Routledge Literary Dollars and Social Sense: A People's History of the Mass Market Book

In early nineteenth-century America, the production and commercial distribution of reading matter came face-to-face with social literary practices. As mass readerships emerged, so did a mass authorship grasping after newly available "literary dollars." Yet they did not immediately embrace market values.

Instead, writers - even heavily promoted literary celebrities -- struggled to preserve some semblance of "social sense," rooted in social authorship and dissemination practices.

Summoning a host of ordinary Americans' voices in diaries and letters, the Zborays uncover a neglected, yet pivotal moment in modern mass-market publishing between its elite-driven past and its corporate-directed future. Literary Dollars & Social Sense shows common Americans apprehending the newly industrialized literary marketplace through their reading and gossiping, addressing it through their writing and editing, and serving it through their vending and distributing.

This history encompasses not only popular authorship and dissemination of books, but, as is conventional in history-of-the-book scholarship, all forms of imprints, including newspapers and magazines. A major intervention into this scholarship and a contribution to the "new literary historicism," the book also offers to general readers renewed faith in literature as something socially valuable beyond--and above--monetary reward.