Rattling good reads

They rub shoulders and brush spines in a new and probably unique collection of popular fiction at Sheffield Hallam University: a novel archive of novels from the first half of the 20th century, the sort that literary snobs have sneered at for decades and that high-minded public libraries have chucked in skips.

Some of the authors are long out-of-print and even-longer-forgotten; others (Somerset Maugham, JB Priestley, Winifred Holtby, HG Wells) are still familiar. And there are plenty of famous titles: Grand Hotel, Lost Horizon, The Scarlet Pimpernel, Tarzan of the Apes, No Orchids for Miss Blandish. Books once sold at station bookstalls or loaned by private circulating libraries; the Joanna Trollopes and Danielle Steels of their day .

So which one? Well, there's a lot of middlebrow stuff here, so why not

the middle book on the middle shelf of the middle bookcase? Sandwiched between CS Forester and John Galsworthy is a range of novels by Gilbert Frankau (1884-1952) which once sold in their tens, no, their hundreds, of thousands.

I pull out Peter Jackson, Cigar Merchant, an almost wilfully uncompelling title. "Very interesting," enthuses Dr Mary Grover. "About a lone man battling against huge social and economic pressure. About a man who loses his libido because of shell-shock in the First World War... which would have struck a chord with a lot of people, I imagine."

Dr Grover, an English lecturer at Sheffield Hallam, has a passionate interest in popular fiction and is one of the driving forces behind the Readerships and Literary Cultures Special Collection, which she hopes will be used in research projects into Sheffield's reading habits. She must be one of the few academics to have read Peter Jackson, based partly on Frankau's own wartime experiences in the trenches and his peacetime experiences in the cigar trade. It went through 20 editions in the three years after first publication in 1919, was enthusiastically reviewed by Punch ("I don't recall another War novel that is so convincing"), and is "respectfully dedicated to the average man and woman in the street".

It's the taste of those average men and women that interests Mary Grover. It spurred her, together with her husband Derek and book-browsing friends, to trawl jumble sales, charity shops and second-hand bookshops for the volumes which largely make up the Sheffield collection.

In some shops, they had a special section of their own, generally on the lines of "Dusty, Fusty & Musty". In pubs where old books are bought by the yard to lend "atmosphere", the collectors could help themselves, as long as they handed over replacement books of the same size.

Generations of critics have queued up to lob abuse at such popular fiction. George Orwell was famously dismissive in an essay about working in a London second-hand bookshop in the 1930s. Who were the best-sellers, he asked. Priestley? Hemingway? Wodehouse? "No, Ethel M Dell, with Warwick Deeping a good second and Jeffery Farnol, I should say, third."

Dell, a writer with a gift for lurid melodrama, is best remembered for The Way of an Eagle, a key volume in the Sheffield collection which went through 34 editions between 1912 and 1916. Orwell sourly speculated that her books were "read solely by women... (though) not, as one might expect, merely by wistful spinsters and the fat wives of tobacconists".

It was Warwick Deeping who lured Mary Grover into this shadowy world. She had read Dornford Yates, Mazo de la Roche and Georgette Heyer (as well as Dickens and Thomas Hardy) at boarding school, but as an adult became interested in popular fiction only when a fellow academic lent her one of Deeping's 68 novels. The most successful of them, Sorrell and Son, ran to 41 editions, has been translated into 13 languages and was adapted for television in the 1980s.

Like Ethel M Dell, Deeping was a target for critics, who dismissed him as reactionary, mediocre and crude. As she explored his works (and wrote a book about him), however, Mary Grover was struck by their variety and discovered a more radical side to him, dealing uncompromisingly with such controversial issues as cross-dressing, alcoholism , euthanasia and venereal disease.

"The books reflected the anxieties of their time, about the little man and the big society, the little guy who is doing his best," she says. "Not all the books in this collection are wonderful, but they are culturally significant."

Her colleague Professor Chris Hopkins adds: "Some people wouldn't call this a literary collection at all, but a sub-literary collection. Many of these books are worth studying for historical reasons. If you really want to know what a lot of people were thinking about in the Twenties and Thirties, they're invaluable. If you don't look at what's forgotten, you don't get the whole story."

Prof Hopkins is head of Sheffield Hallam University's Humanities Research Centre, which supports research into English and History and has set up the collection in partnership with the university library. He likens the project to "keeping rare species alive up the Amazon", as part of a debate about "what books are good for you and what books are bad for you".

Popularity and accessibility can be a handicap to critical approval: "Middlebrow is very often a term of abuse, to put people in their place." At which we spend an interesting half-hour debating where "middlebrow" ends and "lowbrow" and "highbrow" begin and whether middlebrows can be upper-middle and lower-middle. We reach only middling conclusions.

In an ideal world, the collection's quiet library corner would be equipped with a winged armchair, an occasional table with a chenille tablecloth, and perhaps a discreet decanter of sweet sherry to help recreate the period atmosphere.

For the moment, though, the books are the thing, together with an on-line catalogue of such long-forgotten titles as Matorni's Vineyard by E Phillips Oppenheim, The Two Mackenzies by W Pett Ridge, The Fulfilment of Daphne Bruno by Ernest Raymond, Rhododendron Pie by Margery Sharp, and Olivia in India by O Douglas (part of the Keep-You-Happy Books series) . I pull out The Blue Lagoon by H De Vere Stacpoole. "A best seller," says Mary Grover. "About incest."

And so to Gilbert Frankau's Peter Jackson, Cigar Merchant. It describes "the dour, stark spirit of Britain" during the First World War and the sufferings of the Tommies.

Frankau can summon heroic prose: "Though they grumbled, they never weakened; though the song died on their lips, and the jest from their eyes, neither their hearts nor their limbs flinched from the task appointed." But he can do better than that. The fragile mental state of the shell-shocked hero is described with alarming vividness: "There was the Fear of the Future, in which the future held no hope beyond the present, and Fear of the Present, when the present held no hope save the future."

It has an anger, power and compassion worthy of JB Priestley, another writer often dismissed as middlebrow. So with blunt Yorkshire resource he came up with the slogan: "Don't be either a highbrow or a lowbrow. Be a man. Be a broad-brow." They should put that up over the collection.

Readers with books suitable for the collection should contact Mary Grover at [email protected]