Books On The Frontier: Print Culture in the American West 1763-1875

By Richard W. Clement

Most people on the frontier were literate and eager for reading material, both to learn about current events and to better themselves. In the absence of schools and other established cultural institutions, books served as the primary carriers of civilization into newly settled regions, penetrating to even the most humble of homesteads. Thus there were many opportunities for the printers who carried presses and type along wilderness tracks, for the booksellers and itinerant salesmen who opened up intellectual horizons across the hinterlands, for the librarians who insisted on making books available for all, and of avid readers who eagerly read almost anything they could get their hands on.

Frontier printers and publishers produced standard works that the new communities needed, while the established publishers in the East printed the tales of frontier adventure that shaped the nation’s view of the West.
People on the frontier enjoyed the adventure stories of Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, Buffalo Bill, and others, along with the entire nation and indeed much of the rest of the world.

In Books on the Frontier: Printed Culture in the American West, 1763-1875, Richard W. Clement considers a variety of such publications as he chronicles the spread of printing westward and shows how the frontier book and newspaper became a medium for the transmission of cultural values and the formation of a new kind of community.

Richard W. Clement’s Books on the Frontier: Print Culture in the American West, 19763-1875 complements his earlier volume, The Book in America, published in 1996, and like the earlier publication, is illustrated with images from the Library of Congress. Dr. Clement heads the Department of Special Collections at the Kenneth Spencer Research Library of the University of Kansas.

Of all its holdings, the Library of Congress has given most emphasis to collecting books, prints, photographs, and maps about American history and culture. Drawing skillfully on the resources of the Library’s Rare Book and Special Collections Division, Prints and Photographs Division, and General Collections, Richard Clement tells a dramatic story: how the making and reading of books and newspapers helped shape the American frontier and how the idea of the frontier has become an integral part of the national identity of the United States.

American Studies/ History of Books ISBN: 0-8444-1080-2
Release: October 2003
Price: $29.95
Cloth cover
140 pages, duotones. 7 x 10”