In this virtual book talk, Matthew P. Brown discusses his new book, The Novel and the Blank (2025), and explores the lively and often overlooked world of eighteenth-century print shops in British America. These workshops produced a kaleidoscope of printed materials—from novels and pamphlets, legal blanks and almanacs to runaway slave ads and chapbooks—which reflect the complexities of colonial life.
Brown paints a rich cultural history of the period, showing how certain popular texts—what he calls “steady sellers”—kept the printing trade going, while moments of religious revival and political unrest fueled bursts of new printing activity. He also examines how the business of printing was tied to both creative expression and systems of oppression like the slave trade.
With a sharp focus on everyday texts and readers, rather than the canonical works emphasized by modern scholars, Brown reveals a broader, more human picture of early American life. He shows how ordinary printed materials shaped big changes in religion, politics, and culture—and how those changes still shape our world.
Matt Brown is an Associate Professor in the English Department and the Center for the Book at the University of Iowa. His 2007 book for Penn Press, The Pilgrim and the Bee: Reading Rituals and Book Culture in Early New England, was a runner-up for the Best First Book prize from the MLA. His second book, The Novel and the Blank: A Literary History of the Book Trades in Eighteenth-Century British America came out this August from Hopkins Press. He has published research in PMLA, American Literary History, and American Quarterly and written essays and reviews for Material Religion, PBSA, Early American Studies, Religion and Literature, Cultural Studies, American Historical Review, Early American Literature, and William and Mary Quarterly. Recent work has turned to curricular innovations and pedagogical theory: a 3-year NEH grant with co-PI Elizabeth Yale to teach global book history by way of a hands-on studio, an article on “critical making” for Philological Quarterly, and a co-authored chapter on teaching artist books for the Routledge volume Teaching Text Technologies and Critical Bibliography Among the Disciplines. Brown was elected to AAS membership in April 2009