Canvassing the Caribbean and Southeast Asia: The Global Expansion of American Subscription Publishing

Door-to-door sale of books is a distinctively 19th-century phenomenonused by American publishers to create an alternative distributionsystem to bookstores. Armed with a bound prospectus, the subscriptionagent crisscrossed... [ view full abstract ]

Door-to-door sale of books is a distinctively 19th-century phenomenon
used by American publishers to create an alternative distribution
system to bookstores. Armed with a bound prospectus, the subscription
agent crisscrossed thousands of miles in the United States, traveling
by steamship and railroad to tap new markets of American readers. This
presentation shows how subscription took an international turn in the
later C19. Using diaries, publishers’ accounting records, and the R.G.
Dun & Company credit reports, I recover an entirely unremarked
dimension of American publishing that connected firms in Connecticut
and Maine to readers in various Caribbean and Asian towns. After
sketching the broad outline of international subscription, I give a
microhistory of one bookseller who traveled to Shanghai, Singapore,
and Ceylon, among other places, circa 1881. This example suggests that
expatriate British readers were a major audience for cheap books. In
their diaries and other writings, traveling booksellers recounted how
subscription brought them into contact with foreign lands, people, and
customs. Consequently, subscription demonstrates how the idea of
“circulation” in literary and cultural history can benefit from a more
finely grained attention to the logistics and personnel of
distribution. Certain titles may have circulated more widely than we
think, and the agents of circulation themselves offer commentary on
the social world of British imperialism.