republic of letters (11. 802)

Via Super Punch, we are reminded of the notoriously weird and incongruous book covers (previously) of academics publisher Routledge, founded in 1836 to capitalise on the market of holiday by train and known as the “Railway Library” and later acquired the rights for printing the collected works of Edward Bulwer-Lytton before after flirting with insolvency entered the scholarly field buying out the the backlists of several university presses and journals and acquiring the imprint of several influential humanities and social sciences titles. The image references last year’s meme about the frequency among men thinking about Ancient Rome.