Hobbies And Interests
The Process of Creating a Pictorial Wrap
According to the website The Hermitage Bookshop, a wood engraver named Edmund Evans developed a process of engraving that produced an image on book covers in multiple colors, most notably red, blue, yellow and brown. The first block printed the outline of the image in brown, and the following blocks printed the details of the image.
The First Pictorial Wrap
The first pictorial wrap was seen in 1853 with the publication of the book "Letters Left at the Tastry Cooks" by Horace Mayhew. The engraving process developed by Edmund Evans printed the cover of this book in brown, blue and red. This new process quickly became popular and led to the invention of yet another alternative to expensive cloth-bound books.
Yellowbacks
The bright pictorial wraps of the 1850s were so popular that a new genre of books cropped up shortly after the publication of "Letters Left at the Pastry Cooks" and were called "yellowbacks." These books were bound to fiberboard covers using glazed paper and also had illustrations block printed on the covers in 2 to 4 colors. They were an alternative to the expensive cloth-covered copies of books of this time period, but were still more expensive than paperbacks. The glazed paper on the cover was usually, but not always, yellow.
Collector Tips
Not all paperbacks of the late 19th and early 20th centuries were reprints of hardback or cloth-covered books. Some were original publications of what are now classic books, such as Mark Twain's "The Innocents at Home and Roughing It" and Alexander Pushkin's "The Queen of Spades." Familiarize yourself with the different genres and time periods that pictorial wraps were used in to ensure the authenticity of collectors' editions of paperbacks with pictorial wraps.