The Merriams of Brookfield: Printing in the Economy and Culture of Rural Massachusetts in the Early Nineteenth Century.

After the failure of their rural newspaper in 1802, the Merriam family of Brookfield, Massachusetts, turned to printing materials for urban markets. The careers of Ebenezer and George Merriam illuminate "the transformation of rural economic life, the structure of the American book trade, and . . . the rural cultural landscape." Documents the economic changes wrought by an increasing rural-to-urban flow of goods in Brookfield and similar communities, as well as the networks that emerged as the pattern of book exchange expanded.