Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [541]
“The Bill-Poster’s Dream,” an 1862 cartoon spoofing the proliferation of signs in the city. When read down, beginning in the upper left, the juxtaposition of messages makes an amusing commentary on local persons and events: “People’s Candidate for Mayor . . . The Hippopotamus,” “Miss Cushman will. . . take Brandreth’s Pills,” “The American Bible Society will meet at the. . . Gaieties Conceit Saloon,” “$ioo Bounty Wanted . . . A Jewess for One Night Only,” etc. (Eno Collection. Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs. The New York Public Library. Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations)
BOOK MART
The widespread assumption, by all these print publicists, of near-universal literacy was largely accurate. During the 1840s and 1850s—thanks to the country’s growing number of schools and colleges, a general conviction that literacy was essential to republican citizenship, the tremendous evangelical commitment to teaching sacred texts, and the emergence of a cheap popular press—the literacy rate among white adults climbed past 90 percent in the city and throughout the nation.
With the national market for reading matter growing briskly, and with the economy rising, postal rates dropping, and railroads affording inexpensive access to the interior, New York publishers flourished as never before. By 1860 seventeen book-printing firms were manufacturing over three million dollars’ worth of volumes for the national marketplace. New York City, with 2 percent of the country’s population, produced over 37 percent of its total publishing revenue.
Harper and Brothers retained its preeminence. By 1853, when its workforce of five hundred issued more than four and a half million volumes, it had become the largest employer in New York Qty. After its Cliff Street plant burned down that year, the firm immediately set James Bogardus to building two splendid five-story cast-iron structures, which between them covered half an acre on Franklin Square. One combined all of Harpers’ editorial, management, inventory, and wholesaling operations. The other, the factory, devoted a separate floor to each stage of the production process. This powerhouse secured Harpers’ position as the largest publisher in the world.
The company distributed its tremendous output with smooth efficiency. Advertising extensively—it placed notices in 844 local papers during 1856 alone—Harpers circulated its wares through a network of over a thousand booksellers and a phalanx of colporteurs (peddlers of religious material). Harpers, indeed, had great success with religious works, especially Harper’s Illuminated and New Pictorial Bible (1846) a giltedged, gold-embossed, morocco-bound edition that set new (and rococo) standards for taste and elegance. The firm did well, too, with inexpensive book sets: the 150 volumes of the Harper’s Family Library could be had for sixty-five dollars. And state legislative appropriations underwrote widespread and profitable purchase of the two-hundredplus titles in its Harper’s School District Library series.
The firm continued to pirate European authors: Dickens, Thackeray, the Brontë sisters, and above all Thomas Babbington Macaulay, whose confident assertions in the History of England from the Accession of James II (1848) about the benefits of industrial progress helped it to sales of four hundred thousand copies. It also extended growing attention to a wide array of American texts embracing Prescott’s Conquest of Mexico (1843), a miscellaneity of geographies and travel accounts, including Harper’s New York and Erie Rail-road Guide Book (1851), and the domestic advice books of Catharine Beecher.