Editing Leisure (section)

==== Reading ====

As literacy and leisure time expanded after 1900, reading became a popular [[pastime]]. New additions to adult fiction doubled during the 1920s, reaching 2800 new books a year  by 1935. Libraries tripled their stocks, and saw heavy demand for new fiction.<ref>{{cite journal | author-link = Basil Cottle | last1 = Cottle | first1 = Basil | year = 1978 | title = Popular Reading And Our Public Libraries: The Abjured Prescription | journal = Library Review | volume = 27 | issue = 4| pages = 222–227 | doi=10.1108/eb012677}}</ref> A dramatic innovation was the inexpensive paperback, pioneered by [[Allen Lane]] (1902–70) at [[Penguin Books]] in 1935.  The first titles included novels  by Ernest Hemingway and Agatha Christie. They were sold cheap (usually sixpence) in a wide variety of inexpensive stores such as Woolworth's.   Penguin aimed at an educated middle class "middlebrow" audience. It avoided the downscale image of American paperbacks. The line signaled cultural self-improvement and political education. The more polemical Penguin Specials, typically with a leftist orientation for Labour readers, were widely distributed during World War II.<ref>Nicholas Joicey, "A Paperback Guide to Progress: Penguin Books 1935–c. 1951." ''Twentieth Century British History'' 4#1 (1993): 25–56.  [https://web.archive.org/web/20160421073425/http://tcbh.oxfordjournals.org/content/4/1/25.extract online]</ref>   However the war years caused a shortage of staff for publishers and book stores, and a severe shortage of rationed paper, worsened by  the air raid on Paternoster Square in 1940 that burned 5 million books in warehouses.<ref>Joseph McAleer, ''Popular Reading and Publishing in Britain: 1914–1950'' (1992).</ref>

Romantic fiction was especially popular, with [[Mills and Boon]] the leading publisher.<ref>Joseph McAleer, ''Passion's fortune: the story of Mills & Boon'' (1999).</ref>  Romantic encounters were embodied in a principle of sexual purity that demonstrated not only [[social conservatism]], but also how heroines could control their personal autonomy.<ref>Nicola Humble, ''The Feminine Middlebrow Novel, 1920s to 1950s: Class, Domesticity, and Bohemianism'' (2001).</ref><ref>Alison Light, ''Forever England: femininity, literature and conservatism between the wars'' (1991).</ref> Adventure magazines became quite popular, especially those published by [[DC Thomson]]; the publisher sent observers around the country to talk to boys and learn what they wanted to read about.  The story line in magazines and cinema that most appealed to boys was the glamorous heroism of British soldiers fighting wars that were perceived as exciting and just.<ref>Ernest Sackville Turner, ''Boys Will Be Boys: The Story of Sweeney Todd, Deadwood Dick, Sexton Blake, Billy Bunter, Dick Barton et al.'' (3rd ed. 1975).</ref>