Print for the Pocket

In Print for the Pocket, Madeline Zehnder examines how nineteenth-century Americans understood a common but often overlooked feature of their publishing landscape: the pocket-sized book. Analyzing archival print artifacts alongside both major and little-known texts, Print for the Pocket argues that the material properties of small, portable books offered Americans conceptual frameworks as well as practical resources for grappling with challenges posed by their country's vast and growing size. During the early nineteenth century, the territorial growth and rapidly expanding population of the United States intensified national anxieties about cultural and social cohesion. For many nineteenth-century commentators, pocket-sized books suitable for carrying close to the body promised both to ease movement across long distances and to choreograph the opinions and embodied behaviors of newly dispersed reading audiences. Reassessing longstanding scholarly associations between increased print circulation and liberal progress, this study of early American print cultures shows how books designed “for the pocket” inspired fantasies as well as practices of nineteenth-century spatial and population management. Its chapters shed light on diverse American reading audiences-from children to soldiers-while illuminating pivotal national sites ranging from the frontier to the Union Army camp. Although rhetoric of the great and vast has dominated understandings of American literature and culture, Print for the Pocket establishes smallness as a concept deserving of fresh critical attention.

Madeline Lee Zehnder is a postdoctoral fellow at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Her work has appeared in publications including American Literature, American Literary History, New Literary History, and Book History.