Newspapers and magazines were sold on bookstalls, and publishers were not slow to see the opening for the sale of cheap, attractive, easy-to-carry, paperbound books. A whole series of ‘libraries’ of such books was developed, initially to appeal to first-class passengers—the first volume in Murray’s Library of Railway Readings consisted of selected articles from The Times. The range soon widened and by the later 1850s the yellow backs’, so called because they were characteristically bound in glazed yellow paper, crowded the bookstalls. Some series were reprints of older works and some were original, so-called ‘railway’ novels. In addition to fiction, there were non-fiction works and topical books on, for example, the Crimean War and the Indian Mutiny. Most of the books sold for one or two shillings and, although they were more expensive than newspapers, they provided more reading matter. The bright display of books in the mundane background of the station, the ease and cheapness of buying them, and the lack of pretension in their binding made them familiar objects and helped remove the mystique which had always surrounded books in the past. Books ceased to be altarpieces in temples of prosperity and became the everyday possessions of the common man.