Great Books by the Millions : J. M. Dent’s Everyman’s Library

Abstract

From its founding in 1888, the publishing house of J. M. Dent relied upon books in series. The most notable early example of the large series was The Temple Classics, embracing some 300 volumes. There were also many successful smaller series, including the Medieval Towns, the Temple Shakespeare, Temple Dramatists and several author series: Defoe, Fielding, Dickens, Dumas, Scott and all forty volumes of Balzac, just to name a few. As we shall see, these efforts were a mere warm-up for Everyman’s Library. A series, of course, may be any sort of collection of books that share some thematic or authorial relationship. Such a series is generally produced in volumes with a distinctive common appearance. The series, particularly as Dent viewed it, would typically have a logo, often on the front cover, sometimes in gilt, sometimes blind-stamped. The Temple Classics used an owl in gilt on the leather front covers and a sundial blind-stamped on the cloth front covers. While the Temple Series was broad in scope, Everyman’s Library went well beyond Temple and other similar series efforts and aspired to be a library in the comprehensive sense of that term.

Dati dell'indice centrale: OpenAlex (licenza CC0).