ABSTRACT
In 2017, as part of W. H. Smith’s 225th anniversary celebrations, the company announced they were launching a special commemorative series of yellowbacks, which would offer a new collection of paperback editions of nineteenth-century novels, to be published in collaboration with the Penguin Random House Vintage Classics series. One of the leading sites of dissemination for cheap books in series was the Victorian railway station bookstall; accordingly, the reading offered by the texts’ publishers issued in the ventures ideally needed to lend itself to a specific sort of literary consumption. The nineteenth-century series books were cheap and frequently clothed in packaging that accentuated their dramatic escapist reading credentials but did not necessarily always make for the most hardwearing or attractive items of reading matter. Readers acquired the series books in discretionary or sometimes even impulse purchases in a consumer context that mediated their engagement with the literature in a number of important ways.
