Ranging over the long history of American publishing, at its best this collection asks some some intriguing questions about the nature of literary popularity. How have we historically decided what a bestseller actually is? And just what is it that propels a book from the merely popular into the exalted realm of the bestseller? (Boy wizards or bondage with billionaires is not the only answer, it turns out). More contentiously for those who spend their time teaching literature to students, does popularity equate to literary importance? Should we be organizing earnest graduate symposia on the works of Danielle Steel? These are not new questions, of course, but the explicit aim here is to cast some serious analytical eyes on a wide range of texts (not just novels) that have traditionally been dismissed by the sections of the literary academy still in thrall to the Great Tradition. The result is an erratically mixed bag, but the better essays offer some first-class literary analysis and some useful new directions for the study of popular fiction.

It is a necessarily, if conspicuously, selective group of texts under consideration, but along the way there is a welcome historical spread as well as some unexpected discoveries. William Gleason's contribution on Timothy Shay Arthur's temperance classic Ten Nights in Bar-Room (1854) effortlessly integrates attention to print and visual culture with social history to read the various frontispieces that accompanied the book as indicative of the “multiple temperance rhetorics” at work within it. Hsuan Hsu takes an original line by tracking the re-publication history of Edward Everett Hale's short story “The Man without a Country” (1863), revealing its curious deployment at various moments of American nation-building. A frequent method of reclaiming popular culture for academic study has been to consider it as a valuable index of the political unconscious, and such approaches are found here in J. Michelle Coghlan's illuminating queer reading of Tarzan of the Apes (1912) and Ardis Cameron's account of the gender performances bound up both in Peyton Place (1956) and in its author, Grace Metalious. There is also some interesting treatment of other mega-selling novels, from Charlotte Temple (1794) and Ben-Hur (1880), to The Kite Runner (2003) and The Da Vinci Code (2003). Sarah Churchwell's contribution on evangelical schmaltz-peddler Nicholas Sparks is probably the most entertaining essay in the volume, gleefully sticking the boot in as she decries the right-wing Christian chauvinism that Sparks's pap insistently promotes. Enjoyably vituperative as it is, however, it raises a point about the rationale of the collection. Along with Rachel Ihara's essay on E. D. E. N. Southworth, Churchwell's entry raises the question why other serial bestsellers don't get a look in – and what separates one-hit wonders from those whose name on the cover is more important than the title. Is it simply a knack for an addictive formula that made Horatio Alger and Sidney Sheldon such bankable brands? What was it that kept people coming back for more Harold Robbins?

I have a more serious grumble as well. It is notable that this collection deals with the era of paper and print, yet acknowledges in its introduction that we are in a “vital moment” in the rapidly changing landscape of publishing, because as an example of the publisher's art this book does not bode well for the future. Virtually all of the essays are marred by frequent errors and typos (some of which are wince-inducing), and there is the frankly baffling bibliographical presentation that gives us all the citation details twice: once in a bibliography at the end of the essay and once again, straight afterwards, in endnotes. Certain works of criticism have their bibliographical details repeated five or six times during the course of the volume, and referencing material ends up accounting for almost eighty of the book's 370 pages. This is not just a pedant's lament, because these issues amount to something that feels, ironically, more like a rushed-out paperback than a lasting scholarly edition. Either it's a brilliant piece of immanent critique, or it's something that the editors and publishers needed to address far more carefully.