Tasting and Testing Books
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€91.99
A Feeling for Books
A01=Amy L. Blair
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Advice columns
advice literature for readers
American reading trends 1920s
American reading trends 1930s
Author_Amy L. Blair
Bestsellers
book advice columns history
book selection guidance in magazines
Category=DSBH
Category=JBSF1
consumer culture and reading
cultural history of Good
democratization of reading
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
everyday reading practices
Great Depression reading habits
historical book marketing strategies
history of book reviews
history of literary consumption
Home economics
Influencers
interwar literary culture
interwar publishing industry
Janice Radway
Joan Shelley Rubin
literary accessibility for women
literary authority and consumerism
literary criticism outside academia
literary democratization in America
literary taste in mass magazines
literary taste makers in the 20th century
literature in popular periodicals
magazines as cultural arbiters
magazines shaping literary taste
middle-class literary culture
middle-class women and books
middlebrow culture in the U.S.
middlebrow literature
non-elite literary culture
Periodicals
popular fiction in early 20th century
popular reading in interwar America
print culture and gender
Publishers
reading as personal investment
reading during economic hardship
reading habits of American women
reading recommendations in magazines
Reception studies
The Making of Middlebrow Culture
women and cultural authority
women and reading in the 1920s
women's engagement with literature
women's leisure reading
women's magazines and literature
women's reading culture
Product details
- ISBN 9781625348210
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 31 Dec 2024
- Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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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.
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.
Amy Blair is associate professor of English at Marquette University and author of Reading Up: Middle-class Readers and the Culture of Success in the Early Twentieth-Century United States. She is also coeditor of the journal Reception: Texts, Readers, Audiences, History.
