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.)