What Middletown Read
Through a stroke of good fortune, Frank Felsenstein, no Reed D. Voran Professor of the Humanities Emeritus at Ball State, uncovered a unique cache of surviving library records that document the books each borrower took from the local public library in Muncie—the city featured in the famed “Middletown” sociological studies—for a period of approximately 10 years. Historians of print culture in the U.S. have long sought this sort of evidence of reading behavior among ordinary people. This extraordinarily rich body of materials, which includes demographic data drawn from city directories and census records as well as bibliographic information collected for each title in the MPL collection, provides an opportunity to explore the sociology and cultural history of the book in the United States in unmatched depth.
The Center for Middletown Studies and Ball State University Libraries collaborated with the Muncie Public Library to convert these records into an online, searchable database that contains details on more than 6,000 patrons, 11,000 books, and 175,000 circulation transactions for the period from 1891-1902 (with one gap). Construction of the What Middletown Read database was made possible by financial support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, and Ball State University. This rich resource, made publicly available in 2011, has received wide use by students, scholars, and members of the public over the past decade. In 2015, Felsenstein and Center Director James Connolly published What Middletown Read: Print Culture in an American Small City (Massachusetts). That same year, the National Endowment for the Humanities named What Middletown Read as one of its NEH Essentials, fifty “top grant projects from the NEH’s history” that “have shaped what we know about ourselves and our world.”
The success of What Middletown Read positioned the Center to expand its research on the history of print culture. In 2013, the Center received NEH funding for a conference to bring together scholars from around the world to consider the historical circulation and consumption of printed material. The result was Print Culture Histories Beyond the Metropolis, a volume of essays published by the University of Toronto Press in 2016. The Center received an additional grant to hold the Library Circulation Histories Workshop (LINK), which will take place using a virtual format in 2021.