What Middletown read : print culture in an American small city / Frank Felsenstein and James J. Connolly.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Felsenstein, Frank, author.

Connolly, James J., 1962- author.

Series:

Studies in print culture and the history of the book

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Muncie Public Library.

Books and reading--Indiana--Muncie--History--19th century.

Books and reading.

Books and reading--Indiana--Muncie--History--20th century.

Muncie Public Library--History--19th century.

Muncie Public Library--History--20th century.

Libraries and community--Indiana--Muncie--History.

Libraries and community.

History.

Indiana--Muncie.

Physical Description:

xiii, 304 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Amherst ; Boston : University of Massachusetts Press, [2015]

Summary:

The discovery of a large cache of circulation records from the Muncie, Indiana, Public Library in 2003 offers unprecedented detail about American reading behavior at the turn of the twentieth century. Frank Felsenstein and James J. Connolly have mined these records to produce an in-depth account of print culture in Muncie, the city featured in the famed "Middletown" studies conducted by Robert and Helen Lynd almost a century ago. Using the data assembled and made public through the What Middletown Read Database (www.bsu.edu/libraries/wmr), a celebrated new resource the authors helped launch, Felsenstein and Connolly analyze the borrowing choices and reading culture of social groups and individuals. What Middletown Read is much more than a statistical study. Felsenstein and Connolly dig into diaries, meeting minutes, newspaper reports, and local histories to trace the library's development in relation to the city's cosmopolitan aspirations, to profile individual readers, and to explore such topics as the relationship between children's reading and their schooling and what books were discussed by local women's clubs. The authors situate borrowing patterns and reading behaviour within the contexts of a rapidly growing, culturally ambitious small city, an evolving public library, an expanding market for print, and the broad social changes that accompanied industrialization in the United States. The result is a rich, revealing portrait of the place of reading in an emblematic American community.

Contents:

"Now we are a city" : portrait of a boomtown

"A magnificent array of books" : the origins and development of the Muncie Public Library

Cosmopolitan trends : print culture and the public library in 1890s Muncie

Borrowing patterns : the Muncie Public Library and its patrons

"Bread sweet as honey" : reading, education, and the public library

Reading and reform : the role of fiction in the civic imagination of Muncie's activist women

Schoolboys and social butterflies : profiling Middletown readers

Epilogue. Looking backward, looking forward

Appendix. The What Middletown read database.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 269-296) and index.

ISBN:

9781625341402

1625341407

9781625341419

1625341415

OCLC:

898222274