Book series

[1] In 1841 the German Tauchnitz publishing firm launched the Collection of British and American Authors, a reprint series of inexpensive paperbound editions of both public domain and copyrighted fiction and nonfiction works.

[2] This book series was unique for paying living authors of the works published even though copyright protection did not exist between nations in the 19th century.

Some works in a series can stand alone—they can be read in any order, as each book makes few, if any, reference to past events, and the characters seldom, if ever, change.

Thus, the books in a series are sometimes enumerated according to the internal chronology rather than in publication order, depending on the intended purpose for the list.

With precedents such as Madeleine de Scudéry's magnum opus, Artamène, the novel sequence was a product of the nineteenth century, with James Fenimore Cooper's works appearing in the 1820s, and Anthony Trollope's Barchester books in the 1850s.

In French literature, Honoré de Balzac's ambitious La Comédie humaine, a set of nearly 100 novels, novellas and short stories with some recurring characters, started to come together during the 1830s.

Émile Zola's Rougon-Macquart cycle is a family saga, a format that later became a popular fictional form, going beyond the conventional three-volume novel.

A roman-fleuve (French, literally "river-novel") is an extended sequence of novels of which the whole acts as a commentary for a society or an epoch, and which continually deals with a central character, community or a saga within a family.

Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu has come to be regarded as a definitive roman fleuve.

The twenty-novel Aubrey-Maturin series by the English author Patrick O'Brian has been called perhaps the best-loved roman fleuve of the twentieth century: "[an] epic of two heroic yet believably realistic men that would in some ways define a generation".

[citation needed] The introduction of the preconstructed novel sequence is often attributed to E. E. Doc Smith, with his Lensman books.

Book series can be compared with editorial collection, a type of serial publication which is common in the Romance-speaking world, especially in France.