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TPO60 阅读-2 The Revolution of Cheap Print

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背景知识........................................................................................................................................... 8

原文

The Revolution of Cheap Print

①The first half of the nineteenth century saw dramatic changes in the economics

of the printed word in both the United States and Europe, though the changes

generally happened earlier and on a wider basis in America. In the 1830s and

1840s, sharp reductions in prices for newspapers and books in America highlighted

the advent of an era of cheap print. Now there were daily newspapers that instead

of 6 cents per copy sold for a penny or two. Now there were novels that instead of

an earlier price of $2 sold for 25 cents or less, when the same books in Britain cost

the equivalent of more than $7. So steep were the declines in the price of print

over so short a period that they amounted to an information-price revolution, the

first of several such episodes of declining prices that have profoundly affected

information and culture during the past two centuries. Two

mid-nineteenth-century American cultural innovations, the "penny press" and the

"dime novel", were actually named for their low price. These were criticized for

being cheap in both senses of that word: low in price and low in taste. But low

price did not necessarily mean lowbrow. Increasingly, book publishers issued even

the most esteemed works in cheap as well as expensive editions to reach as wide a

public as possible. The information-price revolution also affected religious and

political publishing, as reading became a basis of mass persuasion for the first time

in history.

②Cheap print was not entirely unprecedented. In seventeenth- and

eighteenth-century England and France, cheap collections of stories, ballads, and

other miscellany had circulated among the lower classes. But since only a minority

of the poor could read, most listened while a few read aloud; thus cheap print

reached not so much a reading as a listening public. The expansion of cheap print

in the nineteenth century in America and Europe was on a much larger scale, and it

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took place during a great increase in popular literacy. Together these amounted to

a cultural watershed. Traditionally, even in literate homes, books and other

publications had been relatively rare and treasured objects; reading meant

returning to a few texts, especially religious works. But with the explosion of print,

reading became more varied, and readers scanned newspapers, magazines, and

cheap books that they soon passed on or discarded. Intensive reading of religious

and other works did not disappear, but reading became an increasingly common

form of diversion as well as devotion.

③The usual explanation for the rise of cheap print emphasizes new technology.

Unquestionably, the full development of cheap print could not have happened

without technological change. Print, however, had already become cheaper in

America before technological advances played a significant role; new technology

arrived once the process was under way, not at the beginning. This was no

accident: the continuing expansion of print created an incentive for technological

innovation. To conceive of technology as the causal force is to understate the prior

importance of politics, culture, and markets in creating the conditions that allowed

investments in new technology to pay off.

④Cheap print was public policy in America. While European governments taxed

newspapers and other publications, the United States let them go tax free and

even subsidized them, to a degree, through the postal system. The rise of cheap

books and other forms of cheap print in the United States also reflected distinctive

patterns of nineteenth-century American consumer markets. As the economic

historian Nathan Rosenberg remarks, citing the cases of cutlery, guns, boots, and

clothing, "Americans readily accepted products which had been deliberately

designed for low cost, mass production methods "at a time when handmade goods

persisted in Britain. Books fit this pattern. Americans had not been primarily

responsible for introducing new manufacturing technology to the production of

books. On the contrary, most of the key advances in printing and papermaking

before 1850 had traveled west across the Atlantic rather than the reverse. But the

industrialization of book production proceeded more rapidly in the United States,

where the market by the middle decades of the century was not only larger than in

Britain but also apparently more sensitive to price than to quality, perhaps because

elite readers constituted a smaller proportion of book buyers.

译文

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