In the twenty-first century, mass media corporations are often seen
as profit-hungry money machines. It was a different world in the
early days of mass communication in America. Faith in Reading tells
the remarkable story of the noncommercial religious origins of our
modern media culture. In the early nineteenth century, a few
visionary entrepreneurs decided the time was right to reach
everyone in America through the medium of print. Though they were
modern businessmen, their publishing enterprises were not
commercial businesses but nonprofit societies committed to the
publication of traditional religious texts. Drawing on
organizational reports and archival sources, David Paul Nord shows
how the managers of Bible and religious tract societies made
themselves into large-scale manufacturers and distributors of
print. These organizations believed it was possible to place the
same printed message into the hands of every man, woman, and child
in America. Employing modern printing technologies and business
methods, they were remarkably successful, churning out millions of
Bibles, tracts, religious books, and periodicals. They mounted
massive campaigns to make books cheap and plentiful by turning them
into modern, mass-produced consumer goods. Nord demonstrates how
religious publishers learned to work against the flow of ordinary
commerce. They believed that reading was too important to be left
to the "market revolution," so they turned the market on its head,
seeking to deliver their product to everyone, regardless of ability
or even desire to buy. Wedding modern technology and national
organization to a traditional faith in reading, these publishing
societies imagined and then invented massmedia in America.
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