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 a circulating library in Weymouth Dorset

 

which proclaims itself in connection with Mudie's and one from a library in Ryde (presumably the Ryde on the Isle of Wight - Union Street being one of the main streets in Ryde)

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.

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 bought from circulating libraries (remember in this case, possibly an extreme example, each volume came from a different library) and export them to Australia for resale...