Author Archives: readersinhistory

World Book Night 2020 coincided with the beginning of Covid lockdown in the UK. At a moment when many public events were being put on ice, The Reading Agency, an organization dedicated to promoting wellbeing through reading, announced that the celebration would go ahead anyway. But April 23 would be a World Book Night withContinue reading “Anti-social Reading”

There are a lot of myths surrounding the history of reading. From time to time, we aim to correct historical misconceptions that have entered the realm of received wisdom. This one relates to the most celebrated trench newspaper to be printed on the Western Front during the First World War. The title of The WipersContinue reading “The Myth of the Wipers Times”

‘I have no books’ Robert Louis Stevenson complained to one of his correspondents shortly after he arrived in Samoa in 1890.  A full six months later he was able to report, not without a little ambivalence: Our books and furniture keep slowly draining up the road, in a sad state of scatterment and disrepair; IContinue reading “Robert Louis Stevenson in Samoa”

Ever since the publication of Rudyard Kipling’s ‘The Janeites’ – a short story about a secret society of officers in the First World War with an overwhelming devotion to the works of Jane Austen – it has been rumored that Tommy Atkins was a big fan. It is an idea that appears to have beenContinue reading “Jane Austen in the Trenches?”

One of the most poignant meditations on the intimacy that can exist between the exile and his books was written by Walter Benjamin in the 1930s. After the breakup of his marriage he found himself alone in a new city and, having spent years drifting from place to place, he reflected on the way thatContinue reading “Unpacking my Library”

After I had been there about Ten or Twelve days, it came into my Thoughts that I should lose my Reckoning of Time for want of Books and Pen and Ink, and should even forget the Sabbath Days from the working Days; but to prevent this, I cut it with my Knife upon a largeContinue reading “Welcome to Crusoe’s Books”