The full eleven volumes of The Story of Civilization, Will and Ariel Durant’s popular history of (mostly) the “Western world,” take up exactly 22” of shelf space, fitting perfectly on the top shelf of one of the unfinished pine bookcases I bought for my apartment during my VAP year at Tarleton State University.  Now those shelves are ranged against a wall of my bedroom (bookshelf creep in my house is real, y’all). There stand the Durants, serene and complete, as I make my way through their pages. In her indispensable book The Making of Middlebrow Culture, Joan Shelley Rubin situates Read more