Trysh Travis, who contributes the chapter “New York’s Cultures of Print” to the Cambridge Companion, is Assistant Professor in the Center for Women’s Studies and Gender Research at the University of Florida. She received her bachelor’s degree from New York University, where she designed her own major in Media Studies and American Culture. Trysh taught high school English in New York City for three years before earning a master’s in English from the Breadloaf School at Middlebury College and a doctorate in American Studies from Yale University.
Trysh’s teaching and scholarship centers on contemporary US cultural and literary history with an emphasis on the gendered history of the book. Her writings on radical feminist publishing, contemporary spirituality, and popular culture have appeared in journals like Book History, American Quarterly, and Men and Masculinities as well as in publications like The Chronicle of Higher Education and Bitch magazine.
Her contribution to the Cambridge Companion traces “official,” mainstream print culture in New York City. In contrast, her most recent book, The Language of the Heart: A Cultural History of the Recovery Movement from Alcoholics Anonymous to Oprah Winfrey (2009), focuses on marginal and amateur readers, writers, and publishers—but, as Trysh puts it, “on squares, not hipsters.” You can read an interview with Trysh about the book at Rorotoko.com.
Here is an excerpt from Trysh’s contribution to the Companion:
Throughout the long twentieth century, this dizzying array of publishers, printers, retailers, and readers overlapped and intersected in New York, reflecting and giving voice to the city’s unique pluralism. The various print trades — not merely publishing but also paper manufacturing, printing, binding, and the like — had long been significant contributors to New York’s economy, and by 1900 their concentration in and around the city had created a self-sustaining synergy. The presence of so many print institutions created a marketplace of goods, labor, and ideas that drew literary talent in from across the nation and sent texts of all kinds back out in return. Critic and editor Malcolm Cowley spoke for many when he observed in 1934 that the ambitious litterateurs of his generation flocked to Manhattan because“living was cheap, because friends of ours had come already (and written letters full of enchantment), because it seemed that New York was the only city where a young writer could get published.” The city’s complex web of print cultures invited competition and innovation, attracting talent and keeping the costs of entry for new enterprises relatively low.
At the center of that web sat a concern conspicuously absent from the cultures of print enumerated above: trade book publishing, which produces those volumes we think of when we think of the generic “book” -– works of fiction, drama, and poetry, as well as all forms of non-fiction prose, from presidential biographies to the latest weight-loss manuals. Trade publishers’ enterprise went unremarked in the earlier list of New York’s print cultures because its size, longevity, and ubiquity have to a large extent naturalized its presence in the city, masking the fact that, like all those other cultures of print, it is the result of particular cultural and political-economic arrangements. But what seems a commonsense equation of New York City and book publishing has not always been so commonsensical, and this chapter examines the ways that trade publishers (“book men,” as they liked to call themselves) constructed that equation between the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. To do so, they deployed specific ideas about culture and democracy that both relied on and helped to create the image of New York as an “international capital of culture,” a modern and modernist city emblematic of all that was best in the free world.
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