| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

In the Company of Books: Literature and Its "Classes" in Nineteenth-Century America. By Sarah Wadsworth. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2006. xvi, 278 pp. Cloth, $80.00, ISBN 1-55849-540-1. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 1-55849-541-X.)

To enhance knowledge of the business side of U.S. letters between the 1850s and the Spanish-American War, Sarah Wadsworth focuses attention not on readers but on readerships as forecasted, shaped, and put to use by high-ranking members of the U.S. world of letters. Attention to readerships could seem the natural object of histories of literature, yet Wadsworth is among the first to scour the archives for information about the process by which fiction lovers clump into distinctive, if often overlapping, consumption-cohorts. In six case studies of cohort formation, In the Company of Books helps "demonstrate how market segmentation effectively led to new roles for the book in American culture, the innovation of literary genres, and new relationships between books and readers" (p. 9).

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