The two following sections of this article are based upon a list I have compiled, from all
available sources, of cheap reprint series of English classics from 1830 to 1906. At the
outset, the criteria of eligibility I have used should be made clear: (1) No hard-and-fast
test of "cheapness" has been adopted; but series designed chiefly for the specialist or
scholar (such as the Fuller Worthies Library and W. E. Henley's Tudor Translations), or
published at a price that was clearly beyond the reach of any but the well-to-do, have been
omitted. (2) What is a "classic"? Since value judgments are irrelevant to our present
purposes, perhaps the best definition is the one implied in the statement, attributed to the
publisher Stanley Unwin, that "it takes two generations to make a classic."[8] Obviously some books become
established classics even within the lifetime of their authors, as did the novels of Scott and
Dickens and the poetry of Byron and Tennyson, so that the demarcation between classics and
recent books of evidently lasting popularity is vague indeed. But since a line must be drawn
somewhere, series composed mainly of nineteenth-century titles have
been
excluded, except for series late in the century, by which time works surviving from the
generation of Wordsworth, Shelley, and Lamb had achieved, by any definition, the status of
classic. (3) Series expressly designed for schoolroom use have been excluded. (4) Series which
were virtually abortive, running to only a few titles and then vanishing, have also been
omitted.
The remarkable thing is that even with these severe restrictions, the list of cheap classic
reprint series for the period 1830-1906 runs to between ninety and one hundred. Even if we
make liberal allowance for series which appear more than once, under different names—for
the bibliographer, a source of exasperation which will be commented on in a little
while—the number would in any event exceed seventy-five: an average of one new classic
reprint series for every year in the period covered.
Some of the main cultural reasons for the proliferation of cheap classics after 1830 have
already been mentioned. In addition, a powerful economic factor encouraged publishers to
launch such series: the simple circumstance that most standard classics are in the public
domain and therefore are cheaper to reprint than works still in copyright. As the literacy
rate increased and the reading habit became more widespread, the demand for cheap books grew.
For various reasons, among them the tyranny of the circulating-library system and the higher
prices authors were getting for their work, books by contemporary writers were expensive and,
despite the developing practice of issuing 6s. reprints of successful
works some time after first publication, they remained so until the 1890's. Thus the hunger
for cheap reading matter was met, in part, by printing non-copyright works. In 1894 Augustine
Birrell observed that "you may buy twenty books by dead men at the price of one work by a
living man."[9]
The prices charged for volumes by "dead men" more or less followed the broad tendencies in
the publishing trade as a whole. Technological improvements—the use of steam-driven
presses; the cheapening of paper by the introduction of paper-making machines, the
substitution of esparto and chemical woodpulp for expensive rags, and the reduction and
eventual repeal of the paper tax; the invention of machine-made casings to replace hand-sewed
bindings—made the production of cheap books more and more rewarding. The low profit per
copy was compensated for by the enlarged quantity sold.
Down into the fifties and sixties, the usual price of a classic reprint was between 3s.6d. and 5s.. The lower
figure was that charged, for instance, for a volume in Bohn's Standard Library and British
Classics
(series begun in 1846 and 1853 respectively); the higher was the
price of most of the other Bohn libraries, which in the aggregate comprised one of the
century's two or three most famous reprint lists. Into this price range fell also the other
leading series of the period—Routledge's British Poets, Bell and Daldy's reissue of the
old Aldine Poets, Warne's Popular Poets and Chandos Library, Nelson's Illustrated Series of
the Poets, Nimmo's Cheap Edition of the Poets, and Macmillan's Globe Library. But already,
because the 3
s.6
d. price for non-copyright
reprints compared unfavorably with the shilling or two charged for "railway library" reprints
of copyright works, certain firms experimented with lower prices. The highly diversified
Cottage Library of Milner and Sowerby, a firm originally of Halifax but later of Paternoster
Row, sold for a shilling a volume. Robert Bell's Annotated Series of the English Poets came
out at 2
s.6
d. in 1854-57 and was reissued in
1864 in monthly volumes, 1
s. in paper and 1
s.6
d. in cloth. In the sixties Griffin's Universal Library and
Warne's Chandos Classics sold at 2
s. or less.
This trend toward lower prices was hastened by two spectacular free-for-alls in the reprint
trade. One was occasioned by the Waverley novels, the "Author's Edition" of which, issued in
1829, had initiated the 5s. or 6s. copyright
reprint. Cadell's "People's Edition," issued in weekly numbers (i.e., parts of volumes) in
1844, sold over 7,000,000 numbers of the novels alone, and 674,000 of the poems. After
Cadell's death in 1849, his Scott copyrights were bought by the firm of A. and C. Black, who
felt that there still was life left in the fabulous old property. For the "Railway Edition" in
1858-60 the price per volume was reduced to 1s.6d., and in 1862-63 it was further cut, to a straight shilling. At this point the novels
began to fall out of copyright, and other firms scrambled to pick them up. One publisher, John
Camden Hotten, brought out 6d. monthly volumes, each containing a
complete novel. Black responded with a competitively priced series, which had the extra
attraction of Scott's own revisions and notes—material that was still in copyright. But
within a few years (1873) even this sensationally low price was halved when John Dicks, a
reprint publisher whose activities deserve more study than the extant records permit, brought
out complete Waverley novels at 3d.
[10]
There was also the episode of the shilling Shakespeares. In 1864, the year of the poet's
tercentenary, John Dicks brought out the plays at two for a penny, and sold about 150,000
copies. Collecting them into a 2s. cloth-bound volume, he sold 50,000
more. Then, hearing that Hotten was planning a complete Shakespeare to sell at 1s., Dicks cut
the price of his own edition in half,
substituting wrappers for cloth, and sold 700,000 copies in the next three or four years. For
his shilling the Shakespeare lover got 1,020 pages of closely packed text and thirty-seven
woodcuts. In 1868 both Routledge and Warne issued editions at the same price.
[11]
In the seventies, the increased demand created by the schools, further economies in
production, and, we may suppose, the example of the irrepressible Dicks, who had followed up
his shilling Shakespeare with a 473-page illustrated Byron at 7d., a
Thomson at 6d., and about a dozen other classic authors at similar
reductions, pushed prices down still further. The Aldine Poets were reissued at 1s.6d., and in response Bell's Annotated Edition was
cut to 1s.3d. Later in the decade the Moxon
Library Poets, originally priced at 5s., were taken over by Ward, Lock
and Co., and, renamed the Standard Poets, sold at 1s.6d. in paper and 2s. in cloth.
In the eighties, houses like Routledge and Cassell, by then the titans of the reprint trade,
waged an all-out price war. Routledge's Universal Library, edited by Henry Morley, began in
1883 at a shilling a volume. Two years later Cassell hired Morley to edit the firm's new
National Library, issued weekly at 3d. in paper and 6d. in cloth. This proved the most popular classic series yet produced, and in quick
retaliation Routledge brought out their World Library at the same price. The bitterness of the
rivalry between these houses can be judged from a squabble they conducted in the
correspondence columns of the London Times for March 20, 22, and 23,
1886. Cassell vigorously objected to Routledge's issuing, in their World Library, the same
titles that had been announced for Cassell's National Library; Routledge retorted that they
had been forced to do so by similar "illegitimate competition" on the part of Cassell. Morley
managed to smooth the ruffled feathers of both his employers, but among other questions left
unanswered was that of the ethics involved in an editor's managing two rival series at once.[12]
The gradual but steady reduction in price during the second half of the century is
exemplified by the fact that Sampson Low's Choice Editions of Choice Books, originally
published in the late 1850's at 5s. a volume, were reprinted in the
seventies at 2s.6d., and again in the nineties
at 1s. (There was also a progressive shrinkage in size, from "small
quarto" to "small octavo" to "royal 16mo.") By the end of the century, one or two shillings or
a half-crown was the standard price for a full-length pocket classic bound in cloth. The
enterprising W. T. Stead, to be sure, undercut even the 3d. National
and World Libraries with his Masterpiece Library (1895), composed of weekly leaflets in two
series, the Penny Novelists and Penny Poets. But this venture, though initially successful,
was short-lived and set no precedent.
Our modern era of cheap-reprint publishing may be dated from 1906, the year with which the
present study ends. It was then that J. M. Dent, who had gained experience as the publisher of
the Temple Shakespeare, the Temple Dramatists, and the Temple Classics, fulfilled a
long-standing ambition by issuing Everyman's Library at 1s. a volume:
not one title at a time, but fifty. The frenzied editorial and production activity and
financial maneuvering necessary to issue a classic library on so grandiose a scale—a
"small army" of "British Museum foragers" and introduction-writers was employed, extended
credit was wheedled from papermakers—is a vividly recorded episode in British book trade
history.[13] But the larger
significance of the Everyman series (and in this connection, the World's Classics, begun a few
years earlier by Grant Richards but soon transferred to Henry Frowde, must also receive
honorable mention) is twofold: it reintroduced into reprint publishing the concern for
attractive format which had been largely neglected since the days of Whittingham and the
Chiswick Press, and it boldly departed from the conventionalized lists of classics, reprinting
for the first time scores upon scores of good books which had never before been available in
inexpensive editions.
