The Last Triple Decker

• Chapter 1 The Six-Shilling Shadow
• Chapter 2 Paternoster Row
• Chapter 3 Volume One: A Promising Start
• Chapter 4 The Select Library
• Chapter 5 Ink and Ironmongery
• Chapter 6 The Subscription List
• Chapter 7 Proofs in the Dark
• Chapter 8 Mudie’s Ultimatum
• Chapter 9 The Margin of Profit
• Chapter 10 Volume Two: The Padding
• Chapter 11 Bound in Cloth
• Chapter 12 The Circulating Empire
• Chapter 13 Whispers at the Garrick
• Chapter 14 The Penny Dreadful Invasion
• Chapter 15 Type and Typography
• Chapter 16 Volume Three: The Unravelling
• Chapter 17 The Decree of July 1894
• Chapter 18 Unsold Sheets
• Chapter 19 The Single-Volume Revolution
• Chapter 20 Bankruptcy and Binding
• Chapter 21 The Reader’s Verdict
• Chapter 22 The Auction Block
• Chapter 23 Remaindered Lives
• Chapter 24 The New Realism
• Chapter 25 A Cheap Edition
• Chapter 26 The Last Page Turned

The fog that crept off the Thames in the late autumn of 1893 carried with it the smell of sea-coal, wet draft-horses, and rotting cabbage leaves from Covent Garden, but inside the sanctum of Bentham & Son, Publishers, the prevailing odor was that of cold calfskin and damp proof-paper.

Arthur Bentham, senior partner of the house, stood before the tall arched window of his office on Fleet Street, holding a golden pocket watch in the palm of his hand. The watch ticked with a dry, mechanical urgency that seemed entirely out of place in a room so heavily cushioned by turkey-red carpets and rows of calf-bound octavos. Below him, the omnibuses clattered over the granite pavers, their drivers shouting into the gloom, carrying clerks home to Peckham and Camberwell.

"He is late, Charles," Arthur said, without turning. "A man who wishes to extract three hundred pounds on account should at least have the grace to arrive before the lamps are trimmed."

Behind the mahogany desk, his younger partner—and nephew—Charles Bentham dipped his pen into the inkwell. Charles was thirty-two, sharp-eyed, and possessed a deeply worrying interest in the balance sheets of the railway bookstalls.

"Mr. Finch is not late because he is careless, Uncle," Charles said quietly, blotting his page. "He is late because he travels from Hampstead on the underground railway, where I understand the atmosphere is currently indistinguishable from a sewer main. Besides, he knows we need his name for the spring list."

"We need a good novel," Arthur corrected, turning around. His gray whiskers were neatly trimmed in the style of the late sixties, a decade in which, he frequently reminded anyone who would listen, a publisher could count on five hundred library orders before the ink on the title page was dry. "We do not need a experiment. We need three solid, handsome volumes, bound in dark blue cloth, priced at thirty-one shillings and sixpence, to be absorbed in tidy quantities by Mr. Mudie and Mr. Smith."

"Mudie is cutting his orders," Charles replied. He did not raise his voice; he merely turned over a ledger page. "The quarterly return from New Oxford Street arrived this morning. Where they took two hundred copies of The Barons of Exmoor three years ago, they have taken seventy-five of The Countess’s Secret. The subscribers do not want three volumes of sentiment at half a guinea each, Uncle. They are buying single volumes at the stations for six shillings. George Allen is selling Ruskin in cheap single books. Heinemann is doing it. Even Arrowsmith in Bristol—"

"Arrowsmith publishes railway trash for clerks to read between Temple Meads and Paddington," Arthur snapped, though he immediately smoothed his waistcoat. "We are Bentham & Son. We do not cater to the man who reads while being jolted over iron rails. We cater to the lady who sits by the fire in a country house with two weeks of quiet ahead of her, and who expects her fiction to last the fortnight."

A heavy knock at the heavy oak door cut short the debate. A clerk stepped into the room, his jacket sleeves shiny from rubbing against desk-edges, and announced Mr. Algernon Finch.

The novelist entered the room like a damp storm. Finch was forty-five, with a thinning mane of dark hair that had succumbed early to gray, and a frock coat that showed unmistakable signs of having been pressed under a mattress. Under his arm he carried a heavy, paper-wrapped parcel tied with twine—a bundle that represented seven months of labor and the immediate financial survival of his household.

"Arthur, my dear fellow! Charles," Finch said, dropping his hat onto a leather armchair and placing the parcel upon the desk with a thud that sounded to Arthur Bentham like the falling of a trapdoor. "The streets are an abomination. I had to fight a drayman for a cab at Charing Cross, and the man had the audacity to demand an extra sixpence on account of the haze."

"The haze is general, Algernon," Arthur said, offering a tight smile as he gestured to a chair. "Sit down, sit down. Tea will be here presently. Is that the new manuscript?"

Finch smoothed his hand over the brown paper package with a protective, almost paternal tenderness. "It is The Shadow of the Spire. Three hundred thousand words, right on the mark. I have paced it precisely according to your formula. Volume One ends with the discovery of the forged codicil at the ball; Volume Two leaves young Gerald stranded in the Italian monastery while the plague rages; and Volume Three brings us back to Yorkshire for the restoration of the estate and the double marriage."

"Splendid," Arthur said, his spirits noticeably lifting. He leaned forward, resting his liver-spotted hands on the desk. "A proper architecture. None of this French business. No lingering in gutters or analyzing the motives of fallen women."

"There is a fallen woman," Finch admitted, coughing slightly into his handkerchief, "but she dies of consumption in the second volume, well off-stage, after repenting in a letter to the bishop."

"Acceptable," Arthur murmured. "Entirely acceptable. Mr. Mudie’s readers are sensitive to consumption, provided it stays off-stage."

Charles, however, had pulled the parcel toward himself. He cut the twine with a small silver pocketknife and folded back the heavy paper. Inside lay three thick stacks of ruled foolscap, covered in Finch’s cramped, sloping handwriting.

"Three hundred thousand words," Charles said, running his fingers down the edge of the first stack. "Algernon, if we print this in three volumes at twelve points, with double-spacing between the lines and wide margins, we can stretch it to eight hundred pages across the set. But the composition cost alone will be ninety pounds. The paper has gone up two shillings a ream since August. And if Mudie takes only a hundred copies—"

"Mudie will take four hundred, as he always does with Finch," Arthur interrupted testily. "Algernon is an established name. He is a staple of the circulating library."

"I was a staple," Finch said quietly. The

The fog that hung over Fleet Street seemed to thin slightly as Charles Bentham turned off the main thoroughfare and pushed his way through the narrow mouth of Stationers’ Hall Court toward Paternoster Row. Here, under the shadow of St. Paul’s Cathedral, the air did not smell of horses or the river, but of damp cardboard, printer’s ink, leather dressing, and the bitter, hot dust thrown off by steam-driven printing presses working late in cellar basements.

Paternoster Row was the beating heart of the British publishing trade, a cobblestone alley so compressed by tall, soot-blackened brick tenements that the sky above appeared only as a slate-gray ribbon. On either side, heavy oak doors and brass plates bore the names of firm after firm that had fed the reading public since the reign of Queen Anne. It was a street built on tradition, where business was conducted in dark panelled back parlors over glasses of sherry, and where the three-volume novel had reigned supreme for more than half a century.

Charles adjusted his wool scarf against the damp chill and turned into the archway leading to the offices of Messrs. Spottiswoode & Co., Printers to the Trade. He was carrying the heavy manuscript of Finch’s The Shadow of the Spire under his arm. His uncle Arthur had wanted to send a junior clerk with the parcel, but Charles had insisted on bringing it himself. He needed to see the estimates in black and white. He needed to talk to the men who actually laid the metal type and bought the paper by the ream, away from his uncle’s romantic recollections of the golden fifties.

He climbed the worn wooden staircase, past the heavy iron doors that vibrated with the rhythmic thump-thump-thump of the cylinder machines in the basement, and entered the composing shop.

The room was vast, ill-lit by flickering gas jets, and stiflingly hot. Row upon row of wooden frames held the type cases, where compositors stood in their leather aprons, their right hands moving with incredible, rhythmic speed between the small wooden boxes—picking up letters, spaces, and punctuation marks, setting them upside down into their composing sticks. The air was thick with the smell of antimony, lead, and engine oil.

At a high desk near the window sat Mr. Thomas Jarrold, the overseer, a man with ink-stained knuckles and a tape measure looped around his neck like a executioner’s rope. He looked up through thick spectacles as Charles approached.

"Ah, Mr. Bentham," Jarrold said, dropping his pencil into a groove on his desk. "I thought we should be seeing you soon. Is that the new Finch?"

"It is," Charles said, setting the thick package down. "Three hundred thousand words. My uncle wants three volumes, octavo, bound in navy pebble-grain cloth. Gold lettering on the spine, plain blind-stamping on the boards. He expects the first proofs by the middle of next month."

Jarrold picked up the first bundle of manuscript, untied the knot, and turned over a few pages, his thumb flicking through the foolscap with the practiced skill of a butcher evaluating a side of beef. He stopped at a page where Finch had crossed out two paragraphs and rewritten them in the margins in a minute, spider-like hand.

"He’s not getting any easier to set, your Mr. Finch," Jarrold remarked, peering closely at the ink. "Look at those descenders. Is that an e or an o? My boys will spend half their time on piece-work just trying to decipher his Latin quotations. It’ll cost you extra for corrections, Mr. Charles."

"How much extra?" Charles asked, leaning against the edge of the high desk.

Jarrold reached for his ledger—a battered, thumb-indexed book that contained the precise financial realities of London’s literary appetite. "Let us see. Three hundred thousand words. If we set it in twelve-point Caslon, with leaded lines—three-point leads to stretch the measure, as you usually do for Mudie’s—you’ll get about three hundred pages per volume. That’s nine hundred pages total for the set. Paper at eleven shillings a ream for good esparto deckle. Composition, imposition, stereo plates—because I suppose your uncle will want to keep the plates standing for a cheap edition later?"

"He always hopes for one," Charles said with a faint smile.

"Hopes, aye," Jarrold muttered, pulling a wooden rule across his figure sheet. "Well, for an edition of seven hundred and fifty copies—which is all you’ll dare print, I take it?—the whole run will set you back roughly one hundred and forty pounds before binding. Binding in cloth with gold leaf will add another forty-five. Say one hundred and eighty-five pounds, total, to bring the three volumes onto the street."

Charles did the calculation mentally. One hundred and eighty-five pounds for printing and binding. Add Finch’s three-hundred-pound advance, thirty pounds for advertising in the Athenaeum and the Times, and ten pounds for cartage and sundries. Total capital outlay: over five hundred pounds.

"And if Mudie takes three hundred copies at his usual wholesale discount of fourteen shillings per set," Charles said aloud, "we gross two hundred and ten pounds."

"Which leaves you nearly three hundred pounds in the red until Smith or the independent libraries buy the rest," Jarrold said bluntly. He took off his spectacles and wiped them with a dirty handkerchief. "It worked ten years ago, Mr. Charles. When Mudie would buy five hundred copies sight unseen, and Smith would take three hundred for the railway stalls, and you could squeeze another fifty out of the provincial institutes. But today? The numbers don't square."

"My uncle believes the market will recover with the spring season," Charles said, though his tone lacked conviction.

"Your uncle is looking at Paternoster Row through a rose-colored stereoscope," Jarrold replied. He gestured with his spectacles toward the window, which looked out across the alley onto the brick wall of a competing print-house. "Walk down to the corner of Warwick Lane, Mr. Bentham. Look at what Chapman & Hall are doing. Look at Macmillan. They are putting out single-volume editions at six shillings within six months of first publication. Some of them aren't even bothering with the three-volume library edition at all. They go straight to six shillings, sell three thousand copies to the public outright, and turn a profit in two months."

"The profit margin on a six-shilling book is pennies," Charles noted.

"Pennies multiplied by thousands make sovereigns," Jarrold said. "Pennies multiplied by three hundred copies that sit in Mudie’s cellar waiting to be pulped make nothing at all except a hole in your bank balance."

Jarrold pulled a freshly printed sheet from a stack behind him and slid it across the desk to Charles. It was a sample page from a novel they were printing for a new house in Covent Garden—a young, aggressive firm that had only opened its doors two years prior. The page was set in clean, dense type, with narrow margins and double columns. It looked modern, efficient, and slightly breathless.

"Single volume," Jarrold said. "Six hundred pages on light Indian paper. Retails at three shillings and sixpence. We’re printing five thousand copies for the first run, and the paper-maker has already been paid in full. No waiting on library subscriptions. No padding out the second volume with descriptions of Italian scenery to make up the length. Just the story, printed cheap, sold fast."

Charles picked up the sample page. It smelled of fresh printer’s ink—crisp, sharp, and smelling of the future. He thought of Finch sitting in his cold study in Hampstead, painfully counting his words to ensure that Volume Two hit the mandatory seventy-five thousand mark, deliberately slowing down his plot so that the lovers would not marry until the middle of Volume Three.

"My uncle would call this a railway dreadful," Charles said softly.

"Your uncle can call it the Prince of Wales if he likes," Jarrold chuckled, picking up his pencil again. "It pays the compositors on Saturday afternoon, which is more than can be said for some of the three-deckers we’ve racked up in the back warehouse."

Charles stepped to the window of the composing room and looked down into the narrow lane below. A heavy two-horse dray from the Great Northern Railway had halted outside a paper-merchant’s warehouse, blocking the narrow passage. The driver was swearing violently at a boy who was trying to push a handcart loaded with wooden crates through the gap. The crates were stenciled with the mark of George Bell & Sons.

Everything in Paternoster Row seemed pressed, cramped, and straining against the limits of space and time. For three generations, this quarter-mile of narrow lanes had dictated what the British Empire read. From these damp cellars and third-floor garrets, tens of thousands of three-volume novels had floated out into the country—to grand houses in Devon, to rectory parlors in Yorkshire, to garrison posts in India—all wrapped in blue, green, or crimson cloth, carrying the weight of middle-class respectability.

The three-volume novel was not merely a book; it was an economic fortress. By setting the retail price at thirty-one shillings and sixpence—a figure far beyond the reach of an ordinary clerk, whose weekly wage might be thirty shillings—the publishers had effectively guaranteed that no private individual would ever buy a novel. Instead, the public was forced to join the circulating libraries. Mudie’s and W.H. Smith bought the books wholesale from publishers like Bentham & Son at a discount of nearly fifty percent, then rented them out to subscribers for a guinea a year.

It was a perfect, cozy triangle: the publisher had a guaranteed buyer in the library; the library had a captive audience of subscribers; and the novelist had a predictable, if modest, income based on steady word counts.

But as Charles watched the drayman clear his cart from the alley below, he knew the triangle was cracking. The price of paper was falling; steam power was making printing ridiculously cheap; literacy was rising thanks to the Board Schools established twenty years earlier. A new generation of readers had grown up—clerks, shopgirls, teachers, telegraphists—who had sixpence or a shilling in their pockets, but who had no desire to pay a guinea a year for the privilege of waiting six weeks for Volume Two of a romance set in a country house they would never be allowed to enter.

He turned back to the overseer. "Set the first three sheets of Finch," Charles said, placing the manuscript back on the desk. "Give us the standard octavo layout. But do not make the plates yet. Just pull the proofs for the author to read."

Jarrold looked up over his spectacles, his pen poised. "Not making stereo plates? That’ll mean setting the whole thing again if you go to a cheap edition later."

"We’ll see," Charles said quietly. "Let us get through the library run first."

He left the composing room and walked down the dark stairs, his hand sliding along the smoothed mahogany handrail that had been polished by three generations of publishers, authors, and clerks.

At the street door, he met Arthur Finch’s friend, the critic and essayist Julian Vance, who was coming in out of the drizzle, his cloak dripping onto the floorboards. Vance was a tall, thin man with a sharp, pointed nose and an eyeglass suspended from a black silk ribbon. He wrote long, devastating reviews for the Saturday Review and was reputed to read six novels a week, usually while eating cold mutton in his chambers at the Temple.

"Ah, young Bentham!" Vance exclaimed, dropping his wet umbrella into the stand. "Have