Selections from Cassell & Company

This 1958 catalog from Cassell & Company reads like a compressed civilization. Here in one volume lies the entire Victorian and Edwardian reading universe: Richard Jefferies' "After London" alongside medical manuals for country practitioners, Washington's "Life and Voyages of Columbus" next to "Cassell's Dictionary of Cookery." The publisher's selections span British battles and European butterflies, John Bright's speeches and Bismarck's biography, fine-art volumes and school textbooks. What emerges from these pages is not merely a business record but a portrait of what educated England wanted to know. Cassell & Company published for the drawing room and the laboratory, for the amateur naturalist and the practical housewife. Each entry with its price and illustration notes reveals what books cost, what they looked like, and who was meant to hold them. For historians of the book, this catalog is indispensable. For anyone curious about what Victorians actually read beyond the novels we still teach, it offers an answer both mundane and wondrous: they read everything, and Cassell printed it.