Book History

In 1884, a New Jersey man named Henry Dwight Stiles (1823–89) published a comparison between bees and people that drew upon his travels in Southeast Asia:

Last January I saw in Singapore, upon a tree in the hotel yard, a large colony of bees. They had no hive or covering: had been there several months. Like the other natives they did very little work. They were high up on a large limb, and no comb was to be seen. I was reminded that necessity was the mother of industry.¹

For most of his life Stiles worked as a farmer and a clerk in Vineland, New Jersey. But in later years "H.D." Stiles moonlighted as a canvassing agent, selling books overseas for the J.B. Burr Publishing Company, a subscription publisher based in Hartford, Connecticut.² Stiles's contentious remarks about the "natives" of Singapore stemmed from his experience as a salesman in a variety of Australian, Asian, and Middle Eastern port cities. But why was this American in Asia in the first place? What brought him there, and how does the book trade figure into his travels?

This essay draws upon the economics of publishing to give context to the travels of H.D. Stiles and explain how nineteenth-century subscription publishers entered into the international trade in books, pictures, and other consumer goods. I demonstrate that subscription publishers and canvassing agents, who have been absent from book histories of the British Empire, targeted Anglophone readers in Asia, Australia, the West Indies, and even parts of the Middle East. The internationalization of the subscription book trade contributed to the burgeoning print cultures of imperial port cities, making this aspect of American publishing a participant in "informal empire," a term that encompasses the political, economic, and cultural relations set forth by British imperial activity across the globe.³ Subscription therefore marks an important and hitherto unrecognized intersection between nineteenth-century [End Page 85] US publishing and global book history, one in which the canvassing agent serves as a crucial link between local, national, and "global" modes of print production, circulation, and consumption.

Scholars have established the period between 1830 and 1914 as one of increased internationalization for English-language publishing, not just for the overseas activity of the British book trade but also in terms of the growing quantity of US exports.⁴ But subscription hasn't been adequately discussed as a transnational or global phenomenon. The leading authority on American publishing in this period, Michael Winship, focuses on trade publishing when considering the international activity of US publishers, and for good reason, since firms like Ticknor and Fields certainly took part in such markets.⁵ Related scholarship on the global networks of the British book trade has similar limitations, framing discussion in terms of wholesale distributors and bookstores, consequently overlooking the movements of canvassing agents.⁶ But even as steamships were transporting more books to retail outlets in imperial or semi-imperial port cities, this era of increasing internationalization was also populated by door-to-door book salesmen (Figure 1).⁷

Recovering the global network of American subscription publishing contributes to an understanding of place and connection in imperial print culture that avoids a simple binary of metropole and periphery in favor of unexpected pathways of print circulation.⁸ I examine a variety of recently discovered and underutilized sources to situate American book agents in Australasia, among other locations. The discussion yields a vastly different geographic scope missing from older scholarship on subscription which focused solely on the US market. Scholars have proven that subscription created a distinct system of book distribution in the nineteenth-century United States, where publishers used individual canvassers to reach customers in person.⁹ By targeting potential readers in their homes and workplaces, subscription bypassed the trade routes of the general merchant, the catalogue, the bookstore, the newsstand, and other urban retailers. The numerous subscription firms comprised a mosaic whose decentralized network reached beyond the eastern US cities to include dispersed communities of readers in the American South, the Midwest, and western regions like California, especially after the...