MBC Event, 19 March 2009

"By Book or By Crook: The Hidden History of Richard Edward King, Publisher of Victorian Fiction."

I am pleased to announce that on Thursday 19 March at 5.30pm Prof. John Spiers will present, in the McArthur Gallery (Rare Books), off the Redmond Barry Reading Room at the State Library of Victoria, a paper on Richard Edward King (1854–1916).

[Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (London: Richard Edward King, [n.d.])

R. E. King was mainly a reprint publisher of cheap editions of fiction. He issued some 450 reprints, chiefly of English classics. He travelled world-wide, and sold large numbers of books outside the book trade—a part of the market still too little understood. King was an extremely capable, energetic, venturesome and competitive entrepreneurial fi gure. However, he began as a millionaire and ended in a pauper’s grave. He went to gaol for serious fraud, serving with hard labour. There is no known commercial archive of King’s business activities, so Spiers has collected and studied the books themselves as an archive. They provide new insights into how such publishers worked, and how readers obtained these works of fi ction. King’s story, and the stories of his direct competitors, are just one aspect of the enormous changes that occurred in late-Victorian and Edwardian culture.

John Spiers is a Senior Research Fellow in the Institute of English Studies, University of London, Visiting Professor in the School of Humanities, University of Glamorgan, and Visiting Research Fellow in the Ruskin Programme, University of Lancaster.