Looking to give a sales boost to some of the most popular books of its era, Houghton, Mifflin and Co. took out a full-page ad in August 1885 to promote new editions of four titles. Among those were editions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and The Scarlet Letter priced at $1. “In this cheap edition it is sure of a very large sale,” HM promised about Harriet Beecher Stowe’s classic. The publisher also predicted that the “inexpensive edition” of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s work can “hardly fail to win universal circulation.”

From the Archive: August 29, 1885 by Publishers Weekly on Scribd