As John Richard Green observed in 1873, it was common practice to measure writers’ worth by the size of their books, not by their publications’ “intrinsic value.” For historians this meant, Green concluded, that “you must publish in ‘three volume octavo’ to be a great historian.” Green was certainly right in claiming how size as a paratext designated genre, value, and authorial qualities. Traditionally, the large formats had been reserved for serious works or prestigious editions. Cambridge University Press established accordingly a hierarchy of formats in the 1870s. Bigger the book, the weightier its scholarly content, the Cambridge Syndicates concluded. Size, however, could be misleading. Not every book in large format corresponded with high quality; the readers of Thomas Craig-Brown’s History of Selkirkshire (1886) were warned that regardless of its “big book” appearance, it was so full of historical errors that it in fact bordered “grotesque.” While in Craig-Brown’s case the mismatch between the format and the content was accidental – he was so convinced about the quality and value of his work that he donated a copy of it to the Queen – there are numerous incidents where size and the format were intentionally manipulated by the publishers to persuade readers.
The literary marketplace underwent several significant changes during the nineteenth century. The increasing literacy, affluence, and leisure expanded the market of the middle-class, and sometimes also the lower-class, readers. This led to an intense market segmentation. Books were no longer produced for a rather homogenous audience of gentle readers. Instead, the potential consumers consisted of readers with different socioeconomic, cultural, educational, and ideological backgrounds. The middle classes were by far the most interesting and promising audience from a publisher’s point of view. Thus, it was important to learn to know their literary needs and an often-used example were the middle-class men who commuted daily from the London suburbs to the City, and who had different demands for books than the upper-class readers with ample leisure. It was not the same thing to read a book in a crowded train compartment than in an easy chair in a private study. In no time publishers began to customize books for various segments. W. H. Smith furnished its stalls at railway stations with small books with content that leaned towards light literature and easily digestible popular science. The demand for large books was in decline, because the middle-class audience was too busy for the “three volume octavos,” feared that their content was too dull and demanding, or considered them physically too unpleasant to hold. Reading was a holistic experience and bulky volumes created an uncomfortable sensation in the middle-class readers.
Although “the imaginary average man” preferred “its dishes prepared in the most appetizing fashion,” as the Pall Mall Gazette described the middle-class reading habits, publishing houses nonetheless continued to issue big books. To increase their appeal, publishers used several techniques to mislead readers with manipulated formats. It was essential to create a visual impression of reduced size and lightness. This was particularly acute with serious scholarly works, whose content tended to be anything else but light. The choice of paper was the most obvious method of engineering the size. The adjustment of margins and the selection of typeface were other common means to tackle the issue.
Publishing houses such as Macmillan and Oxford University Press frequently consulted scholars about size, format, and possibilities to regulate their books’ size and appearance. The press secretary of the Oxford Delegates, C. E. Doble, wrote to Frederick York Powell in 1891 about the “Legenda Angliae,”introducing several choices for paper and size and explaining how the different attached specimens would impact the materiality of the book. If Powell preferred the smaller type, a page could contain 20 per cent more text than the larger type allowed. Yet, as Doble granted, the larger type would produce a “handsomer” look. In another instance, Doble informed Thomas Hodgkin, the author of the Italy and her Invaders, that the Delegates wished the book to be as “handy” as possible, because buyers seemed to prefer “the handiness of books.” To achieve the desired format required either from Hodgkin the compressing of his text or a use of thin paper. Doble had doubts about the latter option because thin paper undermined the easy consultation of educational works. For his great relief, Hodgkin’s prose turned out to be an ideal length and there was no need for playing with the quality or thickness of paper. Five hundred pages in demy octavo did not yet make a too “unwieldy book.” Publishers were tiptoeing between size, appearance, usability, and legibility especially with scholarly and educational books. As I have written here earlier, page, typeface, and layout all influenced the reception and reading of history books. Publishers had to be careful of not to reduce the size too much with their tricks or otherwise they could have compromised legibility and usability. That, too, could have diminished the commercial appeal.
Commercial considerations were by far the most common reason for manipulating the size of books. Yet, marketing was not the only incentive for artificially shaping books’ format. In countries with strict control on publishing, the regulations forced publishers and printers to bend the rules by manipulating books’ appearances. In Germany, as Jeffrey Sammons explains, the extremely severe censorship in the early nineteenth century induced publishers not to reduce, but to expand, the size of their books. According to the censorship rules, all publications under 320 pages in octavo were subjected to control before publication. The rule rested on an assumption that readers did not care to read large books. The short books, which reached larger audiences were therefore the dangerous ones and demanded tight control. Publishers understood that they could deviate the rule by swelling the number of pages by selecting large type and broad margins. They also left blank spaces between the paragraphs and chapters as well as printed as few as twenty lines per page. In such cases, largeness of the format was not necessarily an indication of heaviness of the content. It was a means to spread information – and of course to make also profit at the same go.
Jane Austen complained about the enormous and stupid thick quarto volumes for her sister already in 1813. For her, they symbolized authorial inability to condense thoughts. As the middle-class market grew, publishers who recognized its economic power, became sensitive to the increasingly loud complaints about bulky volumes which were physically demanding to hold and for which an average middle-class reader did not have enough leisure to spare. Historians, just like writers of other scholarly and scientific descriptions, were reluctant to accept the change in tastes and continued to supply the market with unwieldy volumes that were either too pricy or uninviting to most consumers. Historians experimented with primers, textbooks, and other smaller modes, but the “three volume octavo” remained the ideal; it enabled a comprehensive treatment of complex historical questions and, perhaps even more importantly, served as a proof of scholarly abilities. It was a historian’s ticket to the membership in the learned community. J. R. Green, who never succeeded in producing a large history, campaigned in vain for a change in historians’ narrative and scholarly practices. While he was convinced that “A short book need not be shallow, and a large book need not be big,” his fellow historians disagreed. As Mandell Creighton phrased it, life was incomplete “unless one has a ‘great work’ in the stocks.” Scholarly and commercial interests were not always compatible, and publishers were too well-aware that it was almost impossible to coax historians into shortening their narrative. Instead, they tried to rescue the situation by manipulating the size of books, sometimes at the cost of their handiness for educational reading.
Sources
The Edward Freeman Papers. John Rylands Library (Manchester).
The Letter Books. Oxford University Press Archive (Oxford).
The Oscar Browning Papers. The Archive Centre of King’s College (Cambridge).
*
“Freeman’s ‘William Rufus’.” Pall Mall Gazette, 18 August 1882.
Russell, John. “Ettrick Forrest and the Yarrow.” Edinburgh Review, July 1887, 1–34.
Stephen, Leslie. Letters of John Richard Green. London: Macmillan, 1902.
*
Genette Gerard. Paratexts. Thresholds of Interpretation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
McKitterick, David. A History of Cambridge University Press, vol. 3. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Sammons Jeffrey L. “Thinking Clearly about the Marriage of Heinrich Heine and His Publisher, Julius Campe.” In Publishing Culture and the ‘Reading Nation’: German Book History in the Long Nineteenth Century, edited by Lynne Tatlock, 213–229. Rochester: Camden House, 2010.
Suarez, Michael F, S.J. “Towards a bibliometric analysis of the surviving records.” In The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vol. 5, edited by Michael F. Suarez, S.J. & Michael L. Turner, 39–65. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
*
Royal Collection Trust, https://www.rct.uk/collection/1078428/the-history-of-selkirkshire-or-chronicles-of-ettrick-forest.v-l-by-t-graig-brown.
Clio's footnotes 