PRINTING AND PUBLISHING

PRINTING AND PUBLISHING. The shift from script to print in early modern communications was both dramatic and gradual. The invention of printing from movable type did produce many more books and led to a steep decline in the production of manuscripts by about 1475. Still, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, three or four hundred years after the introduction of movable type, manuscript was a legitimate form of publication in every field of scientific and literary endeavor. And while official communications from the political and religious spheres more and more began to take printed form, a lively network of clandestine manuscript production allowed unorthodox ideas to circulate outside the purview of the censors. Only by the turn of the nineteenth century did book production begin to assume its modern form. Then, the "typographical old regime," as the previous system is sometimes called, began to be replaced by the structure of an industry, divided into creative, editorial, and publishing sectors, that would emerge during the course of the century as capable of reaching the first mass audiences. Before then, individual entrepreneurs operated myriad relatively small firms in all the major cities without significant legal protection and under a regime of more or less strict political and ecclesiastical control. In spite of these conditions, printing and publishing exercised a profound influence on religious, intellectual, and political life wherever it flourished.

TECHNOLOGY AND MATERIALS

In the generation following Johannes Gutenberg, whose "forty-two-line Bible" was probably completed around 1455, the industry had already begun to take on the features that would characterize it for the next three and a half centuries. A typical operation, under the direction of a master printer, eventually included a compositor who was responsible for composing and justifying the lines of characters in his composing stick. He then tied up the page (i.e., the lead necessary to print a page) and imposed the pages of a sheet, situating the pages of lead so that the sheets would be printed correctly, with the chase and furniture around them, made up a form, and fixed the signatures so the sheets could be folded in an orderly succession when printed. A pressman and his companion were engaged in the actual printing of pages—one was responsible for inking the forms with leather ink balls while the other placed the wet paper upon the tympan, turned the frisket down, moved the carriage in for the correct positioning of the platen, and then pulled the bar two times on one side of a sheet. The whole print run was repeated on the other side for perfecting the sheets. A corrector read proof in the lead characters and then sent his corrections back to the compositor, who reopened the form and reworked the lines. Sixteenth-century printers and publishers formed into guilds, which eventually sought to set standards for the quality of the product and the payment of workers, while governing relations between firms.

The cost of materials, coupled with a primitive system of exchange, powerfully conditioned the average size of pressruns. Well into the eighteenth century, accounts between authors and printers and between printers themselves, often at the trade fairs of Antwerp, Leipzig, Frankfurt, and Lyon, were still being settled by barter of books or paper. To save paper, pressruns rarely exceeded the thousand or so copies that were ordered by authors or their agents, or that printers could be certain of exhausting in a short time. Often this meant the quantity a good pressman could pull in twelve hours of work. Few printers had more than a few type fonts on hand, with rarely enough characters to compose more than a few pages of a book. After several pages had been printed up in predetermined quantities, forms were untied and the type redistributed in the fonts for composing successive pages. Second pressruns thus, in effect, almost invariably entailed new editions.

Established from the outset at a high level of sophistication, the technology of printing evolved slowly. As late as the seventeenth century, the main changes in the wood-and-metal press that had been used by Gutenberg some two hundred years earlier were metal rails to make the carriage slide in and out more smoothly and accurately, and brass bars to connect the platen more firmly to the hose. Type founding became an industry in itself, developed notably by Claude Garamond (c. 1480–1561) in the sixteenth century, whereas the chief advances in the eighteenth century came from such exceptional founder-printers as Giambattista Bodoni (1740–1813) and John Baskerville (1706–1775). The manufacture of paper was also a separate industry, mostly located away from the larger cities, on clear streams and rivers, in towns like Fabriano and Salò in northern Italy, Chemnitz in Germany, Basel in Switzerland, and in regions like Alsace and the lower Rhineland. Already in the first decades of the sixteenth century, copper plate engraving began to take the place of woodcuts for illustrating works aimed at more cultivated audiences, although woodcuts did not disappear until well into the eighteenth century.

DIFFUSION OF PRINTING

From Gutenberg's operation in Mainz, whether by emigration of personnel or by emulation of technique, the industry soon spread. If Cologne, at least for sheer number of editions, soon emerged as one of the greatest centers in Germany, beginning with the shop of Ulrich Zell (d. 1507), powerful rivals soon appeared across the Rhine. The lure of scholarly publishing may well have inspired Guillaume Fichet and Johann Heynlin to organize production in Paris in 1470; the presence of a commercial fair eventually made Lyon the second printing center of France, beginning with Barthélemy Buyer in 1473. In Westminster, William Caxton brought his experience on the Continent to bear on the project for an English press in 1476. Between 1465 and 1466 the first shops in Italy were opened in Subiaco outside Rome (Konrad Sweynheym and Arnold Pannartz) and in Rome itself (Ulrich Han). Three years later the debut of Johannes de Spira began the rise of Venice, which in the age of Aldus Manutius (c. 1450–1515) and the Gioliti family of the sixteenth century established its place as the undisputed leader among the 250 or so cities and towns where printing now existed.

By the second half of the sixteenth century, the printing epicenter of Europe began to shift northward. With twenty-four presses and over a hundred workers at the height of his activity, Christophe Plantin (1514–1589), who had offices in Antwerp, Leiden, and Paris, ran the largest printing firm of his age, occupied by, among other commitments, official work for the monarchy of King Philip II of Spain. With a complete type foundry attached to the printing operation, the firm was able to produce 2,450 editions in thirty-four years of activity. A former employee of Plantin, Louis Elzevier (1540–1617), subsequently dominated the market in Leiden.

CULTURAL IMPACT

The vast majority of book production in the early modern period was as uncontroversial as it was unliterary and unscientific. However, almost from the outset, printers became involved in the great cultural movements of the time. Aldus Manutius of Venice was by no means the only humanist who practiced the printing trade, although his case has become paradigmatic. Applying his scholarly knowledge of Latin and Greek, he produced a repertoire of products including the great works of classical antiquity, with text compressed by his innovative italic font, and one work of great beauty, the lavishly illustrated 1499 edition of Francesco Colonna's Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (Dream of Poliphilo). The Gioliti family, also based in Venice, contributed to the growing reputation of Italian literature with editions of such authors as Petrarch and Ariosto. In a slightly later period, Robert Estienne, of the Parisian family that moved in circles close to the humanist theologian Jacques Lefèvre d'Étaples (c. 1450–1536), found himself in the midst of the contention between Protestants and Catholics in the Reformation. His celebrated polyglot New Testament, presenting the Vulgate (traditional Latin), the Greek text, and the Latin translation of the latter by Erasmus, eventually had to be produced in Geneva because of the controversies it aroused in France among authorities in the faculty of theology of the University of Paris.

Wherever important changes were occurring, from Renaissance humanism to the Protestant Reformation, from the birth of modern science to exploration in the New World, the specific role of the press could scarcely be distinguished from the role of other agents of change. Obviously, the printer's art, apart from advantages of speed and diffusion, could be particularly effective for delivering content when combined with various forms of illustration. Almost from the outset, the satiric print, political and religious, and often using primitive xylographic techniques, was a frequent accompaniment to text. Scientific illustration reached a peak of perfection in Basel in 1543 with the publication of Andreas Vesalius's De Humani Corporis Fabrica Libri Septem (Seven books on the structure of the human body), setting the standard for later productions such as those by Georges Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707–1788). Mapmaking advanced from the Cosmographiae Introductio of Martin Waldseemüller, published in 1507 in Saint-Dié (Lorraine) along with a map showing the first depiction of America as such, to the projections of Gerhard Mercator (1512–1594), printed in Amsterdam, to the elaborate editions, printed by the Blaeu family in the same city in the 1640s–1660s, concerning every spot on the known globe.

In the realms of visual arts and music, mechanical reproduction contributed, in ways that still need further study, to education, to the introduction of new categories of leisure-time activities, and even to changing styles. Music printing constituted a particular challenge because notes and other symbols had to be superimposed over a fixed staff. Although the method of movable type, used to particular effect by Ottaviano dei Petrucci in Venice in the early sixteenth century, demanded the extra expense of plural impressions, it spread widely due to the absence of a workable alternative. The engraving of entire sheets of music, first tried in the early sixteenth century, eventually came to be preferred. Still in the eighteenth century, however, important English music publishers like Henry Playford (1657–1709) used the earlier method.

REGULATION

Regulatory mechanisms emerged slowly as officials in church and state began to recognize the potential of the press for ideological purposes—their own and others'. Each new press rule provoked authors, printers, publishers, and purchasers to conceive of new strategies of evasion. Books destined for more tightly controlled markets were shipped in via the free ports or smuggled across political boundaries in shipments of other merchandise. Few dared to suggest, with the early seventeenth-century Italian polemicist Ferrante Pallavicino (1615–1644), that censorship was an advantage; but no one could deny that the demand for certain works was inevitably enhanced by official sanctions.

Preliminary indices of forbidden books drawn up by the faculty of theology of the University of Paris (1540s) and by the Venetian government (1547) in the first decades of the sixteenth century were soon followed by those of Pope Paul IV and the Council of Trent (1564). By the time of the foundation of the Congregation of the Index in 1572, most civil governments had deputed various combinations of churchmen and government representatives to approve manuscripts for publication and oversee book imports.

Censorship was by no means exclusive to Roman Catholic areas, in spite of the relative press freedom advocated by John Milton in his pioneering tract, Areopagitica, in 1644. In fact, even in Milton's own thought, press freedom rarely extended to what were unanimously regarded as dangerous matters in religion and politics. Where prepublication censorship went out of fashion, as it did in Britain after 1695, libel laws continued as an effective method of controlling ideas.

Printers and authors may have regarded piracy as being as serious a problem as censorship. They were fully prepared to protect their vested interest in intellectual property whenever they could. At the local level, they could count on applying for fifteenor twenty-five-year exclusive privileges to print particular works, enforced by heavy punishments meted out by government agencies. They could also be sure that, if the work was successful, printers in other states would print it with impunity, as no rules had any application outside the state where they were issued. Juan Caramuel y Lobkowitz, Spanish-born cleric and correspondent of Pierre Gassendi and Réné Descartes, in his Syntagma de arte typographica (1662; Collection concerning the typographical art), condemned the custom of seizing, using, and selling the writings of authors without their permission, citing the only international convention unequivocally binding all humanity—namely, the divine injunction against stealing. His appeal fell on deaf ears.

A WIDER MARKET

Throughout our period, the quantity of printed material increased in absolute terms as well as in proportion to the rising population of Europe. And apart from the now ubiquitous broadsheets in various combinations of text and illustration, new genres emerged for reaching larger audiences. In France, bibliothèque bleue, and in England, "chapbooks," referred to cheaply printed pamphlets in small formats with primitive woodcut illustrations that were sold mainly by itinerant hawkers. The first newspapers were produced in Antwerp in 1605, and by mid-century they existed in every major city. Whether privately controlled (as in Germany and England) or sponsored by governments (as in France and certain parts of Italy), they spread widely. The eighteenth century added variety magazines to the growing repertoire of literature on which the middling ranks of people had begun to rely for instruction, information, and entertainment.

A veritable "reading revolution" hasbeenattributed to the eighteenth century, entailing a shift from an "intensive" style (fewer books read carefully) to a more "extensive" style (more books, read carelessly). Whether this was actually true or existed only in the imaginations of contemporary observers and modern scholars is difficult to say. In any case, new genres aiming at larger audiences and new methods of distribution were accompanied by new practices of sociability, especially where coffeehouses, as exemplified in the pages of The Spectator (1711–1712) of Joseph Addison andRichard Steele, became places of discussion and cultural exchange. In London, the number of booksellers rose to some six hundred by the end of the century. In eighteenth-century Germany, reading societies and lending libraries fed the appetites of ever larger numbers of readers.

Industry growth and audience development pushed early modern structures to the limits. Subscription publishing allowed printers to plan more carefully for the long term even where credit was tight. Some of the most important works of the eighteenth century were published by this method, including the Encyclopédie conceived by Denis Diderot and Jean d'Alembert (35 vols., 1751–1780). Works of imaginative literature were meanwhile published in weekly or monthly installments to sustain reader interest, with considerable influence on the history of the English novel. Freedom to innovate depended to some degree on the abrogation of guild privileges and, in many parts of Europe, the abolition of guilds. The Remondini firm of Bassano took advantage of its location outside the urban epicenter of the Venetian Republic in order to join papermaking operations with type founding, as well as to manufacture a wide variety of print products besides books, including prayer cards, games, and even wallpaper, in a vast strategy to undercut Venetian competitors.

EDITING AND PUBLISHING

By the end of the century, the figure of the editor/publisher, as distinct from the author and the master printer, began to emerge. Charles-Joseph Panckoucke, for instance, undertook such longterm projects as the reprint of the French Encyclopédie and the direction of the Encyclopédie méthodique, begun in 1781 as a continuation of the former and eventually completed in 166 volumes, along with several newspapers in and around Paris—all before finally purchasing a single press himself. And while John Bell exercised a similar entrepreneurial function in London, publishing several periodicals and newspapers, James Lackington in 1793 opened what may have been the largest book warehouse of the time, including over 500,000 volumes.

Even before mass literacy made a genuine mass market possible in Europe, the premises were laid for transition to a system in which the visual medium, mostly in the form of the products of the printing press, would take the place of speech as the premier method of communicating ideas. The way was prepared, to quote the McLuhanesque phrase, for the irreversible emergence of "typographical man," with all the accompanying cultural consequences that came to define the mental orientation of the modern age.

See also Antwerp ; Bible: Translations and Editions ; Caxton, William ; Censorship ; Dissemination of Knowledge ; Encyclopédie ; Gutenberg, Johannes ; Index of Prohibited Books ; Journalism, Newspapers, and Newssheets ; Libraries ; Literacy and Reading ; Milton, John ; Venice .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Source

Moxon, Joseph. Mechanick Exercises: Or, the Doctrine of Handyworks, Applied to the Art of Printing. Edited by Herbert Davis and H. Carter. London, 1958. Originally published in London, 1683–1684.

Secondary Sources

Chartier, Roger. The Cultural Uses of Print in Early Modern France. Princeton, 1987.

Darnton, Robert. The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclopédie, 1775–1800. Cambridge, Mass., 1979.

Dooley, Brendan, and Sabrina Baron, eds. The Politics of Information in Early Modern Europe. London, 2001.

Febvre, Lucien, and Henri-Jean Martin. The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing, 1450–1800. Translated by David Gerard. London, 1976. Translation of L'apparition du livre. Paris, 1958.

Gaskell, Philip. A New Introduction to Bibliography. London, 1972.

Infelise, Mario. L'editoria veneziana nel '700. Milan, 1989.

Ing, Janet Thompson. Johann Gutenberg and His Bible: A Historical Study. New York, 1988.

Krummel, D. W., and Stanley Sadie, eds. Music Printing and Publishing. The Norton/Grove Handbooks in Music. New York, 1990.

Lowry, Martin. The World of Aldus Manutius: Business and Scholarship in Renaissance Venice. Oxford, 1979.

McLuhan, Marshall. The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographical Man. Toronto, 1962.

Voet, Leon. The Golden Compasses: A History and Evaluation of the Printing and Publishing Activities of the Officina Plantiniana at Antwerp. 2 vols. Amsterdam, 1969–1972.

Brendan Dooley

printing and publishing. Printing was a late arrival in Ireland, introduced by government for administrative and propaganda purposes. The first book, printed in Dublin in 1551 by Humphrey Powell, was The Boke of Common Praier. For almost a century there was never more than a single press in operation, and the output was small.

From 1604 government control was exercised through the king's printer's patent, which granted to the holder a monopoly over all printing and bookselling. In theory this monopoly held, except for a short period in the 1640s, until 1732; in fact the stranglehold it created was effectively ended by the legal challenge offered in 1680–1 by Joseph Ray, permitting a rapid expansion thereafter in the book trades.

In the provinces during the troubled 1640s the propaganda needs of the warring factions of king, parliament, and Confederate Catholics led to presses being established in Waterford (1643), Kilkenny (1646), and Cork (1648). We have firm evidence of a press in only one other town in the 17th century—Belfast (1694).

In 1670 the few booksellers working in Dublin joined together with two other trades, the cutlers and the painter‐stainers, to found the Guild of St Luke. Although it continued in existence until 1841 the guild never really became a regulatory force.

The British Copyright Act of 1709 did not extend to Ireland, and so cheap reprints of London publications became the staple of the Dublin book trade. The 18th century proved to be the most successful period in its history. The printer‐bookseller predominated, George Faulkner being the prime example. Specialist printers, like Samuel Powell, were the exception.

Up to the early 1780s most of the books printed were sold on the domestic market. When export restrictions were fully lifted in 1783 there was a huge increase in overseas trade, especially to America. Wilson's Dublin Directories record an expansion in book trade businesses from 70 in 1781 to 118 in 1793. But the 1790s saw a disastrous decline, the crucial factor being the expense and lack of paper. A wave of key figures emigrated to America. The decline was compounded by the fact that many in the book trade were members of the United Irishmen, and were imprisoned or exiled after the insurrection of 1798.

Beyond the capital only the cities could support specialist printer‐booksellers, Eugene Swiney and James Haly in Cork, and the Blows and the Joys in Belfast being examples. The establishment of provincial newspapers was the impetus to the spread of the printing press beyond the main cities. By 1800 presses had been established in 34 provincial towns.

The output of these provincial presses was of local interest, and they seldom undertook reprints of London works. Thus they were not affected by the extension of the Copyright Act to Ireland in 1801, and the period up to 1840 was one of further expansion. The loss of the reprint trade, however, had a devastating effect on the Dublin printers. The publication of books plummeted 80 per cent, it is said, in the first half of the century and booksellers relied heavily on the sale of imported books. John Cumming was the largest importer in this period and a publisher of note. The printers who survived best were those that had government contracts, or were official printers to learned bodies or societies.

The publication of William Carleton's very popular Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry by Curry & Company of Dublin in 1830 was a watershed in the revival of native publishing. It proved that an Irish writer could be successful without having to appear under a London imprint. The lesson was learned by James Duffy, who in the following decade published many of the authors of the Young Ireland movement in his series The Library of Ireland. Also in the 1840s the long‐established Belfast firm of Simms & M'Intyre took on the British market with their revolutionary Parlour Library series of cheap fiction.

Parallel with these developments, from 1831 onwards the commissioners of national education (see National Schools) started to issue their schoolbooks, Alexander Thom being the principal printer. Their phenomenal success led to a large export trade to Britain and the colonies.

The recovery of the book trade was interrupted by the devastations of the Great Famine of 1845–9, and some of the largest firms in Dublin went bankrupt, Milliken, Folds, Coyne, and Curry among them.

Provincial presses suffered a decline in the second half of the century. The improved postal service and the spread of the railway network meant that the bigger towns could supply the printing needs of wider areas. However, improved communications also allowed the larger Irish firms to print and publish for the British market and the colonies. Starting in 1846 James McGlashan published jointly with many of the large British houses, and Michael Henry Gill, at the Dublin University Press, printed for many of them. The Dublin branch of W. H. Smith, booksellers and newsagents (taken over in 1886 by Easons), established a nationwide wholesale network. Printing works, such as Marcus Ward and Guys of Cork, both founded in the 1840s, and later Bairds in Belfast (1862), were established and expanded over the years.

The second half of the century was one of stability and steady growth, but it ended, and the new century began, with the trade in the slough of a general economic depression. The Irish literary revival did encourage the foundation of Maunsel and the Dun Emer/Cuala Press, but these were peripheral to the main trends. The circumstances of the First World War led to rampant inflation in printers' wages (265 per cent between 1913 and 1920) and huge rises in printing costs.

The depression continued after independence in 1922. The Censorship of Publications Act (1926) tempered any adventurousness that publishers may have had. The dominant Dublin houses were the Talbot Press, Duffy, and Gills, whose output was a mixture of schoolbooks, light literature, and Catholic piety. The Dundalgan Press in Dundalk was one of the few provincial houses undertaking any significant publication. Irish‐language publishing (e.g. An Gúm, the government's imprint, founded in 1926, and Sáirséal agus Dill, started in 1945), buoyed up by state encouragement, could afford to be more innovative.

The poor standard of Irish typography was a recurrent complaint throughout the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. A beacon of good taste at this time was Colm Ó Lochlainn's Three Candles Press, founded in 1926.

During the Economic War large tariffs on imports led to a printing boom. But with the settlement of 1938 the industry was thrown back into recession. Unemployment among Dublin printers was six times higher than in previous years. Stasis continued during and after the Second World War, the foundation of the Mercier Press being an exception.

Many Irish authors still had to go to London to be published. Liam Miller founded the Dolmen Press (1951–87) to provide an outlet for them. At the same time his high standards of typography lifted the design standards in the industry as a whole.

Publishing languished in the 1950s and 1960s. The recurrent need for textbooks meant that the educational houses weathered the storm better than the general trade houses. In contrast, by 1960 the printing trade was booming, riding the crest of industrial revival. However, the revolution then happening in printing technology was soon to disrupt matters. The full impact in Ireland took place during the oil crises of the mid‐1970s, and led to recession and much industrial unrest.

In 1974 one of the largest firms, the Irish University Press, went bankrupt. Ironically its failure helped fuel the revival in Irish publishing then under way. Several of its redundant staff went on to establish their own publishing ventures, Irish Academic Press, Wolfhound, and the periodical Books Ireland among them. At the same time the Blackstaff Press was founded in Belfast, to be followed a few years later by Appletree. The revival can be attributed to improvements in economic conditions and educational levels, and to changes in printing technology. During the 1980s the number of publishers increased by a third.

In 1970 Clé, the Irish Book Publishers' Association, was founded to promote the output of the industry. Centralized distribution was an innovation of the 1980s, and Gill & Macmillan Distribution now handles the output of the largest trade publishers. In 1990 the demand from the publishing industry was such that the first specialist book printer, ColourBooks, could be launched and has proved a success thus far.

Bibliography

Farmer, Tony , A Brief History of Clé [the Irish Publishers' Association]1970–1987 (1995)
Pollard, M. , Dublin's Trade in Books 1550–1800 (1989)
Wheeler, W. G. , The Spread of Provincial Printing in Ireland up to 1850, Irish Booklore, 4/1 (1978)

Vincent Kinane

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