How can we re-create something as ephemeral as reading once the readers who interest us are dead? How can we reconstruct the lives and views of those who have left few traces in the historical record? These are the methodological problems at the center of Part One. Wealthy people with access to education and print media leave all sorts of evidence—diaries, letters, autobiographies, annotated personal libraries—of what they read and how they read it. However ephemeral the reading process may be, the writings of such readers give us representations of their reading selves. The social position of less...

The June 1931 issue ofBlack Mask, the most important publishing outlet for hard-boiled detective fiction between the wars, printed the following letter from a new reader:

I have just read my first copy ofBlack Maskand am writing to ask you why in the world you don’t use good paper. If you had been using good paper I would undoubtedly have started reading it years ago, but I never thought of doing so, because I took it to be just another one of “those” magazines that flood the newsstands which I never buy. I never dreamed that it...

“Crack! His fist landed squarely behind the bully’s ear and down he fell in a heap. Quick as a flash, he turned to face the other hold-up man who, with a fist closed, was right on top of him. Another thud and another limp form lay on the ground. Quivering with tense excitement, he stood over the two prostrate figures waiting for them to get up, but they did not move. Both were knocked cold.”¹ A fight scene from one of the many hard-boiled crime stories printed in Black Mask in the 1920s and 1930s? It certainly sounds like it....

These epigraphs come from a group of studies on the reading practices of ordinary people, conducted in the 1930s by scholars affiliated with Douglas Waples at the University of Chicago Library School.¹ What did people from various different walks of life want to read? What kinds of printed material were available to them, and at what prices? What reading skills did they have? What did people actually read? How were their choices influenced by their gender, age, education, income, and place of residence? How could librarians and adult-literacy workers better serve their needs?

Factory workers were of special concern to...

The hard-boiled detective seems an unlikely proletarian hero.¹ He is not a worker in the traditional sense, or even labor’s ally. Like the operatives of the most famous detective agency, the Pinkertons, who functioned largely as strikebreakers, the private detective is usually hired to protect the interests of those with significant property.² Nevertheless, if we take working-class readers seriously as active makers of meaning, we can hear the “mechanic accents” of this fiction and recognize its resonance with structures of feeling prominent in the early–twentieth-century worker’s life. The detective worked in a seedy neighborhood, took flak and interference from...

Merle Constiner’s “The Turkey Buzzard Blues,” which ran in the July 1943 issue ofBlack Mask, introduced Lute McGavock, a private eye who pays obsessively close attention to interior decoration. In one passage, McGavock studies a wealthy client’s library: “The mansion’s library reeked wealth. The powder-blue rug had a two inch nap. The walls were pressed leather and the rare colonial furniture gave off a lustrous, shimmering patina. There were alabaster figurines and oriental vases and busts of famous poets—but, as far as McGavock could observe, there were no books in the Layton library.”¹

This description demonstrates how wealth...

Dashiell Hammett’sRed Harvest, serialized in the late 1920s inBlack Mask, begins with a meditation on issues of class and language. “I first heard Personville called Poisonville by a red-haired mucker named Hickey Dewey in the Big Ship in Butte,” says Hammett’s narrator, the unnamed Continental Op. “He also called his shirt a shoit.¹ didn’t think anything of what he had done to the city’s name. Later I heard men who could manage their r’s give it the same pronunciation.¹ still didn’t see anything in it but the meaningless sort of humor that used to make richardsnary the thieves’...

The hard-boiled private eye Ben Shaley and his secretary, Sadie, graced the pages of the February 1934 issue ofBlack Maskin Norbert Davis’s “Red Goose.” Ben and Sadie were a fairly representative hard-boiled office duo, and their respective roles and personalities are nicely encapsulated in the following snippet of conversation:

“And my mother was saying just last night,” said Sadie righteously, “that she didn’t think this office was the proper place for a young girl to work. All these questionable people corning in and out all day long and you swearing and yelling at me all the time and”...