the likes of Amos Taylor, a former New Hamp- shire schoolteacher who took to peddling books and pamphlets during the 1780s. Taylor traveled the back roads of the Northeast selling such items as 17th-century English chapbooks, Indian captivity narratives, and even some of his own literary efforts. Taylor thought of his own role in heroic terms. Such "men of an excellent charac- ter," he wrote in The Bookseller's Legacy
Massachusetts shopkeeper Silas Felton was a typical consumer of the...