Bibliography and the Book Trades : : Studies in the Print Culture of Early New England / / Hugh Amory; ed. by David D. Hall.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Penn Press eBook Package Complete Collection
• VerfasserIn: Amory, Hugh,
• HerausgeberIn: Hall, David D.,
• Place / Publishing House: Philadelphia : : University of Pennsylvania Press, , [2013]; ©2005
• Year of Publication: 2013
• Language: English
• Series: Material Texts
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (184 p.) :; 9 illus.

Hugh Amory (1930-2001) was at once the most rigorous and the most methodologically sophisticated historian of the book in early America. Gathered here are his essays, articles, and lectures on the subject, two of them printed for the first time. An introduction by David D. Hall sets this work in context and indicates its significance; Hall has also provided headnotes for each of the essays.Amory used his training as a bibliographer to reexamine every major question about printing, bookmaking, and reading in early New England. Who owned Bibles, and in what formats? Did the colonial book trade consist of books imported from Europe or of local production? Can we go behind the iconic status of the Bay Psalm Book to recover its actual history? Was Michael Wigglesworth's Day of Doom really a bestseller? And why did an Indian gravesite contain a scrap of Psalm 98 in a medicine bundle buried with a young Pe" girl?In answering these and other questions, Amory writes broadly about the social and economic history of printing, bookselling and book ownership. At the heart of his work is a determination to connect the materialities of printed books with the workings of the book trades and, in turn, with how printed books were put to use. This is a collection of great methodological importance for anyone interested in literature and history who wants to make those same connections.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Short Title List -- Introduction -- 1. The Trout and the Milk An Ethnobibliographical Essay -- 2. "Gods Altar Needs Not Our Pollishings": Revisiting the Bay Psalm Book -- 3. ''A Bible and Other Books": Enumerating the Copies in Seventeenth-Century Essex County -- 4. Under the Exchange: The Unprofitable Business of Michael Perry, a Seventeenth-Century Boston Bookseller -- 5. Printing and Bookselling in New England, 1638-1713 -- 6. A Boston Society Library: The Old South Church and Thomas Prince -- 7. A Note on Statistics, or, What Do Our Imprint Bibliographies Mean by "Book"? -- Index