The outpouring of annuals and gift books in the 1820s and 1830s, ‘though treated with disdain by many contemporary writers and artists’, has long been recognised as a significant feature of late Regency print culture. Part of the interest in the early history of annuals has been bibliographical – locating and defining the annual as a print form among the many similar literary innovations that characterised the experimental and entrepreneurial publishing ventures of the 1820s and 1830s.Annuals and gift books were significantly innovative in the history of print. They introduced elaborate embossed bindings for the mass market that employed the new technology of the fly-embossing press, giving the small volumes what Eleanore Jamieson has rather dismissively called ‘a semi luxury’ look. With their decorative covers and gilded fore edges, annuals sought to attract new if not especially ambitious readers, ‘particularly those of the ladies who for the first time [were] considered worthy of commercial attention’, as Jamieson wryly notes. Annuals also exploited the glossy sheen and tonal complexity of their illustrations, becoming ‘the first type of book to benefit from steel engraving’. At a time in the 1820s and 1830s when the cheapness of wood engraving was beginning to be widely exploited, steel engraving had become largely associated with topographical illustration, in which ‘the wide range of tones it could produce and the maximum contrast between black and white’ were of considerable value.