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By Root 2070 0

of American publishing and international reprinting. "I am told that in general 5o o copies of any bookwillpay the expenses and a decent profit," he observed; "if so, what avast number of books must be reprinted if booksellers would only be punctual and honest to each other." Littlejohn urged that the major booksellers of Philadelphia, New York, Boston, and other cities coalesce into what he called a "Company of Stationers of North America." The company would provide a mechanism for alliances to produce editions otherwise too costly or risky to be viable. But it would also go much further. It would create and sustain an entire moral system of print. At a Stationers' Hall in each state, respected practitioners would uphold regulations to "prevent interference in the same work"-that is, to forestall piracy. At the same time, they would police membership of the fraternity, threatening expulsion for "infidelity" to its customs. "The present State of the morals of Booksellers in the United States requires something of this kind to keep them honest punctual & willing to serve each other," Littlejohn concluded.51 Carey agreed; he scrawled "An Idea" on top of the proposal and got to work.

Littlejohn's was but one of several suggestions aired at this time. The Baltimore trade, for example, coalesced to urge the federal government to impose a levy on imports of books. This prompted a Boston bookseller, E. T. Andrews, to suggest to Carey that associations be formed in major cities to regulate the trade, to "prevent the importation of all such Books as may be printed by each association." If a member of such a body reprinted a European book, no other member would be permitted to import copies except in a more expensive format. What all such suggestions shared were three convictions: the paramount importance of reprinting European works; the consequent need to eliminate domestic reprinting and rival importing (in their terms, piracy); and the requirement that a solution to these problems come from the trade itself. And practical moves soon began anew. In 1802 a New York Association of Booksellers convened, its principal purpose being to reprint European schoolbooks. The Company ofPrinters of Philadelphia reconstituted itself, significantly, as a Booksellers' Company, complete with a trade journal, and elected Carey its president. Similar organizations appeared in Boston and Lexington. At Carey's urging, the Philadelphia company proposed a register system to "settle the Priority of claims to new works." And in December 18oi Carey circulated a letter to major publishers across the United States proposing that they harmonize all these emerging bodies into one whole, in a "patriotic spirit of fostering domestic arts and manufactures." By coalescing, as the German trade was then doing, into a single community, the publishers could further to an "incalculable" degree the achievements of "American genius."52

So it was that in summer 1802 New York hosted at Carey's initiative the first publishers' trade fair in America. He intended it to emulate the great fairs of early modern Germany, at which the booksellers of Europe had gathered to barter sheets, make contacts, and sustain trust across farflung networks. Like them, Carey's fair was for booksellers engaged in long-distance publishing projects in a loosely federated polity Its purpose was to foster the development of a coherent national enterprise. He therefore used the occasion to launchwhat he called an `American Company of Booksellers." In part a realization of Littlejohn's scheme, it also attested to a continuing ambition to improve "arts and manufactures" and keep specie within the country by supplanting imported books. The new company would revive a civility that Carey believed had obtained in early modern Europe. The pioneers of publishing in the United States were about to forge a national enterprise by inventing an American equivalent to the Stationers' Company of Shakespeare's London.

The American Company was in practice dominated by Irish emigres. Its first president was Hugh