victorian bestsellers

This semester I'm teaching a graduate course on Victorian Bestsellers - not just fiction, but In Memoriam, and Samuel Smiles, and Mrs Beeton, and prints, and commodities (not Pears Soap, though we'll read about it, but - but what?  what's not over-done but was omnipresent??).  I'm asking, in other words, about commodification, and advertising, and spin-offs, as well as "high" and "low" and "mass" culture.

So of course, instead of spending the afternoon reading up theory, or even re-reading The Woman in White for Tuesday's class, I swallowed up masses of time designing a masthead for our class blog.  Or rather, designing two mastheads.  The first one didn't fit at all.  The second time, I obeyed to the letter the measurements given by WordPress, produced something much more linear - and that doesn't quite fit, either.  So here's the second version (I preferred the first, as it happens - much more of a collage, but there you go) in something more of its entirety.