Lines from the Library

I've been poking around in the stacks and doing some reading so I can keep one step ahead of all the eager seekers of Victorian print culture.

Since I haven't had time to snap more photos of our hidden treasures, I present you with this handy site from the British Library:

Aspects of the Victorian Book

It's full of excellent images of yellowbacks and penny dreadfuls and printing machines and loads of other goodies.

I'll be back with fresh, home grown content soon.

I have spent the past week digging into our holdings of penny dreadfuls. I am delighted to report that we have at least two dozen titles in what appear to be complete runs.

Here, for instance, are some images of Vice and Its Victim:

That's some quality illustration work.

Much better than this example from The Smuggler King

But the important thing is that I have been adjusting the BobCat records for all the titles I have uncovered so far. You can find things by title, you can find things by author, but the one thing I'm doing to make it easy for people to pull up ALL of our penny dreadfuls in a single search is adding Genre/Form Headings.

Thus, if you select "Genre/Form Heading" from the pull-down menu on the BobCat search screen and type "Penny dreadfuls" in the search box, you will pull up 20 titles. More will appear soon, but these things take time. Some of our penny dreadfuls aren't in BobCat at all yet, so those will soon be added.

Over the last couple of weeks I have identified 57 penny dreadfuls in the Fales British collection

57!

That's a whole lot of pennies and a whole lot of dread.

But let's talk a little more about exactly what these things are and how they differ from other cheap formats of the 19th century.

Here is a picture of the front page of part number three of Red Ralph, or, The daughter of the night : a romance of the road in the days of Dick Turpin by Percival Wolfe.

The most obvious feature of these publications is the lurid illustrations -- that's what I emphasized in the last entry. But there are two other fascinating characteristics on display here.

First, note that the page number at the top is 17 and that "No. 3" is found at the lower left corner of the page. That "No. 3" is the only clue that this is the third issue of this story. Parts 1 and 2 are 8 pages each, which is the standard length for penny dreadfuls. A penny (although there is no price printed on most of our items) bought 8 pages of text plus an illustration or two.

Most serial publications had continuous pagination -- penny dreadfuls, novels in monthly parts and standard magazines. Almost all the penny dreadfuls in Fales are bound as single volumes, which partly disguises their origins. There's usually a title page and table of contents at the front, but these would have been included in the LAST issue. If you saved all your penny parts, it was a simple matter to have them all bound together to form a complete book with continuous pagination.

So that little "No. 3" in the corner is an important clue. Some of our titles don't have "No.", just a small number in the lower left margin.

It might not be clear from this image, but the text of this installment begins mid-scene. Unlike monthly parts by Dickens and Thackeray, a penny dreadful might cut off abruptly in the middle of a chapter. Sometimes the breaks come mid-sentence or even mid-word. Dickens and his monthly part fellows never cut the reader off like that.

Generally, the reader of monthly parts paid a shilling (that's twelve pennies) for two illustrations (quality engravings rather than lurid woodcuts) and two full and complete chapters. A monthly part usually contained 32 pages of text, but often came bundled with another 32 pages of advertising. Sometimes more.

Here's another example:

That's some quality penny dreadful!

Coming up next: Penny Dreadful vs. Dime Novel

While we have a decent number of Penny Dreadfuls in Fales, we have a massive collection of Dime Novels. Back in the 1960s, Mr. Edward G. Levy donated an exceptional collection of Dime Novels to NYU. The finding aid to his collection is (at long last) available online at this address:

http://dlib.nyu.edu/findingaids/html/fales/levy.html

Unlike the term "Penny Dreadful," American Dime Novels were advertised as such. For instance:

Malaeska (1860), by Ann Stephens, is the first Dime Novel. It was number 1 in what would become a long series of Dime Novels published by the firm of Beadle and Adams under the "Beadle's Dime Novels" banner. If you really want to know more about Beadle & Adams, take a look at The House of Beadle and Adams and its dime and nickel novels; the story of a vanished literature by Albert Johannsen. It's three solid volumes of mind-numbing detail.

Here's a later title in the series:

And here's the back cover of another:

One notable point of difference between American Dime Novels and the English Penny Dreadfuls is that the Dimes are not serialized. The top right corner of Malaeska informs the buyer that this work is "Complete." Beadle's offered a new number in its Dime Novel series every month, but each number was a complete novel.

The other difference is subject matter. Instead of the sordid underbelly of London, Dime Novels generally featured adventures in the American West. Here's another fine illustrated cover:

It's not published by Beadle, it didn't cost a dime (fifteen cents for this one), but I'd still call this a dime novel. Notice that this one is also complete and part of a series. TWO series, actually.

Just as I've been doing with the Penny Dreadfuls, I'm working on adding the Genre/Form heading "Dime novels" to the BobCat records for our holdings. Because the bulk of our dimes are in the Levy Collection, they won't all show up in BobCat. Go straight to the Levy finding aid if you're keen to get your hands on the goods.

Of course, you'll also find heaps of British material in Levy too. Actually, there are some great runs of Story Papers in Levy, but that's another subject altogether.

Coming up next: Sir Walter Scott!