The Last Triple Decker
A Novel of the Victorian Publishing Crash

About this book:

London, 1893. The fog that chokes Fleet Street carries more than the smell of coal and cabbage—it carries the scent of an empire crumbling. For half a century, the three-volume novel has ruled British literature: a fortress of blue cloth and guinea subscriptions, built on the backs of circulating libraries and the patience of country-house ladies. But the walls are cracking. Paper grows cheap. Steam presses roar. A new generation of clerks and shopgirls wants stories they can buy for sixpence at a railway stall, not rent for a year in three padded installments.

At Bentham & Son, the fracture runs through the family. Arthur Bentham clings to the old rituals—Mudie’s orders, Finch’s formulae, the sacred architecture of Volume One, Two, and Three. His nephew Charles watches the ledgers bleed red, sees the printers composing single-volume revolutions in cellars beneath Paternoster Row, and hears the auctioneer’s hammer warming up for the great houses that refuse to bend. Between them stands Algernon Finch, novelist, deliverer of manuscripts wrapped in twine, fighting for an advance that might keep his study warm through a winter the trade may not survive.

*The Last Triple Decker* is a novel inked in the pressures of history: the smell of antimony and damp proof-paper, the click of a compositor’s stick, the quiet desperation of a business built on a price point the world has stopped paying. It is a story of what happens when the form that shaped a century’s reading habits meets the readers who will no longer wait for Volume Three.