The return of the yellow-backs

Hachette in India have revived yellowbacks. You might not know about yellowbacks. I didn’t. According to Wikipedai,

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.

I bought two of the first tranche of 175 last year and then ordered two more from Amazon which will await me when we return to Kerala in October.

You can read an interview with Thomas Abraham, Managing Director of Hachette India, on his personal passion project right here on Scroll.in. I will just post one quotation here:

Selling in large numbers…not really. That is a function of technology today – I’m taking advantage of the short-run digital printing option to do this. I wouldn’t have been able to do them ten or15 years ago, where even with digital printing the economies wouldn’t have worked. So yes, these definitely need to be commercially successful but viability doesn’t need them to sell in large numbers, though I’d love for that to happen.

He has built the entire project on the back of the kind of printing-on-demand that Amazon and others offer authors who want to self-publish.