ABSTRACT
Opening its favourable appraisal of Kate Percival by Mrs Comyns Carr, The Saturday Review introduced the novel as ‘the tenth volume of ‘Arrowsmith’s Bristol Library’ and one of the shilling stories which are becoming as necessary to the traveller as a rug in winter and a dust-coat in summer’. Accordingly, working with a catholic conception of the nineteenth-century crime novel that acknowledges the genre’s eclecticism and diversity, twenty-three titles in the Arrowsmith series books came under the genre. The remark is also a testament to the confirmed association between light reading and intervals of leisure or recreation, which was a connection that firms like Arrowsmith had worked hard to copperfasten with the promotion of ventures like the ‘Bristol Library’. The spatial profile that Arrowsmith looked to create for the series was also less defined; promotion did not devote the same degree of effort toward categorising the collection as situational reading matter perfect for reading as one travelled by rail.
