The Mystery of the mid Victorian second hand book trade

 In the 1870s, the patrons of the Athenaeum library had a taste for sensation novels, including those by Mary Elizabeth Braddon.

Among those in the collection is a triple decker edition of the now almost forgotten Lost for Love, one of her less popular novels.

We have all three volumes, one with a Mudie's circulating library label, one with  a label from Pruddah's Royal Library, a circulating library in Weymouth, Dorset, pasted over the original Mudie's label and the third with a label from a library in Ryde also pasted over the original label.

I've not been able (so far) to trace the Ryde library, but the local history team at the Weymouth Museum have been helpful as regards Mr Pruddah.

The 1871 census shows that Mr Pruddah was a bookseller and printer in Weymouth who, like a lot of booksellers at the time, also ran a circulating library.

 

 

A little bit of digging shows that in the 1870's Mr Pruddah was advertising 'Books for Seaside Reading' in the local press. Annoyingly, the State Library of Victoria does not provide free access to the British Newspaper Archive, meaning I can search the index but not read the articles.

Mr Pruddah's library label proclaims itself in connection with Mudie's - exactly what his relationship with Mudie's was is not clear.

The third volume came from a library in Ryde (presumably the Ryde on the Isle of Wight - Union Street being one of the main streets in Ryde), again with a Mudie's label just visble underneath the Ryde library's label.

which is interesting as both Weymouth and Ryde were well known tourist resorts in the mid Victorian period.

Weymouth in the mid Victorian period

(source unknown)

In the mid Victorian period it was not uncommon for people summering in the town to join the local circulating library - this is probably why the circulating library charged half a guinea (10s6d or a little over fifty pounds or A$100 in today's money), half the subscription cost of Mudie's, knowing full well that most visitors would be unlikely to stay more than a month or two.

It also shows that these libraries were buying their books second hand from Mudie's as a way of keeping their costs down - or possibly they had an arrangement with Mudie's to be supplied with books that were returned after the summer season was over. I'm speculating wildly here, but such an arrangement could explain Pruddah's in connection with Mudie's claim on his labels.

However, what is more interesting from the Australian point of view is that it was obviously worth some second hand book dealer's time to package up books discarded by circulating libraries (remember in this case, possibly an extreme example, each volume came from a different library) and export them to Australia for resale...

(Many thanks to the Weymouth Museum and their volunteers for helping identify Mr Pruddah)