Even well into the 20th Century, many books in the nonfiction category were listed as being in several volumes. While it was common practice in the 19th Century for novels to be published in several volumes for the commerical lending libraries, by the 20th Century this was not the case, and many of these works-especially in history-seem to be richer in detail and information than current works on the same period. Do you think this is true?
Well, in the past 25 years, the minimum length requirement for a first novel for science fiction and fantasy publishers went from 70,000 words to 90,000 words.
Books did get shorter from the 19th century until the 20th, but they are getting longer now than they were 25 years ago.
As an owner of Henri-Louis de la Grange’s four-volume, 4,632-page biography of Gustav Mahler, completed in 2008, I’d say probably not.
No, I haven’t gotten through the whole thing yet.
Shorter? I don’t think so at all.
Fantasy books are regularly 700-1000 pages.
I’m reading Otherland right now, and it is four sections of 750 pages, totally about 300 pages total.
It’s simply not true that anything but a tiny minority of books in the 19th or the early 20th century were true multiple volumes because of length. I’ve looked at thousands of volumes from that era and only a handful were extremely long, just as only a handful of books today are that long.
Even some of the multi-volume books of that era would be printed as single-volume books today. The majority of 19th century books were physically smaller and used much larger margins and compartively larger leading than today’s books, resulting in far fewer words per page. A 500-page history today probably has enough wordage that it might have gotten printed in 2 or even 3 volumes in the 19th century. All the multi-volume novels of that era are easily contained in single books today. You’re talking about an artefact of printing history, not a real change in word count.
If I had to make a WAG, I’d say that more really fat, long books are published today than at any previous time. People seemingly respond to higher book prices by wanting more heft to their books. Both fiction and nonfiction appear to be longer, i.e. wordier, than I ever remember them or find them in libraries. There is a range of lengths, but that’s always been true. Today the median point is higher. I can’t possibly give you any statistics to back this up, but I’m a bibliophile and a researcher who has handled literally hundreds of thousands of books. I’m always surrounded by piles of books from a variety of times and subjects and types. I would bet that my impression is real.
No, you’re just getting taller.
Multivolume history books are pretty common too.
Weren’t illustrations more common too?
Judging by my bookcase, and the books which I still have from the 1970s, science fiction and fantasy books have gotten much larger.
One new-er book (Hell Hath No Fury, 2008) is easily the thickness of four Hourseclans novels, and seems about three times the length of Ringworld.
I blame word processing, which made re-writing and editing so much easier an author can just keep turning out words without laborious re-typing or wating paper.
(There is also the “extruded fantasy product” where you throw elves, artifacts and a quest into the computer and let it run, slice off and bind into 600-page lengths.)
Many books were multivolume, but not because they were extremely long. I was surprised to learn that Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was originally published in four volumes (!) in 1818. The next edition (and every one since) has been published as a single volume. Many of Jules Verne’s works were published as two or three volume works initially, and were often collected into a single volume later. I’m sure this was the case with many other works, and undoubtedly had to do with the economics and marketing in the book industry, although I don’t know exactly what.
As for the OP, it’s clear to me that , whether or not novels are getting shorter, books themselves are getting longer and larger. This seems to be a continuing trend, and has been going on for some time. My books from the 1960s are very slim volumes that run 100-200 pages, but by the 1980s and 1990s the books tend to be several hundred pages. (You can see the trend in individual authors, too – earlier works by science fiction authors Asimov, Heinlein, and Clarke were slim. Later ones were bloated tomes) Thin books that used to be published then weren’t published later – the thin collection of newspaper comics, like B.C. and Wizard of Id disappeared. Thin Sf novels atarted getting doubled up. They started using tricks like larger print, wider spacing of lines, and largere margins to turn formerly thin works into hefty books. My old copies of some Heinlein books could fit in my pocket – mre recent copies of the same books could be used as doorstops.
I notice that new editions of Nero Wolfe consist of two books, bound as one, whereas only a decade ago they could sell them as individual books.
The trend
Hey, I LIKED those old Ace doubles, and I wish they’d come back. Some stories need to be novelettes or novellas, and if they’re padded to novel size, they just don’t work as well.
I’ve discussed this before in a thread about why we buy certain books, but what you said definitely applies to me - other than subject matter, the one aspect of a book that will make me purchase it is size and word count: if I’m spending $25+ for a book, it had better be thick and be able to give me more than an hour or two worth of reading.
Unless needed for specialized applications (e.g., a book of financial calculations or some such), I won’t even look at books under 100-200 pages.
As I understand it, the highwater mark for SF & fantasy novels came some time in the 90s; I specifically remember a Charles Stross blog post about how he had to cut one of his novels in half because he’d started it when publishers wanted 800-900 page behemoths but finished it when they’d decided to slim down slightly.
Probably not, or at least not significantly so. We did a thread on this recently, I think. People think of the Sherlock Holmes stories as being illustrated, but they accompanied the magazine versions. The books didn’t have them until later on. It’s far easier and less expensive today to include illustrations than it was in the days before offset printing.
So many people here are f&sf readers that I think it skews perceptions. The genre had virtually no novels until the 1950s. Those tended to be quite short. It wasn’t for plot reasons as much as page counts. Publishers could only charge 25 cents and that limited how long a book could be. There are lots of stories of publishers arbitrarily setting a count because of signatures (16-page sections that were printed as one sheet, then cut & folded) and making authors lop off pages or fill in endings to make them fit. By the end of the 50s publishers were forced to raise prices across the board but they started by charging more for the thicker books, with 35 and 50 cent lines. It wasn’t until after fantasies got popular in the 70s that f&sf grew fatter. But that was another era of rapidly rising prices.
We see most genre books grow fat starting in the 70s. In mysteries, writers like Ed McBain or Len Deighton, who had done taut, thin books early in their career, now were told to write (bloated) 400 page books that looked to be the proper size for bestsellers. It worked. Their best sellers are in the 80s with these books. This precedes word processing, and many, if not the great majority, of these writers who had been working with typewriters for decades stayed with them. I know it’s a popular theory to say that word processors bloated books but I don’t know of any evidence to back it up. Editors still existed and they had been cutting out enormous chunks of typewritten manuscript for decades. If you don’t want Thomas Wolfe as an example, take the 60,000 words cut out of Stranger in a Strange Land. Please. Mysteries had already been through a fat period in the 20s and 30s, when the golden age required convoluted plots that needed 300 pages to work out. Faster paced hardboiled novels and the printing restrictions of paperbacks made them thin in the 40s and 50s. And that was all typewriters. Lots of pulp writers ground out a million words a year before even electric typewriters.
Not in the fantasy or alt history world. Harry Turtledove, Stirling, and many others top 1000 pages, which I love, because I’m one of those people that can finish a 200 - 300 page book in an evening. Gimme something that takes me awhile to finish! Of course, now with my Kindle, I don’t have to trudge to the book store. Your crack is available 24/7, right in your hand. My husband may regret his decision to buy me this thing.
“Another d-mn’d thick, square book! Always, scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh! Mr. Gibbon?”
– The Duke of Gloucester (brother of George III)
So am I . . . but reading 10,000 words of Turtledove takes a lot longer than reading 10,000 words of Stirling. In subjective terms, at any rate.