Gift book
Encyclopedia
History
Gift books first appeared in England in the 1820s. They were modelled after the long-established literary almanacs published in France and Germany such as the Almanach des MusesAlmanach des Muses
L'Almanach des Muses was a poetry journal founded in 1765 by Sautreau de Marsy.Almanacs had known a great vogue during the second half of the 18th century. The aim of the Almanach des Muses was to go beyond what previous almanacs had attempted by presenting to its readership a selection of recent...
(1765–1833) and Schiller's Musen-Almanach
Musen-Almanach
A Musen-Almanach was a kind of literary annual, popular in Germany from 1770 into the mid 19th century. They were modelled on the Almanach des Muses published in Paris from 1765.-Development in the 1770s:...
(1796–1800), but lacked some of the critical prestige of their Continental counterparts. The first known example is Rudolph Ackermann
Rudolph Ackermann
Rudolph Ackermann was an Anglo-German bookseller, inventor, lithographer, publisher and businessman.- Biography :...
's Forget Me Not
Forget-Me-Not (annual)
The Forget-Me-Not was an illustrated, British annual published by Rudolph Ackermann. This was the first literary annual in English and it was edited by Frederic Shoberl from its launch in 1822. A junior version appeared in 1828.-History:...
, subtitled a Christmas and New Year’s Present for 1823, published in November 1822. It was decoratively bound and came in a slipcase
Slipcase
A slipcase is a four or five-sided box, usually made of high-quality cardboard, into which binders, books or book sets are slipped for protection. Special editions of books are often slipcased...
. It was successful, and by 1832 there were sixty-three different annual gift books being published in England. In 1826, The Atlantic Souvenir was the first American annual published.
Many gift books were among the first periodicals to pay contributors and editors regularly. This was a draw to many writers, many of whom tailored their work to suit the readers of these types of publications.
Some of the more important annuals of the time were the Opal
The Opal (annual)
The Opal, A Pure Gift for the Holy Days, was an annual gift book, founded by Rufus Wilmot Griswold and published in New York by John C. Riker, from 1844 to 1849. Content included short stories, illustrations and poems....
, Talisman, the Magnolia, the Gift, the Liberty Bell
The Liberty Bell (annual)
The Liberty Bell, by Friends of Freedom, was an annual Abolitionist gift book, edited and published by Maria Weston Chapman, to be sold or gifted to participants in the National Anti-Slavery Bazaar organized by the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society...
(an abolitionist work) and the Token
The Token and Atlantic Souvenir
The Token was an annual, illustrated gift book, containing stories, poems and other light and entertaining reading. In 1833, it became The Token and Atlantic Souvenir.-History:...
. The era of the gift book did not outlast the 19th century; in England most ceased publication before 1860.
The Illustrated London News parodies of 1842 (vol. 1, p. 521) focussed their attacks on four popular annuals: Friendship's Offerings, The Book of Beauty, Forget-Me-Not and The Keepsake, and mimicked the poetry of these books, inverting the sentiment and twisting the illustrations. ("My pretty blue-bell, I'm going to tell..." instead of "My pretty blue-bell, I'll never tell...") The American Book of Beauty had contributed to the death of the annual, by including a story of prison torture followed by an etching of an well-dressed woman holding a lap dog. They published this book several times, sometimes with the etchings in different orders or including additional William Henry Mote
William Henry Mote
William Henry Mote was primarily an English stipple and line engraver on steel and he was primarily known for his portraits. He also did other etchings for reference books, and some original etchings. Today we could just take a picture, however in the mid 1800's engravings illustrated the books...
etchings.
Almost all contained steel engraving
Steel engraving
Steel engraving, is a commercial engraving technique for printing illustrations, based on steel instead of copper. It has been rarely used in artistic printmaking, although was much used for reproductions in the 19th century. Steel engraving was introduced in 1792 by Jacob Perkins , an American...
s, a new technology around 1820 which allowed mass production, and of which the expense was offset by the potential for resale and reuse. Watercolor became popular in the 1830s, and the black-and-white etchings allowed people of ordinary skill to color in and display these book plates, and this gave more legs to the fad. In 1844 there was an article referring to it as imbecilic mania, and finally an "Obituary for the Annual" appeared in the Art Journal of 1857. The new cheaper illustration techniques of the 1860s could not produce the same illustrations (usually well dressed women, with long dresses with sharp facial details).
Editors
Many of the most popular and well-known gift books were edited by women, including Sarah Josepha HaleSarah Josepha Hale
Sarah Josepha Buell Hale was an American writer and an influential editor. She is the author of the nursery rhyme "Mary Had a Little Lamb"...
, Maria Weston Chapman
Maria Weston Chapman
Maria Weston or Maria Weston Chapman was an American abolitionist. She was elected to the executive committee of the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1839 and from 1839 until 1842, she served as editor of the anti-slavery journal, Non-Resistant.-Family:Weston was born in 1806 in Weymouth,...
, Lydia Maria Child, Alice
Alice Cary
Alice Cary was an American poet, and the sister of fellow poet Phoebe Cary .-Biography:Alice Cary was born on April 26, 1820, in Mount Healthy, Ohio near Cincinnati. Her parents lived on a farm bought by Robert Cary in 1813 in what is now North College Hill, Ohio. He called the Clovernook Farm...
and Phoebe Cary
Phoebe Cary
Phoebe Cary was an American poet, and the younger sister of poet Alice Cary . The sisters co-published poems in 1849, and then each went on to publish volumes of her own...
, and Lydia Sigourney
Lydia Sigourney
Lydia Huntley Sigourney , née Lydia Howard Huntley, was a popular American poet during the early and mid 19th century. She was commonly known as the "Sweet Singer of Hartford". Most of her works were published with just her married name Mrs. Sigourney.-Early life:Mrs...
. The annual The Token, which began in 1828 and lasted fifteen years, was edited by Samuel Griswold Goodrich
Samuel Griswold Goodrich
Samuel Griswold Goodrich was an American author, better known under the pseudonym Peter Parley.-Biography:Goodrich was born at Ridgefield, Connecticut as the son of a Congregational minister...
. Because of the prevalence and popularity of gift books, he referred to the time period as the "Age of Annuals".
Features
The material included in the books tended to be entirely "proper" prose and poetry, usually of a sentimental or religious nature, often by well known authors of the day such as (in England) Mary ShelleyMary Shelley
Mary Shelley was a British novelist, short story writer, dramatist, essayist, biographer, and travel writer, best known for her Gothic novel Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus . She also edited and promoted the works of her husband, the Romantic poet and philosopher Percy Bysshe Shelley...
, Charles Dickens
Charles Dickens
Charles John Huffam Dickens was an English novelist, generally considered the greatest of the Victorian period. Dickens enjoyed a wider popularity and fame than had any previous author during his lifetime, and he remains popular, having been responsible for some of English literature's most iconic...
, Lord Byron
George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron
George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron, later George Gordon Noel, 6th Baron Byron, FRS , commonly known simply as Lord Byron, was a British poet and a leading figure in the Romantic movement...
, Robert Southey
Robert Southey
Robert Southey was an English poet of the Romantic school, one of the so-called "Lake Poets", and Poet Laureate for 30 years from 1813 to his death in 1843...
, Walter Scott
Walter Scott
Sir Walter Scott, 1st Baronet was a Scottish historical novelist, playwright, and poet, popular throughout much of the world during his time....
, William Wordsworth
William Wordsworth
William Wordsworth was a major English Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature with the 1798 joint publication Lyrical Ballads....
, and Robert Browning
Robert Browning
Robert Browning was an English poet and playwright whose mastery of dramatic verse, especially dramatic monologues, made him one of the foremost Victorian poets.-Early years:...
, and (in America) authors such as Nathaniel Hawthorne
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Nathaniel Hawthorne was an American novelist and short story writer.Nathaniel Hawthorne was born in 1804 in the city of Salem, Massachusetts to Nathaniel Hathorne and the former Elizabeth Clarke Manning. His ancestors include John Hathorne, a judge during the Salem Witch Trials...
, Lydia Maria Child, Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe was an American author, poet, editor and literary critic, considered part of the American Romantic Movement. Best known for his tales of mystery and the macabre, Poe was one of the earliest American practitioners of the short story and is considered the inventor of the detective...
, John Greenleaf Whittier
John Greenleaf Whittier
John Greenleaf Whittier was an influential American Quaker poet and ardent advocate of the abolition of slavery in the United States. He is usually listed as one of the Fireside Poets...
, Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson was an American essayist, lecturer, and poet, who led the Transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century...
, Frances S. Osgood, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was an American poet and educator whose works include "Paul Revere's Ride", The Song of Hiawatha, and Evangeline...
.
A notable feature of gift books were their decorative aspect. They featured increasingly lavish bindings, ranging from glazed paper to embossed silk or embossed and inlaid leather with mother of pearl. Their size increased over time as well as their interior decoration. Pages often featured flowery borders, and the books were copiously illustrated with engravings or colored plates. An inscription plate was often included for the gift giver to inscribe to the recipient.
The material included was usually original but sometimes in the cheaper volumes may have been reprinted. Usually the books included the year in the title but in some cases, this was omitted, and the publisher would sell the volume's remainder
Remaindered book
Remaindered books are books that are no longer selling well and whose remaining unsold copies are being liquidated by the publisher at greatly reduced prices...
s the next year. In some cases an old annual would be reprinted with a new name, or with just the lead article and some illustration plates changed, or even renamed using a more popular name from a rival publisher. These practices sometimes make it difficult to construct correct bibliographies, and may have been one reason why "the whole tribe of annuals fell into something of disrepute."
Illustrators
Book illustrations before the 1860s involved both an artist and an engraver. Both the artists' work, and the engravers' "copy" had copyright protection in England. Sometimes the artist and the engraver were the same person. New technology made the profession of engraving obsolete (except for currency) around 1860.Artists whose work illustrated these volumes included William Turner
William Turner (artist)
William Turner was an English painter who specialised in watercolour landscapes. He was a contemporary of the more famous artist J. M. W. Turner and his style was not dissimilar. He is often known as William Turner of Oxford or just Turner of Oxford to distinguish him from his better known namesake...
, Edwin Henry Landseer
Edwin Henry Landseer
Sir Edwin Henry Landseer, RA was an English painter, well known for his paintings of animals—particularly horses, dogs and stags...
, Charles Lock Eastlake
Charles Lock Eastlake
Sir Charles Lock Eastlake RA was an English painter, gallery director, collector and writer of the early 19th century.-Early life:...
, John Cheney, and John Sartain
John Sartain
John Sartain was an artist who pioneered mezzotint engraving in the United States.-Biography:John Sartain was born in London, England on October 24, 1808. He learned line engraving, and produced several of the plates in William Young Ottley's Early Florentine School . In 1828, he began to do...
. Many of the illustrations reproduced works by European artists of the Renaissance and later eras and served to make the works of these artists known to a much wider audience.
Engravers had their own art of taking a color painting and converting it to a black and white steel engraving (and also reversing it). These engravers often worked 12-16 hour days and each line was scratched by hand onto soft steel plate with a magnifying glass in one hand. One mistake could ruin an entire plate. There were a half dozen engravers in England that made this look easy, based on the volume of etchings produced. A few of these popular engravers were admitted to the Royal Academy
Royal Academy
The Royal Academy of Arts is an art institution based in Burlington House on Piccadilly, London. The Royal Academy of Arts has a unique position in being an independent, privately funded institution led by eminent artists and architects whose purpose is to promote the creation, enjoyment and...
, including William Henry Mote
William Henry Mote
William Henry Mote was primarily an English stipple and line engraver on steel and he was primarily known for his portraits. He also did other etchings for reference books, and some original etchings. Today we could just take a picture, however in the mid 1800's engravings illustrated the books...
. Here, however, the engraver was sarcastically called a "copier" and thus was limited to the Royal Academy rank of Associate; they were also warned by against "piracy". However, the engraver was the highest paid entity of a book production (but based on hours worked, he was the lowest paid). Most annuals had engravings of portraits. Today, as in the 19th century, the engravers do not get much credit, and their "art" can now be done in photo editing software. The The Wall Street Journal uses a photo etching technique to put etchings in every edition. These old engravings often go unsold on eBay today, but in the 1836 auction of some plates the winning bid was ₤420,000 (adjusted for 2010 inflation). Some of these plates have been found in London antique stores and still exist today, and are much cheaper today then in 1836. Some have been scrapped for scrap metal, as the old plates might weigh 50 lbs or more.