Page:The Story of the House of Cassell (book).djvu/195



House of Cassell was the pioneer of serial publication, and owed its extraordinary and rapid development mainly to the success with which it worked this vein. A "serial" is commonly an illustrated work of sufficiently wide interest to command a considerable sale in Parts—monthly Parts they were at the beginning, but afterwards, as life became more hurried, fortnightly, and, in these bustling days, more often than not, weekly. The great advantage of this mode of publication is, of course, that expensive works become available to multitudes who could never afford to pay many shillings, running it may be into pounds, in a lump sum. A number of large books were thus published during John Cassell's life. But the great period of serial productiveness was in the decade from 1871 to 1880. In those ten years at least thirty new works were issued on the Monthly Part plan, and there were many re-issues. In the next two decades, if the production was somewhat less than in the 'seventies, it was not because the serial had begun to lose its vogue but because the number of first-class subjects appealing to the serial public was not unlimited.

With the dawn of the present century the serial undoubtedly lost ground. One reason probably was the multiplication of popular weekly papers and magazines; another, the enormous scale upon which cheap reprints were produced as popular "Libraries"; and some change in the mental habits of the people, indisposing them to the long perseverance implied in subscribing to a publication over a period of many months—some of the early serials published by Cassell's ran for five years!—may also have been a contributing influence. There is still a place left for the