LONG AGO, FAR AWAY
First appearance of this complete romance novel, issued as the special Saturday edition of the Toronto Star Weekly on 28 March 1953.
Very good.
Price: $200.00
LONG AGO, FAR AWAY
The strategy of publishing entire novels in the form of newspapers goes back at least as far as the 1830s, when American publishers reacted to an economic depression in part by publishing "Weeklies" — novels printed on huge folio sheets that could be distributed through the post at cheaper newspaper rates and used far cheaper materials than typical books. Many early romances in the United States, the UK, and Australia were first published in serial, ephemeral forms similar to this. Indeed, unless they were written by an especially popular author like Augusta Jane Evans, they often didn't ever make it into book form at all: there is an entire lost literature of romances that lives only in these ephemeral publications, now extremely rare. By the 1950s, this kind of publication was still quite common, and in fact many publishing houses kept a close eye on the Weeklies in order to find new novels to bring out in book form. Covert's novel here is one of them, snapped up immediately by Avalon in New York. It was popular enough to be chosen for printing again as part of Bantam's Red Rose series in 1971.
Read more: Romney, The Romance Novel in English: A Survey in Rare Books (item 19); Seville, The Internationalization of Copyright Law: Books, Buccaneers and the Black Flag in the Nineteenth Century.
The Object
Toronto: Star Weekly, 1953. 15.25'' x 10.75''. Original single-folded newsprint with color photographic pictorial front wrapper. Text printed in four columns. Ad for next week's novel, in gutter of pages 8-9. Full-page comic from the series VIGNETTES OF LIFE by Harry Weinhert in color on rear wrapper. 16 pages, including wrappers. Toning to leaves, as expected.
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