The Yellowback's Volume

Yellowbacks were brightly colored, affordable books sold at railway stations in the mid- to late nineteenth century. Their covers used the same design strategies as advertisements, including colorful illustrations of scenes from their storyworlds, to attract consumers. This article examines yellowbacks that enmesh their title lettering within their cover scenes, integrating the seemingly extradiegetic words or letters of the title into the diegetic visual contents of the scene. These yellowback covers exhibit what I call dimensionality—a property of covers that stage their books' literal and figurative depth. Yellowback covers worked in contrast to the advertisements that were pasted up around London or appended into publications. Whereas these advertisements cluttered and disoriented perception, the yellowbacks' cover scenes celebrated the physical volume of the book, offering readers both depth and narrative coherence.