ABSTRACT
Reader, buy Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Go after it, send for it by mail, send some way, any way, only get it. By all means do not go out of this world without having read “the Story of the Age.”
—Morning Star, Dover (1852)1
Distribution
Over 300,000 buyers heeded this piece of advice in the months that followed the initial publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Advertisements and newspaper notices hint at the different ways readers obtained copies of the work. Uncle Tom’s Cabin could be purchased in bookstores (at “the principal booksellers in the country,” according to Jewett’s advertisements). A Bostonian could go to the source of the novel, as it were, since Jewett, like many of his counterparts in various cities, owned a bookstore.2 Both the Boston and the Cleveland firm solicited orders from the trade, that is, the booksellers, and the Boston firm shipped the books by express. Norton noted in June 1852-and the information was credited to Jewett-that the hundred thousand volumes, representing 55 tons of books, were “principally transported in small boxes or packages by Messrs. Kingsley & Co.’s and Thompson & Co.’s Expresses.” In an article relaying the same information, The Independent took the opportunity to express enthusiasm about recent improvements in transportation, which allowed “so large a number of packages” to be transported “in so short a time.”3 The Boston firm of
he moved into a large bookstore on Washington Street. For the different locations of Jewett’s respective firms, see Winship, “John Punchard Jewett,” p. 90. Most publishing and bookselling firms were located on Washington Street and adjoining Cornhill (see Raymond L. Kilgour, Lee and Shepard, pp. 3-22, for a description of literary Boston in the 1840s and 1850s).
