ABSTRACT
Historian Priscilla Coit Murphy titled her book about Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, What a Book Can Do. In it, she explores the signi cant role that the book played in the modern environmental movement. She is part of a larger scholarly tradition that frames books as ‘agents of change’.1 Indeed, book historians have tended to share Murphy’s optimism about the transformational power of books. Historians of the French Revolution, in particular – Robert Darnton and Roger Chartier – have been especially open to the revolutionary potential of reading and literacy.2 But, as I have shown, there is a lot that books cannot do. Indeed, nowhere is that clearer than in the turn-of-the-twentieth-century American socialist movement.
