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By Root 1978 0

Gaine, who had come over in 175o and was now "the oldest printer and bookseller in the United States."53 Careyper- suaded Gaine to make an opening address.The old loyalist spoke at length, using his oration to urge the creation of nothing less than a new "social compact." The elimination of internal pirating would be its keystone. Its objectives would be the refinement of national morals and the advance of science in the republic. Carey's project, Gaine told the gathered book sellers, added "a dignity to our avocation before unknown." Fittingly, he turned to history to articulate its importance. "The mind," he said, "is led, by a natural transition, to the first rise of our manufacture in this country." As with other industries, Gaine remarked, Britain had until recently been the origin of almost all major print initiatives. "Her manufactures enabled her, without the expense of government or protection, to reap all the benefit of our labours." This was very much Carey's view, but it was significant that Gaine voiced it, given his own history Now, he continued, the expansion ofpapermaking and printing had finally made it possible to turn that subservient relationship upside down. To do that, however, the trade needed a moral structure. Most of all, it needed some principle to guide interactions between cities. Such a principle had never existed before, and the law of copyright alone was not sufficient to furnish it now. The great task of the era was therefore to establish this principle. Only with that achieved would it be possible to talk meaningfully of publishing as an American enterprise, different from and superior to its British competition.

Gaine did not condemn all domestic reprinting. Some works, he conceded, were "calculated for more partial spheres," and these could be reprinted in small editions for particular locales. Reprinting per se was not evil, then. But it was "unsafe" and "ungenerous to the last degree" when applied to publications of a larger reach. The new association proposed to counter the practice by making it "unsafe" for the reprinter too. It banned reprinting within the States, and announced that it would try to stop titles being imported if the works were available from American publishers.54 With exchange through Carey's fairs supplanting local reprints, a national market would finally come into being, and with it anational public. This was the heart of what Gaine called "the constitution of our literary republic."

The American Company proclaimed its actual constitution two years later. By this time Carey himself was president. Echoing the U .S. Constitution, he intended his own version to "form a more perfect union" in the realm of print. To that end, it set out to "establish rules for the transaction of business -to promote the Manufactures of our country-and to promote the great interests of Science and Literature." As forecast by Game, the very first article outlawed "the republication of Books already printed in the United States"; the second forbade the import of works already being made in America. These two principles were to be the foundation on which the American book should develop. The Company created a "board" from the three great centers of Boston, New York, and Philadelphia to adjudicate such matters. It would maintain an annual register of all American publications, and could "impeach" any offender against rights, who, on being "convicted," might be censured or even expelled; anyone publishingwork of"immoral tendency" risked the same fate. It would also uphold workmanship in general, offering prizes for the best printing, binding, ink, and paper (much as Carey had long done for other manufactures). But piracy was its principal concern.55

Carey remarked that his plan for the American Company of Booksellers was based "on a deliberate study of society in the United States." No doubt it was. But it nevertheless found its task daunting. In practice the trade could come to no consensus on even its most pressing questions -those of reprinting and of a tariff on imported books. Revealingly,