Textual Cultures

Three nineteenth-century memoirs reveal the risks and rewards of life on the road as a traveling bookseller.

Using the Atlantic Ocean as a guiding metaphor, transatlanticism emphasizes the fluid nature of contrived national boundaries and identities.

Book theft: the books may be rare, but the crime is not.

But the eighteenth-century readerly hobby angered critics, who saw it as a “monstrous practice.”