Reading for Pleasure: Working Women and the Popular Romance in Early Twentieth-Century Britain with Lise Shapiro Sanders (Bloomsbury, 2026)

particular.One of my favorite parts of the research for this book was spending time in both digital and physical archives and coming upon an image or an illustration that I would file away and think, "Okay, maybe one day I'll have the opportunity to reproduce this in the book." And I was so thrilled when my editor, Amy Martin, um, agreed to include thir- up to 30 images in the book.

So there are some really special gems here.

Um, I include a page from Vogue from 1918 that references and, um, shows images of, uh, dresses designed by Lucille, Lady Duff-Gordon, uh, Lucy Duff-Gordon, um, in the early 20th century, and she designed, uh, for her own couture business in London and in Paris and in the US, but she also designed for film, including for films that, um, were made, uh, were associated with the work of her sister, Eleanor Glynn.

So finding a page like that and obtaining permission to reproduce that image was really rewarding.

But I also include many popular, um, periodicals, pages drawn from those periodicals in the book, so advertisements for Eastern Foam Vanishing Cream or a column called In The Dressing Room from Picture Show, um, and photographs from, uh, studio, um, studio production files held at the Margaret Herrick Library at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, for example.

There's a really wonderful scrapbook in that collection that has two pages of images cut from magazines, uh, depicting Gloria Swanson and Rudolph Valentino in Beyond the Rocks.

So it was really exciting to come across that.

The challenging part of working on the book is that, uh, much of it was written during the pandemic, and so at certain moments I wasn't able to, uh, travel to the archives that I had initially looked at.

So I was able to fill in some of the gaps with, um, the increasing number of digital archives and digitized resources.

The Media History Digital Library, for example, has an incredible searchable database.

It's free online open access to an incredible archive of film related magazines, magazines related to broadcasting and media history.

So that's a really special archive, um, and I was able to draw on that.

And as well, there's a, a museum in England called the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum based at the University of Exeter, and they have an incredible archive as well that includes quite a bit of ephemera.

So cinema publicity programs, I reproduce and discuss, um, a page of a program, uh, from 1923.

So being able to include these as well as some stills from the films, um, was a really wonderful way of illustrating the visual culture of the period, which was a really important part to me of being able to represent the texture of the early 20th century romance.

Mm.

particular.One of my favorite parts of the research for this book was spending time in both digital and physical archives and coming upon an image or an illustration that I would file away and think, "Okay, maybe one day I'll have the opportunity to reproduce this in the book." And I was so thrilled when my editor, Amy Martin, um, agreed to include thir- up to 30 images in the book.

So there are some really special gems here.

Um, I include a page from Vogue from 1918 that references and, um, shows images of, uh, dresses designed by Lucille, Lady Duff-Gordon, uh, Lucy Duff-Gordon, um, in the early 20th century, and she designed, uh, for her own couture business in London and in Paris and in the US, but she also designed for film, including for films that, um, were made, uh, were associated with the work of her sister, Eleanor Glynn.

So finding a page like that and obtaining permission to reproduce that image was really rewarding.

But I also include many popular, um, periodicals, pages drawn from those periodicals in the book, so advertisements for Eastern Foam Vanishing Cream or a column called In The Dressing Room from Picture Show, um, and photographs from, uh, studio, um, studio production files held at the Margaret Herrick Library at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, for example.

There's a really wonderful scrapbook in that collection that has two pages of images cut from magazines, uh, depicting Gloria Swanson and Rudolph Valentino in Beyond the Rocks.

So it was really exciting to come across that.

The challenging part of working on the book is that, uh, much of it was written during the pandemic, and so at certain moments I wasn't able to, uh, travel to the archives that I had initially looked at.

So I was able to fill in some of the gaps with, um, the increasing number of digital archives and digitized resources.

The Media History Digital Library, for example, has an incredible searchable database.

It's free online open access to an incredible archive of film related magazines, magazines related to broadcasting and media history.

So that's a really special archive, um, and I was able to draw on that.

And as well, there's a, a museum in England called the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum based at the University of Exeter, and they have an incredible archive as well that includes quite a bit of ephemera.

So cinema publicity programs, I reproduce and discuss, um, a page of a program, uh, from 1923.

So being able to include these as well as some stills from the films, um, was a really wonderful way of illustrating the visual culture of the period, which was a really important part to me of being able to represent the texture of the early 20th century romance.

Mm.