What did most people read? Where did they get it? Where did it come from? What were its uses in its readers' lives? How was it produced and distributed? What were its relations to the wider world of print culture? How did it develop over time? These questions are central to The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture, an ambitious nine-volume series devoted to the exploration of popular print culture in English from the beginning of the sixteenth century to the present.

Volume five traces print's role in the lives of a wide variety of people who settled—or who were displaced or forcibly transported by settlers—in middle North America, from colonial beginnings through the mid-nineteenth-century proliferation of industrially-produced imprints until 1860, when the Civil War disrupted longstanding patterns. While the volume takes account of emerging technological and economic developments in production and distribution, it nevertheless through its focus on readers emphasizes surprising continuities over the longue durée of centuries.

Forty-one contributors from across disciplines consider either literary practices of diverse groups or specific genres of popular print passing through people's hands, which included advertisements, almanacs, captivity narratives, ephemera, lithographs, magazines, newspapers, nonfiction, novels, pamphlets, poetry, and slave narratives. In articulating imprint use and genre among groups ranging from free and enslaved blacks to native peoples to women of all races, contributors provide an unusually well-rounded view of print's everyday meanings. Because people often derived those meanings in relation to scribal production and oral communication, the diaries and letters they penned and transcriptions of words they spoke provide much of the book's evidence. The volume ultimately reorients the study of popular print culture in the early US from locally produced printed texts aimed at national readerships to the practices of readers who engaged the broad universe of imprints — not always American—authored-available to them.