Yellow-back
Cheap novel published in Britain in the 19th century
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.
Two typical examples of authors of yellow-backs include James Grant and Robert Louis Stevenson.
The color yellow is similarly associated with fast-paced crime thrillers in Italy, where the word for "crime story" is giallo even nowadays.
Sources and credits
This article is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Yellow-back”, written by its contributors and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Fathomly has changed the layout, removed citation markers, navigation and maintenance notices, and adjusted punctuation. This adapted version is shared under the same license. For references, see the original article.
Images, from Wikimedia Commons:
- The jealous wife julia pardoe 1865 cover.jpg by Cover art uncredited, Public domain
- Cora by Gertrude Fenton.jpg by Gertrude Fenton, Public domain
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