We have established a collection of novels which reflects the wide range of literary tastes during the period 1900–1950. The collection consists of some 750 novels, most in early editions, by 229 different authors.

These were the best-sellers of their day and the lending library favourites, and they have the potential to reveal an enormous amount about readerships, attitudes to reading, and cultural life. They are rarely preserved systematically elsewhere. University libraries have never collected this type of fiction, while public libraries disposed of such books once they fell out of fashion.

The collection catalogue contains a wealth of data on the novels and can be searched by genre, subject and donor.

Working with members of our reading groups, we are now building enhanced catalogue records which hold even more data, including plot summaries and details of literary and cultural references within the novels. This enables more sophisticated and revealing searches of this unique research resource.

The collection is part of the Middlebrow Network.

Read the collection blog.

The project also produces a paper newsletter.