Ornithology and Enterprise: Making and Marketing John James Audubon's The Birds of America
Central to Nobles’s discussion will be John James Audubon’s double elephant folio edition of The Birds of America (4 vols., 1827-38), a work that still stands as one of the most remarkable artistic and scientific achievements in the history of the book. It is a massive work of natural history that offers the reader an innovative interplay between image and text. For Audubon, though, producing this “Great Work” proved to be as much about enterprise as ornithology, and The Birds of America became the family business for more than three decades.
Disappearing Medium: Poetry and Print in the Antebellum United States
Book historians have for the most part told the story of the rise of a mass-market for literature with reference to short fiction and the novel, leaving poetry curiously out of the picture until the arrival of America’s great printer-poet, Walt Whitman. And yet poetry thrived in the antebellum marketplace, circulating across a wide range of popular and elite print formats. Moreover, poetry was understood as a test case for the viability of American literature itself; many writers and readers assumed that the very possibility of a democratic culture depended on the fate of American verse.
Re-envisioning Black ‘Book History’: The Case of AME Church Print
In this lecture, Professor Gardner asked how careful consideration of nineteenth-century African American experiences can and should reshape our discussions of early Black print. His talk drew on diverse print material that was produced by, for, or via the African Methodist Episcopal Church between 1840 and 1870. He focused on how and why diverse African Americans came to, conceived of, and used print, with emphasis on the ways such exploration challenges dominant senses of terms like “writer,” “editor,” “reader,” and especially “print,” “history,” and “American culture.”