The Railway Library And Other Literary Rubbish That Travels By The Rail

Tancini, F

doi:10.1515/9783110643541-005

The Railway Library And Other Literary Rubbish That Travels By The Rail

Lookup NU author(s): Dr Francesca Tancini

Downloads

Accepted version [.pdf]

Licence

This is the authors' accepted manuscript of a book chapter that has been published in its final definitive form by De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2018.

For re-use rights please refer to the publisher's terms and conditions.

Abstract

With the Railway Library and other books of this kind, a moment is reached, the mid 19th century, when books were produced for a mass market mainly using mechanical printing processes such as steam-operated printing machines, industrially-produced paper, stereotyped and electrotyped printing matrices, and so forth. Of course, this was not the first example of cheap books for a large, uncultivated, mass market – chapbooks and penny dreadfuls in England, the Bibliothèque Bleue and the Imagerie d’Epinal in France, the Remondini prints in Italy –, but in this case both the public and distribution were completely different from those of the other earlier cheap books. These books were the true output of the industrial revolution and blossomed in connection with the development of railway transportation. This was probably the first time the audience – a new reading audience indeed – had widened so rapidly and probably the first time books were distributed so quickly through different distribution means, using marketing politics to maximize sales.