Explores the role of almanacs in early American culture.

In every country across Europe, at some point or other during the last five hundred years, cheap printed materials were the staple diet of ordinary people, providing a rich array of entertainment, education, and information. They came in various forms, but were usually variations on the theme of single sheets or simple booklets, and they were carried far and wide in pedlars’ packs and sold in the streets, at fairs and markets and wherever crowds gathered, as well as in backstreet shops. Their content was as broad as can be imagined: news and scandal, crimes and last-dying confessions of murderers, divinations, instructional works, wonder stories, miracles, folktales and legends, love stories, celebrations of national victories and lamentations for the good old days. They were often couched in the form of poetry or song, and included pictures in the form of woodcuts and engravings to add to their appeal. In every country across Europe, governments and local and religious authorities tried at times to suppress or control these cheap printed materials. Sometimes, too, the authorities would adopt the format of cheap print to spread their own moral and conformist messages. The educated elites almost always treated cheap print with disdain, but the people continued to buy these items in their tens of thousands, and the printers knew exactly what they wanted. Neglected and reviled for centuries, cheap print shines a light on the culture and lives of ordinary people. This is the first volume to take a pan-European perspective, with each chapter detailing the experience of a particular country or region, offering the reader the opportunity to progress from the particular to a continent-wide overview. This combination of the ubiquity of the materials and overarching themes with the variations wrought by local circumstances can be summed up in the phrase always the same, but everywhere different.

In the decades before the Civil War, American society witnessed the emergence of a new form of print culture, as penny papers, mammoth weeklies, giftbooks, fashion magazines, and other ephemeral printed materials brought exuberance and theatricality to public culture and made the practice of reading more controversial. For a short yet pivotal period, argues Isabelle Lehuu, the world of print was turned upside down. Unlike the printed works of the eighteenth century, produced to educate and refine, the new media aimed to entertain a widening yet diversified public of men and women. As they gained popularity among American readers, these new print forms provoked fierce reactions from cultural arbiters who considered them transgressive. No longer the manly art of intellectual pursuit, reading took on new meaning; reading for pleasure became an act with the power to silently disrupt the social order. Neither just an epilogue to an earlier age of scarce books and genteel culture nor merely a prologue to the late nineteenth century and its mass culture and commercial literature, the antebellum era marked a significant passage in the history of books and reading in the United States, Lehuu argues. Originally published 2000. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

First published in 2004. Popular Print Media 1820-1900 makes available a selection of articles from nineteenth-century newspapers, periodicals and books which are otherwise unavailable except in their original publications. The collection also includes a significant amount of material that highlights the complex and changing importance of women in and for the nineteenth-century media at large. The collection is made up of three volumes, divided into six sections and will cover the following themes: technology, reading spaces, influence of print, graphic media, serial fiction, periodicals and the 'popular'. Each section includes a new introduction by the editors. The editors will also include a thematic table that enables readers to pursue a specific conceptual and/or historical issue, such as the impact of serial publication upon practices of reading and authorship.

This book looks at popular belief through a detailed study of the cheapest printed wares in London in the century after the Reformation.

This highly acclaimed book is being published for the first time in paperback. The author studies the cheap printed literature which was read in eighteenth and nineteenth century Ireland and the cultures of its audience. It takes an interdisciplinary approach to a little-known topic, pursuing comparisons with other regions such as Brittany and Scotland. By addressing questions such as the language shift and the unique social configuration of Ireland in this period, it adds a new dimension to the growing body of studies of popular culture in Europe.