In nineteenth-century England, circulating libraries allowed subscribers to borrow books for an annual fee. English professor Troy Bassett of Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne has created At the Circulating Library: a "biographical and bibliographical database of nineteenth-century British fiction" spanning from 1837 through 1901. This database, which is hosted by the Victorian...

The Poetry Foundation has a myriad of wonderful resources for the lover of quatrains, hyperbole, or iambic pentameter. This corner of its site houses audio and podcasts in one convenient locale. The Poetry Off the Shelf section contains recent conversations with poets Edward Hirsch, Nathaniel Mackey, Robert Duncan, and others. Moving on, the Poem of the Day features a number of lovely works, such...

AustLit aims to "be the definitive information resource and research environment for Australian literary, print, and narrative cultures." The project, headed by the University of Queensland, is a collaboration between researchers from a number of Australian universities and the National Library of Australia. Launched in 2000, AustLit offers a rich and authoritative collection of resources for...

The Australian War Memorial site has worked diligently over the past several years to add to their rather nice online collections, and this particular addition is quite a find. It consists of excerpts from diaries from those who served Australia during the First and Second World Wars, the Korean War, and in the South East Asian conflicts. The homepage for these diaries includes a brief...

The New York Public Library's online collection of prints and photographs from the Berg Collection of English and American Literature is comprised of portraits of 120 authors from the 1860s to the 1920s. The Bergs originally obtained the photos when acquiring books and manuscripts, but eventually bought or otherwise acquired other author portraits. Visitors can put a face to a name of those...

Created by Mary Kelly and Holly Hibner, two public librarians in Michigan, the Awful Library Books website exists in part to showcase books that have been weeded, or removed, from library collections. That is, titles that at one time seemed like a good acquisition, but have become outdated or are no longer relevant. Some examples of this type of title currently on view include "Antiques for Men,"...

The Baldwin Library Digital Collection at the University of Florida includes over 2500 fully digitized children's books, published in the United States and Great Britain between 1850 and 1900 (selected from more than more than 100,000 in the Baldwin Library of Historical Children's Literature, dating from the mid-1600s through 2007). Although baby-boomers may be disappointed in not finding their...

The web makes finding reference works rather simple, and Bartleby.com has been kind enough over the past few years to put more than a healthy offering of their publications online at no cost to voracious readers and the generally curious. On this corner of their site they have brought together over one hundred popular nonfiction works. Visitors can meander through "The World's Famous Orations",...

English teachers and lovers of English prose, drama, and poetry will find much to appreciate with this English Literature resource. Hosted by BBC Bitesize, the site boasts invaluable resources for understanding the various elements of many classic works of literature, all in accordance with the GCSE, a qualifying exam for secondary education students in England, Northern Ireland, and Wales....

With a clever name and comforting (and challenging) content, the Ilkley Literature Festival's Be All Write portal is a wonderful resource for literature enthusiasts. The festival, an annual, multi-day event that takes place just outside of Leeds, England, brings together book lovers in person. But, amidst the pandemic, the portal invites readers and writers from around the world to convene online....