printing press

Westerville became the heart of the Prohibition movement, deploying everything from hymns to bombs to keep their town dry.

Glenn Fleishman’s history of the comic strip as a technological artifact vividly restores the world of newspaper printing—gamboge, Zip-A-Tone, flongs, and all.

The inventor, philosopher, and elder statesman of the American Revolution never gave up on his first love — publishing.

Why were so many early European books laden with self-deprecation? Blame genre conventions.

If ever a book ought not to be judged by its cover, Edgar Allan Poe’s debut collection, "Tamerlane and Other Poems," is that book.

Part of what defines Pittsburgh literature is the transcendent in the prosaic, the sacred in the profane. An intimation of beauty amid a kingdom of ugliness.

Don’t blame the mix of languages; look to quirks of timing and technology.

The first newspapers contained not high-minded journalism, but hundreds of readers’ letters exchanging news with one another.

An anti-imperialist network made his warning possible.

A brief history of the printed ballot.

July 4th celebrates the signing of the Declaration of Independence, but we don’t even have the original!

On the witch craze of early modern Europe, and how the concurrent rise of the mass-produced woodcut helped forge the archetype of the broom-riding crone.

Where coloring books came from says something about what they are today.

Populist and patrician, hustler and moralist, salesman and satirist, he embodied the tensions within his America, and ours.

Publishing needs his democratic spirit.

The forgotten history of the Lloyd-La Follette Act and of whistleblowing in the federal workforce.

“The Bookshop” tells the story of American bookstores in thirteen types. Its true subject is not how bookstore can survive, but how they should be.

The enduring necessity (and importance) of a nearly 200-year-old technology.

Whatever writing is today, it is not self-evident. But writing by hand did not simply continue to “advance” until it inevitably began to erode.

Meet the feuding twin sisters who popularized the American advice column.

In 1941 an ambitious Philadelphia pediatrician, the wonderfully named Waldo Emerson Nelson, became the editor of America’s leading textbook of pediatrics.

Look closely—very closely—at a Sunday comic strip in a printed newspaper.

The United States has forgotten the radical German American immigrant socialists who spilled blood for antislavery and other liberatory causes.

A Spanish-language pamphlet by Cotton Mather explodes the Black-versus-white binary that dominates most discussions of race in our time.

At the back of the book, the index provides a space for reference—and sometimes revenge.

Back in the 18th and 19th centuries, novels were regarded as the video games or TikTok of their age — shallow, addictive, and dangerous.

In her new book, Colley shows how written constitutions developed both as a way to further justify rulers and to turn rebellions into legitimate governments.

Lovejoy, who ran a weekly paper called the Observer, was repeatedly targeted by mobs over his persistent writings against slavery.

That tradition of finding partners in the face of social isolation persists today.

Was this new age spurred by the ideals of the Enlightenment or by the imperatives of global warfare?