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New Day Cafe: Beach Reading [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2023-08-31
“As English and Communications scholar Donna Harrington-Lueker writes, light reading has been associated with summer vacations for a long time.
In the early 1800s, Harrington-Lueker writes, many well-to-do Americans began taking time off in the summer to travel by railroad or steamship to picturesque destinations like Niagara Falls or the Catskills. Within a century, the middle and even working classes were increasingly enjoying summer travel, even if it was just a day trip to the beach.
It didn’t take long for publishers to see an opportunity. In 1853, Boston’s Ticknor, Reed & Fields published A Book for the Sea-Side, a collection of ocean-themed poetry featuring work by Lord Alfred Tennyson, William Wordsworth, and others. In 1872, the Book Buyer, a trade journal from the Charles Scribner publishing house, ran its first ads for books explicitly labeled “summer reading.” Among the beach reads of the 1870s was Scribner’s own Bric-A-Brac series, gossipy stories about famous authors. In 1876, the Book Buyer reported that “‘Have you seen the new Bric-A-Brac’ was as common a question at Newport and Saratoga as ‘Shall you be at the hop [dance] tonight?’”
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