Read Me

By Dwight Garner
Harper Collins, $26.99, 288 pages

Do you love to read? Do you love books? And do you know why? You may not realize it, or you may not even want to admit it, but part of the reason why you love to read and why you love books is because of the ads that promoted them. Publishers have put out ads, buying spaces and created eye-catching layouts in order to convince you to part with your hard-earned money.

In a book all its own, Read Me: A Century of Classic American Book Advertisements, Dwight Garner assembled more than 300 vintage book ad illustrations. Surveying these book ads of yore–10 decades, beginning in the 1900s–from Rudyard Kipling’s Kim to Barack Obama’s Dreams From My Father, you’ll discover how an entire book industry managed to gang up on you in order to keep you reading.

But more than simply a sales tool, Garner’s compilation, a hundred-year showcase of how publishers encouraged you, plodded you, pleaded with you, motivated you, threatened you, scared you, sweet-talked you—all for the purpose of making you buy a book, has turned into a collection of important and lasting literary documents.

Reviewed by Dominique James