and i'm the director of community partnerships for themassachusetts historical society . our program this evening is a seasonal, it's a look at the tradition of summer reading we are joined by professor donna harrington-lueker on her new publication gavin kleespies, 19th century publishing the rise of summer reading. she is a passer in newport rhode island and she has an undergraduate degree from rhode island and phd. as a former magazine writer and editor, research interests include 19th-century print culture, women's magazines on any period and radical or alternative press. before we begin i'd like to extend a special welcome to anyone joining the virtual program for the first time. if you're not familiar with the massachusetts historical society we are the first historical society in america and have been preserving publishing and sharing our history since 1791. we hold a collection of 14 million manuscript pages including the papers of the first three presidents of the unitedstates . or i'm sorry, i misspoke. we are continuing to collect today and if you are interested, we are currently collecting materials related to the covid-19 experience. we have a special initiative designedto report people's experiences during this unusual time and preserve the diverse standpoint of first-hand accounts for future generations . in these days of social distancing we have taken to hosting virtual programs and have online programs planned every week from now till the end of july. so even into the beginning of august . next week we are hosting a talk by kate nelson on her new publication the three cornered war. find more information on that in our website and before we begin we have a few housekeeping details to go through. first of all if you have a question, comment orconcern about the program or our general programs , contact me or sarah virtually our public programs coordinator and the email will make it to us or you can reach us through our website. as i mentioned we are producing all our programs for free during the covid-19 period but of course we are a nonprofit and an independent nonprofit so if you have the capability and would like to support the massachusetts historical society we would encourage you to do so and you can do that i visiting masshistory.com/support. we will have a presentation by miss harrington-lueker and then a question and answer period and there are two ways tests can ask questions. the first is to use the q and a function. if you're using the computer at the bottom of your screen. if you're using a tablet or cell phone it may be at the top of the screen essentially you click on that and you can type a questionin . sarah virtually and i will read the questions to our speaker and then she will answer them. the other way you can do it is to raise the use the raised hand function and this will allow you to indicate that you'd like to ask a question and we will unmute people if we have time . the one thing about the unmute function is that you will most likely need to unmute your self as well so just keep that in mind. so without further ado, i am going to introduce our speaker, today we will be hearing from donna harrington-lueker and if you'd like to turn on your camera and unmute yourself , we will be off to the races. great to see you and now i am going to fade off into the digital ether. >> thank you so much and thank you all for coming. thank you to gavin and to sarah for making thispossible . before we begin i want to acknowledge these are such difficult times. with so much at stake and so much of import on our minds and as i worked on this lecture, this presentation in the last week i must admit i did find myself thinking is this really the time to be talking about summer reading summer leisure or even about 19th century publishing but the last quarter of the 19th century, the period i focus on in my study it wasn't without its challenges. at the beginning of the period in 1877 federal troops were sent in to quell of money workers strike against the railroad and at the end the united states found itself inthe spanish-american war . in between the country struggled with the failure of reconstruction in a period of rapid industrialization so the period was not without economic and social upheaval . so with those challenges in mind i'd like to invoke perhaps one of the most prominent arguments of the period in favor of summer leisure. and that is that the short period of time away from the pressures of 19th century life it gave people the wherewithal to engage with the world once again on their return. and i hope tonight's talk at work in the same way for you. so let's just jump in. okay. now i talk about the rise of summer reading and could really begin anywhere in the 19th century. but i like to start today's talk in boston or more specifically in dorchester with alice stone blackwell, the daughter of lucy stone and henry brown blackwell. the prominence 19th century abolitionist and women's rights advocate. and you can see it's kind of a family portrait, a family photo over here on the left of this three of them. in the early 1870s alice was a teenager and she was a gracious reader, especially in the summertime when her reading turned very dramatically to stories of adventure and sensation. so if you read from a journal of this period her journals are filled with entries of accounts of rushing into boston by train or streetcar, picking up the latest issue of robert bonds popular ledger, the weekly story paper. or she talks about stopping at the boston public library for stacks of books that she devours one week and then returns the next. a quote here from her journals, changed my books and got out in time for dinner she writes in july 1872. i've got a very good set of books this time so i've read them all before. and among the titles that she mentions in this journal, she mentions a gothic mystery called the people in the night which she admits upset her nerves and also thomas hughes tom brown at oxford which she describesas a favorite . but alice took part in a far different kind of summer reading as well and that where the picture in the right is going to come in. this is the family's home in dorchester. throughout the summer the stone blackwell's household engaged in shared family reading. this was a common practice in the 19th century but it was summer and they did so on the windows walk. you can see it there i thought the families dorchester home to take advantage of the cool breezes from the nearby bay. and there alice reports the family read books like sir walter scott's antiquarian and vanity fair. that is run long novels over the course of many a summer evening. and her delight in this shared reading was absolutely apparent read there's another quote from her journal. the antiquarian was read up on the roof she wrote in july 1872 and i chased poppa about to tickle his toes. i'm restrained, informal, given to action and adventure . alice's summer reading choices and reading practices i think resonate with us today area every year we are familiar with this, every year sometime around memorial day weekend this summer reading season begins. oprah makes her pick for the best summer reads but so does the new york times, national public radio, the wall street journal and ahost of other media outlets .summer is the time when we are advised to turn to lightweight paperbacks we can stuff into a beach bag or read without worry by thepoolside . it's the time we are told to reach for the light popular novel or the action-packed bestseller area clive barnes a critic for the new york times wrote in the papers summer big book issue for 1968 he said number reading like the statue ofliberty and motherhood is always with us . and that's still true today. the list of best summer reads continues in this very very fraught season. i just have taken some screen grabs, the first one to three of them came from the weekend of the memorial day weekend and the one on the bottom was just from today so we see here the top one is from the new york times read the beach maybe close but these books are worthopening . the next one down, refinery 29. a fight for millennial young women read a 25 books you'll wantto read this summer . on the left is from oprah, 28 of the bestbeach reads of the summer 2020 . and then yet another list, this one came from today's afternoon boston globe online. the best books to read this summer. and i might note here about the boston globe, i had a chance to go quickly through it and see what they were recommending. and i was really struck. at one point the new york times was criticized or its book list that included primarily white authors read one season roof refused having to reach peak capacity with their choices. and the best books to read this summer in the boston globe are incredibly varied and diverse. okay, but where did this idea of summer reading come from? summer reading is a specific practice. how did it come to the an established part not only of literary commerce but of american culture as well? and those are some of the questions i began to explore. so i'm a book historian so i practice in the field looks at the intersection of authorship, reading and publishing. history is a field that concerns itself with the book as a material object. first, but also with the cultural practices that surround books. how books are produced, how they're circulated, how they received and one summer, one june i was returning from a print culture conference in halifax and i was looking for something to read on the flight home and i came across the ubiquitous glossy brochure announcing the best summer reads for that season. and i found myself as a result kind of thinking about my own number reading rituals and the ways in which the publishing industry may have shaped and sustained those area so that led me to the john hay library at brown university where i worked with a magazine called the book buyer, is a magazine from charles scribner the new yorkcity publisher and i'll talk about it a little bit later in this talk as well . the very rich text full of advertisements from other publishers, copy about what the book trade was like and what people were reading and from there i moved on and i moved outward. two other 19th-century magazines and newspapers from across the united states. i didn't want to leave it just in new england. i included the african-american presses as well as a number of alternative presses. after that it was on to publishing archives at harvard and princeton and columbia, on the letters and journals and to a long list of novels that set at summer resorts, many written by some of the period's most famous authors read ethan crane, william dean howell, louisa may alcott. they all practiced in the tradition of the summer novel at some point in their career. so what i found as a result of this, my summers were now not so i don't know what i found was a very interesting chapter in the history of publishing. summer reading can be sure in the 19th century was very much a commercial construction area the idea of summer reading is a product that's part of the publishing industries really concerted effort to redefine a slow season and to capitalize on a really dramatic rise of travel, tourism and summer leisure in victorian america in thegilded age . but 19th century number reading involved more than commerce as well area in the last quarter of the 19th century it also became a well-established cultural practice , a performance and many of those characteristics remain with us today. overall than an interesting chapter both in the history of the book and in the history ofsummer leisure . now my book itself covers a lot of ground. i just easily reproduced the table of contents here to give you a bit of the flavor of the larger argument as well read i look at the dramatic rise of travel tourism the summer leisure in the period, in the period where exchanging from an elite cultural practice to one that is embraced by a middle-class and increasingly uses it as a marker of gentility. and i would be read this and not noting here be professional authors of the period all indulged in summer leisure. i also look at a variety of books that were advertised as best summer reads and i looked especially the development of what i callthe american summer novel . the novel that was specifically set at a summer resort . and finally, i looked at the ways in which authorship intersected with and exploited this new genre. and the ways in which civil spaces shake reading practices and i looked at everything from resort libraries at saratoga springs to rattan chairs that were advertised for portside reading that had built in bookshelves, built into the very wide arms. today though i want to focus on one part of the book's argument and that is the role of the 19th century, the role that 19th century magazine culture played in reframing summer reading into a genteel practice. i'm especially interested in the so-called peacemaking publications and i've reproduced coverage on these here. these are the three most prominent, the atlantic monthly which was published in boston , harbors new monthly magazine arrival in new york city and the century illustrated monthly area there role is going to be significant rid of these were publications that have a significant degree of cultural authority . sedgwick has described the atlantic as an exemplar of yankee humanism in the kind of copy that it featured. and in this age of the magazine these publications and others become the primary vehicle for what jane compton calls the machinery of publishing and reviewing area that is, the machinery that presents a book to readers in a certain way. that frames the text that establishes a context for it repairs us as readers to read it in a certain way and with a certain framework in mind . together these and other publications, these and other magazines shake the discourse on the summer reading through their text and visual and that'swhat i'd like to explore . let me just say given an idea of where i want to go with this, it's in three parts . i want to look at early in the century, the very beginning of the discourse on summer reading area i then want to move on to the complete disruption of cheap fiction that develops in the period and finally i want to look at the publishers efforts to reframe and reclaim summer reading as something that, we'll see how that develops. okay. though the first part, the very early discourse onsummer reading . let's go back a bit and i have some images here, paintings from the period. taking a cue from england and europe, domestic tourism developed in the late 1700s around places like niagara falls, seen here atthe top , the hudson river,the catskills on the left . and tourism develops around there. by the 18 20s and 1830s, wealthy travelers were visiting the white mountains and you can see that at the bottom image onthe right . there's a painting of horseback riding up mt. washington. they were in mount desert island in maine, mineral springs andthe south and a host of other sites . excuse me, it's allergy season if you can bear with me. newport rhode island begins taking shape here as a respite for the heat in the summer. now, i want to look at two magazines here to give you the tenor of how the discourse begins. on the left, 1835, new england magazine. you can see here that it's opening story is up on john goodman brown. 1845, the magazine ran an article called summer philosophy and it began by invoking the political philosopher edmund burke and his advice to live pleasant, that the theme of this article. summer philosophy advised younger and less experienced travelers with ways to use their time and advised they needed to use their time to cultivate equanimity. here's a quote. walk slow, talk slow, think slow, read, write, undress and in short lived with studied and exquisite deliberation. and that deliberation needed to extend to whatever reading matter the traveler chose. the summer travel for example was advised to avoid anything having to do with politics as well as anything that smacked of twaddle and egotism. the best authors the article advised were lord byron and charles lamb, especially lambs essays area here's another quote. the reviewer wrote lambs essays were quote, is soda, his customary after dinner net visions in the garden. his do we jasmine and chat with good girls under it. the young man who follows this advice and the article is very specific about the gender of the summer reader would cultivate a sweet and imperturbable serenity was going to last until october . putnam over here on the right, putnam's in the 1850s adopted a similarly dignified approach.in 1853 putnam's rant review of a new poetry collection called a book for the seaside on the boston firm of kicker and field and it was a collection of poetry aboutthe cd featuring the works of shelley , tennyson, longfellow and others and putnam's was very keen on it and said it was going to be not just a good summary a collection of permanentvalue . later in the 1850s buttons would also recommend the work of washington irving for summer reading and it would describe irving who just happened to be one of putnam's authors as a quote, genial and beautiful genius. it also noted that irving's works were part of a convenience and classic series that would be quote, delightful for summerreading . so here's our kind of first look, our first glimpse of a discourse taking shape. it frames it as masculine and framed it as deliberate. it frames it as very distinctive in what it was designed toaccomplish . by mid century that changed area that discourse is gone. the discourse changes and it does so in large part to cause a really interesting development in the literary field and that is the wave of cheap paperback fiction that flooded the literary markets after the civil war. this was really an absolutely unprecedented expansion of the korean americans popular culture and a significant challenge to mainstream publishers area now, that challenge to a variety of forms and i'll go here to a wave of cheap fiction. first, in this period this was before the passage of the international copyright act. this wave of cheap fiction included pirated editions of british and european fiction so george eliot's middlemarch, lewis carroll's alice in wonderland, charles dickens, all these were not protected by copyright and i publishing in the united states, christie's pick them up and published them in chief paper covered editions. often in libraries sometimes releasing him volume multiple times a week at a cost of $.10-$.20 a volume. now readers probably wouldn't find these in bookstores these cheap paperbacks and instead they find them at newsstands, railway kiosks and even onboard trains boys would go up and down selling snacks but also paperbound books. book historian john campbell remarks that by the 1870s virtually everyone who took a train for a journey of any length at all would have encountered a book from one of the popular cheaplibraries . cheap fiction took another form as well. in stories from the so-called action factories, these were stories that were quickly produced, of questionable quality and were long on murders and rescue and melodrama. very heavily formulaic. a real industrial commodity that flooded themarket . one other part of this mix of cheap fiction needs to be mentioned. and that is the questionable and perceived to be very immoral french novel. typically appearing and yellow paper covers, people talk about this through the period and decried by one of the critics as not just being sinful butbeing scrappy was . so all of these are in the mix and you can kind of see three of the covers that will give you the flavor of this wave of cheap fiction. so on the left captives of the frontier, western stories wereincredibly popular and they did a lot in the way of nationbuilding . in the middle levels library withbarry lyndon , they were particularly aggressive about the absence of a copyright and one of the most popular writers, laura jean libby. prolific, wildly popular author working in paper covers. now once the relationship with summer reading, like summer reading comes kind of art of associated with this wave of cheap fiction. and indeed a number of publishers in the period tried to exploit that connection and wanted to take advantage of. he was one of them, george monroe a new york publisher and he had successful series called the seaside library and you see on the left this would have been the typical seaside library cover. it's doctor jekyll and mister hyde so clearly pirated. it does a pocket edition, portability is going to become an incredibly important in terms of marketing summer fiction but here you can read it into a pocket or a satchel . in the middle you see george monroe packaging that cheap paperback a little bit differently. very decidedly for the summer market. so you have the seaside library edition again, king solomon's wives. but then we have that postcard with the lighthouse, with the couple on the cliff overlooking the sea in a sailboat going by. clearly evoking summer. and then finally over here on the right, this is one of my favorite cheap paperbacks and illustrates kind of another way they figured in this marketplace. again it's laura jean libby is called flirtations of a beauty. laura jean libby as i said, wildly popular. three of her novels were set specifically at summer resort read there's one at lenox, one atlantic city and this one locations of the beauty is set initially, the story starts in newport rhode island. now libby's plots were really quite wild and incredibly predictable in their unpredictability . the plot here is the typical, a penniless young woman falls in love with a veryrich man newport . he knows it will work out, and here she she's shown sacrificing herself by throwing herself off the wharf. if you're familiar with newport i like to think this is long wharf but i have no reason for doing so but here she is throwing herself off the wharf and the cut line says i am going into the bitterness of death, i'm going to set you free. this is early in the novel and she doesn't die and in fact as the story progresses she ends up in the mountains of new hampshire where she's kidnapped by pirates andtaken down the connecticut river . this is all in about the first exceeds 70 pages. now, more worrisome perhaps for any publisher interested in jumpstarting this season was a cultural conversation around this kind of light reading and more. in 1876 the reverend talmage, a prominent brooklyn creature launched the summer season with a sermon condemning summer life at saratoga springs. he criticized its dancing, the horse racing and all the other frivolities that he associated with saratoga springs but he leveled some of his severest criticisms against summer reading itself and he called summer reading literary poison in august and he warned that the kinds of light novels that people read in the summer were dangerous to his congregations immortal souls . so here we have him, toquotes from his sermon and this would get repeated in the brooklyn eagle with some regularity . do not let the frogs and life of a corrupt rinsing press crawl into your saratoga trunk or white mountain sleeves. would it not be an awful thing for you to be struck by lightning someday and you have in your hand one of these paper coveredromances , the hero up for reason, the heroine and unprincipled flirt, chapters in the book you would not read to your children at the rate of $100 aligned. i believe there is more festive for us trash red among the intelligent classes in july and august and all the other 10 months of the year. talent alone throughout the 19th century criticism of the novel in general and cheap paperback fiction in particular was rampant. 19th century clerics and cultural critics invariably equatednovel reading with a basement , especially for the woman reader. so given this kind of cultural crosscurrents, the period between 1870 and 1900 wasn't the most congenial setting for the birth of light summer reading mainstream publishers persisted and they use a variety of tactics so they're going to reclaim number reading from this wave of cheap fiction. they use a variety of tactics. for example 1st in their advertising a began to put labels on everything. even if the book had nothing to do with the summer. they use another strategy of packaging books, making each of them recognizable summer brand. alvin helmets town and country library, can they hold its leisure our series read there was a satchel series, and in the case of one newspaper, a 100 degree in the shadesummer fiction series . they also embraced the paperback as the perfect summer read. here's a quote from the american bookmaker. in praise of the paper covers. these are the golden days of the paper cover, the flexible plot ofthe pocketbook . being without covers have a cool and summery look and from the flex ability, maybe readily stowed away in one's pocket or thrust into an unfilledcorner of the traveling bag .they adapt themselves to every conceivable reading attitude from mobile upright to the recumbent position assumed on a sofa or lounge or in a steamer chair and a corvette or stretched out on greenwood or a sandy beach. i think perhaps most important, taking aim at the cultural discourse that equated novel reading with a sensational and simple, publishers worked very specifically to reframe and repackage light summerreading . framing it as a genteel act, a welcome escape and an essential middle-class treasure . the case making monthlies that i mentioned earlier, harpers atlantic, harbored contagion reading and they all helped with this and when you read issues in this period you find in their pages summer novels can be described as a way to fill up the vacant hours at the resort or to protect against the boredom of rainydays . was saying summer novels didn't demand too much attention but that made them excellent company on long rides in pullman cars. summer novels were episodic in structure that this meant that summer novels could be picked up and put down without losing the thread if other activities back in. most importantly i think like an easy-to-read, summer novels for an escape from the pressures of 19th century life. one of the most poignant examples came from the overland monthly, a literary monthly in san francisco and one season critic noted it was an especially liked weight collection of summer fiction that was available that year.and he was almost inclined to criticize but then they stopped and they said it had been an incredibly difficult cholera season that year and may postulate that people needed something to take their minds away from that. most important, publishers, authors and the literary press together worked specifically to reframe summer reading is a gracious feminine pastime. henry james starts this out, is incredibly young henry james in the 18th century like many authors in this period are starting out once youbecome part of a literary marketplace , they began with travel writing and james was no exception here. in 1870 he wrote a travel column for the nation and in a dispatch written from saratoga springs he observed for example that there are few prettier sites that are charmingly dressed woman, gracefully established in some shady spot with a piece of needlework or a book in hand. or this quote, later in the piece he is recounting a trip on steamer crossing lake george to burlington vermont and he goes on at once about the scenery around him but then he drills down and he focuses on the young women are on the steamboat that he is on on the steamer and reports that their standing in a group with copies of benjamin's disraeli's latest novel which had just been published by appleton and they all had it in their hands and so we see that here. the setting of the lake as a whole, the vast underserved women and we are almost startled to behold these little makeshifts of civilization . you have to wonder at a capital steamer and a young lady from the hotel on the deck with copies in their hand. summer reading is becoming a performance and women are embracing that performance. another link very clear link in the literary monthlies at link women and the summer reading. this is karel dudley warner and in harpers he's writing as certainly as the birds appear comes the crop of summer novels . watering down the stall in possession through the wear away in cars, littering the drawing room table, inlet covers, ornamental attractive and colored in fanciful designs as welcome and grateful as the girls in muslim. later on in this column he goes on to say that when you're reading something, summer reading should always come lightly clad and out of state. that is, it should always come in a lightweight paperback , a metaphor for relief . okay. let me drill down just a little bit further to show you how this narrative arc, this discourse takes shape and the book buyer is a really good site for doing this. you can really see this process of reframing network clearly in charles scribner's the book buyer. this publication is very well known today. it was published by charles scribner's, one of the leading american publishing companies of the 19th century . and initially was a house organ, that is a magazine designed to feature the firm's own work and at this time when it starts 1867, scribner's is specializing in ecclesiastical tests. the history of protestantism and its specializing in school textbooks and maps. between 1867 and 1870 the first 77, the first decade of its run the book buyer was tepidat best about the prospects of summer publishing . for example every month the book buyer featured a column purportedly written from its london office and it was called for an literary intelligence and you can see that over here on the left. it was the cover column and this offered insight of the book trade in england and the continent . and in 1868 column noted that in the space of a scorching summer, driving everyone abroad in search of coolness few new books were being brought. was going to have to wait until late autumn any kind of new offerings from the publishing world. a year later the column noted london was in the middle of a heated term that left people's sweltering in tweets, that is language, not mine and therefore stymieing the sale of books. let me read you just a little bit from this august 1869 column . the papers say thermometer and the volunteer camp at wimbledon on friday last at 130 degrees in the shade. and though this seems to be an exaggeration, the heat has been so intense that books have become a wariness to the flesh and they issues of the publishers drop off gradually until they nearly cease altogether during the months of august and september or what is called the long vacation where everybody that is anybody takes himself away from town. in short, people were just too busy in the summer with their travel guidebooks to have any time for reading. okay. gradually though, in later years beginning in the 1880s especially, gradually the book buyer begins to explore the market or the potential for summer titles in the united states. here's an advertisement from 1872, this is fairly early. it's the first advertisement that scribner's specifically labeled as summer reading. summer reading, popular books from scribner armstrong and the company and it may be difficult to see here but basically this is kind of the grab bag approach to summer reading. it's a real grab bag oftitles it happens to have online . read in the upper left-hand side, these were french authors. a very popular historical fiction and have a new book out, a moments of the war but underneath it, there's something called common sense in the household by marion harland. she's a bit of a steward of her age and she's a phenomenally popular author for scriveners, author of domestic advice books and over on the right have shooting, boating and fishing so a very kind of utilitarian link with the summer season. that grab bag strategy, marketing strategy gets refined and it and we see scriveners becoming very much more sophisticated. and what follows this is advertisements in 1874 and then again in 1876 for a series called the bric-a-brac series area this was a selection of gossipy literary reminiscences that scribner positions quite specifically as a summer offering an advertisement of the period, the newspaper program promotions and advertisements reflected that discourse as well. they began to describe it as the most pleasant summer reading aimed to take the taurus at the height of his ennui read a just private as a refreshing volume suitable for the country or seashore and guarantee to chase away the fatigue of a long journey in a pullman car. you can see some of these in the critical notices over here on my left. from the christian union to all lovers of literary anecdotes and of gossip is whispers of the murmurs of same book will prove a refreshment in many tired mood. or the boston post, no more refreshing volume could be carried into the country or the seashore to fill in the niches of time which intervene between the pleasures of summer holidays . by the 1880s, the discourse continues to develop. strategy, marketing strategy continues and the book buyer begins a very sustained defense of summer reading and has a much more sophisticated marketingcampaign . the book buyer of this period has changed. it very much was a house organ and more of a literary magazine, a literary monthly and its publishing reviews of new books and advertisements from a variety of firms. appleton, lippincott, mcmillan and others and in june 1884 the start of the summer season, it does the best summer books in paper addition. and then we have this, 1885. this is the first ad for summer books in paper covers. and this is very interesting in terms of the way to advertise the work. if you look closely you can see the prices, these are paper. they are $.50 to a low of $.30 so not as low as cheap publishing but lower than the $1.25 percent cost cover the books may have appeared in .. >> .. look at the tree titled underneath it, the three in the middle are by george carson lathrop, one is a novel and an echo of passion and the third is in the distance. all three of these are novels such that summer resorts so the potential of capitalizing specifically on summer reading by featuring a reading matter that is set novel, fiction, light fiction that is set at a summer resort. and then at the bottom we have a [inaudible] some of the firm's most popular authors have been advocating this for years and over on the left we have francis hudson burnett and her husband swan burnett lobbied repeatedly to issue a low-price addition addition of his wife's work to compete with peterson on all the material for this side came from the archives at princeton where i have had the pleasure of spending a week reading. he wrote scribner could recommend a decent firm in new york that might take on the task of issuing his wife's work in cheap paperback editions and specifically is incredibly disingenuously mentions both george munroe which scribner would have been appalled by an even archrival harpers which had begun its paperback editions for summer reading that year. the middle mary dodge made a much more obvious pitch for summer volume and she was the author of, we know her from hans brinker and the silver skates and she was also editor of scribner's very popular summer children's mike i'm sorry, very popular children's magazine, saint niclas. but she had a collection of short stories for the adult market called theophilus and others and scribner had published that but she saw potential for reassuring it for the summer market and rights to scribner quote, do you think well of the idea of issuing a very cheap and abridged addition of theophilus and others in a attractive cover for summer reading? two years later she renewed her request for a cheap and thin covered addition assuring scribner's quote, a number of literary friends have suggested that the book would do well as a summer book of this kind. and then finally my all-time favorite over here on the right, mary virginia tribune and her pen name was mary [inaudible] who i mentioned before in one of the firm's best selling author author's, prolific novelist in her own right as well as the 19th century domestic diva and in 1890 was the editor of a magazine called the homemaker and just a real scribner celebrity. in march in 1890 she wrote to scribner asking if you would be interested in her new novel which was then running serially in the homemaker and had not been completed and will not be completed until september but in march she is writing to him in the novel was called with the best intentions and was set at the resort at mackinac island and increasingly popular resort in the great lakes. she advised scribner that it would be a fair summer sale especially in the west. she hadn't finished the novel but scribner was interested or at least it was to publish the novel. in a little more than four months after her first letter of inquiry the book was published as part of the yellow paper cover series and scribner's advertised it heavily in july and august, including if that year among its pic for the best books for idle summer days. a little bit of an aside here, she had an entirely commercial motive for making this asked. she admitted to scribner's quote, i am building again and wants a large sum of ready money, that is she needed the $600 advance that scribner was offering. a final chapter in the book buyers history with summer reading which i really want to suggest is suggestive about the larger publishing industries discourse on a summer reading as well. this is june 1888 issue and scribner's here decided to go head-to-head with publishers weekly which had been publishing a special summer issue for the trade since the 1870s. but it devoted its entire june 1888 issue exclusively to the summer book market and summer reading. this was something publishers routinely did for the christmas promotions but they hadn't done it for the summer. you can see here on the cover of this very, very definite buildup of the audience for summer reading as the woman leader so we see on the left the young woman in the white muslin holding up her book and she seems to be under some kind of apple blossom tree all freshness and solitude, nothing of the heat and dust in crowds and railroad cars that would've been attendant on summer leisure. that image gets repeated on a full-page ad with this familiar, an old favorite titled a new volume as well. the woman reader becomes the center of the marketing strategy. and the woman reader will stay there for the rest of the century. she will become a trope that other publishers exploit making summer reading a markedly female space. i have some posters here, for example, by the 1890s publishers used out posters like these to publicize new issues of their magazine. we have a poster for the century, lippincott, harpers and all of them featuring the summer reader. now, to be sure reservations remained. some magazines and illustrators turned a ride i to the woman reader in her summer reading practices and you can see these in the next three images and i will try to go through these. this is a life magazine cover from july 1883 and it features several people in hammocks but it is the prettiest thing in hammock as the young woman in the center and she is linguistically absorbed in a novel titled [inaudible]'s love and she was and wrapped in the hammock and has a bag of candy and if you look closely under her trouble she has a bag of candy at her side so she becomes a consumer of book, words and suites. another one, july 1886 and this is from charles warner their pilgrimage which was running in harpers and a fictional romp through the summer resort and here is a scene from the installment that takes place at newport, rhode island called the shepherd and the sloth by the very well-known illustrator cs reinhardt. it shows the schoolteachers convention at the hotel in newport and every one of the young woman here is totally absorbed in her paperback book or magazine while the preacher looks on. i don't think that is the reverend talmage who seems more accepting and then finally one of my absolute favorite images of the time is from july 1897 and it is charles weiner gibson called marooned. the distinctive gibson girl is here in her summer dress on the beach and her body language suggesting the effects of too much leisure, too much sun and if the boxes and paperbacks at their feet are any signs they are suffering from too much summer reading and having consumed the latest novels to arrive by mail readers are spe spent. finally, i think i'm doing okay with time here. since i began with an example from boston i would like to end there as well. this example is far removed from blackwell and her copy of the thief in the night. it's also an example that complicates this discussion of summer reading and are referencing a second tradition that take shape in the 19th century but the counter narrative summer is a time for serious sustained read. the book i want to end with in this illustration is taken from the book the new harry and [inaudible] story of boston in the summer of 1891 and it is by edward hale and his sister lucretia hale. the plot is exceedingly familiar to anyone who is familiar with the genre and to anyone who has ever read the novel and two young people meet, fall in love in the summertime and the plot moves forward with the characters engaging in a variety of summer activities. in this case, they ride the street carts to riverside where they rent a canoe, they visit the mount auburn cemetery and ride the vote to the hamptons and back. but the young lucy of the title takes her summers especially seriously and for her summer is a time also to visit the tremont temple with a lecture from helen keller and a time to teach in morning vacation school for boston's at-risk children and time to end a birthday commemoration of the suffragist and labor reformer which established a charity home for boston's poor working women and summer, in other words, was a time, not just for voting and ferry rides, but for serious engagement with significant social issues. i found myself wondering as i put this together maybe this is the tenor of our summer reading today but it was still be summer reading. with that, i thank you and i guess i'm going to channel my inner swarmer net by just calling your attention here and this is the cover of my book, "books for idle hours" and it is available online from the university of massachusetts press and i just put the coat here for 30% off and free shipping. your support for the press would be greatly appreciated. i guess i will just stop sharing and go to questions. >> that would be great. just to refresh everyone's memory, you can either use the raise hand function at the bottom of your screen or be the q&a function at and type in your questions. looks like we have a couple questions coming and are there any 19th century summer reads that are still read today? >> oh, okay. that is a question i really grappled a lot with. they definitely are ephemeral and definitely are of their time and not many of them are available today with the possible exceptions of the work of william dean howell one of most common authors of the time so his work is still there. there was one book called one summer by the author of blanche willis howard that wasn't readily powered most of these novels were there for one season and then disappeared but the novel was published every year from 1870s on to the 1900s and beyond and it took place tells a story of young woman who was courted by a young man and was wildly popular and found references in the holland -- howard college library and that would probably come closest, the works of [inaudible] but they are the books are very much of their time and the tradition is very much a part of ours still today. thank you. great question. >> thank you, wonderful, with reading recommended as an escape from george beards i'm sorry -- american nervousness or ultimately associated with a version of american nervousness that characterizes it as language. >> i think that what they were probably most concerned with was a hypersensitivity and the full time which they talk about women and women's hysteria and they definitely were in conversation. critics of summer reading were in conversation with those effects but for women i think they were more worried about not so much about land work but about hypersensitivity to sexual stimulation by reading novels that we cannot have that. >> great. does summer reading become populist beyond the middle class and isn't marketed to non- caucasian audiences? >> i was really surprised by the range of audiences and i had to tease this out but i found a number of books that were contributed to libraries so a copy of one summer appeared in the stanford university collection and it comes specifically from the stanford family and the stanford family estate and a copy at harvard that has an indication of a harvard political professor who was donated it. at the same time though, i looked there in the wonderful online sites called what muncie red and it looked at what was checked out of the library in muncie, indiana and we can kind of trace summer novels there as well and then the final piece they were advertised not just in new england but in california as well so novels about maine would appear in california and working would have been featured in the fiction but may be less clear than it went beyond the middle class except for -- i don't know if i can call her by her first two names. >> to think this type of reading helps to sort to quote, keep people in their place and reinforced their inferior status in society? >> marriage was definitely a major concern in all the plots had to do with marriage. this would've been time just after the civil war where you had a proliferation of young, single women so i thank you had to say the glass half empty or is it half-full and does it provide agency and it does end in marriage for just about everyone and i can think of one exception that is william dean howell's novel so i guess that in mind but the young women are shown in dramatic, summer was a time of relief, so young women were in canoes and going out and young women were climbing trees and mountains and so it's like that shakespearean comedy which has this festive comedy where there is a time of festive relief where women are trying new roles and given the freedom to do that but there is that marriage at the end and whether you see that as containment or fruition i think books leave that in the year. >> donna, wonderful presentation in your book you mentioned many of the characters in summer novels were themselves reading and could you talk about the invention there and was it for fun, a wink and a nod marketing? >> yeah, a number of the novels authors were writing were very, very aware of what the conventions are so very often there will be references to characters seeking out summer reading and in one summer for example the true people eventually were married and they meet because the young woman goes out on a rainy night because she is seen a paperback best seller in the drugstore that morning and has to go into the ring to do that and bumps into the man who will become her husband because she has to do that and another young woman is being courted by multiple suitors and they have her reading in the novel itself so it is a meta-analysis, if you will, but the authors were very aware of what the conventions were, what readers expected and i don't want to say they were slavishly following it but i think that in a number of cases, especially for howell, it's exploding some of the conventions and showing the ways in which the genre can store how stories are more truncated. >> i want to be conscious of people's time and we may have time for one last question. last question could be what happens with summer novels in the 20th century has returned to the 20th century? >> i had to stop at some point and i stopped in the early 1900s but i went back through and just looked and it persists. i went back and looked, for example, in times of war what happened and so the tradition of quitting or putting the label on it and this persists. the idea that being a specific kind of a novel and i think that persists as well but you can take the hilderbrand and some of the books that are set in nantucket and in other places today that are very much designed for female audience and trace that genre back but as i said, i cited clive barnes saying the statue of liberty with summer reading is always with it. i think it persists clearly as a marketing practice and i am not sure that it has the force of a cultural practice today as it did back in the 19th century. >> thank you very much for a wonderful presentation. i will share with everyone how to go about getting a copy of this. so if you would like to order a copy of the book is available from mass press and this discount code is on screen here and thank everyone for joining us and we hope you enjoyed the program and we hope you consider continuing to support mhs and joining us for the rest of our program over the summer while you may be on the beach reading. i hope everyone has a wonderful day. thank you. >> weeknights this month were featuring full tv programs as a preview of what is available every weekend on c-span2. tonight, beginning at 8:00 p.m. eastern book tv features several programs with the laid author and columnist william s buckley junior. enjoy book tv on c-span2. >> you know, when you read the things said about thomas jefferson that he was an infidel and that he was an agent of the first government sounds a little reminiscent, doesn't it? the things said about abraham lincoln and the things said about fdr that he wanted to be a dictator so does kind of come with the territory but i think in terms case at least in the modern political era post-world war ii i have never seen anything like it. >> sunday at noon eastern on in-depth, alive to our conversation with author and faith and freedom coalition founder ralph read his books include awakening, active faith in his most recent, for god and country. joint and the conversation with your phone calls, facebook comments, text and tweets. watch book tvs in-depth sunday at noon eastern on c-span2. >> you are watching booktv on c-span2, every weekend with the latest nonfiction books and authors. c-span2 created i america's cable television company is a public service and brought to you today by your television provider.

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