Eve, by S Baring Gould

 Sabine Baring Gould was a priest, a collector of folk songs and a prolific late nineteenth century novelist.

His books are mostly forgotten now, but one of his books was undoubtedly the star of today's cataloguing session up at the Athenaeum

simply because it was published and printed by George  Robertson and company in Australia in 1888.

Quite a few of S Baring Gould's novels were published by Chatto and Windus in London, and I've previously found evidence that George Robertson was producing yellowbacks in Australia using the stereogrphs of the Chatto and Windus yellowback editions - the stereograph being a papier mache squeeze of the plates for the original book from which new plates could be made. (incidentally Rawlinson used the same squeeze method to copy monumental cuneiform inscriptions carved into cliffs in Iran).

Unfortunately our edition of Eve has been rebound, so it is impossible to tell what the original binding was, but the paper is reasonably good quality suggesting that while it might have been reprinted via a squeeze, it was something more than a yellowback.

Other than that it was mosly 1950's romance novels today, along with one or two nineteen thirties crime and mystery novels, but we have even more proof that hygenic libraries were still a thing in the nineteen fifties