Empire, Mass Manufacture, and Craft on Display: The German Book Pavilion at the Centennial Exhibition of 1876

Abstract

The Centennial Exhibition of 1876 in Philadelphia ignited debates about the here-and-now of innovation driven by transnational flows of capital, commodities, immigration, and the exchange of ideas. In this article, I direct our attention to book exhibitions at this event. I demonstrate that the proper display and handling of American and German books occasioned reflections on the distinctive national German character of book history, advertised technologies that fostered book manufacture, and generated a space in which booksellers and readers could imagine the past, present, and future of books, precisely at a moment when the status of the United States and Germany as industrial nations was far from settled. (VB)