Cheap Book Production In The United States, 1870-1891 - Raymond Howard Shove (University of Illinois Library, 1937)
Note: The chapters in the PDF have been bookmarked for ease of access. Cheap Book Production In The United States, 1870 To 1891 was written as Raymond Howard Shove's master's thesis and was published in book form in 1937 by the University of Illinois Library. The book's title may not sound terribly exciting but it's a well-written, carefully researched study of a little known but important period in American publishing history which followed the American Civil War, when "pirates" ruled not the high seas, but the American publishing industry. The inexpensive paperbound books produced during this period as part of the "cheap book libraries" were the ancestors of the modern paperback book, serving as a bridge between the early dime novels of the 1860s and the rise of the pulps which began with the revamp of Argosy as a pulp in 1896. Shove's book focuses on the publishers and "cheap libraries," (e.g., The Lakeside Library, The Seaside Library, Franklin Square Library, Lovell's Library; T.B. Peterson, George Munro, Hurst, Lovell, Worthington, etc.) in the period leading to the American copyright law of 1891. The first part of the book is a year-by-year chronicle of the birth and death of the "cheap libraries." The second part spotlights the individual publishers, including those noted above which were known primarily for cheap books and the major publishers (Harper, Dodd, Mead, Appleton, Henry Holt, Funk & Wagnalls, etc.) who jumped on the bandwagon with their own "cheap…
- Series
- Cheap Book Production In The United States
- Genres
- Fiction and letters, History
- Language
- English
- Collection
- The Pulp Magazine Archive
- Licence or status
- Public Domain Mark 1.0 (as the archive states it)
- Who can read it
- Teens profiles and older (placed by Invisible Network from what the archive says; archives give no ratings)
- Archive
- Internet Archive