Join us on Wednesday, October 11^th, 2023 The Mark Twain House & Museum welcomes Donna Harrington-Lueker to the Trouble Begins stage to talk about her book: Books for Idle Hours: Nineteenth-Century Publishing and the Rise of Summer Reading

From Newport to Bar Harbor and Long Branch to Chautauqua, 19th-century summer vacationers did more than promenade on boardwalks or bathe at the shore. Primed by a publishing industry seeking new markets–and authors seeking new readers–vacationers increasingly indulged in a phenomenon we today call “summer reading” or “the beach read.” Drawing on publishing records, readers’ diaries, and popular novels of the period, Donna Harrington-Lueker explores the beginning of summer reading as a seasonal publishing event that persists today.

About the Author: Author of Books for Idle Hours: Nineteenth-Century Publishing and the Rise of Summer Reading, Donna Harrington-Lueker is a professor of English, Communications and Media at Salve Regina University in Newport, Rhode Island, where her research interests include book history, the alternative and underground press, and women and gender studies. Her work has appeared in Nineteenth Century Studies, Journalism History, and the Keats-Shelley Journal and her book on 19^th-century summer reading has been cited in  the New Yorker, Yankee, the New England Quarterly, the Washington Post, CSPAN, and other media outlets.