This report accompanies a collection of 210,266 volumes, predicted to be fiction, that researchers are encouraged to borrow for their own work. We divide the collection into seven subsets with different emphases (for instance, one where books written by men and women are represented equally, and one composed of only the most prominent and widely-held books). Comparing the pictures produced by these different subsets allows us to assess the resilience or fragility of recent quantitative arguments about literary history. Readers can also simply browse the report as a description of English-language fiction in HathiTrust Digital Library. This report describes a collection of 210,266 volumes of fiction drawn from HathiTrust Digital Library. 1 Our aim is to provide researchers greater access to English-language fiction in the Hathi collection and to advance understanding of the nature of the collection. Intellectual property laws keep us from providing the texts themselves, but researchers can use the volume IDs in our metadata tables to locate volumes in HathiTrust, or download extracted feature files that are openly available on the web. 2 In this report, we define seven samples of Hathi's English-language fiction that can be freely used by scholars for a range of purposes. We have offered seven distinct subsets because we do not think any single dataset will be universally valuable for all research questions. Some scholars are interested in literary production; others are interested in reception, and care mainly about widelyread works. Some scholars need a large collection of books. Others would prefer a smaller, manually-groomed list. So we selected volumes using a range of different criteria, and invested time in manually labeling some of the smaller lists. Through the process of manual annotation, we were able to illuminate some of the broad demographic contours of fiction over the last two centuries as represented in academic libraries. Thus, we see this report as ideally benefitting both practitioners of
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