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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, 34th 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
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)
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)
Patricia Okker, University of Missouri (Magazines as a vehicle for the dissemination of literature and as an industry)
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)
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)
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