As an avid reader, I'm curious about where books come from and what they do. How does a story get to be a book? How does someone become an author? What is happening to us as we read? I worked in publishing, and eventually, I started teaching other people how to become editors and publishers. As a faculty member, I had time to study and write about book history. I joined the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing when it was formed and became its president. The conferences helped me to learn about the history of books throughout the world and from pre-print times to the present.
I wrote
Expanding the American Mind: Books and the Popularization of Knowledge
I always like to start learning about a subject with an overview, and this book brings together experts on topics ranging from technology to censorship, marketing, copyright, and book clubs in the period starting with World War II. I turn to this volume, again and again, to refresh my knowledge and enjoy excellent writing by the top scholars in book history. Earlier volumes in the series cover the topic from colonial times.
This is the only comprehensive, interpretive survey of the history of the book in the United States since 1945.The fifth volume of ""A History of the Book in America"" addresses the economic, social, and cultural shifts affecting print culture from World War II to the present. During this period factors such as the expansion of government, the growth of higher education, the climate of the Cold War, globalization, and the development of multimedia and digital technologies influenced the patterns of consolidation and diversification established earlier.The thirty-three contributors to the volume explore the evolution of the publishing industry and the business…
As a voracious reader, I’ve often wondered about why exactly reading is so pleasurable—so essential—and whether others feel the same way about books as I do. Leah Price writes about books and reading clearly and entertainingly, busting myths about a “golden age” of books as well as the much-feared “death of the book.” I learned a lot from this book and enjoyed every minute.
Around 2000, people began to believe that books were on verge of extinction. Their obsolescence, in turn, was expected to doom the habits of mind that longform print had once prompted: the capacity to follow a demanding idea from start to finish, to look beyond the day's news, or even just to be alone. The "death of the book" is an anxiety that has spawned a thousand jeremiads about the dumbing down of American culture, the ever-shorter attention spans of our children, the collapse of civilized discourse.
All of these anxieties rely on the idea of a golden age, when…
One of the important themes that emerges from Black history is the importance of literacy in gaining freedom and seeking respect and equality. Elizabeth McHenry shows how African Americans used not just individual literacy but book clubs and social clubs organized around reading to achieve their goals. I loved reading about this quiet, behind-the-scenes element of the fight for participation in American civic culture
Over the past decade the popularity of black writers including E. Lynn Harris and Terry McMillan has been hailed as an indication that an active African American reading public has come into being. Yet this is not a new trend; there is a vibrant history of African American literacy, literary associations, and book clubs. Forgotten Readers reveals that neglected past, looking at the reading practices of free blacks in the antebellum north and among African Americans following the Civil War. It places the black upper and middle classes within American literary history, illustrating how they used reading and literary conversation…
I’ve always been convinced that—regardless of educational level—people want to learn, to understand a wide range of subjects, and to join the conversation about literature and the arts. Joan Shelley Rubin looks at the people and institutions created to guide those aspiring to expand their minds in the mid-twentieth century: the Book-of-the-Month Club, “Great Books” series, radio book programs, and literary magazines. In the process, she takes on the issue of high-brow versus low-brow and her own subject: what comes in between.
The proliferation of book clubs, reading groups, "outline" volumes, and new forms of book reviewing in the first half of the twentieth century influenced the tastes and pastimes of millions of Americans. Joan Rubin here provides the first comprehensive analysis of this phenomenon, the rise of American middlebrow culture, and the values encompassed by it. Rubin centers her discussion on five important expressions of the middlebrow: the founding of the Book-of-the-Month Club; the beginnings of "great books" programs; the creation of the New York Herald Tribune's book-review section; the popularity of such works as Will Durant's The Story of Philosophy;…
As a writer and teacher, I’ve always classified plagiarism as a high crime and misdemeanor. It’s the academic equivalent of treason. Thomas Mallon covers well-known and unknown instances, word thieves punished and not. The book is highly entertaining but deadly serious about the harm done by plagiarists and by those who do not take their crimes seriously.
"The definitive book on the subject" of plagiarism (The New York Times) is updated with a new afterword about the Internet.
What is plagiarism, and why is it such a big deal? Since when is originality considered an indispensable attribute of authorship? Stolen Words is a deft and well-informed history of the sin every writer fears from every angle. Award-winning author Thomas Mallon begins in the seventeenth century and pushes forward toward scandals in publishing, academia, and Hollywood, exploring the motivations, consequences, and emotional reverberations of an intriguing and distressingly widespread practice. In this now-classic study, Mallon proves himself to…
Even in an age of Google and Wikipedia, we continue to rely on books written by historians, scientists, economists, and other researchers to learn more about important subjects. My book looks at serious nonfiction—its authors, publishers, and readers—in the United States since World War II, the moment when the GI Bill opened college to thousands, and when paperbacks became widely available. I used the books themselves, publishers’ archives, authors’ correspondence, and surveys to learn why and how scholars and others write serious books for serious readers, and what those readers expect from the books they choose.
Historical fiction inspired by the story of Mary Leakey, who carved her own path to become one of the world's most distinguished paleoanthropologists.
It's 1983 and seventeen-year-old Grace Clark has just lost her mother when she begrudgingly accompanies her estranged father to an archeological dig at Olduvai Gorge on the Serengeti plains of Tanzania. Here, seventy-year-old Mary Leakey enlists Grace to sort and pack her fifty years of work and memories.
Their interaction reminds Mary how she pursued her ambitions of becoming an archeologist in the 1930s by sneaking into lectures and working on excavations. When well-known paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey…
Historical fiction inspired by the story of Mary Leakey, who carved her own path to become one of the world's most distinguished paleoanthropologists.
It's 1983 and seventeen-year-old Grace Clark has just lost her mother when she begrudgingly accompanies her estranged father to an archeological dig at Olduvai Gorge on the Serengeti plains of Tanzania. Here, seventy-year-old Mary Leakey enlists Grace to sort and pack her fifty years of work and memories.
Their interaction reminds Mary how she pursued her ambitions of becoming an archeologist in the 1930s by sneaking into lectures and working on excavations. When well-known paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey…
