Paperbacks have been around Europe since the 17th century but initially they were expensive and available only to the few. They became more widely accessible with the invention of the steam-powered rotary press and the development of the railway networks that enabled wider distribution. The 1860s saw the birth of the US ‘dime novel’ and the first ‘penny dreadfuls’ appeared soon after in the UK. These early paperbacks were tales of romance, of derring-do on the wild frontier. The first …
Author: Mary Burnham
→Mary says she is in the enviable position of combining work with pleasure as books are what have always sustained her in good times and bad!
There’s a rumour going round that one can have too many books! I hear it occasionally from people who say their house is falling down with books, that they can’t …
‘I don’t know why he can’t get his books from the library,’ says his wife, who doesn’t see the point of buying books at all. What she fails to notice …
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