How to Find Out About Literature aims to provide a general survey of literatures and a general indication of the dates of these literatures. The book first elaborates on how to study and appreciate literature and how to trace literary works, including exercises and universal and national bibliographies. The text then examines how to trace poetry, drama, novels, and prose, foreign and subject bibliographies, library and sale catalogues, and guides to libraries, and literary information on general reference books and encyclopedias. The manuscript discusses how to trace literary information in handbooks and concordances to poetry and drama, handbooks and reference books on novelists and prose writers, dictionaries and guides to the English language and specialized subjects, essays, theses, and periodical articles. The text ponders on how to trace periodical articles and literary abstracts. The book is a valuable reference for students and researchers in their studies.

The Future of the Book: Images of Reading in the American Utopian Novel looks at how turn-of-the-century utopian novelists imagined what the book would be like in the ideal future. This works examines many different aspects of book culture. One chapter looks at the utopian residential library, both its contents and its personal and social functions. In the ideal future, everyone has books in their home. Another chapter discusses the public library in utopia. Many of the innovations the utopian novelists imagined correct problems that real public libraries faced in late nineteenth-century America. In utopia, everyone knows how to use the public library. A third chapter shifts the discussion of books and reading from the place of consumption to the place of production, looking at the role of the author in utopia. This chapter also attempts to answer a vexing question: Can an ideal world produce great literature? The utopian novelists said yes, but the novels they imagined in the future make their conclusions more circumspect. A parallel chapter studies what the utopian newspaper would be like. Some utopian novelists projected alternative news media, foreseeing technology that anticipated television and the internet. The final chapter examines what printed books would look like in the ideal future, looking at graphic design, universal languages, and methods to assure that the books would be printed without censorship or editorial intrusion.

Transatlantic Footholds: Turn-of-the-Century American Women Writers and British Reviewers analyses British reviews of American women fiction writers, essayists and poets between the periods of literary domesticity and modernism. The book demonstrates that a variety of American women writers were intelligently read in Britain during this era. British reviewers read American women as literary artists, as women and as Americans. While their notion of who counted as "women" was too limited by race and class, they eagerly read these writers for insight about how women around the world were entering debates on women’s place, the class struggle, religion, Indian policy, childrearing, and high society. In the process, by reading American women in varied ways, reviewers became hybrid and dissenting readers. The taste among British reviewers for American women’s books helped change the predominant direction that high culture flowed across the Atlantic from east-to-west to west-to-east. Britons working in London or far afield were deeply invested in the idea of "America." "America," their responses prove, is a transnational construct.

Modern Book Collecting offers advice that answers all the basic questions a book lover and collector might have—what to collect and where to find it, how to tell a first edition from a reprint, how to build an author collection, how to get the best price from dealers, how to understand the prices and rarity of books, and more. With a handy dictionary of terms used in auction and dealer catalogs and a new section on Internet resources, this is a must-have guide for book lovers.