The University of North Carolina Press

A History of the Book in America

Volume 5: The Enduring Book: Print Culture in Postwar America

Edited By David Paul Nord, Joan Shelley Rubin and Michael Schudson

The fifth volume of A History of the Book in America addresses the economic, social, and cultural shifts affecting print culture from World War II to the present. During this period factors such as the expansion of government, the growth of higher education, the climate of the Cold War, globalization, and the development of multimedia and digital technologies influenced the patterns of consolidation and diversification established earlier.

The thirty-three contributors to the volume explore the evolution of the publishing industry and the business of bookselling. The histories of government publishing, law and policy, the periodical press, literary criticism, and reading--in settings such as schools, libraries, book clubs, self-help programs, and collectors' societies--receive imaginative scrutiny as well. The Enduring Book demonstrates that the corporate consolidations of the last half-century have left space for the independent publisher, that multiplicity continues to define American print culture, and that even in the digital age, the book endures.

Contributors:

David Abrahamson, Northwestern University

James L. Baughman, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Kenneth Cmiel (d. 2006)

James Danky, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Robert DeMaria Jr., Vassar College

Donald A. Downs, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Robert W. Frase (d. 2003)

Paul C. Gutjahr, Indiana University

David D. Hall, Harvard Divinity School

John B. Hench, American Antiquarian Society

Patrick Henry, New York City College of Technology

Dan Lacy (d. 2001)

Marshall Leaffer, Indiana University

Bruce Lewenstein, Cornell University

Elizabeth Long, Rice University

Beth Luey, Arizona State University

Tom McCarthy, Beirut, Lebanon

Laura J. Miller, Brandeis University

Priscilla Coit Murphy, Chapel Hill, N.C.

David Paul Nord, Indiana University

Carol Polsgrove, Indiana University

David Reinking, Clemson University

Jane Rhodes, Macalester College

John V. Richardson Jr., University of California, Los Angeles

Joan Shelley Rubin, University of Rochester

Michael Schudson, University of California, San Diego, and Columbia University

Linda Scott, University of Oxford

Dan Simon, Seven Stories Press

Ilan Stavans, Amherst College

Harvey M. Teres, Syracuse University

John B. Thompson, University of Cambridge

Trysh Travis, University of Florida

Jonathan Zimmerman, New York University

About the Author

David Paul Nord is professor of journalism and adjunct professor of history at Indiana University. He is author of Faith in Reading: Religious Publishing and the Birth of Mass Media in America. Joan Shelley Rubin is professor of history at the University of Rochester. She is author of Songs of Ourselves: The Uses of Poetry in America. Michael Schudson is professor of communication at the University of California, San Diego and at the Graduate School of Journalism, Columbia University. He is author of Why Democracies Need an Unlovable Press.