ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the Chatto & Windus collection mined the body of material belonging to its predecessors in the series reprint game. The yellowback, the Victorian cheap book-publishing format that was typically used to circulate reprints of fiction, was one of the original examples of railway reading matter that were issued in series. The chapter also argues that the lineage of the second-generation status of the Chatto & Windus yellowback series manifested in several fundamental ways. Given the particular historical moment in which this Chatto & Windus series began to circulate material, the development of the ‘Cheap Editions’ collection should be conceptualised through a generational or more precisely, a genetic lens. Granted, inheritances and assimilation formed an important part of the ‘Cheap Editions’ venture but the blended enterprise was also marked by a number of clear mutations.
