Adverts in books

According to John Carter, in his ABC for Book Collectors, it was quite common for printers, in the early days of book printing, to include adverts on the blank pages at the end of their books. Apparently it was also not uncommon for binders to remove them when they bound up the sheets, which was of course how early books were sold. These adverts were usually for the printer/publisher’s own wares, but often were not. In the nineteenth and early twentieth century publishers came up with the idea of printing up a separate advertisement section, on different paper, and binding it into the books they published. By then edition binding had evolved — the practice of the publishers’ taking care of binding their books before they sold them — and thus they just needed to send the bindery a sufficient quantity of say their complete catalog, and have that bound in at the end of the volume. Mr Carter tells us this practice became rare after 1915. Since the catalog inserts usually had a date, this…