Bookcover artwork from 1895

 

Up at the Athenaeum, I've been pressing on with the guerrilla cataloguing exercise, and I came across this rather battered 1895 edition of Dorothy Forster by Walter Besant - popular in his time for his historical romances and more or less forgotten now.

However, the book is interesting for two reasons - the use of colour on the cover and the fact that this is an Australian edition published by George Robertson & Co.

The history of Australian publishing in the 1890's is confusing with two George Robertsons, one of whom at one time worked for the other, but were not related to each other.

The elder George Robertson was the erstwhile partner of Samuel Mullen. Melbourne based, he was primarily a bookseller although he did begin to publish books. The younger George Robertson later went into partnership with David Angus to found Angus and Robertson, which was Sydney based.

This book is published by the Melbourne based publisher by arrangement with the UK publishers.

This is interesting because, at a time when most books in Australia were imported, George Robertson and Co were printing editions of popular novels in Australia, probably from the original stereotype shipped from England to save the cost of resetting the type.

The need to ship the stereotype from England may explain why one or two of the George Robertson reprints have publication dates a year later than the British originals.

The other interesting use is that while most of the books I catalogued today had fairly standard boring late Victorian covers, this one has a colour lithograph stuck to the cover of the book, in much the same way we might expect an illustrated cover on a paperback today.

Not all Victorian publishers listed the date of publication on the title page of their books. Most did, some didn't, and some did when they felt like it. Infuriatingly, while some other books republished in Australia by George Robertson had a publication date, this book didn't.

In an attempt to track down the publication date I searched ebay, as a lot of book collectors but and sell there,   where I turned up a copy of the same book with the same cover illustration, but published by Chatto and Windus in London in 1895.

The Chatto and Windus edition was described as a yellowback, a term I had not come across before. I'd come across cheap paperbound books such as in this copy of An African Millionaire while documenting Lake View House for the National Trust

but I'd never come across the term 'yellowback' before.

Yellowbacks, sometimes called 'railway novels', were cheaply produced mass market books that filled the role of paperbacks in the nineteenth century. Cheaply produced, few survive, and while the early editions had plain covers, later on it became the norm for them to have an illustrated, often lithographed cover.

Unlike clothbound books from the nineteenth century, few yellowbacks have survived due to the cheap materials used in their manufacture. The copy of Dorothy Forster in the Athenaeum's collection is a sort of half way house with a conventional binding but the cover is made of thin cardboard and the spine, which is detaching, is made of something resembling cartridge paper.

Other cheap books from the nineteenth century,  shilling shockers like the one above, are even more cheaply made with heavy gauge paper covers and metal staples used in place of a conventional binding, which can pose conservation problems...

(I have also come across the steel staple method in old Penguin and Pelican books produced in England during the Second World War. I’m guessing that the use of staples was to both reduce production costs and save on materials.)

Mullens circulating library

 Up at the Athenaeum, the guerilla cataloguing approach continues to work well, and I think we have a methodology that works.

And it continues to throw up items of interest, yesterday's discovery being a book with a Mullen's circulating library label on the cover.

Unfortunately, the label is so badly worn it's difficult to read - at first I mistook it for a Mudie's label due to the similarity of design, but playing about with the image improved matters a little

and one can make out the words Mullen's, Collins Street, Melbourne - the rest is illegible. I am of course hoping to find a better example.

Samuel Mullen was an Irish bookseller who migrated to Australia and set up a high class circulating library in Melbourne in conscious imitation of Mudie's in London in 1859 at the end of the gold rush era when the city was awash with money.

The circulating library, combined with a bookshop, was very successful, and served as centre for intellectual life in the city. There's a rather nice woodblock engraving of the inside of Mullen's in 1889 - unfortunately it's not public domain, but it can be found online, including via this link.

So, how did a book from Mullen's library end up at the Athenaeum?

Well, I was looking at the State Library of Victoria catalogue for material related to Mullen's and I stumbled across this

Evidently Mullen's periodically sold off withdrawn stock from the circulating library, and the Athenaeum, or more likely via an intermediary, bought second hand books from Mullen's and elsewhere to add to the collection.

This can also possibly explain why books from Mudie's have turned up at the Athenaeum - that there was someone who imported second hand and remaindered books from the UK for sale in Australia.

Unfortunately the Athenaeum accession registers and minute books from the 1860s and 70s are missing so it's not possible to check to see who the Athenaeum was buying books from.

It may, or may not, be significant that both the Mudie's and the Mullen's stickers are on copies of less well known Mary Elizabeth Braddon novels dating from the 1860's - having identified a demand for Mary Elizabeth Braddon's novels perhaps the Athenaeum was trying to buy as many copies as they could and stretching their budget by buying second hand ...

Guerilla cataloguing continued

 

Using Librarything's Overcat works well, but it's not perfect, occasionally failing to find books, even though they turn out to be in other user's collections, I'm guessing because some people have created manual entries for the books concerned from scratch when they couldn't find them via a catalogue search.

However, when I can't find a book, I've been carrying out a manual search of both the British Library and National Library of Scotland catalogues, and then creating a manual entry based on their data and noting the data sources used in the comments section.

Ideally I'd simply rerun the Overcat search from Library Thing against the British Library, but LibraryThing's link to the British Library catalogue is unreliable, so searching manually it is for the moment.

Given that I would guess that around 90% of the pre 1950's items in the collection were sourced from the UK, even though the book in question may have originally been published in the USA, so, so far there's no need to check the Library of Congress catalogue.

However, working with the books directly has benefits - for instance the Treloar's hygenic library label at the top of this article came from a 1930s edition of a Max Brand Western novel, suggesting that perhaps the Athenaeum was sometimes buying books second hand to add to their collection.

It also shows that circulating libraries were still a thing in early 1930s Australia - post depression money was tight and being imported, books were relatively expensive. (Hygenic libraries were circulating libraries that made a point of sterlising books between loans, either by spraying them with antiseptic or placing them in an oven.)

One might have expected that public libraries might have taken up the slack, but only around 15% of Victoria’s population had access to a public library, often housed in a Mechanics Institute or Athenaeum.

For example, the Wangaratta Free Library was originally housed in the Athenaeum, and according to reports of the time was cramped and little used, and it was only due to a sustained fund raising campaign that the 'old' Free Library building on Murphy Street was built in 1909 replacing the earlier building

While  what is now the State Library did send out boxes of books on loan to the Mechanics Institute libraries, the general lack of access meant most people used commercial circulating libraries, especially for fiction and other lighter reading.

Also, sometimes on gets to touch history - in our collection we have an 1863 edition of Alice King's now forgotten three volume novel Eveline.

Forgotten now, but obviously very popular when it first appeared as the flyleaves of each volume - volume 1 is unfortunately missing - are endorsed 10 days allowed  in ink

suggesting that there was considerable demand, and that patrons could only sign the book out for 10 days rather than the more normal fourteen or twenty one days.