Historians of publishing and bibliography both love and hate Henry Colburn (1784/5–1855). His publishing practices and use of blatant commercialism shaped the modern literary marketplace and can be seen as both ‘innovative’ and ‘unethical’, causing some critics – in the nineteenth century and today – to question Colburn's place within publishing history. For example, in his account of the Bentley Archives, Royal Gettman assumes a negative stance with regard to Col-burn, citing his ‘mercantile attitude toward the world of letters’ and perspective on literary talent, writing that Colburn ‘crassly assumed that he could contrive it [talent] or purchase it’. John Strachan offers a more tempered position in his work on Romantic satire, noting that Colburn ‘provoked some unease among poets and essayists, notably in a feeling that books were being marketed in the same way as more mundane products such as blacking, hair oil or lottery tickets’. Publishing historian John Sutherland offers a still more positive view: ‘As regards his more extravagant feats of “puffing” (what is now called “hype”), Colburn's main offence was to be ahead of his time’. Regardless of individual persuasion, a few facts remain objective. Colburn made his mark on the literary scene as a publisher of novels and periodicals, having begun his career working for a bookseller and a circulating library, and he also, Sutherland writes, ‘was clearly influential in the 1820s in fixing the standard first-form of issue for fiction as the three-volume, 31s 6d novel, designed to sell to libraries rather than direct to the reading public’. Colburn started some of the most influential periodicals of the period, including New Monthly Magazine (1814), Literary Gazette (1817) and Court Journal (1829), and he had a partial interest in the Athenaeum and The Times for a period. As a book publisher, he published a variety of non-fiction works, including travelogues, diaries and letters, biographies and memoirs, but he was best known for novels.