Literary Industries

An autobiography of the bookseller, library collector, man of letters, and historian of the American West edited by his great-great granddaughter. A bookseller in San Francisco during the gold rush, Hubert Howe Bancroft (1832–1918) rose to become the man who would define the early history of California and the West. Creating what he called a “history factory,” he assembled a vast library of over sixty thousand books, maps, letters, and documents; hired scribes to copy material in private hands; employed interviewers to capture the memories of early Spanish and Mexican settlers; and published multiple volumes sold throughout the country by his subscription agents. In 1890 he published an eight-hundred-page autobiography, aptly entitled Literary Industries. Literary Industries sparkles with the exuberance of nineteenth-century California and introduces us to a man of great complexity and wit. Edited for the modern reader and yet relating the history of the West as it was taking place—and as it was being recorded—Kim Bancroft’s edition of Literary Industries is a joy to read.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1887.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1890.

This Pivot investigates the impact of the digital on literary culture through the analysis of selected marketing narratives, social media stories, and reading communities. Drawing on the work of contemporary writers, from Bernardine Evaristo to Patricia Lockwood, each chapter addresses a specific tension arising from the overarching question: How has writing culture changed in this digital age? By examining shifting modes of literary production, this book considers how discourses of writing and publishing and hierarchies of cultural capital circulate in a socially motivated post-digital environment. Writing Cultures and Literary Media combines compelling accounts of book trends, reader reception, and interviews with writers and publishers to reveal fresh insights for students, practitioners, and scholars of writing, publishing, and communications.

Hubert Howe Bancroft (1832-1918) moved to California from Buffalo, New York, in 1852. After a brief exposure to gold mining, he returned to the profession of bookselling, setting up shop in Crescent City. In 1856, he moved to San Francisco, where he founded H.H. Bancroft & Co., which soon became the state's premier bookseller and publisher. From 1871 to 1889, Bancroft labored on his Native races and history of the Pacific states, western Canada, and Alaska, which he published beginning in 1874, hiring qualified authors for the volumes and even sending out field workers who obtained dictated reminiscences from surviving pioneers. Literary industries: a memoir (1891) recounts his early life and experiences in California. He recounts his career as a businessman and his growing fascination with his hobbies of collecting books on Pacific Coast history and amassing the source materials for a multi-volume study of the subject. This is a book about the writing of history and preservation of source materials as well as the recollections of a leading early California businessman.

This book contends that mainstream considerations of the economic and social force of culture, including theories of the creative class and of cognitive and immaterial labor, are indebted to historic conceptions of the art of literary authorship. It shows how contemporary literature has been involved in and has responded to creative-economy phenomena, including the presentation of artists as models of contentedly flexible and self-managed work, the treatment of training in and exposure to art as a pathway to social inclusion, the use of culture and cultural institutions to increase property values, and support for cultural diversity as a means of growing cultural markets. Contemporary writers have tended to explore how their own critical capacities have become compatible with or even essential to a neoliberal economy that has embraced art's autonomous gestures as proof that authentic self-articulation and social engagement can and should occur within capitalism. Taking a sociological approach to literary criticism, Sarah Brouillette interprets major works of contemporary fiction by Monica Ali, Aravind Adiga, Daljit Nagra, and Ian McEwan alongside government policy, social science, and theoretical explorations of creative work and immaterial labor.