University of Virginia Library

The practices adopted in producing and marketing the cheap classic series often throw interesting light upon contemporary publishing theory and book-buying habits. The "library" idea—selling a frequently miscellaneous list of books under a generic title—reflects three familiar merchandising premises, now known as "package psychology,"

"brand name psychology," and "snob appeal" respectively. The first assumes that when a buyer owns a few volumes in a given series (the "package"), he is likely to want to acquire the rest. The second assumes that a reader who is already pleased with one or two books belonging to such-and-such a "library" will regard the name of that series as a guarantee of excellence. The third depends on the connotation of "library," a term which in the nineteenth century was frequently preceded by "gentleman's." Possession of a shelf or two of books prominently labeled "library" gave a man a pleasant feeling of added status, however humble his actual circumstances.

Closely associated with the series concept—they developed side by side in the eighteenth century—is the practice of publishing a book in instalments. From the publisher's standpoint, number- or part-issue not only has the advantages just attributed to the series but in addition, by spreading the book's cost to the purchaser over a period of time, makes it seem lower than it actually is. Many classic reprint series during the first two-thirds of the century—Cassell's various illustrated editions of literary masterpieces offer examples from the 1860's—were initially issued in weekly or monthly numbers at a few pennies each, with the completed volume becoming available immediately upon the end of the part-issue. This, of course, was exactly the procedure followed in the case of well-known Victorian novelists, from The Pickwick Papers on into the early seventies.

Frequently, too, the principle of publishing at stated intervals was applied to complete volumes, without the preliminary step of issuing in several separate numbers. Thus book publishers exploited the habit of regular purchase which became increasingly prevalent as cheap periodicals won the allegiance of the mass public. If a reader was used to buying a favorite paper each Saturday, why should he not acquire the custom of buying the latest issue in a certain reprint series at the same time? This was the reasoning behind the weekly or monthly issue of series like Walter Scott's Camelot Classics and Canterbury Poets, Routledge's Universal Library, and Cassell's National Library. Like the yellow-backs that had won immense popularity a generation earlier, the classic reprint series of the nineties, priced at 3d., and 1s., used the newsagents' stalls to reach a large public that never ventured inside a regular bookshop. Then as now (at least in certain outlets) classic reprints were displayed alongside soft-bound copyright reprints and mass-circulation weeklies.

In their anxiety to squeeze every possible farthing of profit from the plates and sheets of their classic titles, publishers used almost every conceivable merchandising device. Frequently an old series whose component

titles had not originally appeared at regular intervals—the Aldine Poets, Bell's English Poets, and Kent's (later Cassell's) Miniature Library of Poets are cases in point—was reissued in periodic volumes, fortnightly or monthly. Sometimes, as was true of Moxon's Old Dramatists, a series previously issued in complete volumes was reintroduced in numbers. Almost every successful series was reissued, sometimes more than once, in cheaper format. Occasionally the process was reversed, and a cheap series (for instance, Bell and Daldy's Pocket Volumes) was transmuted into a more expensive one (the Elzevir Series) "so as to be more suitable for Presents and School Prizes."[14]

Some series had relatively brief lives, at least in the catalogues of their original publishers. They strutted their brief moment on the stage, heralded by blaring publicity, and then were heard no more. In 1866, for example, Frederick Warne proclaimed the debut of the Clydesdale Classics, "Marvels of Standard Cheap Literature, without a parallel as yet in English Publishing"; their first number, a Pilgrim's Progress, offered eighty pages of original colored designs, new type, and fine paper—all for 6d. "One Hundred Thousand of this elegant Pocket Edition is all that can be produced this year," Warne advertised.[15] But the supply must have exceeded the demand, for nothing more is recorded of the series.

Series with longer lives often were transferred from firm to firm. Sometimes they retained their baptismal name, as did the Aldine Poets, acquired after Pickering's death in 1854 by Bell and Daldy and later inherited (1873) by their successors, George Bell and Sons. Still others suffered a name-change every time they passed to a new house, and a few appeared simultaneously, under different names, in the catalogues of two or more firms—the result of the practice, not infrequent in that era, of a "publisher-jobber [selling] other firms' sheets over his own imprint."[16] Even libraries retained by the original publisher were not exempt from rechristening whenever sales needed a boost. The firms that purveyed serial shockers to the pavement market often did the same thing when they started a fresh issue of an old favorite, and the practice is hardly extinct today, when individual soft-bound reprints sometimes bear titles different from those under which the hard-cover edition appeared.[17]

Renamed series and series that led double or triple lives under the

auspices of different firms are the bibliographer's despair. As he attempts to establish their provenance and history from the published records of the trade, he feels as if he were reviewing a stage army: the same lists of titles turn up again and again under different series designations. For example, unless the firm's archives were painstakingly examined, it would be an almost hopeless task to disentangle and properly label the various series of reprints which the Edinburgh house of Nimmo advertised over two or three decades. Nimmo seems to have made a specialty of buying up odds and ends; and he displayed remarkable energy and ingenuity in dressing his wares in new bindings and marshaling them under new series titles. There is a striking family resemblance between his Cheap Edition of the Poets, Red Line Editions (later retitled Popular Edition of the Works of the Poets), and Crown Library, all published in the sixties. Nimmo's Library Edition of the British Poets was a reissue of George Gilfillan's British Poets, an expensive series originally published by Nimmo's townsman, J. Nichol. In 1870 the sheets of this edition were remaindered to a third owner, Cassell, who sent them forth again in 6d. parts as Cassell's Library Edition, and in cloth-bound volumes as Cassell's Three-and-Sixpenny Edition.[18]

Or take the case of Moxon's Popular Poets, first issued about 1870 at 3s. 6d., then presented in more expensive formats as Moxon's Royal Poets (7s. 6d.) and Moxon's Library Poets (5s.) As if membership in three separate series were not enough, the collection was subsequently acquired by Ward, Lock, who reissued it in cheaper form as Ward, Lock's Standard Poets, and in turn by Collins, who converted it into the Grosvenor Poets.

After coping with genealogies like these, one is grateful for the comparative simplicity of concurrent series within a single house. There is no problem, for instance, with Warne's five series of the 1860's and '70's: the Chandos Classics, which eventually extended to over 120 titles, were a cheaper edition of works printed earlier in the Chandos Library of prose writers and the Chandos Poets; and the Lansdowne and Arundel Poets were simply alternate formats, the one cheap, the

other expensive, for certain titles in the Chandos Poets. In 1882 Warne published Longfellow's Poems in no fewer than four series—the Chandos Poets, the Chandos Classics, the Arundel Poets, and the Lansdowne Poets. Warne, indeed, was one of the most resourceful of all Victorian publishers when it came to getting the maximum mileage out of his stock of standard authors. In addition to the series already named, in the eighties he offered a dozen or so titles (all of them long familiar to readers of his advertisements) in the Imperial Poets, and at the same time a virtually identical list in the Albion Poets. The latter genus was divided into several species according to binding: 3s. 6d. cloth gilt, 5s. imitation half-roxburghe, 7s. 6d. limp French morocco, 10s. 6d. full calf.

This diversification of binding styles, either under a single series heading or under a new name for each style, was common Victorian practice. Many, if not most, series were offered in both paper and cloth, and some also were available in at least one kind of leather. In an age when middle-class taste favored highly ornate household objects, more than a few publishers regarded the printed sheets of a classic work primarily as something around which to sew or glue a pretty binding. Nimmo, for instance, devised new bindings every season; between 1870 and 1873 his Popular Edition of the Works of the Poets could be had in (among others) "Cloth Extra, Gold and Colours," "Morocco Extra, with novel prismatic effect and floral silk centre," and "entirely new cloth binding, with beautifully illuminated imitation ivory tablet on side."

Elaborate bindings and lavish internal "embellishments" of course tended to remove such books from the cheap-reprint category. But even among reprints whose price was unquestionably low, the quality of physical makeup varied widely. The Aldine Poets set a high standard of typography and general design that was seldom equalled until the advent of J. M. Dent and his Temple and Everyman series. It would be hard to say which series, of the several scores published, marked the nadir of cheap book production. The 6d. plays and novels of John Dicks would be a strong contender for the distinction, but numerous other series would be in the running. Strenuously small (and often badly worn) type; thin margins, sometimes crowded with legends advertising tea, baking powder, or patent medicines; poor paper; paper wrappers; flimsy sewing—these were too often the result of the pressure to cut prices. Whatever aesthetic satisfaction the impecunious reader derived from his purchase came from the text alone, not from the volume's appearance.

Though some series were designed for parlor display and thus were of a size that would catch the eye, the majority were in small octavo or 12mo., or even as tiny as 32mo.—true "pocket books."[19] Not only were these smaller sizes, requiring less paper and binding material per volume, more economical to produce; they were best adapted to the living habits of the period. Popular books had to be portable, for an ever-increasing amount of reading was done in railway carriages and buses, and they had to be small enough to find room in the cramped households of the lower-middle and working classes, who were coming more and more to constitute the bulk of the reading audience. The day of the folio and quarto was over.

The quantity and quality of text in these series varied as greatly as did the format. Some series provided complete texts of the works described on the title-page, while others provided only selections or truncated texts, a fact that was often suppressed in advertisements and on title-pages. A buyer of Spenser's "works" in one volume, for example, was not likely to acquire the whole of the Spenser canon thereby. A reprint publisher especially notorious for his cavalier handling of texts was Thomas Tegg, who, according to some of his contemporaries, included only as much of a given classic in a volume as the paper set aside for the job permitted. Tegg was scarcely unique in this respect. While they may not have been so completely lacking in concern for textual accuracy and completeness as to give rise to trade legends, most publishers were content to reprint whatever version of a masterpiece came to hand, however corrupt or fragmentary the text might be. Even if accuracy had been prized as highly in Victorian times as it is today—at least among scholars—the economics of the cheap reprinting business made careful scrutiny of the printer's copy, and subsequently of proofs, a dispensable luxury. Editorial supervision in the modern sense was rare, except in the interests of bowdlerization. Money laid out to oblige Mrs. Grundy was a thoroughly justifiable business expense.

The contents of the various series, if subjected to close statistical analysis, would provide an interesting, if not always dependable, index of Victorian literary taste and of the comparative reputations of classic authors in Victorian times. The relative frequency with which various standard works were reprinted, as well as the decline in availability of

certain classics and the rise of others, can be documented by studying the advertisements in the trade journals and the lists of reprints-in-series in the Reference Catalogue and Appendix B of the cumulated volumes of the English Catalogue. But one cannot assume that the reprint libraries were an unerringly faithful barometer of the literary climate, the publishers readily responding to changes in the critical and popular standings of classic authors. Practical considerations, such as the publishers' desire to get their full money's worth out of their investment in plates and stock, may well have caused certain old standbys, such as Dryden, Pope, Goldsmith, Johnson, and Cowper, to overstay their welcome. Accessibility, in short, must not be equated with popularity. The fact that Author A was represented in 75 percent of the reprint series current at a certain date, while Author B was in only 10 percent, does not prove that Author A actually stood that much higher in contemporary esteem. Thus it is quite posssible that by artificially prolonging the dominance of certain classic writers in the reprint libraries, publishers not only impeded the normal fluctuations of taste but left us a record of popular preference which is easily misinterpreted. (Future historians of a classic author's reputation in the nineteenth century, take note.) However, until much more information on the inner workings of the English book trade is available, the problem of how far the reprint publisher was responsive to public taste, and how far he influenced it, must remain a matter for speculation.

The selection of titles for a classic reprint series and the preparation of introductory matter often gave employment to well-known men of letters, just as they do today. Robert Bell consulted Leigh Hunt when planning his Annotated Edition of the English Poets; it was Hunt who encouraged Bell to stray from the beaten path and include some little-known poets in his collection.[20] After Bell and Daldy acquired the Aldine Poets, they called upon men like Lord Houghton, W. M. Rossetti, Buxton Forman, and Edward Dowden to prepare new titles for the series. The individual volumes in Macmillan's Globe Edition, one of the few relatively authoritative series, were edited by men of the stature of David Masson, F. T. Palgrave, and A. W. Ward. William Michael Rossetti was the general editor of Moxon's Popular Poets during the brief period before Ward and Lock took over the series. He specifically states in his autobiography that revision or emendation of the text was not part of his job.[21] The Camelot and Canterbury series, issued by Walter Scott, a wealthy Newcastle dock and railway

contractor and colliery owner who turned publisher in his late fifties, were edited in part by the self-taught collier-poet Joseph Skipsey, the novelist William Sharp, and Ernest Rhys. But perhaps the brightest galaxy of "name" editors was the one associated with Kegan Paul's Parchment Library, begun in 1880. It included Dowden, Edmund Gosse, Andrew Lang, Richard Garnett, Mark Pattison, Austin Dobson, and George Saintsbury.

Until Ernest Rhys became the living symbol of Everyman's Library, the single figure most conspicuously associated with cheap classic reprints in the public mind was the critic and lecturer, Henry Morley. His son-in-law and biographer, Henry Solly, implies that his fame as editor of various reprint series somewhat embarrassed his family. "There seemed real danger," wrote Solly, "that he would be remembered after his death only in connection with his services for the diffusion of cheap literature"—a fear which proved not unfounded.[22] Punch praised him thus, in lines whose sentiment is more to be admired than their execution:

Comment in trade journals suggests that the National Library, which Morley edited for Cassell, had the greatest success of any classic-reprint series down to that time. As Solly said, "At a cost not exceeding the gas or water rate, a constant supply of good literature could be 'laid on' to any house in town or country, and a circulation varying

from 50,000 to 100,000 copies for each volume attests the popular appreciation of the enterprise. Letters, which Professor Morley greatly prized, came from the far West in America, and from other lands on the borders of civilization, expressing gratitude for these cheap and handy volumes, which seemed almost as ubiquitous as Palmer's biscuits."[24]