I found this to be a fascinating read:
"Through My Telescope" by W.T. Hay (1935):
https://archive.org/details/ThroughMyTelescope
Will Hay was a well-known British music-hall and film entertainer in the 1920s and 30s, and he was also a very accomplished amateur astronomer. This book gives an insight into the state of amateur astronomy at around the same era as Hale and Hubble et all were "doing their stuff". (It's interesting to contemplate that the most distant known object when this book was written was "only" 140 million light years away.)