Reading and Riding is the first in-depth study of Hachette and Company's railroad bookstore network. The Bibliotheque des Chemins de Fer, begun in 1853 as a means to market a special collection of books to train travelers, developed into France's first national chain bookstore. This analysis of the railroad bookstore network demonstrates how it transformed Hachette and Company from an academic publishing house into Europe's dominant publisher and distributor of all types of books, newspapers, and periodicals. It reveals the network's critical role in the modernization of the French publishing industry through the application of new marketing techniques, the use of the growing rail network as a primary means of distribution, and the large-scale employment of women.

In France's Third Republic, secularism was, for its adherents, a new faith, a civic religion founded on a rabid belief in progress and the Enlightenment conviction that men (and women) could remake their world. And yet with all of its pragmatic smoothing over of the supernatural edges of Catholicism, the Third Republic engendered its own fantastical ways of seeing by embracing observation, corporeal dynamism, and imaginative introspection. How these republican ideals and the new national education system of the 1870s and 80s - the structure meant to impart these ideals - shaped belle époque popular culture is the focus of this book. The author reassesses the meaning of secularization and offers a cultural history of this period by way of an interrogation of several fraught episodes which, although seemingly disconnected, shared an attachment to the potent moral and aesthetic directives of French republicanism: a village's battle to secularize its schools, a scandalous novel, a vaudeville hit featuring a nude celebrity, and a craze for female boxing. Beginning with the writer and performer Colette (1873-1954) as a point of entry, this re-evaluation of belle époque popular culture probes the startling connections between republican values of labor and physical health on the one hand, and the cultural innovations of the decades preceding World War I on the other.

The exploration of Africa documents the history and of the explorers that ventured into Africa, with a vivid and absorbing narrative and hundreds of rarely seen illustrations and photos - from native art and contemporary paintings extolling the bravery of intrepid explorers to photos of the breathtaking and forbidding African landscapes into which they ventured.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1873. The publishing house Anatiposi publishes historical books as reprints. Due to their age, these books may have missing pages or inferior quality. Our aim is to preserve these books and make them available to the public so that they do not get lost.