Pause: Press Principles
From the birth of the United States, democracy has walked hand in hand with literacy and a free press. Between 1640 and 1700, 89 to 90 percent of the men living in Boston and Connecticut could read. They held possibly the highest literacy rate in the world at the time. (In England, their country of origin, literacy hovered around 40 percent.) Literacy in American women also sailed beyond female literacy in other nations, reaching 62 percent between 1681 and 1697.
Early Americans devoured books. One Boston bookseller imported 3,421 books in the three years following 1682. Note that only 75,000 people lived in the northern colonies at the time. To serve the number living there now, a modern book dealer would have to order 10 million books over three years. To match Thomas Paine's success with his 1776 work Common Sense, an author of a new title today would have to sell eight million copies in two months.
The result of this early American reading frenzy? Jacob Duche wrote in 1772, "The poorest labourer upon the shore of the Delaware thinks himself entitled to deliver his sentiment in matters of religion or politics with as much freedom as the gentleman or …
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