Together with the frequent anonymity and apparent fixity of printed texts, the mobility of printed matter across provincial boundaries and national frontiers has undergirded the argument that print created an impersonal public sphere. However, this seemingly impersonal public sphere was also an effect produced by members of the trade who understood the power of print and not infrequently put it to use to support causes in which they were personally invested. This was exemplarily, but not uniquely, the case during the American Revolution. Exploring patterns of publication constructed by individual printers through their selection of reprints can shed light on how particular printers used the power of print, as well as on their appropriation and deployment of reprints. I call such larger patterns printscapes.

In America as in Britain, reprints of foreign works (when necessary, in translation), were susceptible to very various fates. In Britain, some fell stillborn from the press; some were appropriated, imitated, answered or adapted by British authors; and some – like Schiller's Die Räuber and other “German Gothic” texts – became integral to an entire genre, cooperating with British-authored texts, and helping to shape the imaginary of generations of British readers. In America, given the predominance of reprints in the early years, the conjunction of carefully selected British, French, German and Spanish reprints with American-authored texts produced a literary scene in Philadelphia, Boston or New York that differed substantially from that in London, Dublin or Edinburgh during the same years.