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Material Texts: John Garcia (American Antiquarian Society), "Black Lives in the Early U.S. Book Trades"

  • Monday, February 16, 2026 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm

Class of 1978 Pavilion, sixth floor of Van Pelt-Dietrich Library


We welcome John Garcia (American Antiquarian Society) for a talk titled “Black Lives in the Early U.S. Book Trades.”

Dr. Garcia writes:

 

"From the revolutionary era through the 1820s, free and enslaved people of African descent worked in virtually every aspect of book production, from presswork to papermaking, binding, and distribution, but to date no comprehensive survey has been conducted of these communities. Most scholars who have written on the topic rely on Isiaah Thomas’s History of Printing in America (1810) as the basis of their investigations, but Thomas only names three examples. This talk expands the range of actors through evidence found in newspapers, business records, and indenture forms; at the same time, I also propose a broader definition of who counts as part of book trade activity by including tradespeople such as carpenters, bricklayers, and wagoners. After sharing some of this evidence, the talk reconstructs the stories of two extraordinary lives: James Moody, a free Black papermaker from revolutionary Boston, and Andrew Cain, a Black pressman who contributed to the Quaker abolitionist press and who labored in Philadelphia’s print shops for over forty years."

 

 

 

John Garcia  is Director of Scholarly Programs and Partnerships at the American Antiquarian Society, where he oversees the Program in the History of the Book in American Culture and the Center for Historic American Visual Culture. His publications have appeared in journals such as Early American Studies, Criticism, Book History, and New England Quarterly, and his 2023 NEQ article on the seventeenth-century transatlantic book trade won the Whitehill Prize in Early American History. He is a Senior Fellow and former President of the Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography at Rare Book School and occasionally teaches summer courses in the history of the book for UCLA’s California Rare Book School.