The subtitle of Science for All does not accurately reflect its content. Rather than a scholarly exposition or critical analysis of “The Popularization of Science in Early Twentieth-Century Britain,” per se, this text instead presents an encyclopedic catalog and descriptive overview of the history and development of popular science books, magazines, and other print-based media produced in and around England during the first half of the last century. As such, the study represents an interesting and valuable hybridization of the methods and interests of the history of the book with those of the history of popular science.

In the introductory chapter, Bowler quite rightly points out that both the quantity and variety of popular science print materials produced during this specific time period raise intriguing questions about the continuity and discontinuity of the motivations and practices of Victorian popular science writers. Is it true, as some historians of popular science have long believed, that as science became increasingly professionalized during the nineteenth century, fewer and fewer of practitioners wrote about their work for general, popular audiences? For the immediate British context, at least, Bowler's research debunks this “myth.”

In the first of the book's three main parts, Bowler provides a descriptive overview of the general dynamics of the creation of early twentieth-century popular science texts and outlines the major themes and debates that most frequently motivated their production. Consciously keeping such material “to a minimum,” he briefly discusses aspects of contemporary science in relation to religious belief, materialism, idealism and moral values, public and professional enthusiasm for new discoveries, national pride and imperialism, as well as political and social reform movements. He then sketches out the “big picture” of how works of popular science communicated the most revolutionary developments in current theoretical science and shaped the worldviews of those who read them, explaining how public interest in atomic physics, cosmology, and relativity to a certain extent “eclipsed” that of mid-Victorian evolutionary narratives, until new discoveries and investigations into human origins, human nature, and applied medicine again attracted popular attention. Similarly, science texts that emphasized the immediate applicability and relevance of new technology and household and workplace “gadgets” found a ready audience, as did those that built upon and extended long-established connections between professional and amateur scientific investigations (e.g., astronomy and natural history, especially botany and fossil hunting).

Part 2 forms the heart and soul of this study of popular science publishing history. In the six chapters here, Bowler adroitly details how publishers gauged the various markets for popular science materials and the strategies they took in creating materials to meet potential purchasers’ needs and expectations. In Britain (although not across the Atlantic), the market for what he calls “serious popular science books” underwent substantial expansion after 1900. Publishers sought to address the general public's ignorance and fear of science with texts written by specialist experts who could write without the use of technical jargon and mathematics and possessed the literary skills needed to produce simplified but exciting narratives that could directly compete with those found in fictional adventure stories. Chapter 6 focuses on the most successful of these texts, the rare blockbusters that offered “grand narratives” about the religious or philosophical implications of new astrophysical discoveries and cosmological ideas (Arthur Eddington and James Jeans), discussions of humanity's place in the organic universe (H. G. Wells, Julian Huxley, G. P. Wells), or the possibilities for human action in social and political improvement for life on earth (Lancelot Hogben). As Bowler concludes with characteristic understatement: “It is interesting to note … how the very small number of science books that achieved sales into the multiple tens of thousands track the changing intellectual and political climate of the interwar years” (112).

Part 3 opens with a description of the personal motivations and career trajectories of the “big names” in popular science writing and supplies four individual case studies that represent the range of authorial experiences in this category: Julian Huxley, the classic case of a scientist turned science writer and public figure; J. B. S. Haldane, an elite scientist who maintained a strong research program while working as a public science writer; Arthur Keith, a popular writer trained in science and recognized as an expert by his audience, but whose credentials were “limited or outdated”; and J. Arthur Thomson, an academic scientist who “abandoned” research for educational pursuits, becoming “probably the best-known science writer in the country” for the first thirty years of the twentieth century, but now “largely forgotten” (233). Chapter 12 quickly surveys dozens of additional authors who wrote occasional pieces for magazines or book series, and many of whom (despite traditional notions to the contrary) were professional scientists working in academic and/or research settings. In the epilogue, Bowler extends his findings into the 1950s and beyond, briefly suggesting some points of continuity in radio, film, television, and comics, and, more significantly, extrapolating that the roots of the “myth” of disengaged scientists may well stem from this later period, when the “demand for self-educational materials was being whittled down by the expansion of formal education” (275).

Admitting early on that the “actual content of the texts is not the primary focus” here (13), Bowler's study, nonetheless, very usefully prepares the way for such research. Drawing upon his groundwork, other scholars may soon take up the many intriguing questions he does not engage: How did early twentieth-century popular science texts actually “popularize” science and why? Were best sellers the only “success” stories? Could a non–best seller “fail” as a profit-maker but succeed as public science? How did elite scientists adapt their traditional literary and classical training to the production of these texts in ways different from other practitioner-writers? With what results? How might the rise and fall of popular science writing and its incentives and disincentives among professional scientists relate to the later perception of a “two cultures” gap? And, should individual scientists’ experiences of professional disapproval of their popular science writing necessarily all be dismissed as “myth”?