Book Browser
Professor Tatlock owns a considerable collection of English translations of nineteenth-century German novels. The volumes in the collection demonstrate a range of physical attributes: different sizes, bindings, illustrations, etc. These physical properties are important evidence in the kind of readers imaged and marketed to by publishers. Although there's no real substitute for examining the physical books, we wanted to provide a digital pathway to seeing the differences between the volumes.
On the left hand side of page, there's a blue arrow on a green background. Click it to cycle through the images for the books.
Salable Books
As a starting point for understanding “popularity,” the project started with a list of the most salable books from an 1876 number from Publisher's Weekly. The HDW provided a simple way to browse the data.
Who Read These Novels?
Another rich trove of data is the circulation records from the Muncie Public Library from the 1890's, made available by the What Middletown Read project at Ball State University. The HDW built a tool for browsing the circulation records for books written by E. Marlitt, one of the authors studied by Professor Tatlock.
What Else Were They Reading?
What did people in Muncie read? What did people of different ages read? Did boys and read different books. A basic word cloud browser provides a way to pick through the Muncie Public Library data.
Gendered and Age-Specific Reading
The Muncie Public Library confirmed that young men and young women read very differently. A pair of bubble graphs, one showing differences in the authors they read, and another showing the differences in titles, makes the pattern very clear.
Books or authors on the left side were read by more women, whereas those on the right were read by more men. Books or titles lower on the graph were read by younger readers, whereas those higher on the graph were read by older readers.