The extensive influence of scott's fiction on art in the nineteenth century has long been a subject of commentary, while a parallel, if less developed, line of enquiry has examined the symbiosis between text and illustrative material in the production of collected sets of the Waverley novels. Until recently, however, general analysis has largely concentrated on exhibition painting, quantifiable as it is from sources such as the catalogues of the Royal Academy and British Institution. Catherine Gordon thus points to the exhibition by over three hundred painters and sculptors of more than a thousand Scott-related works between 1805 and 1870, with an increasing choice of the novels rather than poetry for subject-matter. Likewise, Richard Altick locates an equivalent heyday for Scott illustration: ‘The great age of Scott painting was the period 1830–50. During those two decades, well over 400 examples were exhibited, an average of more than twenty a year.’ Though never openly stated, in both critics one senses an underlying feeling that print illustrations were for the most part an offshoot of this ‘primary’ field of activity. However, there are a number of reasons for believing the opposite to have been the case, with the print market providing the chief motor force for the production of Scott imagery. In many instances paintings and drawings were commissioned for engraving first, and only exhibited subsequently.

The Early Nineteenth-Century Almanac

The presence of the almanac in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century households from right across the social scale has long been noted by historians of print culture. Characterised as publications within the important category of ‘pocket usefulness’ by James Raven, almanacs were a vital source of information within an agricultural society. If the almanac was not always to be found in the pocket, then it may have moved no further than the table – ‘Of all books the Almanack is the most indispensable. So constant is the need for it that, unlike other books, it is not deposited on the shelf, but lies ready to hand on the table.’ As William St. Clair elaborates:

Like no other text in the eighteenth century, James Thomson's The Seasons demonstrates the socio-economic importance of what James Raven has discussed in terms of product design: booksellers realised that ‘tailoring products to a particular clientele, experimenting in the design and packaging of products, and presenting these, as well as wider publishing activities, as fashionable’ contributed materially to increased sales. At the same time, following the lapse of perpetual copyright, which the pirated reprinting in Scotland of The Seasons had indirectly brought about, a market for the reprinting of works previously controlled by the monopolies of individual booksellers emerged. This proliferating market saw the publication of editions of Thomson's work, in various formats, for a socially diverse buying public. Ranging from relatively cheap, small-format and serialised editions to high-end subscription ventures, the print capital of The Seasons was seen as a testing ground for bookseller-publishers' experiments with marketing strategies, which after 1765 no longer restricted an edition's format to that used by Thomson's formerly exclusive copyright holder, Andrew Millar. The impetus to reprint popular works not only culminated in a large number of competing editions; it also resulted in the formation of a canon of British literature that was underpinned, primarily, by economic considerations regarding available copyright and demand, rather than the recognition of aesthetic merit as a criterion for inclusion in the canon of eighteenth-century literary worthies. Collaboration between booksellers, artists, designers and various trades catering to booksellers' demand for improved materials such as paper and type culminated, in the 1790s, in some of the most impressive ventures in book printing and a range of subscription projects.

Print-culture studies is a burgeoning field: it is actively fostered by bibliographical societies worldwide; centres for the study of the history of the book and material text have been founded, and several specialist book series on print culture have produced excellent contributions to the field. These series continuously demonstrate the need to revisit existing histories of print and to include alternative narratives that reveal hitherto neglected, often ephemeral print cultures. It is the recovery of these lesser-known print cultures that is essential for the mapping of cultural production in different knowledge economies and a better understanding of the role that print played in the fashioning of literature. Book-historical perspectives have helped scholars to investigate the cultural mechanisms affecting the production, dissemination and consumption of books in print form; as a discipline book history has expanded beyond the traditional focus on the material book to explore the social, cultural, ideological and economic processes underpinning an explosion of print in the eighteenth century. The flood of print matter that fed consumer demand and encouraged the consumption of all kinds of fashionable objects was closely linked with the rapidly developing visual cultures of society, especially in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when innovations in the printing of illustrations contributed to creating a mass-culture of the visual not possible before. Print culture catered to, and shaped, readers' visual imagination, and literary texts were frequently illustrated.

Question: how did a nineteenth-century dinosaur publication like the Athenaeum (1828–1921) prepare for the twentieth century? Answer: it appointed a new editor. This essay aims to look at the print legacy of this new editor, Vernon Horace Rendali (1869–1960), who in spite of the enormity of the task loaded onto his shoulders, has remained an unknown entity in print-culture history. As was often the case it was through the columns of the Athenaeum that the change of captain was announced:

This sudden resignation of Norman Maccoll (1843–1904) as editorin-chief of the weekly was to signal a new but unexciting path for this major Victorian periodical. His assistant editor, Vernon Rendall, had already carried out the editorial duties for several years before being entrusted with the sole management of the prestigious publication. The result of his reign as an editor was not really something he could boast about but he did try hard to make sure the Athenaeum continued to be the cultural flagship it had been up to then. In short, Rendall continued the publication policy he and Maccoll had followed in the previous years.

In The what-d'ye-call-it: a tragi-comi-pastoral farce (1715), English poet and dramatist John Gay satirised the popularity of John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress (Part 1, 1678; Part 2, 1684) in a scene where a condemned sinner is offered a prayer book and urged to make use of it:

While Bunyan's allegory of the Christian life on earth was immediately successful, his reputation as a Nonconformist writer of lowly origin held him in disrepute among the literati of his time. Besides Bunyan's varied reception, Gay's humorous, if not inaccurate, account reflects many facets of the late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century book trade on the whole, and some of the factors by which a work then became and remained a best-seller. Published in the material form of a book, having gone through several editions, printed for a publisher who was also its editor, and advertised as having been newly expanded, The Pilgrim's Progress had, by the early eighteenth century already, passed through the hands of a number of publishers, printers and readers. It had already lived an eventful life on the London book market and in the homes of many.

On the title page of the fifth edition of Aphra Behn's collected novels (1705), someone added the tag ‘Corrected from the many Errors of former Impressions’. Whether the phrase was inspired by a sense of pride in work well done or, more likely, a desire to advertise the book's superiority, it advises the modern reader of a number of important things. First, it tells us that the 1705 edition succeeds a number of previous editions, informing us that Behn's novels have a history, a textual history that involves errors. The language refers to the physical action of the hand-press, and it reminds us of those individual hands that set the type that formed the impressions remaining on the page today. The phrase underscores the fact that the text we receive underwent changes well after Behn's death in 1689. Most importantly for this essay, its claim testifies to a widespread and largely unacknowledged textual practice in the transmission of Aphra Behn's most famous short fiction, Oroonoko.

Over the course of the eighteenth century, various hands anonymously ‘corrected’ and ‘improved’ Behn's text in a gradual accretion of extensive textual corruption. Given the pedagogical prominence Oroonoko has assumed in the past twenty years and its overwhelming presence in literary scholarship of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a fitting subtitle to this article might be: ‘The Hazards of Choosing an Edition’. As Gerald Duchovnay and Mary Ann O'Donnell have documented, the publication of Oroonoko in 1688 was far from free of problems.