This immensely usable archive of vintage illustrations not only offers a wonderful window on the goods and merchandise of a bygone era, but is an absolute treasure trove of easily reproducible graphic art as well. Some 2,300 cuts culled from such rare nineteenth-century periodicals as The Art Journal, The Illustrated London News, The Scientific American, and The Youth's Companion have been organized in convenient categories: clothes, furniture, kitchenware, toys and games, musical instruments, stationery supplies, domestic accessories, and much more. Among them are detailed and highly reproducible illustrations of fans, corsets, toiletry kits, jewelry, roller skates, a baby carriage, bicycles, baseball gloves, a pencil sharpener, crayons, fountain pen, typewriter, drafting tools, compass, microscope, feather duster, parasol, small table with smoking paraphernalia, high-topped "storm slippers," and hundreds of other objects.

How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain asks how our culture came to frown on using books for any purpose other than reading. When did the coffee-table book become an object of scorn? Why did law courts forbid witnesses to kiss the Bible? What made Victorian cartoonists mock commuters who hid behind the newspaper, ladies who matched their books' binding to their dress, and servants who reduced newspapers to fish 'n' chips wrap? Shedding new light on novels by Thackeray, Dickens, the Brontës, Trollope, and Collins, as well as the urban sociology of Henry Mayhew, Leah Price also uncovers the lives and afterlives of anonymous religious tracts and household manuals. From knickknacks to wastepaper, books mattered to the Victorians in ways that cannot be explained by their printed content alone. And whether displayed, defaced, exchanged, or discarded, printed matter participated, and still participates, in a range of transactions that stretches far beyond reading. Supplementing close readings with a sensitive reconstruction of how Victorians thought and felt about books, Price offers a new model for integrating literary theory with cultural history. How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain reshapes our understanding of the interplay between words and objects in the nineteenth century and beyond.

2,300 quaint images of vintage 19th-century items: fans, corsets, toiletry kits, sewing machine, meat grinder, typewriter, ice cream freezer, lantern — all arranged according to category.

Brings together the stories and facts of a life very different from what we know today but which played a fascinating part in the development of what has been called a nation of shopkeepers (UK)

Richly detailed, authentic, and engrossing, this compendium draws upon Dover's archives to present a pictorial survey of the Victorian world. Sources include historical periodicals such as Harper's Weekly,The Illustrated London News, and Punch as well as printers' and trade catalogs, architectural graphics, and patterns for fabric and wall decoration by William Morris, Christopher Dresser, and other designers. Hundreds of color and black-and-white images offer glimpses of social history from the great book illustrators of the era as well as ordinary and extraordinary everyday objects, including displays of glassware, furniture, needlework, and stained glass windows from the famous Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851. Detailed bibliographical information concerning every source ― including biographical details of each artist ― makes this collection a vital reference tool as well as a stunning compendium of Victorian graphic and pictorial art and illustration. Students of graphic art, typography, and illustration as well as graphic designers and advertising professionals will prize this remarkable resource.

This provocative and theoretically sophisticated book reveals how capitalism produced and sustained a culture of its own in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. "Richards provides a valuable account of the interaction between cultural and business development in Victorian England by focusing on the evolution of advertising. Through an examination of five case studies, ranging from how advertisers employed images of the Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851 to their use of images of women just before WWI, he argues that the British developed a new type of culture in the mid and late-19th century--a new way of thinking and living increasingly based upon the possession of material goods, commodities. Revising the findings of some earlier scholars, Richards shows that 'cultural forms of consumerism . . . came into being well before the consumer economy did.' The 50 well-reproduced advertising images greatly enhance the value of this study." --M. Blackford, "Choice"