Features
The material included in the books tended to be entirely "proper" prose and poetry, usually of a sentimental or religious nature, often by well-known authors of the day, such as (in England) Mary Shelley, Charles Dickens, Lord Byron, Robert Southey, Walter Scott, William Wordsworth, and Robert Browning, and (in America) authors such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Lydia Maria Child, Edgar Allan Poe, John Greenleaf Whittier, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frances S. Osgood, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
A notable feature of gift books were their decorative aspect. They featured increasingly lavish bindings, ranging from glazed paper to embossed silk or embossed and inlaid leather with mother of pearl. Their size increased over time as well as their interior decoration. Pages often featured flowery borders, and the books were copiously illustrated with engravings or colored plates. An inscription plate was often included for the gift giver to inscribe to the recipient.
The material included was usually original but sometimes in the cheaper volumes may have been reprinted. Usually the books included the year in the title but in some cases, this was omitted, and the publisher would sell the volume's remainders the next year. In some cases an old annual would be reprinted with a new name, or with just the lead article and some illustration plates changed, or even renamed using a more popular name from a rival publisher. These practices sometimes make it difficult to construct correct bibliographies, and may have been one reason why "the whole tribe of annuals fell into something of disrepute."
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Famous quotes containing the word features:
“It is a tribute to the peculiar horror of contemporary life that it makes the worst features of earlier times—the stupefaction of the masses, the obsessed and driven lives of the bourgeoisie—seem attractive by comparison.”
—Christopher Lasch (b. 1932)
“All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event—in the living act, the undoubted deed—there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask!”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)
“However much we may differ in the choice of the measures which should guide the administration of the government, there can be but little doubt in the minds of those who are really friendly to the republican features of our system that one of its most important securities consists in the separation of the legislative and executive powers at the same time that each is acknowledged to be supreme, in the will of the people constitutionally expressed.”
—Andrew Jackson (1767–1845)