| Sumario: | The article focuses on the process of publishing in the nineteenth century. The revolutionary changes in production brought about by machine-produced paper, powered book presses, stereotyping and publishers' cloth bindings inevitably had dramatic effects on publishing activity. Publishers were experimenting with review periodicals which catered for a middle-class audience which was larger but less leisured than its eighteenth century equivalent. Under the pressure of high production costs, low volume sales and punitive taxation, both educated and uneducated audiences had been trained into a relationship with text that depended to a significant extent on borrowing, hiring or segmenting into parts. The only texts generally available whole and cheaply were non-copyright materials, mostly classics of one kind or another, few of which had a wide enough appeal to be profitably mass-produced. The most important development in middle-class publishing was the speed and cheapness with which fiction was reprinted. By 1870 the common publishing pattern for a novel was serialization in a magazine or newspaper followed immediately by a 31s is 6d three-decker.
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