Significant changes in print culture took place during Edgar Allan Poe's lifetime, and he witnessed or participated in most of them. From his boyhood reading to the ambitious projects he left unfinished at the time of his death, Poe confronted innovative technology in book manufacture and changing attitudes toward print. The two are inseparable. Technological developments changed the book's physical appearance, first giving it a mass-produced appearance with the muslin bindings and later, with the pamphlet novel format, making books cheap, throwaway objects. The changes to the book's physical appearance took some getting used to. Books became something everyone could afford, but not without the sacrifice of their elegance. Though the physical changes affected many people's attitudes toward the consumption of books, for Poe, who made literature his profession, the changes had a more profound effect, for they influenced the literature he created.

When Poe was a schoolboy in Great Britain and, later, in Virginia, books opened his mind to the world of the imagination, a world he precociously wished to join. During his adolescence, he expressed a desire to publish his youthful poetic compositions, but his teacher, Joseph Clarke, dissuaded him and, in so doing, taught Poe a valuable lesson about the propriety and impropriety of print. Not all writing, Poe learned, belonged in print.