Mary Hammond is Professor of English and Book History at University of Southampton. She is a senior member of the management group of the Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project, 'The Reading Experience Database, 1800-1945'. She is the author of Charles Dickens's Great Expectations: A Cultural Life, 1860-2012 (Ashgate, 2015) and Reading, Publishing and the Formation of Literary Taste in England, 1880-1914 (Ashgate, 2006). She is also the co-editor of three books, including, Publishing in the First World War: Essays in Book Hstory (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

Jonathan Rose is William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of History at Drew University, USA. He is the author of Readers' Liberation (Oxford University Press, 2018), The Literary Churchill: Author, Reader, Actor (Yale University Press, 2014), which won the New Jersey Council for the Humanities Book Prize, and The Edwardian Temperament 1895-1919 (Ohio University Press, 1986). He is also the editor of The Holocaust and the Book: Destruction and Preservation (University of Massachusetts Press, 2001) and co-editor of A Companion to the History of the Book (Blackwell, 2007) and British Literary Publishing Houses, 1820-1965 (Gale, 1991).