First edition. These essays have been written by leading scholars on early bookselling, reading habits and the impact of printing in early America. Printing history in its broadest context may be viewed as a distinct form of cultural history, a synthesis combining the attention to ideas that is central to intellectual history with the emphasis on patterns of behavior and organization characteristic of social history. This work encourages new approaches to the study of early printing, including the fusion of bibliographical analysis and the broadly cultural approach of the French historians of books and society. Together, the essays demonstrate how the world of print changed between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries - both shaping and reflecting the larger American culture. Titles of the papers presented here include "The Uses of Literacy in New England, 1600-1850," "The Anglo-American Book Trade before 1776," "The Wages of Piety: The Boston Book Trade of Jeremy Condy," "The Colonial Retail Book Trade: Availability and Affordability of Reading Material in Mid-Eighteenth Century Virginia," "Bibliography and the Cultural Historian: Notes on the Eighteenth-Century Novel," "Early Music Printing and Publishing," Books and the Social Authority of Learning: The Case of Mid-Eighteenth-Century Virginia," "Elias Smith and the Rise of Religious Journalism in the Early Republic" and "Print and the Public Lecture System, 1840-1860." Most of the essays were originally prepared for an October 1980 conference of the same title sponsored by the American Antiquarian Society.