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 culture and civilizations into newly settled regions, penetrating to even the most humble of homesteads. Thus there were many opportunities for 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 for avid readers who eagerly read almost anything they could get theirs 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 the others, along with the entire nation - and indeed much of the rest of the world but locally they required the pragmatic kinds of publications that formed the underpinnings of civilized society, such as newspapers, almanacs, books of law and statutes, maps and guidebooks, schoolbooks, and missionary tracts.

A scholar and teacher of book history, Dr. Clement heads the Department of Special Collections at the Kenneth Spencer Research Library of the University of Kansas.

Author/Creator: Richard W. Clement

Description: Cloth, 7 x 10 inches, 140 pages, duotones

ISBN: 0844410802

Price: $19.95

Availability: Usually ships in 3-4 business days.

Product #: 21107129