Fisher T. Unwin and Victorian ‘Library’ Series paul mcgrane Victorian publishers were no slouches at marketing. One good example of this is the ‘library’ series: reprints of novels at a V ordable prices in branded series or libraries. This concept had its tentative beginnings in the 1830s with Colburn and Bentley’s Standard Novels series and was fully developed by the Irish firm of Simms and McIntyre whose Parlour Library was started in 1847 and went on to be developed successfully in Britain by other publishers. The gener- al environment that made this possible was of course the nineteenth century development of the novel as a literary form in tandem with the explosion in literacy and the growth of a popular demand for a V ordable literary entertainment. But the library concept specifi- cally took o V when the burgeoning railways and the growth of W.H. Smith bookstalls at stations combined to create a mass market for cheap reprints. The railway network was developed over a 50-year period from the first line opening in 1830. This revolutionised the distribution of daily newspapers which in turn prompted W. H. Smith to develop newspaper and book retailing on station platforms: they opened their first bookstall in Euston in 1848 and over the next fifty years developed the business to well over 1,000 prime sites. Just as railway stations and bookstalls grew together, so did the association of rail- ways with novel reading in the minds of the travelling public. The launch of Routledge’s Railway Library in 1848, modelled on the Parlour Library confirmed the association. Other publishers, scep- tical at first, soon followed suit with their own cheap ranges, often in the low cost/low quality ‘yellowback’ format, designed for impulse purchase, and with relatively short storylines to accommodate the length of a train journey. Profit margins at this end of the market were thin, but the library series concept helped keep costs down. Each volume in a library both implicitly and explicitly advertised
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