In 1800 the modern world of publishing was still in its infancy. Most of the activity in drama was still in the hands of small syndicates of stationers and booksellers, who carried on the publishing traditions of the eighteenth century. But established partnerships on rather more modern lines like Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, catering for a wide range of dramatic genres, and specialists such as John Murray, concentrating on serious drama, were also active in the field. These firms tended to cater for an educated and reasonably prosperous market for printed plays, publishing in relatively expensive octavo form, usually with paper covers, ready for binding up into leather-cased volumes to grace any self-respecting gentleman's library. During the 1820s, however, publishing began to change its character as the established firms surrendered their dramatic interests to a new generation of theatrical bookseller – publishers, who took full advantage of mass-production methods made available by the introduction of the machine press, cheap, lowgrade paper, and the process of stereotyping, and later electrotyping, which made it possible to keep ‘in stock’ huge numbers of play texts and to sell them at very cheap prices. Small format ‘acting editions’ cornered the theatrical market in the series which bear the names of their respective publishers – Dolby, Duncombe, Cumberland, Lacy, French, and Dicks – almost all of whom published nothing but cheaply produced plays.