Bill Bell – författare

This is a book about readers on the move in the age of Victorian empire. It examines the libraries and reading habits of five reading constituencies from the long nineteenth century: shipboard emigrants, Australian convicts, Scottish settlers, polar explorers, and troops in the First World War. What was the role of reading in extreme circumstances? How were new meanings made under strange skies? How was reading connected with mobile communities in an age of expansion? Uncovering a vast range of sources from the period, from diaries, periodicals, and literary culture, Bill Bell reveals some remarkable and unanticipated insights into the way that reading operated within and upon the British Empire for over a century.

On the eve of World War II, Stewart Ferguson, a football coach from a tiny Arkansas agricultural college, decided the sport ought to played for fun. Under a bizarre contract that made no bones about whether they ever won a game, "Fergie" and his team of misfits piled into a rickety bus for a three-year barnstorming odyssey that would see the Wandering Weevils of Arkansas A & M befuddle their opponents with slapstick antics, become media and fan favorites, and earn the moniker "the Marx Brothers of Football."Born in Missouri and raised near Mitchell, South Dakota, this son of a stern Methodist minister was a larger-than-life personality with equally outsized opinions. Fergie left an indelible impression on generations of athletes, first in Louisiana, then at Dakota Wesleyan University and Arkansas A & M, and later as head coach at Deadwood High School, where he led the Bears to their first ever football conference championship.In Football for Fun, authors Bill Bell and Peter Oltchick draw on rich sources, including Ferguson's unpublished memoirs and interviews with former players and family, to bring this remarkable South Dakotan—and the often cutthroat world of high school and collegiate sports—to life.

The year 2019 marked the 300th anniversary of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. His novel was a huge success right away and was soon followed by bootlegs and translations. With the robinsonade, an independent genre of adventure literature was born. These contributions examine the novel within the context of bookselling history, provide new interpretations, and shed light on its multifaceted adaptation history up into the twenty-first century.