Early Publications Open Book on Columbus’
History
(May
16, 2001)
Back
to Aldus Society In the News
By
Bill Eichenberger, Dispatch Book Critic
Publish
books and you have all sorts of worries.
You
might run out of paper or ink. Maybe Federal Express goes on strike and your
books are stranded in a remote warehouse. Maybe your biggest author decides to
publish on the Internet.
But
no modern publisher is likely to face the obstacle that confronted Scott and
Wright, the firm that printed the 11th edition of John Kilbourn’s The Ohio
Gazetteer in 1833.
“About
the time designated for the commencement of the work,” the publishers of The
Gazetteer explain in a preface, “the cholera made its appearance in Columbus .
. . and during the continuance of its ravages, it was found impracticable to go
on with it.”
Charles
C. Cole Jr. is the author of A Fragile Capital: Identity and the Early Years of
Columbus, Ohio. In it, he writes of Columbus’ publishing history -- the
subject of a talk he’ll give Thursday to the Aldus Society, A Columbus Book
Club.
“The
interesting thing about Kilbourn’s Gazetteer, which was one of the first books
published in Columbus, is that it became a best seller,” Cole said.
“He
published the first edition in July of 1816 and the second edition four months
later. He sold 14,000 copies in the first four years, mostly to people who lived
out east and were considering coming to live in Ohio.”
The
nephew of Worthington founder James Kilbourne, John Kilbourn opened a bookstore
in the post office on High Street in 1812. Had he been paid by the word,
Kilbourn would have become rich on the full title of the Gazetteer alone:
The
Ohio Gazetteer; or Topographical Dictionary, Containing a Description of Several
Counties, Towns, Villages and Settlements, Roads, Rivers, Lakes, Springs, Mines,
etc., in the State of Ohio, Alphabetically Arranged ...
And
so on.
“Yes,
they used a more verbose style than we would in the 21st century,” Cole said,
laughing. “But one of the things I was most impressed with in Columbus’
early books was the quality of the writing. It seems the general population was
more interested in schools, libraries and education than was the state
legislature. That seems to be a tradition in Columbus.”
The
earliest books published in Columbus were of the self-improvement variety.
“Useful” books were in demand -- and novels weren’t deemed useful.
(Besides, pirated versions of European novels were available from East Coast
publishers cheap, a disincentive for Columbus publishers.)
“Most
of the books focused on practical information and were intended to be read by
the local residents,” Cole said. “They included books like Margaret Coxe’s
Young Lady’s Companion, in which she offers friendly hints on how women should
behave.”
Ladies,
according to Coxe, should develop the following characteristics: “meekness,
humility, gentleness, love and purity.” They should also practice
“self-renunciation and subjugation of the will.”
Coxe
followed up her best seller with Woman: Her Station Providentially Appointed,
daring proto-feminists to take up the argument for women’s rights with God.
“There
was some evidence of feminism in books from the 1840s,” Cole said. “The
daughter of (19th-century Columbusite) Alfred Kelley told her minister,
‘Please don’t ask me to obey’ during her wedding ceremony.”
Like
many of the books from Columbus’ early years, the various Gazetteers are
filled with bits of information. To wit: In 1836, Ohio had an estimated 280,562
horses; High Street was 100 feet wide and Broad Street, 120 feet wide; and,
Columbus enjoyed the services in 1838 of “12 lawyers, 12 physicians, one
dentist and five clergymen.”
Who
wouldn’t risk a little cholera to live in a city with only 12 lawyers?
In
addition to its physicians, Columbus in 1833 was home to eight or nine
“botanical practitioners, or steam doctors” who espoused the medicinal value
of plants and the Indian practice of using steam treatments to cure various
ailments. “Health books were the most profitable,” Cole said. “Boston
steam doctor Samuel Thomson published the third edition of A New Guide to
Health, or Botanic Family Physician with Columbus publisher Horton Howard and it
sold for $20.”
The
cost was well worth it to many of Columbus’ pioneer families:
“The
Guide listed what Thomson called ‘vegetable medicines’ for curing or
preventing disease and also detailed descriptions of the diseases themselves. If
you had six or eight or 10 children, it’s the sort of book you’d get a lot
of use out of.”
New
editions of popular books were common in Columbus. Warren Jenkins followed in
Kilbourn’s footsteps, publishing his own version of the Gazetteer in 1837.
“Without
boasting, we aver,” Jenkins wrote, “and challenge the world to contradict
the assertion, that this great and growing state, possesses more of the
essential ingredients of future greatness . . . than any other territory of
equal size on the face of the globe.”
The
Chamber of Commerce couldn’t have said it better.
As a
rule, publishers augmented their income by running hotels or grocery stores and
often sold their presses and got out of the business, so that there was great
turnover in the profession.
And
yet these publishers provided an invaluable service to contemporary scholars and
to the merely curious: