Gift book

They were modelled after the long-established literary almanacs published in France and Germany such as the Almanach des Muses (1765–1833) and Schiller's Musen-Almanach (1796–1800), but lacked some of the critical prestige of their Continental counterparts.

[5] Some of the more important annuals of the time were the Opal, Talisman, the Magnolia, the Gift, the Liberty Bell (an abolitionist work) and The Token.

The Victorian gift book market emerged in a time of mass-production, increased literacy, and growing demand of middle-class buyers.

Gift books were a display of cultural capital and, in many cases, design took precedent over content, with an emphasis on the volumes being seen rather than read.

Their emphasis on aesthetic form over content was criticized by contemporaries, but their visual and material qualities were a welcome addition to many middle-class domestic spaces.

An anonymous critic for The Saturday Review wrote that, "Nobody expects or wishes for originality, or depth, or learning in a Christmas book.

Hallam or Grote or Milman or Darwin is not what a Christmas book is made of..."[8] Almost all contained steel engravings, 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, which gave more legs to the fad.

[10] 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 Shelley, Charles Dickens, Lord Byron, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Robert Southey, Walter Scott, William Wordsworth, and Robert Browning, and (in America) authors such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Lydia Maria Child, Edgar Allan Poe, John Greenleaf Whittier, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frances S. Osgood, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

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.

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".