"Through richly detailed accounts of individual entrepreneurs, including the prominent printer-publisher Mathew Carey, Remer reveals the economic logic behind this distinctive book trade."—The Book

Home to the so-called big five publishers as well as hundreds of smaller presses, renowned literary agents, a vigorous arts scene, and an uncountable number of aspiring and established writers alike, New York City is widely perceived as the publishing capital of the United States and the world. This book traces the origins and early evolution of the city’s rise to literary preeminence. Through five case studies, Steven Carl Smith examines publishing in New York from the post–Revolutionary War period through the Jacksonian era. He discusses the gradual development of local, regional, and national distribution networks, assesses the economic relationships and shared social and cultural practices that connected printers, booksellers, and their customers, and explores the uncharacteristically modern approaches taken by the city’s preindustrial printers and distributors. If the cultural matrix of printed texts served as the primary legitimating vehicle for political debate and literary expression, Smith argues, then deeper understanding of the economic interests and political affiliations of the people who produced these texts gives necessary insight into the emergence of a major American industry. Those involved in New York’s book trade imagined for themselves, like their counterparts in other major seaport cities, a robust business that could satisfy the new nation’s desire for print, and many fulfilled their ambition by cultivating networks that crossed regional boundaries, delivering books to the masses. A fresh interpretation of the market economy in early America, An Empire of Print reveals how New York started on the road to becoming the publishing powerhouse it is today.

"I Married Me a Wife" is a revisionist study of gender relations in late-eighteenth-century America. The American Museum, published during five early years of the United States, was a popular middle-class magazine in many ways the Reader's Digest of its time. Analyzing fiction, essays, poetry, and editorials in the American Museum on the subject of women, Arthur Scherr finds its views less parochial and antifeminist than many of the period's literary sources have led scholars to expect. The selections printed in the magazine, rather than reiterating the idea that "the woman's place is in the home," depict a more variegated view of women in diverse socioeconomic and emotional situations vis-a-vis men. The American Museum was published during the shaping of the U.S. Constitution; it is Scherr's conclusion that the Constitution's founding principle of individual freedom influenced the middle-class man's respect and support for women's autonomy, individuality, and self-determination to a degree rarely acknowledged by contemporary historians.