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The Book in America: Economic Aspects of the Material Text:

Program and links to pre-circulated background readings

Spring Term 2006

Lea Library (Sixth floor of Van Pelt Library, 34^th and Walnut Streets, Philadelphia—enter from Locust Walk)

Selected Friday afternoons 3-5:30 or so

Week 1 (January 13): General Introduction, British background, American context

• Daniel Traister, University of Pennsylvania (The social, cultural, and physical environment of print and printers in the Early Modern period)
  <Text>

• James Green, Library Company of Philadelphia (The eighteenth-century British book trade as business)
  <Background reading> | <For those who want more...> | <Handouts>

• Michelle Craig McDonald, Harvard Business School (The early American economic setting)
  <Background reading> | <Talk outline> | <Images> | <Handout>

• <Notes on the discussion of the presentations>

Week 2 (January 27): Authorship and authors in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries

• Daniel Traister, University of Pennsylvania (Franklin as bookman)
  <Background reading 1> | <Background reading 2> | <Text>

• Meredith McGill, Rutgers University (Practices and cultures of reprinting [including production methods and serial printing])
  <Background reading> | <Text> | <Slides>

• Max Cavitch, University of Pennsylvania (The binding of tradition)  

• Nancy Bentley, University of Pennsylvania (The influences of legal developments)
  <Slides> | <Summary of Remarks> | <For those who want more 1> | <For those who want more 2>

Week 3 (February 10): Suppliers, binders, printers/publishers, and a beginning on process and product in the nineteenth century

• John Bidwell, Pierpont Morgan Library (Paper-making, craft to industrial, as craft and as production process)
  <Background reading>

• Willman Spawn, Bryn Mawr College, and Tom Kinsella, Richard Stockton College (Early bookbinding, craft to industrial)

  <Background reading> | <Handout>

• James Green, Library Company of Philadelphia (Organization of the early printing trade and the transition to publishing per se, status quo ante in bookselling)
  <Background reading> | <Handout 1> | <Handout 2> | <Handout 3>

Week 4 (February 24):  Nineteenth century transformations

• Farley Grubb, University of Delaware (Scene-setting on nineteenth century shifts in the structure of the American economic activity, infrastructure, and population)
  <Slides>

• Michael Winship, University of Texas (The transformation of production and of bookselling from the publishing company perspective)

• Walter Friedman, Harvard Business School (Selling goods, especially books, in places where there weren’t many people)

  <Background reading>

• Patricia Okker, University of Missouri (Magazines as a vehicle for the dissemination of literature and as an industry)

  <Background reading>

Week 5 (March 3):  Twentieth century transitions to ca. 1975

• Catherine Turner, College Misericordia (Marketing literary modernism)
  <Background reading 1> | <Background reading 2>

• Erin Smith, University of Texas-Dallas (Mass market print culture)

  <Background reading 1> | <Background reading 2>

• Daniel Raff, University of Pennsylvania (Traditional distribution, retail and wholesale, mail order as a sector, and the Book of the Month Club as an economic institution)
  <Background reading>

Week 6 (March 17):  Fin de siècle changes

• James English, University of Pennsylvania  (The economy of prestige)
  <Background reading>

• Daniel Raff, University of Pennsylvania (Two epochs of chains and then Amazon, evolution of wholesale trade and its larger significance, and industry evolution in the long view)

  <Background reading>

Week 7 (March 31):  Panel: The future text, material and perhaps otherwise

• Franklyn Rodgers, University of Pennsylvania Press Board of Trustees (formerly President of Scribner Book Co. & Warner Publishing Services)

• Kathleen Keane, Johns Hopkins University Press

• Paul Dry, Paul Dry Books

• Peter Hildick-Smith, Codex-Group LLC