel. “Please marry all the books with the others,” he wrote, indicating his wish for the supplier to mix those sheets with obscene texts with others whose content was not dangerous (Darnton 1996: 17). The clandestine activities were more complex than this relatively simple hide-and-seek game by publisher–booksellers. The literary underground could be accessed by a European network of smuggling routes. Dutch publishers of forbidden books for the French market made use of the overseas trade routes via Rouen, or sent their contraband over the French borders through Maastricht, Liège, and Bouillon. The Société Typographique de Neuchâtel hired smugglers, or insurers
(assureurs),
to transport the crates of illegal books to the Swiss–French border. They insured the publisher a safe passage. The carriers did the actual work and carried these heavy packs across winding mountain paths to a secret address, just over the border (Darnton 1996: 17–21).

As early as the second half of the seventeenth century, the first signs of the expansion of the public sphere can be seen. This was accompanied by an explosive increase in books, newspapers, periodicals, pamphlets, and other printed matter. The Enlightenment ideal – the propagation of knowledge and civilization – was an especially motivating force in this development. But the speed with which the book trade expanded in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe was highly influenced by the political situation in individual countries. By the end of the eighteenth century, specialization, rationalization, and innovation in the book trade had been put into motion nearly everywhere. The political unrest just before the end of the century, culminating in the French Revolution, temporarily set back this development, but also ushered in a century of huge print-related technical innovation, of modern ways of distribution, and of the commercially oriented book trade.

References and Further Reading

Bachleitner, N., Eybl, F. M., and Fischer, E. (2000)
Geschichte des Buchhandels in Östenreich.
Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.

Barbier, F., Juratic, S., and Varry, D. (eds.) (1996)
L’Europe et le livre: réseaux et pratiques du négoce de librairie XVIe–XIXe siècles.
Paris: Klincksiek.

Barenbaum, I. E. (1991)
Geschichte des Buchhandels in Russland und der Sowjetunion.
Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.

Berkvens-Stevelinck, C., Bots, H., Hoftijzer, P. G., et al. (eds.) (1992)
Le magasin de l’univers: The Dutch Republic as the Centre of the European Book Trade.
Leiden: Brill.

Blanning, T. C. W. (2002)
The Culture of Power and the Power of Culture: Old Regime Europe 1660– 1789.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Burke, P. (2000) A
Social History of Knowledge: From Gutenberg to Diderot.
Cambridge: Polity.

Chartier, R., and Martin, H-J. (eds.) (1989)
Histoire de l’édition française,
vol. I:
Le livre conquérant. Du Moyen Age au milieu du XVIIe siècle,
2nd edn. Paris: Fayard/Promodis.

— and — (eds.) (1990)
Histoire de l’édition française,
vol. II:
Le livre triomphant 1660–1830,
2nd edn. Paris: Fayard/Promodis.

Darnton, R. (1979)
The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclopédie
1775–1800. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.

— (1982)
The Literary Underground of the Old Regime.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

— (1996)
The Forbidden Best-sellers of Prerevolutionary France.
London: Fontana.

— and Roche, D. (eds.) (1989)
Revolution in Print: The Press in France 1775–1800.
Berkeley: University of California Press.

van Delft, M., and de Wolf, C. (eds.) (2003)
Bibliopolis: History of the Printed Book in the Netherlands.
Zwolle: Waanders.

Dongelmans, B. P. M., Hoftijzer, P. G., and Lank-horst, O. S. (2000)
Boekverkopers van Europa; Het 17de-eeuivse Nederlandse uitgevershuis Elzevier.
Zutphen: Walburg Pers.

Engelsing, R. (1974)
Der Bürger als heser: Leserge-schichte in Deutschland 1500–1800.
Stuttgart: Metzier.

Fouché, P., Péchoin, D., and Marshall, A. (eds.) (2002–5)
Dictionnaire encyclopédique du livre, 2
vols. Paris: Electre, Éditions du Cercle de la Librairie (vol. 3 forthcoming).

Habermas, J. (1989)
The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press (originally published in 1962).

Houston, R. A. (1988)
Literacy in Early Modern Europe: Culture and Education 1500–1800.
London: Longman.

Laursen, J. C., and van der Zande, J. (eds.) (2003)
Early French and German Defenses of Freedom of the Press.
Leiden: Brill.

Lehmstedt, M. (1999) “’Le rendezvous de tous les gens de lettres et de tous les nouvellistes’: Gestalt und Funktion des Buchladens im Zeitalter der deutschen Aufklärung.”
Leipziger Jahrbuch zur Buchgeschichte,
9: 11–75.

Santoro, M. (2003)
Geschichte des Buchhandels in Italien.
Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.

Schenda, R. (1977)
Volk ohne Buch: Studien zur Sozialgeschichte der populären Lesestoffe 1770–1910,
2nd edn. Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag.

Selwyn, P. E. (2000)
Everyday Life in the German Book Trade: Friedrich Nicolai as Bookseller and Publisher in the Age of Enlightenment 1750–1810.
Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press.

Šim
ck, Z. (2002)
Geschichte des Buchhandels in Tschechien und in der Slowakei.
Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.

Steinberg, S. H. (1996)
Five Hundred Years of Printing,
2nd edn., revised by J. Trevitt. London: British Library.

Steiner, H. (1998)
Das Autorenhonorar: seine Entwicklungsgeschichte vom 17. bis 19. Jahrhundert.
Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.

van Vliet, R. (2005)
Elie Luzac (1721–1796): Boekverkoper van de Verlichting.
Nijmegen: Vantilt (translation forthcoming: Leiden: Brill, 2008).

Wittmann, R. (1991)
Geschichte des deutschen Buchhandels: Ein Überblick.
Munich: Beck.

19

North America and Transatlantic Book Culture to 1800

Russell L. Martin III

The book history of early America begins almost with the history of the printed book itself. Like the other cultural developments that followed in the wake of Gutenberg’s invention of printing with movable type – the humanistic learning of the Renaissance and Enlightenment, the religious controversy of the Protestant Reformation, and the ideological shifts leading to political revolutions in America and France – the discovery of what was for Europeans a “new world” was very much articulated, mediated, and promoted by the printed word. Starting with the publication in Barcelona of Christopher Columbus’s “Letter” of 1493,
Epistola Christofori Colom,
news of his voyage and discoveries spread rapidly through print. Eleven other editions in Latin and Italian appeared within a year, published in Rome, Paris, Antwerp, Basel, and Florence. When Columbus wrote of the “islands of the Indies,” he set off not only geographical, cultural, political, and social change but a publishing phenomenon as well.

Indeed, without the printing press, one doubts whether the European encounter with America could have proceeded at the same pace or at the same level of general interest. Norsemen may have voyaged to America around the year 1000, but the outlines of those discoveries were not made available in print until much later, the Greenland Saga appearing in 1688 and the Vinland Saga in 1705. The explorers and colonists who followed Columbus (within a decade of his first voyage, at least eighty transatlantic crossings are documented) ultimately defined European notions of the New World, in large part because they were able to use the printing press to announce their discoveries to a wide audience.

This chapter focuses on (1) the European publication and reception of accounts of the New World; (2) the development of the art of printing in the Americas, touching especially upon the role of printing in the American Revolution; (3) the distribution of books both within the colonies and through transatlantic networks of trade, including the role of libraries as centers of print culture; and (4) popular works reprinted in early America. For our purposes, “early America” means primarily British North America and what became the United States: that is, writings in English (printed on both sides of the Atlantic) documenting the Anglo-American experience down to about 1800. But that Anglo-American book culture needs to be placed in a larger European context as well, for book history in early America was an international and polyglot phenomenon. All of the European powers with colonial ambitions in the Americas – Spain, Portugal, France, the Netherlands, and England – contributed to a vast literature. Other languages, including those of Native Americans, added to the mix as well.

The multiple editions of the Columbus letter are typical of the reception accorded to numerous other early works documenting the European encounter with the New World. An English landmark in the literature of discovery and exploration was Richard Hakluyt’s
Principall Navigations, Voiages and Discoveries of the English Nation
(London, 1589). The first two parts of Hakluyt’s text deal with British adventurers in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, the Mediterranean, and Europe. The third part is devoted to America and provides detailed (and in some cases the first) accounts of voyages in search of a Northwest Passage; settlements in the Carolinas, in Virginia, and at Roanoke; exploits in Caribbean waters; and the narratives of Cabot, Hawkins, Gilbert, Frobisher, Drake, Lane, and Hariot. The Drake narrative gives a complete account of the circumnavigation of 1577–80, including his exploration of the California coast. Critics have long accorded Hakluyt’s text a place as an epic of the modern English nation, but from the point of view of book history it has a different function: as an anthology that served as a model for later travel narratives. When John Smith came to write his accounts of Virginia and New England, he did so in the tradition of Hakluyt.

Setting the pattern for natural history was Jose de Acosta (1540–1600) and his
Historia natural y moral de las Indias,
first published in Seville in 1590. An encyclopedic treatise, based on first-hand observation in the New World and familiarity with ancient science and the teachings of the Church, Acosta’s work was reprinted in more than twenty Spanish editions from 1590 to 1792 and translated into Italian (1596), German (1598), French (1598), and English (1604). Acosta was especially interested in the pre-Columbian civilizations of the Aztecs and Incas, whose religions, customs, and governments he compared.

Thomas Gage, an English Dominican cleric, began in 1625 his travels as a stowaway, smuggled in a biscuit barrel aboard a ship bound for the Philippines, in violation of the Spanish royal decree excluding foreigners from Spain’s new territories. Gage spent most of the next twelve years in Mexico, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Panama, living among the Indians and occasionally serving as parish priest or professor of philosophy. Upon his return to England, he converted to the Church of England and published
The English American, His Travail by Sea and Land; or, A New Survey of the West Indies
(London, 1648), which caused an immediate sensation for its revelations of the wealth and defenselessness of the Spanish American colonies. It remained in print for almost a century, in more than twenty editions, being translated into French, German, and Dutch. After its long run through the publishing centers of Europe, its last publication came about in colonial America, where James Parker reprinted an abridged version in Woodbridge, New Jersey in 1758 as
The Traveller.
Parker’s plan was to publish the entire account as well in monthly installments in the
New American Magazine,
but the journal folded before the serialization could be completed.

The sheer staying power of a work such as Antonio de Solis’s (1610–86),
Historia de la conquista de Mexico
is instructive. First published in Spanish in Madrid in 1684, it appeared in more than eighty editions through 1800 and was translated into French, Italian, German, Danish, and English. An English translator of 1724 noted that the popularity of Solis offered “conclusive testimony to the charm exercised over the reading public by a thoroughly unreliable work, through the elegance and purity of its literary style.” Reading more like a novel than a work of history, Solis’s grand narrative did more to preserve the heroic view of Cortes and the conquest in the popular mind than any other source.

Although almost unknown today, William Robertson’s
History of America
was among the most popular works of its time. A Scots clergyman and author, Robertson had already established his reputation with his
History of Scotland.
From its first publication in 1777,
History of America
went through more than thirty editions before 1800 and remained a steady seller through the early decades of the nineteenth century. The American Revolution may have contributed to its immediate appeal, but Robertson won readers with his meticulous scholarship and lucid prose.

The popularity enjoyed by Jonathan Carver’s
Travels through the Interior Parts of North America
(London, 1778), one of the earliest books on the Middle West, is unrivalled in the literature of early Native American travel. Thirty-two separate editions of the work are recorded. It was a major stimulus to Alexander Mackenzie and Lewis and Clark. After the Seven Years’ War, in which he served in five campaigns against the French, Carver set out from Boston in 1766 to explore the territory beyond the Mississippi and to find a northwest land passage between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. The work contains one of the earliest descriptions of what is now known as Minnesota and Wisconsin. Carver made important contributions to the mapping of the region and the knowledge of its natural history. Indian life and customs are described with great detail, particularly their methods of war.

The basic tool for the study of the New World’s impact on the old in print is John Alden and Dennis C. Landis,
European Americana: A Chronological Guide to Works Printed in Europe Relating to the Americas, 1493–1776
(1980– ). Continuing the tradition begun by Joseph Sabin’s
Bibliotheca Americana
(begun in 1868, completed in 1936, and also still worth consulting),
European Americana
is the most comprehensive bibliographical guide to the entire printed record of the earliest period, with more than 30,000 entries, arranged chronologically. A more restrictive lens is provided by R. C. Simmons,
British Imprints Relating to North America, 1621–1760: An Annotated Checklist
(1996), which lists British reprintings of American works, often brought about by a combination of American hunger for publicity and legitimacy with British curiosity about the colonial scene. Simmons provides entries for 3,212 publications dealing with some aspect of North America through 1760. By comparison, there are 9,085 North American imprints through the same period. The universe of (predominantly) English-language Americana thus extends to 12,297 imprints through 1760, with British imprints accounting for roughly one-quarter of that total. The earlier the date, the higher the ratio. For example, there are 1,170 British imprints in Simmons through 1700; the North American Imprints Program (NAIP) database yields 992 imprints for the same period. (Sponsored by the American Antiquarian Society, NAIP is an ongoing effort to create bibliographical records in machine-readable form for all surviving American imprints, from 1640 onward, with the goal of eventually reaching the year 1876.)

The individual authors most frequently represented in Simmons’s list include John Cotton (39 entries), George Whitefield (38), George Keith (27), Cotton Mather (25), Thomas Hooker (25), Increase Mather (23), and Thomas Bray (19). All of these are familiar names to students of colonial America; less familiar, perhaps, is the transatlantic pattern of their publications. Only seven works authored solely by John Cotton were printed in America, and only one of Thomas Hooker’s – all posthumously, according to NAIP. (That is not surprising given the fact that Cotton died in 1652 and Hooker in 1647, not long after the first printing press was set up in Cambridge.) George White-field, on the other hand, had more works printed in America before 1760 (90 imprints) than in Britain. George Keith’s numbers (30 American imprints) were about the same on either side of the ocean. Cotton Mather and Increase Mather were, of course, fixtures of the Boston press; 414 of Cotton’s works and 132 of Increase’s were printed in America before 1760. Only two works by Thomas Bray (well known for his support of colonial library societies) were printed in America.

These bare figures suggest that comparative studies can add to our knowledge by analyzing exactly which titles by which authors were printed in Britain and America, where, when, and by whom. For example, the Virginia Presbyterian minister Samuel Davies has fourteen entries in Simmons and only nine in NAIP, with little duplication. What were the conditions which led to some of his works being printed in Britain and others in America? To understand Davies better, to re-read him, we need to consider his writings in a transatlantic context. For many colonials, London publication offered legitimacy and a much wider audience. The classic example is Benjamin Franklin’s London edition of his
Experiments and Observations on Electricity, made at Philadelphia in America
(1769). But, as we shall see, by the end of the eighteenth century American printers were also actively reprinting British authors.

Printing came to the New World in 1539, when Juan Cromberger sent a press and a printer, Juan Pablos, to Mexico City. Exactly a century later, Stephen Daye became the first printer of English-speaking North America. He established his press at Cambridge, Massachusetts late in 1638 or early in 1639 and printed the famed Bay Psalm Book there in 1640. This is the first substantial book and the earliest extant example of printing from what is now the United States. The Cambridge press continued under Daye’s son Matthew until his death in 1649, after which it was managed by Samuel Green.

The next press to be established was at Jamestown, Virginia, by the printer William Nuthead. The Nuthead press was quickly suppressed by the colonial government, however, and nothing of its output has survived. After leaving Jamestown, Nuthead established another press at St. Mary’s City, Maryland, sometime before August 31, 1685. It was carried on until Nuthead’s widow removed it to Annapolis around 1695, yet nothing more than a broadside and a few forms survive. Thomas Reading established a second press at Annapolis in 1700. William Bradford brought printing to Pennsylvania in 1685, when he established a press at Philadelphia. He also established the first press in New York in 1693. Thus, by the end of the seventeenth century, there were permanent presses in Cambridge, Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. Their productions were modest, mainly government printing, forms, and sermons.

Thomas Short was the first printer in Connecticut, arriving in New London in 1709 to do the official printing of the colony. It is unclear when printing first came to New Jersey. William Bradford issued a book of laws,
Anno Regni Georgii Regis,
with the imprint Perth Amboy 1723, though some scholars doubt whether he would have moved his press from New York simply to issue this book. The first permanent printer in New Jersey was James Parker, who established his press at Woodbridge in 1757. James Franklin, after running afoul of the authorities in Boston for publishing the
New England Courant,
settled in Newport in 1727, bringing his press and establishing a tradition of lively journalism and literature in Rhode Island. Printing returned to Virginia in 1730 with the arrival of William Parks. In 1731, a monetary incentive offered by the South Carolina government attracted three competing printers to Charleston: George Webb, Eleazer Phillips, and Thomas Whitmarsh. All three soon died or left, though Louis Timothy, a protégé and business associate of Benjamin Franklin, took over the Whitmarsh press. James Davis, trained by William Parks in Williamsburg, became the first printer in North Carolina in 1749, when he settled in New Bern and began to print the journal of the House of Burgesses. Punished by the Massachusetts Assembly for supposedly printing an objectionable pamphlet in 1754, Daniel Fowle consequently moved to Portsmouth, New Hampshire and started the colony’s first press in 1756. Delaware’s first printer was also a Franklin apprentice: James Adams served more than seven years with Franklin and Hall in Philadelphia before he established his press in Wilmington in 1761. Finally, James Johnston, newly arrived from England, set up the first press in Savannah, Georgia in 1762 : he printed the colony’s statutes and began the
Georgia Gazette
in 1763.