A Companion to the History of the Book (56 page)

The last third of the nineteenth century moved further in that direction by inventing the literary series. Book series started in Europe at the very end of the eighteenth century, but before 1800 they existed only in limited numbers. It is only after that date, and particularly in fiction, that they began to multiply, and so much so that in 1837 one of the characters in Balzac’s
Illusions perdues
explains to the young writer Lucien de Rubempré that he must himself become a “series” if he wants a fiction publisher to become interested in his works. By having the same characters appearing repeatedly in several of his works, Balzac himself experimented with this technique. The name of one of the best-known French publishers, Gervais Charpentier, is associated with this revolution through the launching of a series bearing his own name, the “Bibliothèque Charpentier,” in 1838 (Olivero 1995). In England, in 1849, George Routledge launched the first “Railway Library” on the model of Simms and Mclntyre’s “Parlour Library” (Altick 1957), soon to be imitated by Bentley and many other publishers. In Germany, Philip Reclam’s “Universal Biblothek,” launched in 1867 at a very low price, had 3,470 titles by 1896 and, in France, Louis Hachette’s “Bibliothèque des chemins de fer” or Michel Lévy’s one-franc series followed the same path. By offering readers and hurried travelers books that were easy to read, publishers expected to see their print-runs multiply and further to stimulate the demand for reading material which by then existed in all developed societies.

In the 1870s and 1880s, this process was extended by the creation of other kinds of serialized literature, such as sentimental fiction for women and detective fiction for men. With the popular press choosing crime for its front page, just as, in the same period, the crimes committed by Pranzini then Soleillant inflamed the French reading public, one witnesses the appearance of characters such as Sherlock Holmes or Arsène Lupin, Chéri-Bibi or Fantômas. Nick Carter’s adventures, created in the United States and rapidly exported to Europe, together with Western fiction and its youthful hero Buffalo Bill, met with enormous success at the end of the century. Similar to the American dime novels, one could find one-shilling books in England, the
romans à quatre sous
in France, one-lira books in Italy, and books at 10 or 20 pfennigs in Germany, which means that the stream of high circulation, popular fiction was spreading throughout Europe. In France, such an evolution was even more striking when in 1904–5 the publisher Arthème Fayard launched two series, one at 0.95 francs, the other at 0.65 francs, starting with print-runs of 50,000–100,000 copies. Such high figures anticipated the 1935–40 paperback revolution, even though the content of Arthème Fayard’s “Livre Populaire” was closer to twentieth-century north-American pulp fiction. The
littérature de gare,
as it is contemptuously called in France, or
trivialtiteratur
in Germany, could boast thousands of readers, even though in England, for example, its expansion was limited by Victorian morality whose forcefulness can be seen in the trials of Henry Vizetelly, Zola’s publisher, and in the imprisonment of Oscar Wilde.

Guidebooks, Practical Books, and Mass-market Dictionaries

Originally, guidebooks interested only pilgrims traveling to the Holy Land or, a thousand years later, young English aristocrats going on the Grand Tour. At the end of the eighteenth century, the first genuine guidebooks for the city of Rome appeared, followed by books about the Alps, Switzerland, spas, or cities like Paris, London, Vienna, and Hamburg. A study of the publication of guidebooks in France from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century has shown that the phenomenon actually started between 1800 and 1830 since as many guidebooks were published during these three decades as between 1600 and 1799. However, the publication of these kinds of work then rapidly increased. Whereas 114 titles were registered between 1800 and 1830, 160 titles were published between 1837 and 1852, and 348 between 1853 and 1870, with 50 titles in 1851, the year of the Great Exhibition in London (Chabaud et al. 2000: 573–6).

Following the success of the Galignani Brothers and of Samuel Leigh, the modern concept of “handbooks for travelers” was to be associated in England with the name of a family of publishers, the Murrays (Monaghan 1998). In Germany, Karl Baedeker is as famous in that field as Giuseppe and Petro Vallardi or Ferdinand Artaria in Italy. In France, the same type of work was popularized by Adolphe Joanne. With the railways, universal exhibitions, tourism, seaside resorts, and soon ski resorts, guidebooks experienced their first golden age between 1851 and 1900. In most European countries, thousands of similar volumes were published. Often marketed on railway station bookstalls, but also in the more traditional bookshop or department store, they show the emergence of leisure and of tourism long before it became widespread following the extension of paid holidays to the majority of workers.

After John Murray launched the first series of twenty-six red hardback guidebooks for travelers in 1836 (these covered almost all of the European continent and, later, the countries around the Mediterranean, and then India, Japan, and New Zealand), the phenomenon became worldwide (Guilcher 2000: 81–93). Murray was immediately imitated by George Bradshaw, Francis Cogían, and then by the German publisher Karl Baedeker, his great rival, who would deprive him of a large part of the British market after 1870; Murray did not understand the audacity of the latter, who, by offering his guidebooks in three languages, German, English, and French, soon became the model. In France, Louis Hachette managed to adapt by taking over the guidebook publisher Louis Maisons backlist and entrusting Adolphe Joanne with the task of making attractive books whose blue covers became known throughout the century before the appearance of Michelin’s green guidebooks after 1900. If, to those famous forerunners, one adds Thomas Cook’s “Tourist’s Handbook” series, amounting to twenty-five titles published from 1874 onward, Longman’s, Macmillan’s, Stanford’s, and Baddeley’s “Thorough Guide” series in Britain, Trêves guidebooks in Italy, Griben and Meyer for Germany, and Conty and Gamier for France, one gets an idea of the international expansion of guidebooks and of the market that such books catered for up to the beginning of World War I. Though, in general, print-runs never exceeded 5,000 copies, the multiplication of titles and of editions is evidence of a large market in these traveling companions.

At the same time, another market, that of practical books, started. In France, the fashion began with a new kind of manual:
Bon Jardinier, Bonne Cuisinière,
or
Parfait Secrétaire.
It was not such an original idea as conduct books and letter-writing manuals had existed long before the nineteenth century. However, here again, the phenomenon was so vast that it is vain to compare it with the situation of previous centuries. Extending the range of his products to all possible subjects that could be popularized, the French publisher Roret was in the forefront of this market; the introduction of electricity around 1880 allowed him to launch a still wider range of do-it-yourself volumes, as they are called today. Just as lively in Britain and Germany, the publication of practical books all over the continent benefited from the appearance of a market for foreign-language teaching books. Methods of learning French or English were quickly offered by the Galignani Brothers, followed by Ollendorff’s method of learning German. Connected to the publication of books for schools and universities, this market rapidly attracted the great publishing houses in Britain and on the continent, such as Macmil-lan, Nelson, Hachette, Gamier, Larousse, Brockhaus, and Mayer. In fact, these powerful publishers, selling millions of copies of printed books after 1870, benefited from the mass extension of literacy and schooling in many European countries by increasing the list of their publications thanks to the reputation of their names, which were often used almost as common names. When one says “I bought a Larousse or a Baedeker,” one forgets that, behind these trade names, there exist real men and women, often the founders of immense publishing empires.

The development of dictionaries and encyclopedias is one of the most obvious characteristics of societies in which a mass market appears quite early. Pierre Larousse, who edited the
Grand dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle,
defined his century as that of dictionaries without risk of being contradicted by his contemporaries. A very old genre, but transformed into an object of real worship after 1850, the dictionary attracted German publishers first. Friedrich Brockhaus, whose
Konversationslexicon
met with immense success during that period and was imitated all over the continent, is the most famous name in the field. Besides him, one must mention another German, Meyer, whose large dictionaries, illustrated first with engravings, and later with photographs, became known all around the world. In France, Pierre Larousse’s name has remained associated with the very concept of dictionaries. In Britain as in Italy, in Spain as in most other countries, the dictionary craze was boundless. The launching in 1905 of Claude Augé’s
Petit Larousse illustré,
with a print-run of 300,000 copies, marks the beginning of the mass-market circulation of this kind of work. In the 1860s–1870s, the possibility of obtaining credit to buy books had allowed the less wealthy middle and lower middle classes to purchase those huge 6–15-volume encyclopedias. But after 1900, smaller or even pocket format dictionaries were printed and sold to a widening circle of readers.

A flood of religious books flowed over Europe after 1800. An instrument to spread the gospel to native populations before becoming the privileged tool of foreign missions, the Bible had also been used in Britain to counteract the influence of the French Revolution and of Thomas Paine’s book,
The Rights of Man
(1791). Millions of copies of the publications of the Religious Tract Society, the British and Foreign Bible Society, and the London Missionary Society were printed, and similar organizations in Geneva or in other countries reached almost the same figures. The Roman Catholic Church preferred alternative genres, such as the lives of saints or “good” novels, but religious books were not neglected, particularly after the adoption of the Roman liturgy everywhere in France, which made the fortune of the publisher Mame in Tours who was given the responsibility of producing the new unified prayer-book. During the whole period, religious books and textbooks, dictionaries and practical books, guidebooks and treatises of popular medicine, all books destined for a mass readership, competed with the most widely circulated novels, a fact that should not be forgotten when one examines the deluge of books that rained down on the whole of Europe in the nineteenth century.

The Internationalization of the Novel

It was during the period 1800–90, the time of Chateaubriand and Zola, that the novel captured the whole world, as has already been shown. We return to the novel, in the conclusion of this chapter, in order to underline its transmedia character: that is, its capacity to pass from one mode of production to another and to migrate throughout the world. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
is a very good case in point. In the first stage of the book’s career, between 1852 and 1879, over 1,500,000 copies were sold in the original language, and eight different translations into French and many other translations into German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Danish, Finnish, and other languages (Winship 1999; Parfait 2000) were also published. But probably even more important was the serial publication of the novel in daily papers and weekly or monthly periodicals, whether national, regional, or local, in the United States and in Europe. Moreover, what is now called merchandizing was on the same scale. This tragic story was adapted for the theater, and later on made into a film. Popular songs praising Uncle Tom’s courage were written, and his face was reproduced on glasses, plates, shawls, shirts, and all kinds of objects. This proved the novel’s ability to move from one medium to another and from one country to another throughout the world.

Another similar example is that of Alexandre Dumas’s
Comte de Monte Cristo
(1844– 5). In the 1860s, cigar manufacturers in Cuba paid one of their workers to read the successful serialized novels of the time to his fellow-workers. The cigar-makers’ craze for the character of the Count of Monte Cristo was such that they decided to give their hero’s name to one of their best products, the famous “Monte Cristo” cigar. Here again one can witness the plasticity of the novel which can be read silently and individually, or aloud to a large audience, or performed by a temporary actor, or transformed into an item of public consumption. In the nineteenth century, besides Harriet Beecher Stowe’s and Alexandre Dumas’s novels, Eugène Sue’s
hes Mystères de Paris,
Victor Hugo’s
hes Misérables,
Zola’s
Germinal,
as well as Charles Dickens’s
Pickwick Papers
and Robert Louis Stevenson’s
Treasure Island
and
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
went around the world. The authors of these books impressed their contemporaries’ imaginations by representing unforgettable characters, and consequently erasing or keeping in the background the memory of most other books. In that respect, there is no possible comparison between a popular scientific work and one of Sherlock Holmes’s investigations, or between a textbook and the exciting adventures of the hero of
Treasure Island.
Even if these different kinds of books have contributed to the making of the modern reader’s identity, novels have remained the most potent in that reader’s memory.

There is no denying that poetry and drama were still read at school. The lasting fame of Byron or Lamartine, Goethe, Keats, Heine, or Hugo could not be understood if they had not been published in textbooks at the end of the nineteenth century, and neither perhaps would the fervor for Shakespeare, Schiller, Hugo, Ibsen, or other playwrights have survived without the work done in the various kinds of schools which, over the whole continent, contributed to the creation of the pantheon of literature about whose heroes everyone was expected to know.