Having a well curated library is one of life’s great joys, whether it’s made of paper or living inside an electronic device. There are some books that bear the laurels of being a “classic”–they’ve stood the test of time and have merit for their writing, their themes or their ideas. But buying such a long list of books in editions worthy of collecting…that could be an expensive venture.
Enter the Everyman’s Library, the brainchild of Joseph Dent. The son of a housepainter, he arrived in London with a crown coin in his pocket and a vision to make great books available to everyone. According to the Everyman’s Library website, “Dent promised to publish new and beautiful editions of the world’s classics at one shilling a volume, ‘to appeal to every kind of reader: the worker, the student, the cultured man, the child, the man and the woman’, so that ‘for a few shillings the reader may have a whole bookshelf of the immortals; for five pounds (which will procure him with a hundred volumes) a man may be intellectually rich for life.'”
In 1906, his publishing house, J.M. Dent and Co. in London, and later co-publishers the E.P. Dutton Publishing Company in the US, set out to do exactly that as a 1000 book series. Trying to publish books for everyone’s taste in editions at every price point was not a small goal. But that’s what they did and what the publishing companies that have taken over the line do to this day.
The publishers had produced a remarkable 500 titles by 1910. It took until 1956 to finally reach that 1000 title goal. New titles stopped being added in the 1970s, but when the line was relaunched by a transAtlantic partnership of Random House in the UK and Alfred A, Knopf in the US, new titles started being added again. The current list of Everyman’s Library titles is here.
The Early Editions
Joseph Dent had the books designed to be as beautiful as the words they contained. The early editions had glorious art nouveau ornamentation on the flyleaf and title pages.
Dent divided the titles they printed into categories, which were highlighted at the front of each edition.
Different categories had different colors and different poems opposite the title page. You can see all of them on everymanslibrarycollecting.com which has detailed and rich picture references to help date and research your treasures when you find them.
Collecting Everyman’s Library
If you’ve been bitten by the Everyman’s bug, here as in all things, informed collectors are smart collectors. An online seller can put whatever price on a book they want. This is less likely on auction-style listings where demand and scarcity drive the final sale price. Nonetheless, a good reference like A Guide to Collecting Everyman’s Library (2005) by Terry Seymour (reviewed here) give you an advantage. Terry Seymour ferreted out a company sales journal in a university library. He crunched all their numbers and provides J.M. Denton sales info by title for the first 50 years of Everyman’s Library. Knowing how scarce a volume is useful to help you decide what what you are willing to pay.
Other helpful links:
A digitized copy Isabella Mitchell Cooper’s Dictionary Catalogue of the First 505 editions of Everyman’s Library.
A Primer for Buying and Selling Everyman’s Library by Craig Stark on his website book think.com has some good insider information for collectors.
The Amenities of Everyman’s Library Collecting is another fine site with an expanded index to titles.
