In 1795, Carey hired Mason Locke Weems to penetrate the Southern market for books of American manufacture. Unlike Philadelphia, New York and Boston, where printers were making the transition to publishing, the South was largely rural, lacking large cities with publishers eager to manufacture books. Mason Weems, best remembered for his story about the cherry tree in the Life of Washington, was an itinerant Anglican preacher, and a gifted salesman. Many years after soliciting subscriptions, Weems reminisced to Carey:
“On our first acquaintance you took me to yr back room on Market Street, where you told me of 3.000 copies of Goldsmith’s A[nimated]. Nature on hand—not a single subr . save 100 by a young Hibernian…People knew nothing of [Goldsmith’s] A[nimated] Nature & had done nothing so simple a Sub[scription] paper. At your own instance I sketchd.. out a Prospectus that gave the People to expect that “Worlds on Worlds inclosd were to burst upon their senses,” if they wd but seize the precious moment to subscribe for this marvelous book. They subsribd at such a rate, that my sales (150 copies) in Balto. alone, excited yr astonishment.”[1]
Mason Weems
Mason Weems (1756-1825) Best known for his story about George Washington and the cherry tree, Weems and his legend became part of popular culture during the twentieth century. As a result, he is better known than Mathew Carey, his employer.
Parson Weems’ Fable (1939) painted in oil by Grant Wood (1891-1942) Mason Weems was Mathew Carey’s bookseller, an itinerant preacher, and the creator of the cherry tree legend which he wrote in the fifth edition of his book Life of George Washington, the Great. Weems fabricated the story, and its purpose was to express a moral, not historical fact. During Wood’s lifetime, it became fashionable for intellectuals to debunk stories about George Washington that idealized him and presented him as something more than he truly might have been. Grant Wood satisfied both those who wished to keep the folklore and those who wished to expose the stories as less-than-truth.” Courtesy of Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas
With a cheerful personality, and the integrity his position as a preacher implied, Weems collected nearly a thousand subscriptions for Goldsmith’s A History of the Earth, and Animated Nature in Maryland and Virginia in just a few months.
Weems set about to cover the South selling Carey’s books. He was at his best as an orator, choosing times when crowds would gather at courthouse days, races and other local events to begin his sales pitch. Radiating with charm, and delighting his audiences with amusing turns of phrase, Weems praised the virtues of Carey’s books, appointing “adjutants” as he called them, to collect orders after he left. On a return visits, he would gather the orders and payments and forward them on to Carey. Then Carey’s firm would ship the books to Weems, who distributed them. [2]
TRANSITION TO PUBLISHER | Geographies For A New Nation
[1] Weems to Carey, Washington 8 August 1817, in Mason Locke Weems His Works and Ways in Three Volumes, Letters 1784-1825, 3, Emily Ellsworth Ford Skeel, (ed.) (New York, 1929) 205-6.
[2] Lewis Leary, The Book-Peddling Parson, An account of the life and works of Mason Locke Weems, patriot, pitchman, author and purveyor of morality to the citizenry of the early United States of America, (Chapel Hill, Algonquin Books, 1984) 21, and James N. Green, “Mathew Carey, Publisher and Patriot,”: The Library Company of Philadelphia, 1985) 11.