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21 " The most successful ran a shop full of scribes turning out several dozen copies a week. These avvisi were succinct, wide ranging and remarkably well informed. "
― Andrew Pettegree , The Invention of News: How the World Came to Know About Itself
22 " Britain, where the establishment of a local library board required a taxpayer levy, the take-up rate was initially sluggish. Even when a library rate was proposed, hostile campaigning, often underwritten by the powerful brewers’ lobby, could ensure that it was defeated. "
― Andrew Pettegree , The Library: A Fragile History
23 " Mudie's insistence on the three-volume format was undoubtedly responsible for the verbosity of many nineteenth-century novels, as authors went to extraordinary efforts to pad their texts to the required length. While a seasoned professional like Anthony Trollope mastered the required skill, many struggled to maintain inspiration and dramatic tension for the required 200,000 words, 66,000 words per volume. If we wonder why so many nineteenth-century novels lose themselves in a convoluted (though chaste) love story between two marginal characters in the novel's middle passage, we should blame Charles Edward Mudie: this was the problem of the difficult second volume. If all else failed and authors acme in short, publishers resorted to larger typefaces and wide margins to disguise the deficit. "