Yellow-Backs were Railway Reading.
Raffish Men about town & notorious beauties of the boulevards
ROUTLEDGE'S RAILWAY LIBRARY was a a popular cheap reprint series designed to be sold to train travellers on the fast growing British railway network in the Victorian period. These were sold through W. H. Smith's bookstalls on railway platforms. Over a period of 50 years 1,277 books were published in this series. 1
The development of passenger railways combined with the widespread availability of inexpensively-produced books significantly influenced what people read, how they obtained what they read, and, indeed, how they read.2
The railway must be understood as more than a simple mode of transport: for the Victorians it stood as both agent and icon of the acceleration of the pace of everyday life. 3
In his essay on collecting railway fiction Alan Walbank observes:
Collecting railway novels gives one a much broader view of Victorian fiction..and reveals how cheap editions swamping the market in their fives and tens of thousands helped to lower the level of popular literature.4
Railway novels were sometimes called yellow-books because their glazed paper covers were often yellow. The Michael Sadleir Collection of 19th Century Fiction at the University of California, Los Angeles includes many examples of railroad fiction:
FEATURES OF A YELLOW-BACK
Work of fiction in one volume
Costs 2 shillings or less
Bound in colored glazed paper (yellow, or less often, pink, green, blue, grey)
Cover shows a picture illustrating the story within, overprinted in 2-4 colors
Spine features decorative titling and a picture or design
Back cover mirrors its front cover or lists publisher’s titles and series and eventually it displays unrelated advertising.5
ROUTLEDGE'S RAILWAY LIBRARY. Publishing History website.
Hayes, Kevin J. “Railway Reading.” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 106, no. 2 (1996): 301
Daly, Nicholas. “Railway Novels: Sensation Fiction and the Modernization of the Senses.” ELH 66, no. 2 (1999): 461–87.
Walbank, Alan. 1960. “Railway Reading.” The Book Collector. 9 no.3 (Autumn): 285-291.
Michael Sadleir Collection of 19th Century Fiction. Railway Reading and the Yellow-Back Era. UCLA LibGuide.
Do you know if they bore any relation to the dime Westerns of the late 19th and early 20th centuries which were all written by people who had never gone farther West than New Jersey?
Do you know if they bore any relation to the dime Westerns of the late 19th and early 20th centuries which were all written by people who had never gone farther West than New Jersey?