My Official Wife : Richard Henry Savage : Yellow-Back Book Routledge 1895

My Official Wife : A Novel

By Richard Henry Savage

Published by George Routledge and Sons, London, 1895. Hardback, Yellow-back, printed paper covered boards and spine. Advert endpapers, 231 pages plus 9 pages of adverts at the rear.

CONDITION
A good copy. The binding is good with signs of age and with wear to the head and tail of the spine. Endpapers are browned with age. All contents present and pages good throughout with perhaps the odd light thumb mark to the odd margin. Overall a good copy.

ABOUT YELLOW-BACK BOOKS
A yellow-back or yellowback is a cheap novel which was published in Britain in the second half of the 19th century. They were 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, often printed by chromoxylography, that were attractive to a new class of readers, thanks to the spread of education and rail travel.

Routledge was one of the first publishers to begin marketing yellow-backs by starting their "Railway Library" in 1848. The series included 1,277 titles, published over 50 years. These mainly consisted of stereotyped reprints of novels originally published as cloth editions. By the late 19th century, yellow-backs included sensational fiction, adventure stories, "educational" manuals, handbooks, and cheap biographies

(Blue Shelves 3, 2 up)