the new railroads carried books west…

Book review:

Literary Publishing in America: 1790-1850

by William Charvat

Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1959

William Charvat offers, probably, more appealing detail than you ever imagined about American novels, short stories, and poems around the turn of the 19th century.

Writing was then, as it is now, a tough business for writers and publishers. Literary Publishing in America confirms that most writers didn’t get rich, and more than a few publishers managed to turn a really good buck.

In America, the market-expanding extension of railroads westward from the east coast had a lot to do with publishing success and the evolution of American reading taste.

Hint: the inland readers largely went for the romance-based novels, trashy and otherwise.

Hint: poetry has always been a tough slog for poets—ain’t much money in it.

Hint: history, and a historical context, were significantly important in the formation of the reading public’s taste for fiction.

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The Collected Poems of Sara Teasdale…book review

Literate, but impersonal

click here

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As with another eye: Poems of exactitude with 55 free verse and haiku poems,

and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)

and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”