100 books like A History of the Book in America

As an avid reader, I'm curious about where books come from and what they do. How does a story get to be a book? How does someone become an author? What is happening to us as we read? I worked in publishing, and eventually, I started teaching other people how to become editors and publishers. As a faculty member, I had time to study and write about book history. I joined the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing when it was formed and became its president. The conferences helped me to learn about the history of books throughout the world and from pre-print times to the present.

Good question. Why would a white guy be passionate about nineteenth-century African American community building and activism? It’s a long story, but the short version is that by the time I reached graduate school, I could no longer avoid the realization that I had been dramatically miseducated about American history, and that the key to American history—one important key, anyway—is African American history. You can’t understand what it means to be an American if you don’t know this history, and you can’t understand our own very troubled times, or how to respond to these times, how to turn frustration into action, unless you know this history. So I developed my expertise over the years. 

As an avid reader, I'm curious about where books come from and what they do. How does a story get to be a book? How does someone become an author? What is happening to us as we read? I worked in publishing, and eventually, I started teaching other people how to become editors and publishers. As a faculty member, I had time to study and write about book history. I joined the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing when it was formed and became its president. The conferences helped me to learn about the history of books throughout the world and from pre-print times to the present.

As an avid reader, I'm curious about where books come from and what they do. How does a story get to be a book? How does someone become an author? What is happening to us as we read? I worked in publishing, and eventually, I started teaching other people how to become editors and publishers. As a faculty member, I had time to study and write about book history. I joined the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing when it was formed and became its president. The conferences helped me to learn about the history of books throughout the world and from pre-print times to the present.

I teach historical martial arts for a living. 25 years ago, one of my students asked me to write a training manual about medieval Italian longswords, so I did… it took me four years and changed everything. Teaching in person is my favourite thing, but writing books about my art is a close second. I’m always on the lookout for ways to write better and faster and sell more books. Being an effective writer means I make enough money from my books that I can spend my time researching, writing, training, and teaching historical martial arts and have plenty of time to spend with my wife and kids.

In 2008, as an author who had a message that I was desperate to get out into the world, I had a decision to make… to continue to pitch my non-fiction book for new moms to traditional publishers or to create a publishing company and publish it myself. I chose to create a publishing company and publish it myself. I loved the publishing and book marketing process so much that I started to help other authors to market their books.

After college, I studied economics and law. Working in antitrust lets me use what I’ve learned about both fields. I’ve been a professor at a law school and a business school and worked on competition issues while serving in senior government positions in multiple federal agencies, including both antitrust agencies. I also like working in antitrust because fostering competition is important to our economy. Competition encourages firms to pursue success by developing and selling better and cheaper products and services, not by coordinating with their rivals or trying to exclude them. And I like antitrust because the cases can involve any industry—I might learn about baby food one day and digital platforms the next.  

We have backgrounds in writing, activism, and being messed up, so making The Sad Bastard Cookbook together made sense. Our inspiration was partly realizing that most of the recipes purporting to be “good for mental health” require a laundry list of unusual ingredients and a drawer full of spoons, and partly meeting someone who didn't know about cooking eggs in instant ramen. So we crowdsourced recipes from our community, added our naturally witty, radically progressive commentary, and roped in Marten Norr as illustrator. The ebook's free—we know that dealing with poverty, overwork, mental health issues, physical disability, and exhaustion is hard enough without scraping up money for your emotional-support cookbook.

I’m fascinated by what people make of political events at home and abroad. The rapid expansion of public opinion in later eighteenth-century Britain, in tandem with the explosion of the press—newspapers, books, sermons, plays, poetry, novels, magazines, and cartoons—makes it a wonderful period to explore. People in the past were no less complex and sophisticated than we are; they simply lived in different circumstances, opportunities, and constraints, with different assumptions and priorities. My British Visions of America, 1775–1820 (2013) also deals with the British trying to understand foreign affairs, while The Wodrow-Kenrick Correspondence, 1750–1810, eds Fitzpatrick, Macleod and Page is full of events at home and abroad.

As an educator, I’ve experienced the power of true stories to engage readers, widen their world, spur thinking, and support content areas. I’ve learned plenty from these books, too! As an author, I’m fascinated with many aspects of the American Revolution that I never learned about as a student. Researching this time period has revealed much more than men at war. The revolution affected every aspect of life—a “world turned upside-down.” Today, we’re fortunate to have a range of stories that help kids understand that history is about people much like them facing the challenges of their time and place.