The numerous technological innovations of the industrial revolution changed the very fabric of society. As the steam powered printing press became common place in the realm of book making, books could be made far easier and cheaper than what had before been able. Though this changed the face of book production, a more subtle change came about in the process of book consumption and distribution throughout the mid- to late nineteenth century. Rail began to dominate the American countryside, first being common place in the northeast and then moving steadily into the southern and western regions.
Though the emergence of the railroad system in America did not necessarily mean a ‘democratization’ of reading into the masses, railroads did allow for greater distribution of books and allowed for a change from a local consciousness to that of a national one. Through charting the change in transportation from the haphazard modes that were commonplace in pre-1840’s America to the increasing dominance of the railroad as a mode of transportation, the change in trends in mode of distribution, variety of books distributed, and the marketing of those books become apparent.
Before the mid-nineteenth century, the landscape of transportation privileged a more decentralized society whose few books that were in circulation could be reliable sold every year. With each slow step to a further industrialized society, the book and its market became reformed to mimic the modern market of today. Before the introduction of the assembly-line style printing press, regional centers would have a local press which would print materials specifically for that area.
With the introduction of this industrial era press, the public saw a shift in the way that books were distributed. Books began to be dispersed by distant publishers who would send agents to the markets the publisher was trying to enter. These agents and peddlers were dependent on the feeble transportation system to distribute books among the public. Up until the introduction of rail to the world of literary distribution, these books were primarily moved throughout the country through the use of waterways and roads.
As canals as other waterways were built throughout the northeast, regional literary centers emerged. Some of the primary innovations in transport included the stagecoach, canal boat, steam boat, and coastal packet, all of which emerged in the early nineteenth century and, after their introduction, began to monopolize travel and commerce. These improvements in travel were present in the northeastern urban areas, but did not reliably reach the southern and western areas of the United States.
Even in the heavily populated northeastern corridor, the improvements in travel did not provide a reliable route for books to disseminate throughout the antebellum US. During this period the distribution of books was primarily in the hands of book peddlers who would travel to cities throughout the US using these types of transportation. Like the picture that Zboray paints of Weems, a peddler who distributed books to the public for the dominate era publisher, Carey, the peddler was someone who became a regular fixture in society, repeatedly visiting areas near waterways and rivers that were easily reached.
Looking specifically at the example of Weems, the areas visited by him throughout this time-period were primarily in the Potomac and Savannah river basins, including small towns like Pendleton and Abbeville in South Carolina. Because of constraints of the business, Weems and other peddlers had to “locate significant concentrations of literate people with enough money to buy books” (Zboray 43). In order to fulfill this requirement, Weems chose to visit towns on court days after harvest time, which normally saw groups from the surrounding areas come in to town.
This amounted to some regularity for the book buying public, but access to books was nowhere near the amount that it would become after the railroad was introduced into book dissemination. Getting the books to the public was only half the battle, which Weems and Carey both realized as they had to determine how they would make the public buy books which were more diverse then were available before. Before the industrial period, the press was decentralized and local. This local area printer would have a firm grasp on the types of books that would be successful in the area in which he worked.
As presses were industrialized, they began to be decentralized from the markets in which they were penetrating. This lead to a time when the thought behind book marketing and distribution was in flux. Weems’ story illustrates the dichotomy of views between how marketing of books should be done. Weems’ publisher, Carey, believed in a supply-side economics view of books, which required less knowledge of the market he was trying to capitalize on. Weems, on the other hand, due to his being deeply entrenched in the world of the people of his market, believed in knowing the quirks of the market that he was trying to sell to.
As transportation was reformed the channels for communication were opened up to allow for more knowledge to pass through to the publisher, though in this case, Carey was less likely to take it. These are examples of both the opportunities and limits of transportation world of pre-rail America, which was about to change in the mid-nineteenth century. With the scope and marketing strategies of the early nineteenth century taken into consideration, the system for distributing books that came into fashion during this time should make sense.
As peddlers traveled to areas where they knew the market would be rife with the book-buying public, they would bring with them examples of books from the publisher to show. If someone wished to buy a book, they would put in an order form, called a subscription. Then, the peddler would send this back to the publisher. Due to transportation costs as well as the threat of possible damage, the variety and number of books that could be brought with the peddler were small and relegated mainly to the basics.
In order to reach a larger public, some publishers dabbled in the correspondence system of distribution, which would allow “distant publishers to bring out books jointly [with the press] in their local area” (Zboray 58). These two systems still held limits for publisher’s amount of distribution, which, again, mainly were predicated on the poor transportation infrastructure. Communication and the ability to send books to potential buyers was fraught with risks. In fact, for parts of the year, the market would shut down due to the weather, as waterways were closed down or froze over.
Due to lack of reliable transportation, the type and amount of books that could be sold was limited to a few items such as the Bible, almanacs, and others that were known to always have a steady market. After the introduction of rail to America, a new system of sales and distribution came into the market that would foster a greater amount and variety of books being sold. Under this system, the commission system, “publishers sent their books free of charge to a local retailer,” which allowed publishers to send books “virtually anywhere” (Zboray 58).
Instead of being limited to cities in which they could line up correspondents, publishers were able to expand their market, assuming most of the risk on themselves. The success of this system, which encouraged a “much wider circulation of literature than had been possible with the correspondence [system],” was reliant on the railroad (Zboray 58). Railroads operated reliably year-round, a transportation system which not only provided a system for transit for books, but also for communication between the different parties of the agreement, that being the publisher and the bookseller.
The correspondence system was built for a transportation system that was not easily traversable, but with the commission system, a good transportation infrastructure for mail was a necessity to fill orders as the year went on. After being introduced as a postal route in 1838, the railroad’s place in the postal system and as an avenue of communication between book sellers and book publishers was solidified. This system of distributing books from the seller allowed for more variety in books that were being sold as well as to books being reliably available throughout the year.
As the publishers from the northeast moved into markets in other areas, the type of literature that became popular changed in order to more easily be relevant in other areas from that which it was written in. This was one factor that led to the rise in prominence of fiction, a genre that “reciprocate[d] the full dimension of human experience invested in it by readers” (Zboray 81). This rise in fiction, which “transcended local realities,” led to a rise in national consciousness (Zboray 81).
Through fiction, readers saw their own human experience reflected back to them in a way that their local communities, fraught with change, were slowly becoming unable to do. These were the books that were steadily being distributed to the public after the railroad emerged as a dominate type of transport. The type of books that were accessible to the public were slowly causing the emergence of a national consciousness, this due in part to the rise of steady periodical literature. However, it should be noted that books were not steadily disseminated to the public in a predictable way.
Publishers still advertised and sold books based on regional differences. In part this was due to “the uneven development of the national rail system” which “introduced strong geographical biases into the distribution system” (Zboray 66). The rail system slowly reach the south, but for the sake of books distribution there, the South “shows what book distribution might have been nationally without the railroad” (Zboray 67). There book sales went up far slower than in the areas where the rail system was heavily introduced.
Consequently, it cannot be stated that the rail system revolutionized the reading public of America dramatically after the 1850s. Instead, it is important to look at the communities and regional areas in which rail was introduced to see the slow, and at times fast, transformation over a period of decades. The nineteenth century saw vast change in the types of transportation that became available to aid in book distribution. As book production became industrialized and publishers were decentralized from their market, reliable transportation became a necessity to distribute books.
The transportation available in the early nineteenth century, less reliable than railroad, led to the creation of the subscription and correspondence system of distribution, which mainly sold the Bible, almanacs, and religious texts. After the railroad, the commission system came into being. This system, more like the modern system of today, led to a blossoming in the variety of texts distributed and sold throughout the country. Thus, improvements in transportation in the nineteenth century led to a new market of books, both in size and scope.