George Palmer Putnam: Representative American Publisher by Ezra GreenspanReview by: Eric LupferLibraries & Culture, Vol. 37, No. 3 (Summer, 2002), pp. 284-285Published by: University of Texas PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25549023 .

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284 L&C/Book Reviews

that when the Spaniards discovered the remains of the French settlement, they found "more than two hundred books, many of which still retained the traces of

costly bindings," lying around in the mud [La Salle and the Discovery of the Great

West, 469). Robert Weddle also mentions "books with expensive bindings, all in

French," and manuscripts that the rain had rendered illegible [The French Thorn, 73). Primary sources include a letter by Fray Damian Massanet cited by Herbert E. Bolton {Spanish Exploration in the Southwest, New York: Barnes and Noble, 1959, 359) and a report by Alonso de Leon, who found the remains of La Salle's fort on Garcitas Creek four months after its destruction and who wrote: "We

came upon many books and manuscripts that were written in French-a fact

that we learned from the alferez, Francisco Martinez, who knows French very well" (translated by Walter J. O'Donnell, Preliminary Studies of the Texas Catholic Historical Society 3, no. 2 [April 1936]: 7). The first French books to be "collected"

in Texas were found in the mud among corpses. It is quite possible that these books were

religious books, with others on navigation or

artillery and maybe some on

plants or animals, if Joutel

was indeed the naturalist whom Foster

believes he was.

Francois Lagarde, University of Texas at Austin

George Palmer Putnam: Representative American Publisher. By Ezra Greenspan. Uni

versity Park: Penn State Press, 2000. xv, 510 pp. $45.00. ISBN 0-271-02005-9.

In The School of Hawthorne, Richard Brodhead describes Horace Scudder, an

advisor and editor at Houghton Mifflin Company from 1863 to his death in

1902, as "one of those nineteenth century figures who seem to have belonged

simultaneously to the management of every literary and cultural institution, and

also integrated their workings in practical terms" (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986, 59). As this fine if occasionally digressive biography by Ezra

Greenspan makes clear, the same must be said of George Palmer Putnam.

Putnam-the founder of G. P. Putnam and Company and the publisher of Putnam's

Monthly as well as important works by Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne,

Herman Melville, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, and Susan Warner-was not sim

ply a central figure in the nineteenth-century American book and magazine trade.

He was also a leader in the movement for international copyright (as one of the

founding members of the American Copyright Club and, later, the International

Copyright Association), the organizing force behind the New York Book Pub

lishers Association, and one of the founders of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

In short, writes Greenspan, Putnam was "one of the most centrally situated,

broadly and multiply involved, and professionally and patriotically dedicated

figures of his time in the world of American letters" (xiii).

Greenspan's biography, the first extended examination of Putnam since

the turn of the twentieth century, offers a definitive account of this publisher's career. The chronicle of Putnam's work in London in the 1840s-when Putnam

served simultaneously as

publisher, freelance literary agent, institutional book buyer,

and self-appointed promoter of American arts and letters-may be used as a primer on the workings of the Anglo-American book trade in the mid-nineteenth century.

The chapter on Putnam's Monthly is similarly excellent and offers the most com

plete history of this short-lived but significant magazine to date.

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285

The book is a bit too long. Greenspan intends not only to chronicle Putnam's

career but also to portray the publisher's life and that of his family as a register of

the multiform developments transforming life in nineteenth-century America.

Greenspan thus includes a great deal of Putnam's personal and family history.

Such detail, though fascinating in places, distracts from the central and most

valuable part of this book: the account of Putnam's career and its importance. We know much of the history of American publishing in the nineteenth cen

tury through a collection of extraordinary biographies and house histories: Ellen Ballou's The Building of the House (a history of Houghton Mifflin Company), Eugene Exman's The Brothers Harper and The House of Harper, and William Try on's Parnassus Corner (a biography of James T. Fields). Greenspan's biography is a fine and necessary addition to this group, which provides the essential introduc

tion to the American book trade in its formative era.

EricLupfer, University of Texas at Austin

The Russian Reading Revolution: Print Culture in the Soviet and Post-Soviet Eras. By Stephen Lovell. London: Macmillan Press in association with the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University of London, 2000. viii, 215 pp. $65.00. ISBN 0-312-22601-2.

In this succinct monograph, Stephen Lovell addresses one of the most famil iar cliches about the former Soviet Union: for all of the regime's political repres sions, it nonetheless made good

on its commitment to literacy, and as a result

the Soviet population read more than any other in the world. As Lovell points out, this celebration in and of itself said very little about what was read or how it

was processed by Soviet/Russian readers. He therefore sets out to clarify

some

of the critical aspects of what he terms "Russia's reading myth." If his conclu sions ultimately raise more

questions than they answer about the myth, he is

nonetheless to be applauded for reworking the agenda for studies that make

assumptions about readership. In the introduction, Lovell establishes his theoretical frame around issues of

class and culture, as Pierre Bourdieu and others have employed these two con

cepts to identify both readers and the materials they

consume. His brief tour of

continental Europe's nineteenth-century "reading revolution" brings him to the evolution of a

culturally active middle-class reader whose equivalent did not

appear in Russia until, paradoxically, after the Communist revolution. Central to LovelPs argument is the notion that by the 1930s the Soviet Union had devel

oped a

homogenized culture that was not organized according to the elite/middle/

popular hierarchy of readerships that characterize other developed societies. Lovell argues that when the government collapsed these categories for its own

political purposes, it generated a middlebrow audience similar in many impor tant respects to Western

readerships. Lovell develops his theme in three short historical chapters, moving rapidly

from the 1920s into the M. S. Gorbachev years of glastnost, or "openness," in the

1980s. Although the brevity of his survey limits its effectiveness, Lovell has new points to raise about the "book hunger" that began to be felt acutely in the 1960s. Several factors inherent in the socialist system were

responsible: faulty mecha nisms for production and distribution, and inattention to the specific cravings of

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