"Success on a shoestring:" a center for a diverse Print Culture History in Modern America.

ABSTRACT

In 1992 James Danky, Wayne Wiegand, and Carl Kaestle founded the Center for the History of Print Culture in Modern America at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The study of print culture was then a new field represented by scholars from many disciplines, including American studies, history, library and information studies, and literary studies. Stimulated by initiatives of the American Antiquarian Society and the Center for the Book at the Library of Congress, most research covered the northeast of the United States in the period before 1876, but Wisconsin's new center aimed to encourage research into more recent time periods, and broader areas, a well as into the print culture of marginalized groups whose gender, race, class, creed, occupation, ethnicity, and sexual orientation have historically placed them on the periphery of power. Under the directorship of Danky and Wiegand, the center hosted conferences, sponsored lectures and colloquia, and introduced a new publishing series titled "Print Culture History." Over its fifteen-year history, the center has influenced a general shift in print culture studies from texts to readers of all walks of life, and has help move the field, as Danky argues, from "questions of aesthetics and technique" into social history.

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In the late 1980s James Danky, Wayne Wiegand, and Carl Kaestle were holding conversations at the University' of Wisconsin-Madison about print culture history, a relatively new area that each found attractive. (1) Despite their common interest, the three were coming to the subject from somewhat different perspectives. Carl Kaestle, William E Vilas Research Professor in the departments of History and Educational Policy Studies, had arrived on campus in 1970, and by the late 1980s enjoyed an international reputation as a historian of the American education system, and of literacy. Author of several books and many articles, he was working with a group of graduate students on an edited volume, Literacy in the United States (Kaestle, Damon-Moore, Stedman, Tinsley, Trollinger, 1991)

Wayne Wiegand had been a professor in the School of Library and Information Studies since 1987. He came to Madison from the University of Kentucky already well known as a library historian. But Wiegand brought more to Madison than an interest in library history, long a marginalized field within library and information studies, and largely ignored by historians. He read widely outside the narrow boundaries of LIS research, and could see that finding ways to interest librarians in print culture studies and print culture scholars in libraries might breathe new life into the historical perspectives on libraries. He also took an unconventional approach to standard LIS courses. In the late 1980s, his course on collection development, for instance, included a unit on reader response and reception theories, in which he introduced graduate students pursuing professional studies in librarianship to the theories of German scholars Wolfgang Iser and Hans Robert Jauss. Looking around for inspiration from outside the field of LIS, he was finding cultural studies to be full of possibilities.

Like Kaestle, Jim Danky had been a long time on campus. He had worked at the Wisconsin Historical Society (WHS) as a librarian since 1973, and had made a considerable name for himself in the area of what was in the 1970s becoming known as the "alternative" press. At the WHS he had been building research collections of books, newspapers, periodicals, and "ephemera" that represented the print culture of the African American press, marginalized ethnic groups, feminist and other women's publishing, the gay and lesbian press, left- and right-wing political groups, and the literary "underground." In 1982, with Elliott Shore (at that time librarian at Temple University), Danky had published a guide that introduced librarians to the concept of alternative materials (Danky & Shore, 1982). In the years that followed, he became especially well known for his work on successive projects that provide bibliographic control and access to important but neglected newspaper and periodical resources. (2)

Interest in print culture and the history of the book had been building steadily since the 1950s, with the publication in England of Richard Altick's The English Common Reader in 1957 and in France of L'Apparition du Livre by Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin in 1958 (Febvre & Martin, 1976). Yet, in the late 1980s, this was still a new field in which many elements of the usual scholarly infrastructure were still developing. An early instance of institutional support occurred in 1977, when Librarian of Congress Daniel J. Boorstin asked John Y. Cole to become the founding director of the new Center for the Book in the Library of Congress (LC). In this way, Boorstin hoped, the Library of Congress would both stimulate public interest in reading and at the same time foster study in the history of books and print culture. Over the next three decades, Cole encouraged states to establish their own Centers for the Book that would stimulate local reading and literacy programs. At the same time, the LC Center for the Book also gave an impetus to scholarship in April 1978, when librarians, scholars, publishers, collectors, and editors met to discuss contributions the new center might make to the history of books, printing, and libraries, and to print culture studies. Lectures, conferences, and publications began almost immediately, and in 1979 historian Elizabeth Eisenstein became the center's first resident scholar. In 1994, the center won an award for its contribution to book and printing history from the American Printing History Association (Cole, 2003).

Another early institutional innovator in the field was the American Antiquarian Society, whose director, librarian, and bibliographer Marcus McCorison, and others initiated plans for a Program in the History of the Book in American Culture in 1983. (3) Over the next few years, the AAS sponsored conferences, publications, seminars, and research fellowships that made use of the extensive collections at its facility in Worcester, Massachusetts (Gura, 2004). Many of those who later became leading figures in print culture history were initiated through the AAS Program, including the historian David D. Hall, who became its first chair. Funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, in 1993 the AAS started work on a multivolume A History of the Book in America under the editorship of Hall and Hugh Amory that Cambridge University Press initially agreed to publish, and that was later adopted by the University of North Carolina Press. (4) The first volume, The Colonial Book in the Atlantic Worm came in out in 2000, volume three in 2007, and volumes two, four, and five are planned to appear in the next few years. This large-scale undertaking, initially envisaged as consisting of three volumes ending with the first century of the American republic in 1876, was later revised to five volumes. These later volumes (the fourth to be edited by Kaestle and Janice Radway, and fifth by Michael Schudson, David Paul Nord, and Joan Shelley Rubin) will bring the history up to the twentieth century. (5)

In 1991, with encouragement from the Library of Congress and the AAS, historian Jonathan Rose helped launch the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing (SHARP), an association of scholars from all over the world that held the first of its annual conferences in New York City in 1993, and the second at the Library of Congress Center for the Book the following year. SHARP produces a quarterly newsletter and maintains an electronic discussion list (SHARP-L) and published the first annual issue of its journal Book History (edited by Rose and Ezra Greenspan) in 1998. Calling for a broad definition that included "book history, printing history, the book arts, publishing education, textual studies, reading instruction, librarianship, journalism, and the Internet," Rose (2001a) proposed to teach "all these subjects as an integrated whole." Book studies, as he envisaged, would include "everyone concerned with the exploration of script and print." By the twenty-first century, it was evident that his SHARP "big tent" strategy was working, as its membership, drawn from twenty countries, now stood at over one thousand.

While the early AAS initiatives provided a clear inspiration and practical impetus for research in the history of the book, their scope also carried a limitation that Danky, Kaestle, and Wiegand saw as a disadvantage. The AAS collections, the basis for many of the field's early publications, focus on materials published through 1876. As a result, scholarship tended to concentrate on white people living in the northeast, mostly before the Civil War. Recognizing the enormous impact of print in the period after 1876 not only through books but also through newspapers, periodicals, manuals, and all sorts of ephemera, including materials that together constitute the alternative press--the kinds of materials that Danky's own career had been devoted to collecting at the WHS--Danky, Kaestle, and Wiegand talked about ways to fill the temporal, geographical, and diversity gap.

In 1992, these discussions resulted in the founding of the Center for the History of Print Culture in Modern America (CHPC), a joint project of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Wisconsin Historical Society (WHS). "The conversation," Danky later explained, "grew out of a sense that the traditional history of the book was too limited as it did not account for the reader as well as the larger social processes of texts" (Danky, n.d.). Defining "modern" as the history of the United States since 1876, the center set its sights on providing a multidisciplinary focus for scholars from fields such as literature, sociology, political science, journalism, publishing, education, reading and library history, the history of science, and gender and ethnic studies (Wiegand, 1997). The term print culture history seemed more appropriate than book history for the great range of types of texts that the center's founders envisaged as the topic for study.

Wisconsin was an especially suitable place for such an undertaking. Not only were its university libraries rich in collections of scholarly periodicals and monographs, but the WHS library and archives were an extraordinary resource of international renown, made more so by Danky's own collecting practices that had added thirty thousand titles to its newspaper and periodicals collection. Danky and Wiegand were especially interested in uncovering the reading practices of those in whose lives this wide variety of texts was central. The library of the School of Library and Information Studies held primary source material in bibliography, collection development, and the history of libraries. Children's materials could be found in the Cooperative Children's Book Center of the School of Education. In these various collections could be found the newspapers, periodicals, advertising, printed ephemeral materials, and books (including school and college texts, children's literature, trade and scholarly monographs, and mass market paperbacks) that could form the foundation for the investigation of print cultures of those at both the center and the periphery of power in the United States from the late nineteenth century on. Moreover, Wisconsin's geographical location in the Midwest symbolized the center's emphasis on areas outside the northeast.

By encouraging scholarship on print culture that employed theoretical dimensions of class, race and ethnicity, and gender, the center would complement the work of the AAS, and encourage SHARP members to broaden the scope of their work to cover not only more modern historical periods, but also the print culture of those whose records were less likely to have been collected in East Coast archives, such as immigrants, women, African Americans, and indeed anyone living west of the Appalachians. It would also prompt participation in print culture studies of scholars from a wide range of disciplines, including literature, journalism, publishing, education, reading and library history, economics, sociology, the history of science, political science, and gender and ethnic studies (CHPC, n.d.). Like SHARP, the CHPC envisaged a big tent for print culture.

The new center was set up with Danky and Wiegand as joint directors, and Kaestle as chair of an advisory board whose membership was designed to bring together scholars and librarians with an interest in print culture from all over campus. (6) However, they had to do it without the kinds of financial resources available to the AAS. In the early 1990s, the University of Wisconsin's budget did not encourage new initiatives that might draw on university funds, and the then Chancellor, Donna Shalala, was looking for ways to close down centers, rather than approve new ones. However at a meeting of the University Academic Planning Council at which Kaestle and Wiegand, along with SLIS director Jane Robbins, made a pitch for print culture, Shalala must have been impressed. After hearing them out in silence, she turned to Robbins and asked simply, "Will these guys do what they say?" When Robbins assured her they were indeed men of their word, and once everyone had pledged that the new center would cost the university nothing, she gave her assent. Thus in May 1992, the University Academic Planning Council gave the CHPC the official nod, with the proviso that the center would report to the Director of the School of Library and Information Studies.

The new center would have to make do on a shoestring, however. Hiring assistants, let alone an extensive and experienced staff of full-time professionals, was out of the question. Any activities would have to be feasibly run on very little money by individuals already fully employed, with the help of student volunteers. Lectures and colloquia fell into this category, and in 1992, Ian Willison (coeditor of The History of the Book in Great Britain, and formerly of the British Library) gave the center's first Annual Lecture. (7) Although attendance at the first annual lectures tended to be small, as the center's reputation grew, so did the lecture audiences. (8) It helped that Wiegand and Danky worked with, first, the Friends of the University of Wisconsin Libraries, and later, the Wisconsin Book Festival, to list the center's lectures as part of their activities.

In 1994, Kaestle suggested that the center hold a conference on "those odd periodicals and books that Jim collects," referring to the diversity of the collections that Danky was fostering at the WHS. Discussing this idea in an early advisory board meeting, Danky pointed out that there were a number of themes that the center could use in biennial conferences that included labor (what the worker read), women's print activities, religion, and education. The only caveat, he felt, was that these seemed such obvious topics that by the time the center got around to doing them some would have already been covered by others--perhaps by other centers that Wiegand envisioned being created as he traveled around the United States giving lectures on print culture studies. (9) However as it turned out, "No one did them and we did," Danky later reflected (J. P. Danky, personal communication, February 4, 2007). The result was the 1995 conference, "Print Culture in a Diverse America."

Neither of the two home institutions could provide direct financial support for the conference, but LC's John Cole helped promote, publicize, and underwrite it with a generous gift of one thousand dollars. On May 5 and 6, 1995, thirty contributors who came from all over the United States as well as from Canada, presented papers on topics that ranged from late nineteenth-century immigrant cookbooks to World War II Japanese American camp newspapers, to the late twentieth-century Street Wise, Chicago's newspaper to empower the homeless. This small-scale venture into scholarly communication was to have much larger ramifications. First, it provided the basis for an edited volume of the same title, consisting of eleven essays based on conference papers (plus an introduction by Wiegand), that Danky and Wiegand edited and the University of Illinois Press published in 1997. In 1999 this volume won the journal MultiCultural Review's Carey McWilliams Award for an outstanding scholarly or literary work related to the U.S. experience of cultural diversity. Second, it turned out to be the first of a series of (roughly) biennial conferences that were to become a standard fixture on the calendars of print culture scholars.

In 1995 Carl Kaestle left the University of Wisconsin for the University of Chicago, and his place in the chair of the Center's Advisory Board was taken by another renowned scholar, Merle Curti Professor of History Paul Boyer, author of many books on cultural and intellectual history, and in the print culture context of Purity in Print: The Vice-Society Movement and Book Censorship in America, first published in 1968. Now, at the advisory board's fall meeting that followed the successful May 1995 conference, Boyer moved to approve that the second conference would focus on the reading of children and young people. Board members Rima Apple (Human Ecology and Women's Studies), Anne Lundin (children's literature scholar and Wiegand's colleague in Library and Information Studies), Ginny Moore Kruse (Director of Wisconsin's famous Cooperative Children's Book Center), Steve Vaughn (School of Journalism), and Maureen Hady (Danky's colleague at the WHS and now the center's assistant director) formed a committee with Wiegand and Danky to plan and organize the next conference.

In May 1997, the center's second two-day conference took place on the theme "Defining Print Culture for Youth, Children and Reading since 1876." Twenty-five scholars from as far afield as Hawaii in the west and Georgia in the east presented papers, while Anne Scott McLeod of the University of Maryland gave a keynote address entitled "Children, Adults, and Reading at the Turn of the Century." Conference sessions reflected a similar emphasis on diversity to the 1995 conference, with titles like "Constructing Images; African Americans in Print," "Communists and Consumers," and "Heroes and Villains: Reading Masculinity." A contingent from the University of Iowa contributed a panel devoted to "Reading Nancy Drew," and other sessions discussed, for example, the world of children's publishing, and texts geared toward schoolchildren and girl scouts. As in 1995, Wiegand and Danky planned that a volume of selected papers should emerge from the meeting. In fact, two sets of papers made it into print. Three articles appeared in a special issue of The Library Quarterly in 1998 edited by Anne Lundin, and in 2003, Libraries Unlimited published Defining Print Culture for Youth: The Cultural Work of Children's Literature, also edited by Lundin and Wiegand. (10)

The ten papers chosen for this collection, whose authors hailed from a wide variety of disciplines, covered periods from the late nineteenth century onward, and included not only children's literature as conventionally understood, but also manuals, schoolbooks, scrapbooks, comics, journals, and mass-market books (Lundin, 2003). As Lundin herself put it, "The central question that unites these essays asks what a more elastic and dynamic discourse--including multiple perspectives and formats as well as the long-standing traditions--means for the definition of children's literature" (p. xvii). Rather than reinforce the "canons of classical children's fiction and privileged imaginative works," these essays, she argued, show how "cultural institutions and their subjectivities are shaped by print formations" (p. xx).

The successes of their publishing efforts pointed to a logical next step: the creation of a publishing series devoted to print culture history. Although other university presses were also developing series related to book history broadly conceived, notably the University of Massachusetts Press (Studies in Print Culture and the History of the Book) and the University of Toronto Press (Studies in Book and Print Culture, founded in 2001), Danky and Wiegand were eager to foster the publication of works that not only focused on America after 1876, but facilitated research into the print culture history of groups whose gender, race, class, creed, occupation, ethnicity, and sexual orientation (among other factors) have historically placed them on the periphery of power, but who have used print sources as one of the few means of expression available to them. It was board member and cartography historian David Woodward who suggested they contact the University of Wisconsin Press, an idea that ultimately resulted in the series Print Culture History in Modern America. The first publication was a new edition of Paul Boyer's Purity in Print, brought up to date with two new chapters. In 2003, the series published a new edition of another influential book that had long been out of print: Dee Garrison's controversial Apostles of Culture: The Public Librarian and American Society, 1876-1920. (11)

In developing a national identity the center occasionally moved outside the geographic and time restrictions it had set for itself. Among its annual lecturers the celebrities of "mainstream" book history, like Elizabeth Eisenstein and Adrian Johns were well represented. In October 2003, SHARP founder Jonathan Rose gave the center's annual lecture on the topic "Classic Books and Common Readers," in which he discussed his recently published prize-winning book The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (Rose, 2001b). But the Center also hosted lecturers who embodied its emphasis on diversity and more recent time periods, like Barbara Smith of the Kitchen Table Press, and Rodger Streitmatter, author of Voices of Revolution (2001), and Unspeakable: The Rise of the Gay and Lesbian Press in America (1995).

By the end of the 1990s, Danky and Wiegand were taking advantage of their networking activities with other groups involved in print culture and the history of the book. In 1999 the center joined forces with SHARP to host a joint conference that met in Madison. In April 2001 it hosted the annual conference of the Mid-America American Studies Association (MAASA) Conference that took as its theme "The Library as an Agency of Culture." Essays from this conference later appeared in a special issue of the journal American Studies, edited by Wiegand and Thomas Augst, that was later republished in its entirety as part of the Print Culture History series (Augst & Wiegand, 2003). (12)

The year 2001 promised to be a busy one, for in addition to MAASA a third center conference with the title "Women in Print: Authors, Publishers, Readers, and More Since 1876," was also scheduled to be held on September 14-15, with Barbara Sicherman, Kenan Professor of American Institutes and Values at Trinity College, scheduled to deliver the keynote address. But when the terrorist attacks of September 11 grounded commercial flights over the United States, Danky and Wiegand had no choice but to cancel the event. Plans for a publication went ahead, however, and in 2006, Women in Print: Essays on the Print Culture of American Women from the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries appeared in the Print Culture History series, edited by Danky and Wiegand. A foreword by sociologist Elizabeth Long and an introductory paper by Sicherman ushered in ten other essays that featured women like Marie Mason Potts, editor of Smoke Signal (a mid-twentieth century periodical of the Federated Indians of California), Lois Waisbrooker, publisher of books and journals on female sexuality and women's rights in the decades after the Civil War, and Elizabeth Jordan, author of two novels and editor of Harper's Bazaar from 1900 to 1913. (13) This volume broke new ground in other ways, too. Simultaneously with the paper volume, the University of Wisconsin-Madison libraries published an online electronic version as part of an Open Access initiative that made available downloadable chapters at no cost. (14) Reviewers were highly positive. Wrote one, "It would be difficult to exaggerate the importance of Women in Print.... [It] is, quite simply, an essential text for anyone interested in the lives and work of women in American literature" (Whitt, 2007, p. 247).

Women in Print owed at least part of its success to the very rigorous editing process that began with Print Culture in a Diverse America. Aware of the potential for skepticism from scholars confronted with a new term, Danky and Wiegand were both conscious that scholarship in an emerging field like print culture history needed to be especially sound, as well as creative. "We felt it was our responsibility, shared with others of course," explained Danky, "to make sure that the work we put out was as excellent as we could make it. Thus ... we often asked for, and received, up to four revisions of a paper before we sent it to the publisher" (J. P. Danky, personal communication, February 4, 2007). Although the "Women in Print" conference never actually met, it set a pattern that the following two conferences, on religion (2004) and education (2006), also followed, of publishing a selection of essays in a collection published as part of the Print Culture History series.

In addition to adding to the stock of publications on print culture, the conferences provided valuable opportunities for graduate students to practice presenting and to receive feedback on their work from knowledgeable researchers. The Center did not contribute directly to the university's slate of courses, but in 1998 it helped SLIS establish a PhD minor in print culture that allowed students to design a curriculum around the historical study and sociology of print culture within their general PhD studies. The PhD minor was an example of the multidisciplinary approach that the Center has emphasized from the outset. The first student to complete the print culture minor was Andrew Wertheimer, whose dissertation studied the camp libraries that Japanese Americans established during World War II (Wertheimer, 2004). Students not enrolled in the minor also found encouragement and inspiration through the Center. For example, Joanne Passet's PhD dissertation in history examined eleven sex radical periodicals between 1853 and 1910 that, she argued, not only raised grassroots women's consciousness about their rights to control their own bodies but also created a sense of unity and shared identity among them. Many of these overlooked but influential periodicals, like Lucifer the Light Bearer, were to be found in the collections of the Wisconsin Historical Society (Passet, 1999). (15) Other students volunteered their help on various projects, contributing much needed labor, but receiving valuable experience and contacts in return. (16)

Early in 2003, Wiegand left Madison for a named chair in Library and Information Science and a joint appointment as professor in American Studies at Florida State University. By now, Rima Apple was chair of an advisory board that included members from a wide range of departments (as well as librarians from Special Collections and the WHS): Curriculum and Instruction, Educational Policy, English, History, Library and Information Studies, and Religious Studies. (17) After Wiegand left Madison, he and Danky continued to collaborate on editing the Print Culture History series, but Danky took sole charge of the Center, steering it through the next two major conferences, and overseeing the lecture and colloquium schedule. Wiegand's leaving coincided with budget cuts at the WHS that deprived Danky of two full-time coworkers. Nevertheless, he soldiered on, focusing on maintaining what he later modestly described as "a minimalist program that mimicked some of what Wayne and I had done together" (J. P. Danky, personal communication, February 4, 2007).

Whether or not they were indeed "minimalist," the center's activities continued to stimulate innovative scholarship on print culture history. On September 10 and 11, 2004, the center hosted its conference, "Religion and the Culture of Print in America," inviting scholars to consider the "world of print in which religions and religious practices were inherited, constructed and promulgated over the last 125 years" (CHPC, 2004). Studies dealing with religion and class, regionalism, feminism, immigrant groups, racial and sexual minorities, radicals, etc., were especially welcomed. As possible topics, the call for papers suggested:

   Protestantism (in its many manifestations, including revivalism and
   missionary outreach), Roman Catholicism (both the official church
   and grassroots phenomena such as Marian visitations), Eastern
   Orthodox churches, Mormonism, Judaism (all varieties), Islam (both
   immigrant and native originated), and indigenous religions, as well
   as new or less-well-known religious movements. (CHPC, 2004)

Prospective speakers were encouraged to consider the interaction between the reader and printed materials (e.g., books, Bibles, periodicals, newspapers, church bulletins, hymnals, tracts, etc.) aimed at or produced and read by religious individuals and groups. "We're interested in the reaction of the reader to a whole host of printed materials, including books, newspapers, magazines, advertisements, comic books--and now, for religious publications," Danky told a reporter ("Conference Examines," 2004). Print plays an important role in popularizing religion, he argued, pointing to the apocalyptic book series Left Behind by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins which, although among the top best sellers of the past decade, often went unnoticed by "mainstream" literary commentators ("Conference Examines," 2004).

Paul Boyer (now professor emeritus of history) and Charles Cohen (director of the Religious Studies Program and professor of history at University of Wisconsin-Madison) started the conference off with keynote presentations, followed by a variety of sessions featuring over thirty presenters, and focusing on such broad topics as readers of religious publications, print and the construction of religious communities, and missionary uses of print. At the reception, Randall K. Burkett, Curator of African American Collections at Emory University, gave a special illustrated presentation "Sparkling Gems of Race Knowledge Worth Preserving: Collecting African American Religious History." Boyer and Cohen subsequently edited the resulting volume, Religion and the Culture of Print in Modern America, in the Print Culture History series, a collection of essays scheduled to appear early in 2008.

The most recent conference, "Education and the Culture of Print," followed a similar pattern to the conference on religion. Organizers called for papers that "illuminate the interaction between authors, publishers, readers, and printed materials at any level of education--public and private, formal and informal, from preschool to elementary, secondary, postsecondary, and adult--since 1876," and hoped that the conference would "showcase new research concerning the history of literacy," suggesting as examples such topics as the production and use of textbooks, the history of child-rearing manuals, the history of school libraries, and the use of print sources as political propaganda in schools (CHPC, 2005). The conference opened on September 29, 2006, with keynote addresses from Adam Nelson of Wisconsin's departments of History and Educational Policy and Robert Orsi of the Harvard Divinity School. These papers are slated to appear in a volume as part of Print Culture History series resulting from the conference, edited by Nelson and John Rudolph, his colleague in Curriculum and Instruction. Later, Carl Kaestle gave the third keynote address on "Print Culture and Education in a Time of Rapid Social Change," based on examples from the volume of A History of the Book in America that he and Janice Radway were in the process of editing. Over the next two days, thirty-six papers were organized into twelve panels that covered the relationship of education and print with labor, Native Americans and ideas of race, children's librarianship, textbooks, black print, and the roles of television, radio, and film.

Funds would continue to be in short supply, though Danky and Wiegand found ingenious and even self-sacrificing ways to provide themselves with discretionary cash, often funding activities out of their own pockets. Several speakers and authors, including Wiegand, Willison, and Boyer donated honoraria and royalties. In 1999, Danky donated money from an award (given by the library supply company DEMCO) he won as the Wisconsin Library Association's Librarian of the Year. In 2002 he won the Reference and User Services Association's Isadore Gilbert Mudge-R. R. Bowker Award, which recognizes distinguished contributions to reference librarianship. "Mr. Danky's work has centered around efforts to give historical voices to those who have traditionally resided outside the dominant cultures in America: African Americans, Native Americans and women," commented award committee chair Denise Hoover. "Without his efforts, entire segments of our national history would be unfindable." ("Notables," 2002). The Mudge-Bowker award also came with $5,000 that immediately went into the CHPC pot. Royalties from the Print Culture History series and other publications helped augment these funds, occasionally supplemented when conferences more than broke even. "Success on a shoestring" is how Wiegand described their efforts, which were bolstered in 2006 when SLIS Director Louise Robbins committed to providing a regular budget for a part-time assistant for the following five years.

But though financial support might have been thin during these years of state and university financial stringency, the center was never short of generous intellectual collaboration and support from the many individuals from campus and elsewhere who contributed lectures and colloquia, as well as committee time, and from the departments who regularly cosponsored the center's events. In fifteen years between 1992 and 2007 the center acquired a national presence in the larger scene of print culture and the history of the book. "We have carved out a distinct national reputation ... in the field of print culture studies, one that complements the work of our colleagues and friends at AAS, and in SHARP too," comments Danky (personal communication, February 4, 2007). While his work at the WHS may have focused on the collection of often overlooked texts, it was his work at the center that encouraged researchers to concentrate on the people who produced, distributed, and, above all, read those texts. In this way, the center was part of a general shift in print culture studies from texts to readers of all walks of life. Says Danky:

   The Center was explicit in bringing race, class, gender and sexual
   orientation among them to a discussion of print. While not
   prescriptive, we have influenced much of the dialogue about print
   and its meaning (or so I like to think) and have fully wrenched
   book history from questions of aesthetics and technique and placed
   it in social history. (J. P. Danky, personal communication,
   February 4, 2007)

REFERENCES

Altick, R. D. (1957). The English common reader: A social history of the mass reading public, 1800-1900. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Augst, T. & Wiegand, W. A.,(2003). Libraries as agencies of culture. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Center for the History of Print Culture in Modern America. (n.d.). Mission statement. Retrieved May 10, 2007, from http://slisweb.lis.wisc.edu/~printcul/missionstatement .html.

Center for the History of Print Culture in Modern America. (2004). Call for papers: Religion and the culture of print in America. Retrieved August 16, 2007, from http://www.mith2 .umd.edu/WomensStudies/CallsforPapers/print.html.

Center for the History of Print Culture in Modern America. (2005). Call for papers: Education and the culture of print in modern America. Retrieved August 16, 2007, from http:// listserv.kent.edu/cgi-bin/wa.exe?A2=ind0512e&L=ksuslis-I&P=2049.

Cole, J. Y. (2003, January). Promoting books and reading: Nationally, internationally, and in the states [Electronic version]. Library of Congress Information Bulletin, 62(1). Retrieved August 16, 2007, from http://www.loc.gov/loc/lcib/0301/cfb-anni.html.

Conference examines religious publications. (2004, August 27). Retrieved May 10, 2007, from http://www.news.wisc.edu/10077.html.

Danky J. P. (n.d.). History. Retrieved May 10, 2007 from http://slisweb.lis.wisc.edu/~printcul/ history.html

Danky J. P., & Shore, E. (Eds.). (1982). Alternative materials in libraries. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press.

Febvre, L., & Martin H.-J. (1976). The coming of the book: The impact of printing, 1450-1800. London: N.L.B.

Gura, P. F. (2004). 'Magnalia historiae libri Americana': Or how AAS brought the history of the book into the new millennium. Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, 114, 249-280.

Johns, A. (1998). The nature of the book: Print and knowledge in the making. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Kaestle, C. F., Damon-Moore, H., Stedman, L. C., Tinsley, K., Trollinger, W. V., Jr. (1991). Literacy in the United States: Readers and reading since 1880. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Long, E. (2003). Book clubs: Women and the uses of reading in everyday life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Lundin, A. (2003). Introduction. In A. Lundin & W. A. Wiegand (Eds.), Defining print culture for youth: The cultural work of children's literature (pp. xi-xxii). Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited.

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NOTES

(1.) Unless otherwise noted, the sources for this paper are located in the Center for the History of Print Culture Archives, supplemented by personal communication with James P. Danky, Wayne A. Wiegand, and others closely associated with the center.

(2.) For example, with a grant from the Library Services and Construction Act, his Native Americans: Library Resources in Wisconsin Project produced three major publications, including Native American Press in Wisconsin and the Nation. Another venture, the United States Newspaper Project funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, involved the cataloging of the WHS's extensive newspaper collection. This project also produced Newspapers in the State Historical Society of Wisconsin: A Bibliography with Holdings. The African-American Periodicals and Newspapers Project, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the University of Wisconsin System, the Ford Foundation and other private foundations, produced African-American Newspapers and Periodicals: A National Bibliography (Harvard University Press, 1998), a comprehensive, cooperative finding aid for African-American serials.

(3.) By coincidence, both McCorison and Danky were graduates of Ripon College, a small liberal arts school in central Wisconsin.

(4.) Hugh Punory, former Senior Cataloger at the Houghton Library, Harvard University, died in 2001.

(5.) Chapters by Danky appear in Volumes IV and V, and by Wiegand in Volume IV.

(6.) Initial members were Carl Kaestle (Chair, History), Rima Apple (Consumer Science), Dale Bauer (English), Sargeant Bush (English),John M. Cooper, Jr. (History), Ken Frazier (Director, General Library System), Robert Kingdon (History), Ginnie Moore Kruse (Director, Cooperative Children's Book Center), Nellie McKay (Afro-American Studies), R. David Myers (Director, WHS Library), Richard Ralston (Afro-American Studies), Jane Robbins (Director, SLIS), Sue Searing (Assistant Director, General Library System), and Stephen Vaughn (Journalism and Mass Communication). By 1994, Paul Boyer (History), Jane Collins (Sociology), and Anne Lundin (SLIS) had joined the board, bringing the total to fifteen.

(7.) In hosting lectures and colloquia, the CHPC has received generous financial assistance on an ad hoc basis from such bodies as the University Lectures Committee, and the Friends of the UW Libraries. Willison's Lecture, on October 26, 1992, was titled "The History of the Book in Twentieth Century Britain and America: Perspectives and Evidence." The second Annual Lecture, by David Nord of Indiana University took place on September 20, 1993, and was tided "Newspaper Readers in the Early 20th Century."

(8.) Attendance at that first lecture (held in the capacious WHS auditorium), Wiegand remembered, consisted of four board members and their spouses. However, this poor showing did not deter Willison from generously returning to give better attended lectures on subsequent occasions.

(9.) In April 1994, for instance, Wiegand had chaired a meeting at the University of North Carolina's School of Information and Library Science, attended by twenty-three scholars, to discuss strategies for setting up a print culture center at UNC.

(10.) Authors of the three essays (which appeared in The Library Quarterly, 68(3), July 1998) were Christine Jenkins, Christine Pawley, and Rebekah E. Revzin.

(11.) This new edition included an introduction by Christine Pawley.

(12.) American Studies, 42(3) (2002). Contributors were Thomas Augst, Ari Kelman, Elizabeth Jane Aikin, Ronald J. Zboray, Mary Saracino Zboray, Christine Pawley, Juris Dilevko, Lisa Gottlieb, Jean L. Preer, Jacalyn Eddy, Benjamin Hufbauer, and Emily B. Todd.

(13.) Elizabeth Long had recently published Book Clubs: Women and the Uses of Reading in Everyday Life (2003). Contributors to Women in Print (in addition to Long and Sicherman) were Jane Aikin, Kristin Mapel Bloomberg, Terri Castaneda, Michele V. Cloonan, June Howard, Christine Pawley, Sarah Robbins, Toni Samek, and Nancy C. Unger.

(14.) The director of the UW-Madison Libraries, Ken Frazier, was an impassioned advocate of the Open Source movement, an attempt to counter the crippling rises in the subscription price of commercially-produced serials.

(15.) Based on this dissertation is the monograph Sex Radicals and the Quest for Women's Equality (Passet, 2003).

(16.) Student "Research Coordinators" included Christine Pawley, Erin Meyer, and most recently, Irene Hansen.

(17.) Apple took over from the previous chair, Sargent Bush, professor of English, who died in 2003.

Christine Pawley is professor in Library and Information Studies and Director of the Center for the History of Print Culture in Modern America at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her main research interests are in the history of reading, and historical and critical perspectives on LIS education. Her book, Reading on the Middle Border: the Culture of Print Late Nineteenth Century Osage, Iowa, was published by the University of Massachusetts Press in 2001. Other publications have appeared in such journals as The Library Quarterly, the Journal for Education in Library and Information Science, Libraries and Culture, Book History, and American Studies. Her two current book projects are tentatively titled Contested Literacies: Reading, Citizenship, and the Public Library and Reading in the Heartland: Domesticity, Community, and Networks of Print.