About the blog: the short version
How many books published this year will be remembered a century from now? Probably not many.
From Franco Moretti’s book Graphs, Maps, Trees:
A canon of two hundred novels…sounds very large for nineteenth-century Britain…but is still less than one percent of the novels that were actually published: twenty thousand, thirty, no one really knows.
So, there are a lot of books that have been forgotten. And most of them probably weren’t very good, but I bet a lot of them were fun.
Redeeming Qualities 
I just wanted to drop a note real quick to let you know that I’ve so enjoyed the illustrations that you’ve scanned (or rather that Google scanned and you captured). Lots of fun!
very interesting, but I don’t agree with you
Idetrorce
Well, that’s specific.
Hi, i’m schoooler
I’m new to the forum and just saying hello.
I love your blog. I would like to highly recommend May Agnes Fleming books, specifically The Unseen Bridegroom or Wedded for a Week (available at Gutenberg). It’s a page turner (but don’t worry, it has a happy ending)!
Those are wonderful titles! I will definitely have a look.
Hi–
I spoke very briefly at the Book Bloggers Convention in NYC at the end of BEA, May 28th. We’re still reeling down here in Nashville and the need for books is great. I’ve partnered with a local agency to help with our book project, A Dry Read: New Books for Nashville. Please help if you can by blogging about the project and encouraging everyone you know to participate by sending us books! I’ve blogged about it on my page, http://www.rebeecabrothers.com. Please visit and pass along the news. I’d really appreciate it!
Thanks so much-
Becky Brothers
Reader With a Capital “R
Hello,
Do you mind if I link to your site from my fashion sites?
Thanks.
Kathy
You are welcome to. Would you mind giving me a link to your site? Thanks.
I am reminded of a sequence from childhood. I loved old books and their smell and the illustrations in them, but one day an old lady I met saw I was a reader and loaned me a book her son had loved when he was little. it was a cowboy adventure from the forties and I felt as if I were sentenced to death having to read this book. I tried so hard but it was so dull to me. I thought about her son and tried again. I was getting stomachaches about it, because I was supposed to return the book to her. My mother finally told me, “You are under no obligation to read that if you just can’t do it. Return the book and tell her you enjoyed it. She will never know and you won’t have to hurt her feelings.” But what was making me feel so bad the whole time was the thought of that long-ago little boy who really loved this book and I could not see why. Books are so much about the time and the place we are when we read them. I picture my dad clutching his copy of Quo Vadis on the streetcar, my mother voraciously reading Elsie Dinsmore novels in her drab apartment while her Mom worked. I like to think as long as we are talking about them, those books will not die.