Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [352]
New York’s hegemony as a clearinghouse for foreign and domestic news pulled in subscribers from every part of the country and compelled editors elsewhere to cannibalize Manhattan papers for stories. By 1828 160,000 newspapers were shipped out monthly through the New York post office; by 1833 nearly a million. In 1838 some two tons of mail left each day for the South alone, three-fourths of it printed matter.
Not surprisingly, and for many similar reasons, it was during these same years that Manhattan became the center of book publishing in the United States. New York’s leading authors—Irving, Paulding, Halleck, and two newcomers in the 1820s, James Fenimore Cooper and William Cullen Bryant—now commanded national audiences, and the printers who brought out their books were handsomely rewarded; one, Charles Wiley, did so well that he became a full-time publisher. The big money, however, came from pirated editions of English authors (who didn’t have to be paid royalties because the United States government refused as yet to recognize foreign copyrights). Printers and book dealers in New York and Philadelphia competed furiously to bring out the first American editions of new English novels. Some sent agents to England with orders to grab volumes from bookstalls, or sheets from printshops, and ship them west by fast packet. Copy was then rushed from the dock to the composing room, presses run night and day, and books hurried to the stores or hawked in the streets like hot corn.
No one was better at this than the Harper brothers of New York. Their firm began as a printshop in 1817 and evolved over the next decade into a full-time publishing house that kept popular titles in circulation (birthing the backlist). On one celebrated occasion, borrowing techniques from the newspaper trade, the Harpers retrieved the third volume of Walter Scott’s Peveril of the Peak from a packet before it docked. Working nonstop, they got the finished product to the bookstalls twenty-one hours later, well in advance of the edition issued in Philadelphia by Mathew Carey. It was the Harpers, too, who became the first American commercial publishers to make effective use of stereotyping, a printing process brought to the United States from England in 1811 that was ideal for books frequently reprinted in large editions.
What really assured New York of an unassailable lead in the book trade was cheap and easy access to western readers via the Erie Canal. Every fall, just before the onset of winter, and then again in the spring—a seasonal pattern that still rules the industry—city publishers dispatched crate after crate of books via the canal to retailers scattered across upstate New York, around the Great Lakes, and along the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. Like small-town newspaper editors, local book printers were hard-pressed to compete with the low prices and big-name authors offered by their Manhattan counterparts. The canal helped make it clear, indeed, that selling books wasn’t so very different from peddling hats or chamber pots, and the business soon attracted men who knew nothing about printing but had a talent for marketing. Daniel Appleton, for one, was a Massachusetts storekeeper who moved to New York in 1825 and began to sell books along with groceries. He prospered and by 1831 had decided to become a publisher.
INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTIONS
After 1815, if not earlier, the greatest concentration of shipbuilding facilities in the United States lay along the shores of the East River, two or three miles