The Politics of Culture in The Late Age of Print SEAN JOHNSON ANDREWS Ted Striphas. he Late Age of Print: Everyday Book Culture from Consumerism to Con- trol. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009. Print. 272 pp. W ith he Late Age of Print, Ted Striphas cements his place among the growing number of cultural studies scholars, including public intellectuals like Siva Vaidhyanathan and copyright prankster Kimbrew McLeod, who are interested in the contemporary problem of publishing and copyright. Vaidhyanathan has written sev- eral books on the topic and has a forthcoming exploration of Google generated from his initial interest in the controversy over Google’s book search project. Striphas and McLeod recently edited an issue of Cultural Studies on intellectual property rights. In he Late Age of Print, Striphas’ monograph, the author begins a deeper exploration of the original object of copyright’s concern: the book. While issues of copyright and control are still central to his conclusions, Striphas’ main object is the historical production of everyday book culture: more speciically, book culture in the United States in the twentieth and early twenty-irst centuries, or what he refers to as “the late age of print.” his phrase, borrowed from Jay David Bolter, illustrates Striphas’ irst premise, meant to counter the conventional wisdom that books, and the U.S. public’s reading and buying of them, are in their death throes: he late age of print, Bolter explains, consists of “a transformation of our social attitudes towards, and uses of, this familiar technology. Just as late capitalism is still vigorous capitalism, so books and other printed materials in the late age of print are still common and enjoy considerable prestige.” [....] he phrase points up the tense interplay of persistence and change endemic to today’s everyday book culture without necessarily presuming a full-blown crisis exists. (3) hus Striphas begins from the premise that books are alive and well, but are also in the midst of a transformation that itself represents a key index to some of the larger changes that have unfolded over the past century. In addition to its role as the bearer of “homogenous empty time” in the “print capitalism” of Benedict Anderson’s ger- minal work on nationalism, Striphas locates the book and the book industry as key Reviews in Cultural heory Vol. 2, Issue 1. Copyright © 2011 Sean Johnson Andrews.