‘AN UNPRECEDENTED COMMERCIAL SUCCESS’
SHOBERL, Frederic, editor.
Forget me not; a Christmas and New Year’s, and Birth-Day Present for MDCCCXXXI …
London, [Thomas Davison for] R[udolph] Ackermann, 1831.
8vo, pp. ix, [1 (list of plates)], 386, with 15 plates including publisher’s orange embossed presentation plate (loosely inserted) and engraved part-title; a very good copy in the publisher’s green printed boards, small ribbon tab to rear board, edges gilt, housed in the publisher’s printed slipcase; slipcase worn, discoloured, and chipped, boards slightly rubbed, spine bumped.
Added to your basket:
Forget me not; a Christmas and New Year’s, and Birth-Day Present for MDCCCXXXI …
The Anglo-German publisher Rudolph Ackermann’s literary annual Forget-me-not for 1831, instrumental in introducing to English readers the concept of the German ‘gift book’, borrowing ‘from the French almanack and the German Taschenbüch to create the format of the first British-published annual’ (Harris).
London-born journalist and writer Frederic Shoberl (1775–1853) was the editor of the Forget-me-not from 1822 until 1834, as well as Ackermann’s Repository of Arts from 1809 to 1828, and the Juvenile Forget-me-not from 1828 to 1832. Ackermann’s ‘first annual, Forget-me-not, proved an unprecedented commercial success, 20,000 copies a year being published’ (ODNB). The Forget-me-not for 1831 includes, inter alia, tales about the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) peoples of New York, an enslaved Black man, adventures in Italy, ghosts, and elves, as well as poems on cat’s paws, maniacs’ smiles, and puzzled painters, and ‘may be considered as completing the first series of the Forget Me Not; as it is the intention of the Publisher, in compliance with the suggestion of many friends of the work, to make, next year, an alteration in its external appearance, by employing paper of somewhat larger size, and exchanging the certainly delicate but somewhat too frail cover … for a more durable binding in silk’ (pp. v–vi).
See Harris, Forget me not: The Rise of the British Literary Annual, 1823–1835.
