Posts Tagged ‘publishing’
“Traveling booksellers balanced the need to garner sales with the specter of artful deception”*…
We noted in a post last month the extraordinary market in the 19th century U.S. for subscription books (a direct-sales approach to publishing with a long history); even after subscriptions subsided, their infrastructure– sales teams that contained an appreciable number of women– was used to sell books in locations too remote for bookstores. Livia Gershon reviews the risks and rewards of life on the road as a traveling bookseller…
In the second half of the nineteenth century, before the rise of public libraries, many people in remote parts of the United States got their hands on new books thanks to traveling salespeople. As literature scholar and archivist Jolie Braun writes, drawing on three memoirs from this era, women in that line of work had some distinct advantages but also faced serious hardships, both physical and social.
The booksellers visited homes and businesses with sample books, took orders, and then later delivered the books and collected payment. Braun writes that popular volumes included Bibles, farming and health manuals, biographies, and fiction. Ulysses S. Grant’s memoirs and the works of Mark Twain were popular choices. Many books published using this “subscription” model sold hundreds of thousands of copies.
While the vast majority of book peddlers were men, some publishers recruited women with the idea that they would be well suited to sell books on health and hygiene to female readers, and also that customers would find them sympathetic.
In an 1868 account of her work selling books across northern Illinois and Indiana, Annie Nelles Dumond described taking up the work out of necessity. She wrote that, seeking to escape a difficult childhood, she married young to a man who turned out to already have a wife and children. A second husband abandoned her. So Dumond sought ways to support herself.
When she began selling books, she wore a mourning bonnet. She acknowledged that this was deceptive but wrote that it was “almost necessary to my self-preservation that my past should not be known.”
Dumond described pride in her work’s “dissemination of light and knowledge among the masses.” By contrast, in an 1874 book on her own work as a bookseller, J. W. Likins of central California wrote that, despite knowing it was “honorable and legitimate” employment, “it seemed to me very much like begging.”
Likins, who took the job to support her family after her husband became too ill to work, wrote that some potential customers seemed curious or pitying. But a few men were angry to see a woman out on her own, demanding that she go home to take care of her family or incorrectly assuming that she was a suffragist.
More disturbingly, in a third autobiographical account Braun considers, published in 1881, a northern California peddler named Harriet Wasson Styer described a man telling her that, if she were his sister, he would murder her rather than allow her to canvass.
But much of Styer’s account suggested a fascinating experience. She recounted traveling to lumber camps and mining towns, admiring the wild landscapes, and coping with bed bugs and dirty stagecoaches.
Braun notes that all three peddlers were well aware that they were doing something many people believed was improper for a lady, but they took on the work out of a combination of necessity and a chance for adventure…
“The Women Who Sold Books Door to Door,” from @liviagershon.bsky.social in @jstordaily.bsky.social.
Pair with: “Building a Library in Wartime Paris” (“how librarians brought books to U. S. troops during World War I”)
* John Jude Garcia, American Biography, the History of Books, and the Market for Nationalism, 1800-1855
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As we get a foot in the door, we might send grateful birthday greetings to Herman Melville; he was born on this date in 1819. A writer, he is best known for Moby-Dick (1851), Typee (1846), and his posthumously published (1924) novella Billy Budd, Sailor. The efforts of the booksellers described above notwithstanding, Melville was not well known to the public at the time of his death in 1891. But the centennial of his birth was the starting point of a Melville revival; Moby-Dick is now, of course, considered one of the Great American Novels.
“Whatever the world is, today, good and bad together, that is what Gutenberg’s invention has made it”*…
Before he became the renowned author we know, Samuel Clemens– Mark Twain– worked (among other things) as a printer. He knew both the painstaking (and sometimes painful) labor of hand-setting type and the extraordinary cultural power of the mass-printed (by Twain’s time, on steam-powered presses) products that it enabled.
As Jeff Jarvis explains in an excerpt from Hot Type- The Magnificent Machine that Gave Birth to Mass Media and Drove Mark Twain Mad, Twain lived through the transition from hand setting to the Linotype, and through the intertwined transition of the society of which the transition was a part…
In the history of the invention of the typesetting machine and the consequent birth of mass media, Mark Twain is the Zelig of our tale, returning frequently as a typesetter in his brother’s ratty newspaper; as a tramp printer witnessing an explosion of progress in printing technology; as the bankrupted investor in the failed Paige Compositor, a competitor to the successful Linotype; as an early best-selling author and cultural celebrity; and as a publisher trying to invent a business model for books as an industry.
Now that their machinery could produce volume, publishers needed ways to sell at scale, to build the modern phenomenon of the best-seller. The problem: In 1859, only 1,090 bookstores dotted America. By 1914, there were still only 3,501. So if readers couldn’t find books, books had to find their readers. For certain authors and publishers, including Twain, that was accomplished through subscription publishing, with door-to-door canvassers taking orders for books before they were printed. Until the end of the nineteenth century, three quarters of books in the U.S. were sold this way.
In 1874, the New York Tribune estimated that 50,000 agents were employed by subscription publishers. What a wonderful fictional character it would be to imagine the itinerant peddler pitching not pots or patent medicines but literature and literacy, foot in door after door, blurbing Twain with a few dozen sample pages and illustrations to whet curiosity and demand.
Subscription publishing brought advantages. By collecting orders for books before printing, publishers knew how many copies to produce. Publishers could use customers’ capital to finance production—not unlike a content producer today raising money via Kickstarter or Patreon. Subscription publishing’s cross to bear was snobbery. William Dean Howells dismissed subscription books, carving out a caveat only for his friend Twain: “No book of literary quality was made to go by subscription except Mr. Clemens’s books, and I think these went because the subscription public never knew what good literature they were.”
The regular trade carped that subscription publishers “flood the country with worthless books, poorly written, poorly printed and bound, containing a small amount of matter in large type and with wide margins to the page, for a large price.” Elisha Bliss, Twain’s publisher, defended the trade to the Tribune: “Instead of injuring the regular book business I think we create a thirst for knowledge and thus increase the sale of all kinds of books. In the little town where there are no bookstores the book agent induces people to buy.”
Twain valued these readers as they valued him. They freed him from the expectations of high culture and its critics. And he was certain they’d make him rich. “Harper publishes very high-class books,” he wrote to a friend, “and they go to people who are accustomed to read. That class are surfeited. But there is a vast class that isn’t—the factory hands and the farmers. They never go to a bookstore; they have to be hunted down by the canvasser.”
Twain knew that a new, mass audience had to be corralled, one door knocked after another. As he wrote to London critic Andrew Lang: “The thin top crust of humanity—the cultivated—are worth pacifying, worth pleasing, worth coddling, worth nourishing and preserving with dainties and delicacies, it is true; but to cater to that little faction is of no very dignified or valuable occupation, it seems to me; it is merely feeding the over-fed, and there must be small satisfaction in that.” He sought instead to entertain “the mighty mass of the uncultivated who are underneath….I have never tried in even one single instance, to help cultivate the cultivated classes. I was not equipped for that, either by native gifts or training. And I never had any ambition in that direction, but always hunted for bigger game—the masses.”
In 1866, Twain nabbed the assignment of a dream: sailing to the Sandwich Islands (now Hawaii) to send back reports to the Sacramento Union. Upon his return to San Francisco, he launched a side gig as a lecturer, amusing ever-larger audiences with his travel tales and humor. “He wouldn’t be a cloistered writer so much as a showman, a public personality, a professional crowd-pleaser. In short, a celebrity,” wrote Ron Chernow. Next, Twain reported for the Alta California about a journey Back East. Then he issued his first book, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and Other Sketches, which debuted to good reviews and established Twain’s reputation as a wry humorist. The book was published by Twain’s friend Charles Henry Webb, whom he soon dumped, complaining—as would become his habit—about sales.
Next came another enviable gig and a reputation-setting assignment from Alta California, to report from a five-month cruise to the Holy Land on the Quaker City. His letters ran in the paper and were picked up in others across the country. He returned home to a letter from Elisha Bliss of Hartford’s American Publishing Company, soliciting a book on the adventure, which became The Innocents Abroad.
Twain received negotiating advice from famed minister Henry Ward Beecher, who had inspired the Holy Land trip but didn’t go along. In Twain’s telling, Beecher offered a prophetic warning: “Now here—you are one of the talented men of the age—nobody is going to deny that—but in matters of business, I don’t suppose you know more than enough to come in when it rains.” Twain reported to his family, “I listened well, and then came up here and made a splendid contract for a Quaker City book of 5 or 600 large pages, with illustrations….But I had my mind made up to one thing—I wasn’t going to touch a book unless there was money in it, and a good deal of it.” He soon complained this was a bad deal.
Subscription books were fancy and rich in illustration, not so much elegant as tarted up. Buyers had the choice of various bindings as upgrades. The average price of Innocents was $4 (almost $100 today). Readers bought them to display their erudition to visitors: every book a coffee-table book. The Innocents Abroad was received well, favorably reviewed in The Atlantic Monthly by Howells, who noted its length—“in compliance with one of the main conditions of a subscription book’s success, bigness namely”; praised its drollery five times, its irony three times, and its impudence twice; applauded the “amount of pure human nature in the book, that rarely gets into literature”; and counted Twain among America’s humorists, “quite worthy of the company of the best.” Twain’s head swelled sufficiently to accept the praise: “It was quite generally conceded that I was a valuable asset to the American nation and to the great ranks of literature.”
In a year and a half, Innocents sold 82,524 copies, nowhere near Uncle Tom’s Cabin’s 300,000 in its first year, but a success nonetheless. Twain had negotiated well, for he rejected a $10,000 flat payment from Bliss in favor of the 5-percent royalty, which added up to $16,504—about $400,000 today. During his lifetime, no book of Twain’s sold as well as quickly, fueling his chronic grievances with publishers.
Twain wrote a next book for Bliss, about his life Out West, this time demanding half of the profits after manufacturing costs, equaling a royalty of 7.5 percent. Twain told Bliss, “We shall sell 90,000 copies in the first 12 months. I haven’t even a shadow of doubt of that.” Published in 1872, it sold 65,000 in the first year—again, respectable.
Twain and Warren joined to write The Gilded Age, published by Bliss for a 10-percent royalty. The book sold 50,000 copies in its first year. Twain thought he would be a better publisher. He would soon try.
He released The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in 1876, selling only 23,600 copies in its first year. He blamed Bliss for mistiming its release. He next published A Tramp Abroad in 1880. Walter A. Friedman provided an accounting: American Publishing sold 62,000 copies in the first year at $3.50 each for a total of $218,000. Just over half of that went to sales agents, who paid their canvassers. The company kept $106,000, out of which it spent $41,540 on printing, leaving a profit of $64,460, of which Twain received $32,000—nearly $1 million today.
As Twain was writing The Prince and the Pauper, Bliss died. He shifted publication of The Prince to his friend James Osgood. This time, Twain funded the book’s publication—complaining that he was out $65,000 before the first copy was printed. Instead of receiving a royalty, he paid Osgood 7.5 percent of sales. Neither was experienced in subscription sales, and of a first printing of 25,000, 5,000 remained in their warehouses after two years. He repeated the mistake with the publication of Life on the Mississippi, which lured only 30,000 orders, far from the 100,000 Twain hoped for. Osgood’s company ended in bankruptcy in 1885. This might have discouraged a sensible man from deciding to become a publisher. Not Twain.
Twain established his own publishing house, giving it the name of his general manager and dogsbody, Charles L. Webster & Co. The aim was to publish only Twain’s books. The first was his masterpiece, Huckleberry Finn, in 1885. Infamously, an engraver subverted the publication by endowing Uncle Silas Phelps with an erect penis, necessitating the scissoring of the offending image from thousands of copies and delaying publication past prime Christmas season. Nonetheless, the Webster Company’s agents sold 60,000 copies, rewarding the author with a check for $54,000. “Once more I experienced a new birth,” Twain wrote. “I have been born more times than anybody except Krishna, I suppose.”
Huck’s success emboldened Twain and Webster to expand as a full-fledged publishing house. Twain worked diligently to solicit the memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant. Twain offered Grant an astounding 70 percent of profits. He told Webster to hire veterans as canvassers, have them wear their Grand Army regalia, and deliver his script: “I presume it is simply a question with you of your choice of bindings, as no American will want to have it said that he has not read General Grant’s book, a work that will descend to your children and will increase in value with every generation.” The memoirs were a stupendous best-seller, 10,000 door-to-door canvassers selling 325,000 two-volume sets in 1886, earning the general’s widow and children as much as $15 million in today’s dollars.
It was downhill from there for Twain and Webster, their record studded with poor choices of books by a half-dozen Civil War generals or their widows, the king of Hawaii, and Pope Leo XIII (“’Twas kind of a fizzle,” recalled Twain’s maid Katy Leary). Twain signed Henry Ward Beecher to write his memoirs, but the minister died before setting pen to paper. Twain was inspired to publish the ambitious Library of American Literature with 1,700 selections by 500 authors in eleven volumes, but failed to grasp the perilous economics of selling such a gargantuan series by subscription. Readers paid a three-dollar down-payment, but Webster & Co. would not collect the rest of its thirty-three-dollar price until after paying the printers thirteen dollars, on top of twelve dollars to sales agents, with Twain carrying that debt in the meantime. The company needed capital to tide itself over, but where was Twain’s—and his wife’s—money? Sunk into the Paige Compositor. [see here] The business analysis was not complicated. His maid understood it: “Mr. Clemens was all deep in the typesetting machine, and he was putting all his money in that so he didn’t have much left to help out the publishing company. That was the beginning of the end of that venture.”
Even without their bad business decisions, Twain’s venture was likely doomed, along with the subscription publishing industry, for books were getting radically cheaper, with ever-more competition. The number of titles published in the U.S. more than doubled, from 4,559 in 1890 to 12,010 in 1914. In 1895, The Bookman began publishing the first lists of most-popular books according to store sales. The term “best-seller” came into general use around 1910, according to historian of publishing Frank Luther Mott, who set the bar for “best-seller” at “one percent of the total population of continental United States for the decade in which the book was published.” To meet Mott’s benchmark, books today would need to sell 3.4 million copies. For comparison, Kristen McLean, a lead industry analyst at NPD BookScan, reported that in 2022, of 45,571 titles released by just the top ten publishers, only 163 books or 0.36 percent sold more than 100,000 copies in a year.
In our age of mass media, we have developed a skewed definition of big—a presumption that many means most. To sell 100,000 books—and congratulations if you do!—is to speak to 0.03 percent of the nation, hardly a resounding expression of the cultural zeitgeist. The blockbuster economics of media—in film, television, music, and books—depends on a few best-sellers to make up for the vast number of lesser bets. But that eternal quest for blockbusters gives the impression that anything called a best-seller is widely influential, while all else is dismissed. Whether selling entertainment to an audience or an audience to advertisers, the mechanization and industrialization of media—begun with the steam-powered press and culminating with the Linotype—spawned a business and cultural obsession with scale…
The rise and fall of subscription book publishing and the birth of mass media: “Mark Twain, America’s First Celebrity Author and Publisher” from @jeffjarvis.bsky.social via @literaryhub.bsky.social.
* Mark Twain, in an April, 1900 letter contributed to the celebration of the opening of the Gutenberg Museum in Mainz
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As we roll the presses, we might send illuminating birthday greetings to Lee de Forrest; he was born on this date in 1873. An electrical engineer and inventor, he ultimately held 300 patents on a variety of inventions crucial to electronic communications, and co-founded the forerunner organization to the IEEE, De Forest is probably best remembered as the inventor of the Audion vacuum tube, which made possible live radio broadcasting (which he also pioneered) and became the key component of all radio, telephone, radar, television, and computer systems before the invention of the transistor in 1947.
Unwittingly then had I discovered an Invisible Empire of the Air, intangible, yet solid as granite, whose structure shall persist while man inhabits the planet.
– Father of Radio: The Autobiography of Lee De Forest (1950), p. 4
Coincidentally, today is also the anniversary of the award in 1930 of Philo Farnsworth‘s first patent: a television system (U.S. 1,773,980), with a description of his image dissector tube, which was his most important contribution to the development of television.
“Historical oblivion is the default, not the exception”*…
Indeed. And that’s especially true of the institutions that guard the archives that are our cultural heritage. The ongoing transition from physical media sales to digital licensing markets has unleashed a new wave of archival ephemerality, which endangers these memory institutions’ core operations and threatens to plunge society into a digital dark age.
The stakes are high. As Haruki Murakami observed: “Robbing people of their actual history is the same as robbing them of part of themselves. It’s a crime… If our collective memory is taken from us – is rewritten – we lose the ability to sustain our true selves.”
Michael Menna (a Stanford Law Fellow who co-authored the “Our Future Memory” manifesto) and Lila Bailey (Senior Policy Counsel at one of the world’s most crucial repositories, The Internet Archive), call for four digital rights that would allow libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural heritage organizations (“memory institutions”) to uphold their shared public service mission of preserving history and providing access to information…
… We are living through a troubling paradox: Digital technologies have enabled the production and distribution of more information than ever, yet access to that information isincreasingly fragmented and fragile. These technologies should permit us to engage and learn from all the digital content at our fingertips. Instead, many of the basic rights we grew accustomed to in the physical world are now being overtaken by aggressive market tactics that do not reflect the public-interest values the law was meant to protect. If copyright, privacy, and other regulatory frameworks were designed to balance the interests of creators and users with the public’s need to access and contribute to the wealth of human knowledge, then our increasingly digital information economy has thrown that balance out of whack.
In this new media environment, publishers and other content providers have unprecedented power to control knowledge and culture with technical restrictions and exclusionary licensing terms. Governments also have an easier time censoring what people can see by scrubbing their websites and pressuring commercial platforms to do the same. These sudden changes will feel familiar to anyone who has logged onto a streaming service or social media app to find a movie or news story suddenly missing. But for libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural heritage organizations (“memory institutions”), it poses an existential risk to
their core public service mission of preserving culture and protecting history. When these organizations can no longer collect and provide access to digital materials, members of the public cannot place their trust in a stable record—which affects their ability to confidently participate in democratic discourse.
We write this paper from our perspective at the Internet Archive, a nonprofit research library that specializes in web archiving, digitization, and the preservation of media in all forms. We feel the harms from these shifts firsthand and hear many of the same complaints from our partner memory institutions around the world. That shared frustration with today’s digital landscape has given rise to an emerging consensus among libraries, archives, museums, and their allies, calling for better legal protections and practical options to continue their services and preserve cultural memory in today’s information age.
This two-part paper (1) presents the looming threat of “vanishing culture” as a first-order political crisis, and (2) discusses the key role that libraries and other memory institutions can play in meeting that crisis.2 In the first part, we examine the underlying causes of vanishing culture and trace its ripple effects along several different facets of modern life: (a) educational resources, (b) journalistic integrity, (c) civic engagement, (d) religious study, and (e) environmental policy. In the second part, we reintroduce a framework of four rights that would ensure memory institutions’ ability to work together to collect, preserve, and provide access to digital materials. This framework rests on the simple proposition that memory institutions should be allowed to do the same things in the digital world that they’ve historically done in the physical world. It originated in the 2024 statement titled Four Digital Rights for Protecting Memory Institutions Online3 before it became a global rallying cry for the Our Future Memory movement and its growing list of library, archive, and museum signatories. Together, these memory institutions are striving to combat the political causes and effects of vanishing culture by speaking with one voice to the importance of memory work in an age of digital ephemerality. That is why we call on all memory institutions, large and small, to sign onto the Statement and join the movement. Individuals and communities need memory institutions to educate themselves and freely participate in civic life, and every time a content provider lets critical information disappear online, it offers further proof that today’s digital markets alone do not constitute a viable alternative. If things do not change soon, we risk sleepwalking into a future where both memory institutions and the public they serve will become passive consumers, rather than active stewards of human knowledge…
Menna and Bailey explain the situation; unpack the four rights they propose: collection, preservation, access, and collaboration; then issue a call to action.
Eminently worth reading in full: “The Political Threats of Vanishing Culture and the Need to Protect Our Future Memory” (PDF here)
See also Vanishing Culture (full PDF here)
And consider joining me in supporting the Internet Archive.
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As we preserve and share, we might send open birthday greetings to a man who would surely have understood the importance of Menna’s and Bailey’s arguments: Sir Karl Raimund Popper; he was born on this date in 1902. One of the greatest philosophers of science of the 20th century, Popper is best known for his rejection of the classical inductivist views on the scientific method, in favor of empirical falsification: a theory in the empirical sciences can never be proven, but it can be falsified, meaning that it can and should be scrutinized by decisive experiments. (Or more simply put, whereas classical inductive approaches considered hypotheses false until proven true, Popper reversed the logic: conclusions drawn from an empirical finding are true until proven false.)
Popper was also a powerful critic of historicism in political thought, and (in books like The Open Society and Its Enemies and The Poverty of Historicism) an enemy of authoritarianism and totalitarianism (in which role he was a mentor to George Soros).
“Everything is ephemeral, both that which remembers and that which is remembered”*…
Sally O’Reilly on “gray literature,” why it fascinates her… and how an early “AI” attempt to harvest it misses the mark…
In my modest collection of gray literature, the specialist title that comes closest to a blockbuster is Jean Aspin’s Vaginal Examination: A Unique Pocket Guide (ca. 1980s). Or perhaps it’s Dovea Genetics’s Beef Directory (2014).
Aspin was a community midwife in Luton and Dunstable University Hospital’s maternity wing. Her pocket guide is a well-produced, ring-bound, wipe-clean, tongue-shaped booklet, published by the baby milk company Cow & Gate. Its Latinate lists, labeled diagrams, and die-cut holes of increasing diameters, representing vaginal dilation, step a midwife through the assessment of fetal skull position during labor. The Beef Directory promises “Rock Solid Beef Genetics.” It peddles not anonymous meat but the sperm of individual bulls with names that sound like variety acts: Tonroe Lord Ian! Utile Ben! Virginia Andy! Vagabond! Mornity Handyman! Pinocchio! Seaview Tommy! Atok Socrates! Kilowatt D’Ochain! Immense D’Yvoir! It is richly illustrated, suitably glossy, and a chilling ode to muscle. (Behold the bulging rumps of Belgian Blues!)
Among the most niche in my collection of niche titles is the UK Ministry of Defence’s Corrosion: R.A.F. and A.A.C. Aircraft (1966), a bone-dry primer on the control, rectification, and treatment of nine types of corrosion. The Kent County Constabulary’s booklet Special Constabulary Inter-Divisional Competition (1971) is possibly the least read of all. Copied from typewritten documents, with hand-drawn diagrams, and stapled between two pieces of medium-weight red card, the booklet was produced “to enable officials and spectators to follow the progress of the Competition and the fortunes of the teams” during a public event at a Kent police station.3 Fun-seekers watched on as teams, comprising police officers from different divisions within the county, underwent an inspection of uniforms and accoutrements, competed in a quiz, and responded to a hypothetical incident at a demonstration involving a vicar, an unconscious policeman, a drug-addled youth, and an old man with a loaded shotgun.
Gray literature is a diffuse genre. Informational at base, its tone might tend toward bouncy sales patter or flinty authoritativeness. Visually, it ranges between perfunctory pragmatics, rickety flamboyant amateurism, and the polish of corporate comms. The most reliable way to identify an item’s grayness is by its function and milieu. According to the 2010 Prague definition, established at the 12th Annual Conference on Grey Literature and Repositories,
Grey literature stands for manifold document types produced on all levels of government, academics, business and industry in print and electronic formats that are protected by intellectual property rights, of sufficient quality to be collected and preserved by library holdings or institutional repositories, but not controlled by commercial publishers i.e., where publishing is not the primary activity of the producing body.
Gray literature does not have the market or cultural value of a novel or textbook. It is not an end in itself, but facilitative paraphernalia of some other endeavor—midwifery, policing, animal husbandry, war. This vicariousness, and its heterogenous forms, makes it notoriously difficult to place in library catalogues. Should a practical primer on the mitigation of corrosion in airplanes be placed under Dewey Decimal class “671: Metalworking & primary metal products,” “387: Water, air & space transportation,” or “358: Air and other specialized forces”? When a bull sperm directory is a matter of genetics, food production, and commerce, which can it be said to be about? Gray literature isn’t made with libraries or bookshops in mind. It strides out into the world to do an honest day’s work. None of this hanging around on hushed shelves waiting to impart knowledge in the abstract. It’s got sperm to tout, babies to birth, aircraft to maintain, a policed public to mollify.
I find these publications compelling by their very existence and, for the most part, unreadable. Their content slides off my mind. Gray literature’s high and narrow window onto specialist processes is anathema to traditional general-interest non-fiction publishing, which delivers information like a tap dispenses safely managed water—filtered, chlorinated, and piped into your very own quarters. Gray literature is a sploshing bucket of someone else’s water, murky with unfamiliar vocabulary, its means of application not always entirely obvious. Each publication is an invitation to speculate on a sector’s operations, to marvel at the specificity of other people’s knowledge and the focus of their working lives. My paltry library gestures toward the infinite complicatedness of human activity and the vast, disorganized array of murky buckets out of which the materiality of our lives somehow continues to emerge.
I have recently acquired some items that confuse the already untidy category of grayness. While seeking out books on theatrical quick-change (more on that another time), I came across the Webster’s Timeline History series and, out of curiosity, bought the three cheapest of the second-hand editions available: Wallpaper, 1768–2007; Secrecy, 393 BC–2007; and Bristol, 1000–1893. They are collations of excerpts, references, and citations that feature their titular word or phrase, and there are thousands of them. The series’s aggregate subject matter reads like the archest of list poems, the word associations of a disheveled mind, or dying humanity’s life flashing before its eyes…
Do read on for a fascinating/horrifying/illuminating tale all-too-relevant to our times– the story of the Webster’s Timeline History series…
On gray literature and Webster’s Timeline History books: “The First Tomato to Know Everything,” from @sosallyo.bsky.social in @cabinetmagazine.bsky.social.
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As we hold onto the human, we might (in preparation for tomorrow) remind ourselves that it was on this date in 1914 that President Woodrow Wilson issued a proclamation declaring the first national Mother’s Day. The previous day, May 8, Congress had designated the 2nd Sunday in May as Mother’s Day and had requested the proclamation.
“They are alone together”*…
Andrew Trousdale and Erik J. Langer bridge the years between Robert Putnam‘s Bowling Alone and Jonathan Haidt‘s The Anxious Generation with a brief history of the trade-off between convenience and connection in America. From Zach Rauch’s introduction…
The Anxious Generation is best understood as a three-act tragedy. Act I begins in the mid-20th century, when new social and entertainment technologies (e.g., air conditioning and television) set in motion a long, gradual collapse of local community. Act II begins in the 1980s, as the loss of local community weakened social trust and helped erode the play-based childhood. Act III begins in the early 2010s, with the arrival of the phone-based childhood that filled the vacuum left behind.
This post, written by Andrew Trousdale and Erik Larson, goes deep into Act I. Andrew is a psychology researcher and human-computer interaction designer who is co-running a project on the psychological tradeoffs of progress. Erik is the author of The Myth of Artificial Intelligence, writes the Substack Colligo, and is completing the MIT Press book Augmented Human Intelligence: Being Human in an Age of AI, due in 2026. Together, they show how the isolation we experience today did not begin with smartphones but began decades earlier, as Americans, often for good and understandable reasons, traded connection for convenience, and place-based relationships for privacy and control.
Tracing these trade-offs across the twentieth century, Andrew and Erik help explain the problem of loneliness we face today, and offer some guidance for how we can turn it around and reconnect with our neighbors. Robert Putnam, who read a recent draft, described it as “easily the best, most comprehensive, and most persuasive piece on the contemporary social capital conundrum I’ve yet read.”…
Trousdale and Langer trace the social, cultural, economic, political, and technological forces that have played out from the the late 1940s to today. It is, at once, familiar and shocking. They conclude…
When we asked Robert Putnam what gives him hope, he pointed to history. In The Upswing, he reminds us that Americans faced a similar crisis before. The Gilded Age brought economic inequality, industrialization, and the rise of anonymous urban life. Small-town bonds gave way to tenements and factory floors. Trust collapsed. By the 1890s, social capital had reached historic lows — roughly where it stands today.
The Progressive reformers found this new world unacceptable, but they didn’t try to turn back the clock. Cities and factories were here to stay. Instead, they adapted, creating new forms of connection suited to their changed reality, from settlement houses for anonymous neighborhoods to women’s clubs that built networks of mutual aid. They didn’t reject modernity; they metabolized it, showing up day after day to create new institutions and communities suited to the industrialized world.
Decades ago Neil Postman observed in Amusing Ourselves to Death that we haven’t been conquered by technology — we’ve surrendered to it because we like the stimulation and cheap amusement. More recently, Nicholas Carr concludes in Superbloom that we’re complicit in our loneliness because we embrace these superficial, mediated forms of connection. Like Postman and Carr, the Progressive Era reformers understood where they had agency when technology upended their world. It isn’t in demanding that others fix systems we willingly participate in, nor is it in outright rejecting technologies that deliver real benefits — it’s in changing how we ourselves live with and make use of the tools that surround us.
There are already signs that people are willing to do this. In a small, three-day survey, Talker Research found that 63% of Gen Z now intentionally unplug — the highest rate of any generation — and that half of Americans are spending less time on screens for their well-being, and their top alternative activity is time with friends and family. And they found that two-thirds of Americans are embracing “slow living,” with 84% adopting analog lifestyle choices like wristwatches and paper notebooks that help them unplug. Meanwhile in Eventbrite’s “Reset to Real” survey, 74% of young adults say in-person experiences matter more than digital ones. New devices like the Light Phone, Brick, Meadow, and Daylight Computer signal a growing demand for utility without distraction.
Unplugging isn’t enough on its own. The time and energy we reclaim has to go toward building social connections: hosting the dinner party despite the hassle, staying for coffee after church when you’d rather go home, sitting through the awkward silence, offering or asking for help.
Ultimately, we can’t expect deep social connection in a culture that prioritizes individual ease and convenience. Nor is community something technology can deliver for us. What’s required is a change of culture, grounded in a basic fact of human nature: that authentic connection requires action and effort, and that this action and effort is part of what makes connection fulfilling in the first place.
We can form new rituals and institutions that allow us to adapt to technology, ultimately changing it to our liking. But it starts with the tools we use and the choices we make each day. If we all prioritize the individual comforts and conveniences we’ve grown accustomed to, no one else will restore the community we say we miss. No one else can. If we want deeper relationships and better communities than we have, we’re going to have to put more of our time, effort, and attention into the people around us.
History shows that we can adapt, building communities suited to changing times. The question is: Will we stay in and scroll? Or will we go out and choose one another?…
Eminently worth reading in full: “Scrolling Alone.”
In the spirit of the call for forward-looking determination, pair with “The Displacement of Purpose” from Peter Adam Boeckel (“If AI automates production, then humanity must automate compassion. Only then will progress remember what it was for.”)
[Image above: source]
* Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone (in which he also observed: “People divorced from community, occupation, and association are first and foremost among the supporters of extremism.”)
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As we get together, we might spare a thought for Aldus Manutius; he died on this date in 1515. A printer and humanist, he founded the Aldine Press. In the books he published, he introduced a standardized system of punctuation and use of the semicolon. He designed many fonts, and created italic type (which he named for Italy).
And apropos the piece featured above, we might note that on this date in 1965 “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling,” the first major hit for the Righteous Brothers, simultaneously reached #1 on both the Billboard and Cash Box charts in the US as well as the UK singles chart. The song was produced by Phil Spector (who had discovered the duo at a San Francisco show) for his own label, Philles Records. All the songs previously produced by Spector for Philles featured African-American singers; the Righteous Brothers were his first white vocal act– they had a vocal style, blue-eyed soul, that suited Spector.
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