In Books for Idle Hours: Nineteenth-Century Publishing and the Rise of Summer Reading, Donna Harrington-Lueker examines an aspect of the history of reading and print culture in the United States that has, remarkably, received little scholarly attention to date: the rise of summer reading in the second half of the nineteenth century. Through painstaking research and with a keen eye for interesting and thought-provoking detail, Harrington-Lueker has assembled a scholarly study of summer reading in the late nineteenth-century United States that historians of reading and print culture would do well to consult for its incisive commentary on the relationship between market forces and readers' tastes.
The book offers a panoramic view of the topic that is as enjoyable as it is informative. Both a study of the conditions that led to an industry springing up around summer reading in the second half of the nineteenth century and an examination...
