Historians tend to discriminate against unprinted versos. Corinna Zeltsman, however, is unusually interested in the material side of print culture, and looks at these things: flipping over one protest flyer, she found on its reverse side ghostly mirror images of multiple predecessors, all pasted on the same bit of wall to fustigate the government of the day. As they say in the bullring, another venue for protest, “El detalle valió el boleto.” It typifies the imagination, originality, and meticulous attention to detail that bring an important book to life and make it unmissable for anyone interested in Mexico's nineteenth-century public sphere and politics.

It was not just what was printed, Zeltsman argues, that shaped how people thought about, talked about, and acted in the politics of the time: it was authors’ mere ability to turn manuscript into print and get it out there in the first place. That in itself was a major demonstration of power and seriousness of purpose, whether materialized in a newspaper, an opposition pamphlet, or a political poster. Harnessing the clout of public opinion required the new technology of the printing presses, the money to operate them, and the business and political savvy of the people who knew how to use them. The freedom to print words was just as important as the freedom to write them.

Printworkers counted from the beginnings of independent Mexico, and their population exploded in the course of the nineteenth century. By 1823 the handful of print shops of the late colony had risen to 22, and in the 1840s the invention of the cylindrical press made far greater print runs possible, doubling the size of newspapers and taking them from biweekly to daily. The number of workers in the industry quadrupled over the first decade of the Porfiriato, and the subsequent introduction of the high-speed rotary press allowed a whole new order of magnitude of circulation for officialist papers like El Imparcial, which printed the daily run under its masthead. When the regime collapsed, any revolutionary worth their salt kept a close eye on their media; Emiliano Zapata seized as many presses as he could and even telegraphed underlings to monitor their use.

As technology changed, the most basic political mechanisms for controlling access to print shops remained constant: censorship and sponsorship. PIPSA—the state paper monopoly that allowed the Partido Revolucionario Institucional to control press content more subtly—had a distant predecessor in viceroys’ monopolization of scarce paper stocks. Allocations of paper and contracts to print official publications, propaganda, and advertising all favored some shops and put the squeeze on others. Printers faced bans, fines, shutdowns, the seizure of their machines, and arrests by governments of different persuasions on charges of sedition, operating without a government license libel, slander, and copyright infringement. Laws protecting a free press were circumvented with prosecutorial ingenuity. At the same time, however, laws clamping down on a free press were challenged or craftily circumvented by self-identifying “printer citizens” (102). Conservatives tended to be less enthusiastic about such people, but the print world was a complicated one, and liberal belief did not necessarily translate into liberal practice. The Emperor Maximilian, on the other hand, went from repressive to relatively tolerant press laws and shut down his own prior censorship system. He even had his own decrees printed in Nahuatl.

Zeltsman's essentially chronological approach covers this history comprehensively in seven chapters that take the reader from the last days of the colony to the first days of the revolution. She establishes a balance among technology, politics, and culture, while maintaining a focus on the people of the printing trade who operated within and helped shape these structures. Well-penned case studies bring readers deeper into the grimy but enlightened world of the printshop through phenomena such as one printer's commercial sample, which reflected the sophistication and ideological proclivities of the despised typesetters; or through the tortuous journey to print of a salacious potboiler, the anticlerical novel Mysteries of the Inquisition.

The result is a book with an important place in two historical literatures, those of Mexican liberalism and the public sphere, and the sort of good read that hopefully keeps our trade's own presses turning.