1. Carpenter, Kenneth E., ed., Books and Society in History (New York, 1983).Google Scholar

2. Resnick, Daniel P., ed., Literacy in Historical Perspective (Washington, D.C., 1983).Google Scholar

3. Joyce, William L., et al., eds., Printing and Society in Early America (Worcester, Mass., 1983).Google Scholar

4. Darnton, Robert, “What Is the History of Books?” in Reading in America: Literature and Social History, ed. Davidson, Cathy N. (Baltimore, 1989), 29.Google Scholar

5. For an overview of the field, see Hall, David D. and Hench, John B., eds., Needs and Opportunities in the History of the Book: America, 1639–1876 (Worcester, Mass., 1987). Articles relevant to various aspects of the field are published regularly in such journals as the Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, Printing History, and American Quarterly. Among the many notable works published during the 1980s on print culture and books outside of North America are Chartier, Roger, The Cultural Uses of Print in Early Modern France, trans. Cochrane, Lydia G. (Princeton, N.J., 1987); and Marker, Gary, Publishing, Printing, and the Origins of Intellectual Life in Russia, 1700–1800 (Princeton, N.J., 1985).Google Scholar

6. Five of the chapters (including an earlier version of Davidson's introduction) appeared in the March 1988 issue of American Quarterly. Four others were originally published in other journals (1982–88), and four chapters were written especially for this volume.Google Scholar

7. Darnton, Robert, “What Is the History of Books?” Daedalus 111 (Summer 1982): 65–83.Google Scholar

8. Gilmore, William J., “Elementary Literacy on the Eve of the Industrial Revolution: Trends in Rural New England, 1760–1830,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 92, pt. 1 (Apr. 1982): 87–178. See also Jennifer Monaghan's, E. review of this work in Journal of the Early Republic 3 (Winter 1983): 491–93. Gilmore's emphasis on mentalité derives from the French Annales school of history which shifted the focus of academic history early in this century to probing the attitudes and mental habits behind historical events.Google Scholar

9. Brown, Richard D., “Afterword: From Cohesion to Competition,” in Printing and Society in Early America, ed. Joyce, et al., 302.Google Scholar

10. Somewhat neglected by both Brown and Gilmore is the impact on book production of the expansion of schooling in the first half of the nineteenth century. Primers and ABC books were staples of the colonial and early national press, along with stationery, business forms, and the like. By 1820 textbooks represented the single largest category of American book production as measured by dollar revenues. According to data presented in Lehmann-Haupt, Hellmut, The Book in America: A History of the Making and Selling of Books in the United States, 2d ed. (New York, 1952), 122ff., revenues from textbooks increased nearly eight-fold from 1820 through 1850 while total revenues in the industry increased only five-fold.Google Scholar

11. Zboray, Ronald J., “Antebellum Reading and the Ironies of Technological Innovation,” Reading in America, ed. Davidson, , 180–200. The invention and spread of eyeglasses and the improvement of illumination techniques have generally been neglected in the history of literacy and reading. Imitative experiments, in particular, might profitably be applied to these areas of research.Google Scholar

12. Bookbinding in America is discussed extensively by Lehmann-Haupt, , The Book in America, 148–53 and passim.Google Scholar

13. Besides the chapters by Neuburg, Victor (“Chapbooks in America”) and David Paul Nord (“A Republican Literature”) in Reading in America, ed. Davidson, , and the treatment of these genres by Gilmore, , Reading Becomes a Necessity of Life, see especially Margaret Spufford's study of chapbooks in England, Small Books and Pleasant Histories: Popular Fiction and Its Readership in Seventeenth-Century England (London, 1981).Google Scholar

14. Neuburg, Victor, “Chapbooks in America: Reconstructing the Popular Reading of Early America,” in Reading in America, ed. Davidson, , 81–114.Google Scholar

15. Nord, David Paul, “A Republican Literature: Magazine Reading and Readers in Late-Eighteenth-Century New York,” in ibid., 114–39.Google Scholar

16. Jennifer Monaghan, E., “Literacy Instruction and Gender in Colonial New England,” in ibid., 53–80.Google Scholar

17. Joyce, Donald Franklin, “Reflections on the Changing Publishing Objectives of Secular Black Publishers, 1900–1986,” in ibid., 226–39.Google Scholar

18. Davidson, Cathy N., “The Life and Times of Charlotte Temple: The Biography of a Book,” in ibid., 157–79.Google Scholar

19. Radway, Janice A., “The Book-of-the-Month Club and the General Reader: The Uses of Serious Fiction,” in ibid., 259–84; Jameson, Fredric, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, N.Y., 1981).Google Scholar

20. O'Brien, Sharon, “Becoming Noncanonical: The Case against Willa Cather,” in Reading in America, ed. Davidson, , 240–58.Google Scholar

21. Engelsing, Rolf, Analphabetentum und Lekture: Zur Sozialgeschichte des Lesens in Deutschland zwischen feudaler und industrieller Gesellschaft (Stuttgart, 1973); Hall, David D., “The Uses of Literacy in New England, 1600–1850,” in Printing and Society in Early America, ed. Joyce, et al., 20ff.Google Scholar

22. Davidson, Cathy N., Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America (New York, 1986), 69–79.Google Scholar

23. See Heath, Shirley B., “The Functions and Uses of Literacy,” Journal of Communication 30 (Winter 1980): 123–33.Google Scholar

24. In particular, I have in mind bureaucratic and business materials: account books, charters, correspondence, invoices, and the like. Furthermore, the low survival rate of almanacs, posters, broadsides, chapbooks, and ABC books, in particular, makes suspicious the notion of reverential treatment for these genres.Google Scholar

25. Clanchy, Michael T., “Looking Back from the Invention of Printing,” in Literacy in Historical Perspective, ed. Resnick, , 7–22.Google Scholar

26. On the quantity and functions of official documents issued in England from the eleventh through the fourteenth centuries, see Clanchy, Michael T., From Memory to Written Record: England, 1066–1307 (Cambridge, Mass., 1979).Google Scholar

27. Chartier, , The Cultural Uses of Print, 238.Google Scholar

28. Goody, Jack and Watt, Ian, “The Consequences of Literacy,” in Literacy in Traditional Societies, ed. Goody, Jack (Cambridge, Eng., 1968), 27–68.Google Scholar

29. Davidson, , “Life and Times of Charlotte Temple” 157ff. This same theme, applied to children's literature, is advanced in Lurie, Alison, Don't Tell the Grown-Ups: Subversive Children's Literature (Boston, 1990).Google Scholar

30. Lazere, Donald, “Literacy and the Mass Media: The Political Implications,” in Reading in America, ed. Davidson, , 285–303.Google Scholar

31. Jennifer Monaghan, E., in ibid., 53–80; Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher, The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1795–1812 (New York, 1990).Google Scholar

32. On the issues presented by signatures as indicators of literacy, see Venezky, Richard L., “The Development of Literacy in the Industrialized Nations of the West,” in Handbook of Reading Research, ed. Barr, Rebecca et al., vol. 2 (New York, 1990).Google Scholar

33. Sicherman, Barbara, “Sense and Sensibility: A Case Study of Women's Reading in Late-Victorian America,” in Reading in America, ed. Davidson, , 201–25.Google Scholar

34. Salvino, Dana Nelson, “The Word in Black and White: Ideologies of Race and Literacy in Antebellum America,” in ibid., 140–56.Google Scholar

35. Venezky, Richard L., “The History of Reading Research,” in Handbook of Reading Research, ed. David Pearson, P. et al. (New York, 1984).Google Scholar

36. The literature on the psychological study of reading is vast and is scattered across a number of separate fields of inquiry. A good starting point is David Pearson, P. et al., eds., Handbook of Reading Research (New York, 1984). Earlier comprehensive works include Eleanor Gibson, J. and Levin, Harry, The Psychology of Reading (Cambridge, Mass., 1975); Anderson, Irving H. and Dearborn, Walter F., The Psychology of Teaching Reading (New York, 1952); and chapter 10 of Woodworth, Robert S., Experimental Psychology (New York, 1938).Google Scholar

37. Hardyck, Curtis D. and Petrinovich, L. F., “Treatment of Subvocal Speech during Reading,” Journal of Reading 12 (1969): 361–68, 419–22.Google Scholar

38. UNESCO, World Illiteracy at Mid-century: A Statistical Study (Paris, 1957). On this same issue, see Soltow, Lee and Stevens, Edward, The Rise of Literacy and the Common School in the United States: A Socioeconomic Analysis to 1870 (Chicago, 1981), ch. 4.Google Scholar