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N 1825, at the age of eleven, George Palmer Putnam, the future publisher, left behind both school and home in small-town Maine to enter the working world. He first traveled to Boston, where he served as an apprentice in his uncle's carpet store. Four years later, with no visible prospects and no formal training in the book trade, or any related craft, he answered an advertisement for "a boy wanted" at a local newspaper in his new hometown, New York City. In the years to follow, he would make his way up the ladder of his chosen profession, even as that profession was changing radically, in no small part due to his own efforts. The localized, pre-professionalized print culture that engaged his family and the entire region to which he was born would in his lifetime be transformed into a highly organized, nationalized, and commercialized activity of bookreading, -writing, and -making.