Making a Classic: The Advent of the Literary Series

Abstract

In his Plan and Catalogue of Cooke's Uniform, Cheap, and Elegant Pocket Library printed in 1794, publisher John Cooke declared that such an enterprise, creation of complete Library, comprising all most esteemd Works in English Language, each printed on same Type, on same Size, on same Paper, and embellished by same Artists, was never before attempted in this kingdom.' Like most advertising claims then and now, Cooke manages to stay just within bounds of truth; Cooke's Pocket Edition of Select British Poets was perhaps most ambitious literary series of its day, but it was by no means first The practice of assembling multi-author, uniform volume series by booksellers had its beginning in mid-eighteenth century; explosion of popularity for format by end of that century and its subsequent secure place in publishing practices to this day is a revealing episode not only as an innovative moment in history of publishing, but also as a first step in creation of a format for national literary histories. The pervasive use of such marketing methods, which package and present literary materials not as individual works of art but as commodities forming part of a multi-piece series to be collected, consumed, and displayed as a unit, also raises questions concerning ways in which literary aesthetics, a concept of national identity, and concrete particulars of economics of writing and reading intersect at certain historical moments. We can use this historical case of advent of a new method of selling and promoting literary texts in eighteenth century in order to provide a different perspective on ways in which current canons of the classics, or that group of texts literate portion of population is presumed to be acquainted with, have been shaped. Investigating advent of a new method of presenting a work of literature to a commercial public lets us see more clearly dynamics at play in what appears to be a shift to institutionalize and commodify both practice of authorship, or act of producing texts, and of readership, or act of acquiring and consuming them.