- Yellow-backs
Yellow-backs were cheap
fiction novels published in Britain in the second half of the nineteenth century. There were also occasionally called 'mustard-plaster' novels.Developed in the 1840s to compete with the 'penny dreadful', Yellow-Backs were marketed as entertaining reading. They had brightly coloured covers to that were attractive to a new class of readers, thanks to the spread of education and rail travel.
Routledge s were one of the first publishers to begin marketing Yellow-Backs by starting their "Railway Library" in 1849. The series included 1,277 titles, published over 50 years. These mainly consisted of stereotyped reprints of fiction novels originally published as cloth editions. By the late nineteenth century, Yellow-Backs included sensational fiction, adventure stories, 'educational' manuals, handbooks, and cheap biographies.Some typical examples of authors of Yellow-Backs include
Robert Louis Stevenson and James Grant.References
# Citation
title = Rare Books - Important Acquisitions
url=http://www.nls.uk/collections/rarebooks/acquisitions/index.cfm?startRow=211&SORTBY=acqdate
publisher =National Library of Scotland
access-date = 2007-03-22
# Citation
title = Recent acquisitions - October 2001 - Rare Books
url=http://www.nls.uk/collections/rarebooks/news/acquisit1001.html
publisher =National Library of Scotland
access-date = 2007-03-22
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