"There is Nothing So Effective as a Personal Canvass": Revaluing Nineteenth-Century American Subscription Books

Thomas, Amy

doi:10.1353/bh.1998.0013

Cited by 13 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 6 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Amy Thomas has brought to book historians' attention the fact that nineteenthcentury American subscription books need revaluing and that the domain remains largely unexplored. 7 The distribution of Mark Twain's novels is one exception, however, and it has come under the scrutiny of scholars since the 1940s, with special attention paid to The Innocents Abroad. More recently, A Connecticut Yankee has also had its share of attention.…”

Section: Ronald Jennmentioning

confidence: 99%

From American Frontier to European Borders: Publishing French Translations of Mark Twain's Novels Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn (1884-1963)

Jenn¹

2006

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Section: Ronald Jennmentioning

confidence: 99%

From American Frontier to European Borders: Publishing French Translations of Mark Twain's Novels Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn (1884-1963)

Jenn¹

2006

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The History of the Book

Zboray¹,

Zboray²

2012

The International Encyclopedia of Media Studies

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Since most media historians have yet to engage fully the history of the book (HOB), this essay provides a critical introduction to the approach. It discusses the approach's problematical object of study and characterizes its current practice as a postmodern performance of liberal “cultural poetics” rejecting grand narratives, whether the radical history of capitalism's emergence or the conservative history of ideas. We explain HOB's dynamics in terms of its emergence in the 1980s, which coincided with that of the history of the American book (HOAB). Both HOB and, particularly, HOAB were part of a “cultural turn” deployed by displaced intellectual historians against the New Social History (NSH), associated with quantitative or even systematic inquiry present in other national HOB traditions, especially in France's Annales School. Adopting the cultural history spirit of that tradition while replacing its research techniques with almost exclusively qualitative interpretation, HOAB also occluded a range of North American antecedents in journalism and literary studies, including bibliography, but in a way that put the latter to the service of cultural ends. As the new millennium approached, the HOB landscape shifted with the rise of reader‐and‐reception studies that reset the approach's course from books themselves to what books meant to specific end‐users as evidenced in their literary practices. The essay concludes with an overview of approaches to print production (especially publishing and authorship), distribution, and consumption, in light of HOB's move from a producer to a reader orientation, as well as indications of – and recommendations for – the future direction of the approach.

show abstract

“A New Enterprise in Our History”: William Still, Conductor ofThe Underground Rail Road(1872)

Black¹

2020

American Literary History

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This article presents the formal and material innovations of The Underground Rail Road (1872) and its author and publisher, William Still. Before the Civil War, Still chaired the Philadelphia Vigilance Committee, which assisted hundreds of fugitives from slavery in making their way to freedom. After the Civil War, Still wrote a book based on his records of their stories. The discrimination Black writers and readers experienced from the publishing business convinced Still to start his own. Still’s publishing business, like the movement his book documented, was the work of a collective. He called on family members, allies in reform, and friends in Black periodical publishing to produce and distribute the book. Still promoted the book and the business as an extension of the liberation movement. The labors of the fugitives he had helped, and of the booksellers he employed, would stimulate the economic progress, and protect the political and social gains, for which African Americans were striving. Still, a race man and a businessman, proposed a solution to the inequitable production and distribution of Black books. “The time has come,” he declared, “for colored men to be writing books & selling them too.”

show abstract

"There is Nothing So Effective as a Personal Canvass": Revaluing Nineteenth-Century American Subscription Books

Cited by 13 publications

References 6 publications

From American Frontier to European Borders: Publishing French Translations of Mark Twain's Novels Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn (1884-1963)

From American Frontier to European Borders: Publishing French Translations of Mark Twain's Novels Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn (1884-1963)

The History of the Book

“A New Enterprise in Our History”: William Still, Conductor ofThe Underground Rail Road(1872)

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About