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Reviewed by: An Extensive Republic: Print, Culture, and Society in the New Nation, 1790–1840 Lisa M. Logan An Extensive Republic: Print, Culture, and Society in the New Nation, 1790–1840. Edited by Robert A. Gross and Mary Kelley. Volume 2 of A History of the Book in America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010. xxii + 697 pp. $60.00. Appearing a decade after the first volume in this substantial series on colonial American and US book history, the long-awaited second volume, An Extensive Republic: Print, Culture, and Society in the New Nation, 1790–1840, does not disappoint. This well-illustrated, richly documented, and painstakingly edited collection of essays by experts in the field of print culture focuses on the period after the American Revolution through the early decades of the nineteenth century. Contributors include museum curators, librarians, and scholars from diverse fields, especially history, English, and interdisciplinary studies (American, cultural, museum, and women’s studies), as well as anthropology, journalism, and communications. In his editor’s introduction, Robert A. Gross observes that from the 1790s until the 1840s, US print culture “was at once local and cosmopolitan but hardly national” (6). Print thrived in localized markets, “colleges, academies, and district schools; athenaeums, libraries, lyceums; gentlemen’s learned societies, women’s reading circles, mechanics’ institutes, young men’s debating clubs, African Americans’ mutual improvement societies; state and federal governments” (5). Drawing on a vast geography and diverse interests, “print was intimately involved with the leading developments of the age” and its institutions (4). Readers, writers, reviewers, printers, publishers, and booksellers addressed themselves to the building of a particularly American literature, distinguished from its European and British roots and appropriate for citizens of the new republic. This volume concerns the shifts in print culture as the new nation accommodated itself to “the sprawl of population across space, the weakness of national authority, the devolution of power downward to the [End Page 330] states, the release of energies and the proliferation of projects to profit from the unprecedented ‘opening’ of the social order” (6). Historian and volume coeditor Mary Kelley introduces each of six sections: “A Republic in Print: Ideologies and Institutions,” “Spreading the Word in Print,” “Educating the Citizenry,” “Gendering Authorship and Audiences,” “Genres of Print,” and “New Reading and Writing Publics.” Each section includes three to seven chapters by different scholars, an editorial approach that yields a multifaceted view. For example, chapters in “Spreading the Word in Print” address the role of government and law, political print culture, journalism, copyright, communications networks, religious and reform societies, and the importance of displaying “learning” in the new republic. While none of these chapters is centered on women writers, each of the institutions and ideologies described had an impact on women authors and their publishers and audiences. For example, Richard Brown suggests that print culture in the new republic relied on revolutionary ideals, including the importance of a free press and an informed citizenry. These ideals led to women’s and girls’ extensive reading as a marker of social class and republican duty. James Green’s discussion of the rise of book publishing explains how copyright, market, and costs affected publishers and authors, including Susanna Rowson. Karen Nipps’s case study of successful Philadelphia printer Lydia Bailey illuminates the technologies of printing and selling and offers an inside view of an early-nineteenth-century print shop. Analyzing Bailey’s personal writings (day-books, workbooks, and letters), Nipps demonstrates Bailey’s adept negotiation of print culture, politics, and gender. While some sections are more overtly useful to the study of women writers than others, An Extensive Republic presents an outstanding resource for anyone interested in women’s experiences of and impact on print culture. From William S. Pretzer’s essay on journeyman printers we learn that “[w]ives, widows, and daughters labored alongside male relatives and employees as proprietors, clerks, paper folders, and compositors and, less frequently, at the press” (167). Georgia B. Barnhill’s essay on pictorial printing treats the mechanization of illustration with some attention to women illustrators and colorists and the role illustration played in women’s magazines such as Godey’s Lady’s Book. Meredith L. McGill...

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