Printing and Publishing

Printing and Publishing. Since 1640, when a Cambridge, Massachusetts, printer produced a hymnal popularly called the Bay Psalm Book, printing and publishing have loomed large in American culture. The eighteenth‐century Philadelphia printer Benjamin Franklin published numerous works, including popular almanacs. Revolutionary‐era printers produced influential political pamphlets. Isaiah Thomas (1750–1831) of Worcester, Massachusetts, published high‐quality books and magazines that he sold through his bookshops in various cities.

Nineteenth‐century technological developments transformed a craft into a major industry. New York's Richard Hoe invented the steam‐powered rotary press with curved stereotype plates in 1846. The web press (1871), developed by Hoe and Stephen Tucker, printing on both sides of a continuous roll of paper, could produce 18,000 newspapers per hour. The linotype machine, patented in 1884 by Ottmar Mergenthaler (1854–1899), eliminated hand‐set type, creating metal type slugs that could be melted down and reused. The New York Tribune adopted the linotype process in 1886. High‐speed rotary presses made possible mass‐circulation newspapers and magazines; low‐cost books; and mass‐produced Bibles, religious tracts, and Sunday‐school literature.

Nineteenth‐century book publishers—including New York's Charles Scribner's Sons (1846) and Putnam's (1848); J.B. Lippincott (1836) of Philadelphia; and Boston's Little, Brown (1847) and Houghton Mifflin (1852)—produced religious works, histories, novels, dictionaries, gift books, and school textbooks. Books were sold through bookshops, by advance subscription, and door‐to‐door. Prior to the International Copyright Convention (1891), U.S. publishers regularly peddled pirated editions of popular British writers like Walter Scott and Charles Dickens without paying royalties. Dime novels and juveniles, published by Erastus Beadle (1821–1894) and others, proved highly profitable as well.

The early twentieth century brought a wave of new houses, including Alfred A. Knopf (1915), Boni & Liveright (1917), Harcourt Brace (1919), Simon & Schuster (1924), and Bennett Cerf’s Random House (1925). Publishing contemporary European and American authors, they sometimes faced censorship pressures from antivice societies such as Boston's Watch and Ward Society. These new publishers also introduced marketing innovations such as Boni & Liveright's Modern Library (acquired by Random House in 1925), an inexpensive series in a standardized format. The direct‐mail Book‐of‐the‐Month Club and Literary Guild (1926) spawned a host of special‐interest book clubs. The paperback revolution, launched by Pocket Books (1939) and Bantam Books (1946), burgeoned after World War II. By the 1980s, paperbacks comprised one‐third of U.S. book sales.

Like U.S. business generally, the later twentieth century brought mergers and consolidation, such as Random House's 1960 acquisition of Knopf. Venerable houses became divisions of corporate conglomerates: RCA acquired Random House in 1966; CBS bought the textbook publisher Holt Rinehart & Winston (itself a product of earlier mergers) in 1967. Multinational media empires such as Germany's Bertelsmann and Rupert Murdoch's Australian‐based News Company became major players in the acquisitions game. Printing technology evolved as well, with composition directly from computer disk to high‐speed, continuously operating presses, and new techniques of high‐quality color and fine‐art reproduction.

By century's end, with independent bookstores hard‐pressed by high‐volume chains such as Borders and Barnes & Noble, the major publishers concentrated on blockbuster books by authors with name‐brand recognition. As book publishing and marketing were transformed, the book itself seemed vulnerable in an age of electronic information processing. When the best‐selling author Stephen King published several books on the Internet in the late 1990s, some observers saw this as the wave of the future.
See also Bible, The; Computers; Global Economy, America and the; Journalism; Literature; Literature, Popular; Mass Marketing; Mass Production; Multinational Enterprises; Technology.

Bibliography

Isaiah Thomas , History of Printing in America, 2 vols., 1810, reprint 1972.
Charles A. Madison , Book Publishing in America, 1966.
Thomas Whiteside , The Blockbuster Complex: Conglomerates, Show Business, and Book Publishing, 1981.
John W. Tebbel , Between Covers: The Rise and Transformation of Book Publishing in America, 1987.

Paul S. Boyer