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By Root 2020 0

Spy even boasted an emblem of two babes plucking blooms from a basket, with the motto "they cull the choicest." Papers in different cities then reprinted each other's reprints, and since most served local readerships this was not a cause for complaint. Indeed, works like the Whig Letters of Cato obtained a remarkablywide coverage thanks to this form of replication. The occasional reference to something like literary property prior to independence-as, for example, when two Boston printers "purchased the copy" of Nathaniel Ames's almanac in the 1750s-stands out as exceptional and rather inexplicable. A distinct kind of public came into existence as aresult-one accustomed to regurgitated journalism, collated from distant sources as and when ships made landfall.' Not only was Boston not London; it was not even Dublin.

The Stamp Act of 1765, taxing as it did this small and unruly craft's major produc ts, turned the craft itself into apolitical force. The furor the act created fostered a partisan press that didnot disappear againwhen the law did. Printers from then on knew how to address, manipulate, and profit from the spirit of party. Moreover, their colonist readers increasingly recognized that manufactures in generalwere essential to protect their place in the imperial order, and that included books. Nonimportationpacts had been central to the anti-Stamp Act campaign, and the mid-176os saw the first associations for promoting American manufactures of goods like paper. They contradicted what according to London was a colony's role: to supply raw materials to the home nation and buy the manufactures it produced, the traffic in both directions being restricted to British or colonial vessels. That mercantile system seemed rational and mutually beneficial in Westminster, and indeed, the colonies initially resisted London in the name ofpreserving it. But for the colonial book trade it meant that not only books, but type, presses, and skills were all to be imports. Paper was something of an exception, but American mills could not meet demand, so it too had to be shipped in (sometimes illegally, from the Netherlands, or from Spanish ships captured byprivateers). AsAmericans came to perceive the autonomy that might come from an ability to manufacture goods for themselves, everyday objects like books took on a significance in transatlantic politics in addition to their textual contents.3

Americans were used to reprints. The Scots began shipping their own in large quantities in the 1740s, the Irish slightly later. By 1752, David Hall of Philadelphia was warning William Strahan in London that "there are a great many Books imported from Ireland and Scotland which come much cheaper than from England."4 Alexander Donaldson in particular was keen to undercut the Londoners. "He is upon the Pyratical Scheme," Strahan warned, hoping that no "gentlemen" would give houseroom to his books. He was "the Rivington of Scotland." It was a revealingly topsy-turvy comment. More properly, James Rivingtonwas the Donaldson ofAmerica. He was London's worst fear: a highly placed, well-informed turncoat. His attempt to corner the colonial market in books showed why anAmerican reprint trade came to make sense.

Rivington was the scion of a clan of London booksellers that had prospered by helping to invent the conger system. He had made his own fortune by speculating on Smollett. Then he split from his peers and embarked on a remarkable scheme to revolutionize the wholesale trade and take control of the transatlantic commerce of books. He hinted to American contacts that London's oligarchywas duping them and only his insider knowledge could secure fair dealing. It seemed to work, for awhile. By 1757-58 an alarmed Strahan had discovered that Rivington was exporting as many volumes as the rest of the London trade combined. He was also quietly hiring Scottish printers to make reprints specifically for the colonial market.5 But Rivington's Achilles' heel was that the vicissitudes of transatlantic trade and finance made him unreliable, in a trade where predictability