ABSTRACT
Very early in the life of William Tinsley Brothers, when they were just starting to publish books for the circulating libraries, there had been a brief disaster in the book-lending business. Two of the oldest-established circulating libraries – the famous Hookham’s in Bond Street, and Booth’s in Regent Street – were ruined by the sudden opposition, and both collapsed, leaving Mudie to acquire their remains. The whole arrangement was carefully planned to fit with the vogue for three-volume novels, and the library-publishing system was established on an enormous scale. After Tinsley’s death, his faithful and valued assistant, Edmund Downey, who had lived as a publisher himself and experienced the changes in novel publishing, wrote: ‘The backbone of Tinsley Brothers was the three-volume novel. The three-volume novel was killed early in the Nineties, so that in any event the house of Tinsley would hardly have survived the shock.
