And im the director of Community Partnerships for theMassachusetts Historical Society. Our program this evening is a seasonal, its a look at the tradition of Summer Reading we are joined by professor donna harringtonlueker on her new publication gavin kleespies, 19th century publishing the rise of Summer Reading. She is a passer in Newport Rhode island and she has an undergraduate degree from rhode island and phd. As a former magazine writer and editor, Research Interests include 19thcentury print culture, womens magazines on any period and radical or alternative press. Before we begin id like to extend a special welcome to anyone joining the Virtual Program for the first time. If youre not familiar with the Massachusetts Historical Society we are the first Historical Society in america and have been preserving publishing and sharing our history since 1791. We hold a collection of 14 million manuscript pages including the papers of the first three president s of the unitedstates. Or im sorry, i misspoke. We are continuing to collect today and if you are interested, we are currently collecting materials related to the covid19 experience. We have a special initiative designedto report peoples experiences during this unusual time and preserve the diverse standpoint of firsthand accounts for future generations. In these days of social distancing we have taken to hosting Virtual Programs and have online programs planned every week from now till the end of july. So even into the beginning of august. Next week we are hosting a talk by kate nelson on her new publication the three cornered war. Find more information on that in our website and before we begin we have a few housekeeping details to go through. First of all if you have a question, comment orconcern about the program or our general programs , contact me or sarah virtually our Public Programs coordinator and the email will make it to us or you can reach us through our website. As i mentioned we are producing all our programs for free during the covid19 period but of course we are a nonprofit and an independent nonprofit so if you have the capability and would like to support the Massachusetts Historical Society we would encourage you to do so and you can do that i visiting masshistory. Com support. We will have a presentation by miss harringtonlueker and then a question and answer period and there are two ways tests can ask questions. The first is to use the q and a function. If youre using the computer at the bottom of your screen. If youre using a tablet or cell phone it may be at the top of the screen essentially you click on that and you can type a questionin. Sarah virtually and i will read the questions to our speaker and then she will answer them. The other way you can do it is to raise the use the raised hand function and this will allow you to indicate that youd like to ask a question and we will unmute people if we have time. The one thing about the unmute function is that you will most likely need to unmute your self as well so just keep that in mind. So without further ado, i am going to introduce our speaker, today we will be hearing from donna harringtonlueker and if youd like to turn on your camera and unmute yourself , we will be off to the races. Great to see you and now i am going to fade off into the digital ether. Thank you so much and thank you all for coming. Thank you to gavin and to sarah for making thispossible. Before we begin i want to acknowledge these are such difficult times. With so much at stake and so much of import on our minds and as i worked on this lecture, this presentation in the last week i must admit i did find myself thinking is this really the time to be talking about Summer Reading summer leisure or even about 19th century publishing but the last quarter of the 19th century, the period i focus on in my study it wasnt without its challenges. At the beginning of the period in 1877 federal troops were sent in to quell of money workers strike against the railroad and at the end the United States found itself inthe spanishamerican war. In between the country struggled with the failure of reconstruction in a period of rapid industrialization so the period was not without economic and social upheaval. So with those challenges in mind id like to invoke perhaps one of the most prominent arguments of the period in favor of summer leisure. And that is that the short period of time away from the pressures of 19th century life it gave people the wherewithal to engage with the world once again on their return. And i hope tonights talk at work in the same way for you. So lets just jump in. Okay. Now i talk about the rise of Summer Reading and could really begin anywhere in the 19th century. But i like to start todays talk in boston or more specifically in dorchester with alice stone blackwell, the daughter of lucy stone and henry brown blackwell. The prominence 19th century abolitionist and womens rights advocate. And you can see its kind of a family portrait, a family photo over here on the left of this three of them. In the early 1870s alice was a teenager and she was a gracious reader, especially in the summertime when her reading turned very dramatically to stories of adventure and sensation. So if you read from a journal of this period her journals are filled with entries of accounts of rushing into boston by train or streetcar, picking up the latest issue of robert bonds popular ledger, the weekly story paper. Or she talks about stopping at the Boston Public Library for stacks of books that she devours one week and then returns the next. A quote here from her journals, changed my books and got out in time for dinner she writes in july 1872. Ive got a very good set of books this time so ive read them all before. And among the titles that she mentions in this journal, she mentions a gothic mystery called the people in the night which she admits upset her nerves and also Thomas Hughes tom brown at oxford which she describesas a favorite. But alice took part in a far different kind of Summer Reading as well and that where the picture in the right is going to come in. This is the familys home in dorchester. Throughout the summer the stone blackwells household engaged in shared family reading. This was a common practice in the 19th century but it was summer and they did so on the windows walk. You can see it there i thought the families dorchester home to take advantage of the cool breezes from the nearby bay. And there alice reports the family read books like sir Walter Scotts antiquarian and vanity fair. That is run long novels over the course of many a summer evening. And her delight in this shared reading was absolutely apparent read theres another quote from her journal. The antiquarian was read up on the roof she wrote in july 1872 and i chased poppa about to tickle his toes. Im restrained, informal, given to action and adventure. Alices Summer Reading choices and reading practices i think resonate with us today area every year we are familiar with this, every year sometime around memorial day weekend this Summer Reading season begins. Oprah makes her pick for the best summer reads but so does the New York Times, National Public radio, the wall street journal and ahost of other media outlets. Summer is the time when we are advised to turn to lightweight paperbacks we can stuff into a beach bag or read without worry by thepoolside. Its the time we are told to reach for the light popular novel or the actionpacked bestseller area clive barnes a critic for the New York Times wrote in the papers summer big book issue for 1968 he said number reading like the statue ofliberty and motherhood is always with us. And thats still true today. The list of best summer reads continues in this very very fraught season. I just have taken some screen grabs, the first one to three of them came from the weekend of the memorial day weekend and the one on the bottom was just from today so we see here the top one is from the New York Times read the beach maybe close but these books are worthopening. The next one down, refinery 29. A fight for millennial young women read a 25 books youll wantto read this summer. On the left is from oprah, 28 of the bestbeach reads of the summer 2020. And then yet another list, this one came from todays afternoon boston globe online. The best books to read this summer. And i might note here about the boston globe, i had a chance to go quickly through it and see what they were recommending. And i was really struck. At one point the New York Times was criticized or its book list that included primarily white authors read one season roof refused having to reach peak capacity with their choices. And the best books to read this summer in the boston globe are incredibly varied and diverse. Okay, but where did this idea of Summer Reading come from . Summer reading is a specific practice. How did it come to the an established part not only of literary commerce but of American Culture as well . And those are some of the questions i began to explore. So im a book historian so i practice in the field looks at the intersection of authorship, reading and publishing. History is a field that concerns itself with the book as a material object. First, but also with the Cultural Practices that surround books. How books are produced, how theyre circulated, how they received and one summer, one june i was returning from a print culture conference in halifax and i was looking for something to read on the flight home and i came across the ubiquitous glossy brochure announcing the best summer reads for that season. And i found myself as a result kind of thinking about my own number reading rituals and the ways in which the Publishing Industry may have shaped and sustained those area so that led me to the John Hay Library at Brown University where i worked with a magazine called the book buyer, is a magazine from Charles Scribner the new yorkcity publisher and ill talk about it a little bit later in this talk as well. The very rich text full of advertisements from other publishers, copy about what the book trade was like and what people were reading and from there i moved on and i moved outward. Two other 19thcentury magazines and newspapers from across the United States. I didnt want to leave it just in new england. I included the africanamerican presses as well as a number of alternative presses. After that it was on to publishing archives at harvard and princeton and columbia, on the letters and journals and to a long list of novels that set at summer resorts, many written by some of the periods most famous authors read ethan crane, william dean howell, louisa may alcott. They all practiced in the tradition of the summer novel at some point in their career. So what i found as a result of this, my summers were now not so i dont know what i found was a very interesting chapter in the history of publishing. Summer reading can be sure in the 19th century was very much a commercial construction area the idea of Summer Reading is a product thats part of the Publishing Industries really concerted effort to redefine a slow season and to capitalize on a really dramatic rise of travel, tourism and summer leisure in victorian america in thegilded age. But 19th century number reading involved more than commerce as well area in the last quarter of the 19th century it also became a wellestablished Cultural Practice , a performance and many of those characteristics remain with us today. Overall than an interesting chapter both in the history of the book and in the history ofsummer leisure. Now my book itself covers a lot of ground. I just easily reproduced the table of contents here to give you a bit of the flavor of the larger argument as well read i look at the dramatic rise of travel tourism the summer leisure in the period, in the period where exchanging from an elite Cultural Practice to one that is embraced by a middleclass and increasingly uses it as a marker of gentility. And i would be read this and not noting here be professional authors of the period all indulged in summer leisure. I also look at a variety of books that were advertised as best summer reads and i looked especially the development of what i callthe american summer novel. The novel that was specifically set at a summer resort. And finally, i looked at the ways in which authorship intersected with and exploited this new genre. And the ways in which civil spaces shake reading practices and i looked at everything from resort libraries at Saratoga Springs to rattan chairs that were advertised for portside reading that had built in bookshelves, built into the very wide arms. Today though i want to focus on one part of the books argument and that is the role of the 19th century, the role that 19th century magazine culture played in reframing Summer Reading into a genteel practice. Im especially interested in the socalled peacemaking publications and ive reproduced coverage on these here. These are the three most prominent, the Atlantic Monthly which was published in boston , harbors new monthly magazine arrival in new york city and the century illustrated monthly area there role is going to be significant rid of these were publications that have a significant degree of cultural authority. Sedgwick has described the atlantic as an exemplar of yankee humanism in the kind of copy that it featured. And in this age of the magazine these publications and others become the primary vehicle for what jane compton calls the machinery of publishing and reviewing area that is, the machinery that presents a book to readers in a certain way. That frames the text that establishes a context for it repairs us as readers to read it in a certain way and with a certain framework in mind. Together these and other publications, these and other magazines shake the discourse on the Summer Reading through their text and visual and thatswhat id like to explore. Let me just say given an idea of where i want to go with this, its in three parts. I want to look at early in the century, the very beginning of the discourse on Summer Reading area i then want to move on to the complete disruption of cheap fiction that develops in the period and finally i want to look at the publishers efforts to reframe and reclaim Summer Reading as something that, well see how that develops. Okay. Though the first part, the very early discourse onSummer Reading. Lets go back a bit and i have some images here, paintings from the period. Taking a cue from england and europe, Domestic Tourism developed in the late 1700s around places like niagara falls, seen here atthe top , the hudson river,the catskills on the left. And tourism develops around there. By the 18 20s and 1830s, wealthy travelers were visiting the White Mountains and you can see that at the bottom image onthe right. Theres a painting of horseback riding up mt. Washington. They were in Mount Desert Island in maine, Mineral Springs andthe south and a host of other sites. Excuse me, its allergy season if you can bear with me. Newport rhode island begins taking shape here as a respite for the heat in the summer. Now, i want to look at two magazines here to give you the tenor of how the discourse begins. On the left, 1835, new england magazine. You can see here that its opening story is up on john goodman brown. 1845, the magazine ran an article called summer philosophy and it began by invoking the political philosopher edmund burke and his advice to live pleasant, that the theme of this article. Summer philosophy advised younger and less experienced travelers with ways to use their time and advised they needed to use their time to cultivate equanimity. Heres a quote. Walk slow, talk slow, think slow, read, write, undress and in short lived with studied and exquisite deliberation. And that deliberation needed to extend to whatever reading matter the traveler chose. The Summer Travel for example was advised to avoid anything having to do with politics as well as anything that smacked of twaddle and egotism. The best authors the article advised were lord byron and charles lamb, especially lambs essays area heres another quote. The reviewer wrote lambs essays were quote, is soda, his customary after dinner net visions in the garden. His do we jasmine and chat with good girls under it. The young man who follows this advice and the article is very specific about the gender of the summer reader would cultivate a sweet and imperturbable serenity was going to last until october. Putnam over here on the right, putnams in the 1850s adopted a similarly dignified approach. In 1853 putnams rant review of a new poetry collection called a book for the seaside on the boston firm of kicker and field and it was a collection of poetry aboutthe cd featuring the works of shelley , tennyson, longfellow and others and putnams was very keen on it and said it was going to be not just a good summary a collection of permanentvalue. Later in the