In the midst of the current international economic crisis, there has been much harkening back to see what happened during the Great Depression. In this vein, National Public Radio recently broadcast a segment called "What Were People Reading during the Depression?" The people at NPR went through some issues of Publishers Weekly from the period to see what books were popular.
Though we often ponder how things have changed in the last seventy years, much seems to be the same in the area of popular reading-- chick lit, commentaries by noted politicians, vampire novels, and books about dogs, including a fictional biography of a dog named Flush, by Virginia Woolf of all people.
Oh, yes, and like today, public libraries back then recorded marked increases in their circulation statistics. So join the crowd. Come on into the library and borrow a book.
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