The first printing-press in Pittsburgh was purchased by the aspiring newspaper editors John Scull and Joseph Hall from a manufacturer in Philadelphia; it took several weeks in 1786 for the machine to make its way across the Commonwealth, over the wide expanse of the Susquehanna, across the Allegheny Mountains, and down towards the confluence of the Ohio River. With its screw press, its tympan, and its movable type, the printing press was fundamentally unchanged from the age of Gutenberg, and from the workshop of Hall and Scull come a prodigious outpouring of materials in this distant frontier town. Almanacs and catechisms, newspapers and books. The Pittsburgh Gazette, forerunner to the current newspaper of record, was first printed by the two, while noted local leader and judge Hugh Henry Brackenridge’s quixotic picaresque of 1792 entitled Modern Chivalry, arguably the first novel published in the newly independent United States, was sold for a dollar at their shop (not a cheap buy at the time).
By 1805, there was another printing press operating near the banks of the Monongahela, in the shadow of the old fort that had slowly been disassembled to build the new city. Zadok Cramer, his spectacularly biblical-name evidence of his Quaker upbringing that he’d since abandoned after moving from his native Jersey Pine Barrens, opened the shop named At the Sign of the Franklin Head (as in Benjamin), the settlement’s first bookstore and publisher. Charles W. Dahlinger, in the 1916 Pittsburgh: A Sketch of its Early Social Life, records that Cramer’s most popular titles included novels by Charles Brockden Brown, Anne Radcliff, and William Godwin. With slight opprobrium, Dahlinger described Cramer as trading in the literary equivalent of the “lingering scent of lavender and bergamot… [in] languishing eyes, tender accents, quaint dances, dreamy music, and startling and sometimes unreal adventures.” In addition to selling others’ books from his Market Street storefront, where today is located a coworking space and Genoa Pizza and Bar, Cramer published some seventy books, including several editions of his ever-popular Pittsburgh Magazine Almanack, the first memoir of a member of the Lewis and Clark expedition, and his essential guide to the waterways of the Allegheny, Monongahela, Ohio, and Mississippi rivers, The Navigator, as well as pocket-sized copies of the Constitution. In 1813 Cramer also began to edit something unique for the growing mountain city – The Western Gleaner; or, Repository for Arts, Sciences, and Literature. The first Anglophone literary and critical magazine published west of the Alleghenies.
Today we’re launching the latest Pittsburgh literary journal of critical and cultural analyses: The Pittsburgh Review of Books, or if you please, PRoB (as in “problems,” “probabilities,” or “problematize”). There are a lot of ways that we don’t want PRoB to be like The Western Gleaner. Even though Cramer’s journal was the first, it wasn’t successful; publication was discontinued only a year after they started due to financial problems. Even a more crucial thing to avoid, Cramer would die the same year The Western Gleaner was inaugurated, perishing from tuberculosis in Pensacola while trying to make his way to Havana where the editor had hoped that the hot, ocean air would help with his ill health. Nor was The Western Gleaner always held in the highest-regard – George Fleming in his 1923 Life and Times of Zadok Cramer describes the publication as a “pretentious magazine,” where though the “editors were strong on poetry, and poetical effusions were given much space,” they still had the tendency to print “lugubrious… verse.” Examples include Brackenridge’s poetic anti-boosterism about his home city where he writes “What is there in this spot of earth/Repellant to all zest of mirth,/Heart-felt by me,/And which on being seen again,/The Hill, the River and the Plain/To sadden, all agree” and the Lolan Scots doggerel of David Bruce, “an ingenious Scotch poet of Washington County,” who castigated Breckenridge’s role in the recent anti-Constitutional insurrection from 1791 to 1794 by writing that “When Whisky-Boys sedition sang,/An’ anarchy stod owre the lan’/When Folly led Rebellion’s ban’/Sae fierce an’ doure,/Fo’ks said ye sleely lent a han’/To mak the stoure.”
There are ways, however, that I hope PRoB can be like The Western Gleaner (assuming we can largely avoid pretension and tuberculosis). Cramer’s intention was for his journal to be as a portal between Pittsburgh and the wider literary community, an entrance point for both sides. The Western Gleaner introduced its readers to the literature being produced in not just Philadelphia and Boston, but also in London and Edinburgh. In turn, Cramer had hoped to introduce Pittsburgh to the world. Furthermore, he didn’t limit his definitions of “literature” to only that which was canonical or traditional, for within the pages of the few issues that were ever printed The Western Gleaner included naturalist and scientific works, an interdisciplinary “blending together… [of] the useful and agreeable” (including some of the earliest description of the Appalachian coal industry as it moved into the nineteenth-century). Furthermore, Cramer desired to create a “national space,” where as Dahlinger wrote, “He declared that he did not mean to be limited to the confines of the bourough,” for as with PRoB, this earliest magazine was to be not just in Pittsburgh, but of Pittsburgh as it presented itself.
These are some of the principles of Cramer’s example that I hope will become part of the general vibe of PRoB; that it’s a publication grounded in Pittsburgh, that it’s general attitude, disposition, and mentality is forged in the same values of the city at its best (innovative, progressive, diverse), but that it’s not only of Western Pennsylvania. Pittsburgh is in someways the United States’ most unexpected literary, artistic, and cultural capital, a frontier metropolis that the national media rediscovers every now and then, but that regardless of whether we’re ignored or dismissed continues to make art and write literature in its own style and idiom, unassuming but intelligent, critical but unpretentious (Brackenridge’s lugubrious verse aside). Additionally, Cramer’s publications were concerned with materiality, with the nature of manufacturing and objects, embodiment and labor. To that end, PRoB always has as a central concern this belief that thinking is of the body as much as the mind; that considerations of science and technology belong aside those of literature and art, that a grand consilience of disciplines is required to make critical sense of our own confused times. PRoB intends to do the same thing which Cramer wished – to introduce the world to Pittsburgh and Pittsburgh to the world. You will not (only) read about Bessemer Convertors or slagheaps in this magazine, but as our initial spate of publications should evidence, also Aztec philosophy and the parameters of “algospeak.” Pittsburgh authors will always be welcomed and featured, but so will writers from outside the region. More than in the subject matter we publish, or literally where we’re headquartered, the “Pittsburgh” in The Pittsburgh Review of Books is a matter of mentality, of perspective. As a new venture in the public humanities, supported by the English Department of Carnegie Mellon University, PRoB intends to be a voice of cultural and critical analyses, providing a means for both the scholar and nonspecialist to speak with one another. Featuring essays, reviews, interviews, and book excerpts, as well as a podcast and regular columns, the editors of PRoB desire nothing more than that this site should become a bookmarked favorite for readers. My own contribution as Editor-in-Chief will be this regular series with the estimably Pittsburgh-name of “The Foundry,” where I will write about new books and current publishing trends. It’s my sincere hope that PRoB will join the ranks of other city reviews, where if we don’t quite ascend to the same level, we at least contribute a bit of chutzpa to the endeavor of cultural criticism. New York, Los Angeles, Boston – even Cleveland – have their own reviews of books, why shouldn’t Pittsburgh? Cramer wanted The Western Gleaner to be a “repository of the arts.” The Pittsburgh Review of Books will be a repository of the arts as well, as well as everything else that’s important to make sense of the present.
