In its February 1926 issue, Good Housekeeping magazine introduced a column for its approximately one million subscribers called “Tasting and Testing Books.” The column’s author, Emily Newell Blair, would go on to produce ninety-one reading advice columns for the magazine between 1926 and 1934. During this period, Good Housekeeping became the most widely circulated periodical in the United States, doubling its circulation to over two million copies. Much of its popularity stemmed from its intensive promotion of its Seal of Approval for a variety of products, which brought consumers to it for utilitarian purposes. With her focus on regular books, Blair distinguished herself from highbrow literary critics, many of whom have been objects of study as High Modernists. She offered advice to help middle-class women readers make their own choices about the best books in which to invest time and money, rather than dictating what they should or should not read. She aligns herself with the average subscriber, outside the book publishing and reviewer industries, focusing on books that would now be termed middlebrow reading.

Blair’s time at Good Housekeeping covers the era from the heights of the “Roaring Twenties” to the depths of the Great Depression, and her recommendations offer a window into the uses of middlebrow reading during this period of dramatic economic and social shifts. Tasting and Testing Books argues that the consumer-first message of Good Housekeeping infused Blair’s advice column and validated a new attitude of proudly middlebrow pleasure reading in the mid-twentieth century. These columns shed new light on the reading lives of too-often overlooked women, often living outside of urban centers and away from elite literary circles, and present Emily Newell Blair, who strongly identified with her readers as a truly democratic tastemaker.

With original contributions from a diverse range of teachers, scholars, and practitioners in literary studies, history, book arts, library science, language studies, and archives, Teaching the History of the Book is the first collection of its kind dedicated to book history pedagogy. Presenting a variety of methods for teaching book history both as its own subject and as an approach to other material, each chapter describes lessons, courses, and programs centered on the latest and best ways of teaching undergraduate and graduate students.

Expansive and instructive, this volume introduces ways of helping students consider how texts were produced, circulated, and received, with chapters that cover effective ways to organize courses devoted to book history, classroom activities that draw on this subject in other courses, and an overview of selected print and digital tools. Contributors, many of whom are leading figures in the field, utilize their own classroom experiences to bring to life some of the rich possibilities for teaching book history in the twenty-first century.

In addition to the volume editors, contributors include Ryan Cordell, Brigitte Fielder, Barbara Hochman, Leslie Howsam, Matthew Kirschenbaum, Clare Mullaney, Kate Ozment, Leah Price, Jonathan Rose, Jonathan Senchyne, Sarah Wadsworth, and others.