Page 22 - The University of Wisconsin Press Spring 2013
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S
PRING
2013
PRINT CULTURE / HISTORY / AMERICAN STUDIES
“The focus on libraries not as cold, impersonal institutions engaged in
promulgating top-down policies but rather as spaces populated by people
with diverse backgrounds, needs, and values is what makes this volume
valuable.”
Joan Shelley Rubin, University of Rochester
For well over one hundred years, libraries open to the public have played a cru-
cial part in fostering in Americans the skills and habits of reading and writing,
by routinely providing access to standard forms of print: informational genres
such as newspapers, pamphlets, textbooks, and other reference books, and liter-
ary genres including poetry, plays, and novels. Public libraries continue to have
an extraordinary impact; in the early twenty-first century, the American Library
Association reports that there are more public library branches than McDonald’s
restaurants in the United States. Much has been written about libraries from pro-
fessional and managerial points of view, but less so from the perspectives of those
most intimately involved—patrons and librarians.
Drawing on circulation records, patron reviews, and other archived materials,
Libraries and the Reading Public in Twentieth-Century America
underscores the
evolving roles that libraries have played in the lives of American readers. Each
essay in this collection examines a historical circumstance related to reading in
libraries. The essays are organized in sections on methods of researching the his-
tory of reading in libraries; immigrants and localities; censorship issues; and the
role of libraries in providing access to alternative, nonmainstream publications.
The volume shows public libraries as living spaces where individuals and groups
with diverse backgrounds, needs, and desires encountered and used a great vari-
ety of texts, images, and other media throughout the twentieth century.
Christine Pawley
and
Louise S. Robbins
have
both served as professor and director of the School
of Library and Information Studies at the Univer-
sity of Wisconsin–Madison. Pawley’s publications
include
Reading Places: Literacy, Democracy, and
the Public Library in Cold War America
. Robbins is
author of
The Dismissal of Miss Ruth Brown: Civil
Rights, Censorship, and the American Library
.
PAPERBACK ORIGINAL
JULY
LC: 2012040073 Z
256 PP. 6 X 9 9 B/W PHOTOS
E-BOOK $34.95 ISBN 978-0-299-29323-9
Print Culture History
in Modern America
J
ames P. Danky, Christine Pawley,
and Adam R. Nelson, Series Editors
22
THE UNIVERSIT Y OF WISCONSIN PRESS
•
O f r e l a t e d i n t e r e s t
“The essays demonstrate the richness and
diversity of evidence available for the study
of modern print culture in the United
States.”—Thomas Edward Augst, coeditor
of
Libraries as Agencies of Culture
PUBLISHED JUNE 2010
LC: 2009040638 P 234 PP. 6 × 9
7 B/W ILLUS., 1 MAP
E-BOOK $16.95 ISBN 978-0-299-23613-7
Print Culture History
in Modern America
Photo by Michael Forster Rothbart
Photo by Bryce Richter
