Publishing Plates

Stereotyping, the method of casting solid printing plates from movable type, first became a commercial reality in the late eighteenth century, and it changed how books were printed. This study follows the technical and cultural changes that came with the technique when it reached the United States. Commissioning plates altered the daily work of print shops, the ways books reached readers, and the relationship between authors and the publishers who issued their work.

Drawing on archival records, Jeffrey M. Makala begins with the first use of stereotyping in Philadelphia in 1812 and traces its uptake by printers in New York and Philadelphia. He examines the printers, typefounders, authors and publishers who watched small, regional, craft-based printing traditions change quickly, a shift that prepared the way for the industrial publishing business that emerged in the United States around midcentury. Case studies of the publisher Mathew Carey and the American Bible Society, one of the first publishers of inexpensive Bibles, anchor his account of the origins of American publishing and mass media.

Makala also considers how ideas about authorship, copyright and language shifted, and how those shifts affected writers and literary circles. His examples come from the works and lives of Herman Melville, Sojourner Truth, Edgar Allan Poe, Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman, among others.

Bringing together book history, the history of technology, material culture studies and American studies, the book offers a detailed account of an innovation that reshaped American culture.