Whiteaway's import of The Readers Library in 1926

On 4 November 1926, Whiteaway, Laidlaw & Co. placed an advertisement on South China Morning Post to promote its recently import of The Readers Library, London, offering 35 cents each or 3 for $1.00. It includes the following standard works (mainly British and American authors):

Alexander Dumas's The Three Musketeers
H. Rider Haggard's She and King Solomon's Mines
H. G. Wells's The Time Machine
Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland
Charles Dickens's The Old Curiosity Shop, A Tale of Two Cities, and A Christmas Carol and The Cricket on the Hearth
Achmed Abdullah's The Thief of Bagdad, A story from the Arabian Night
Harrison Ainsworth's The Tower of London
Bret Harte's The Luck of Roaring Camp
Washington Irving's Rep Van Winkle
Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe and Kenilworth
Bulwer Lytton's Eugene Aram and The Last Days of Pompeii
George Eliot's The Million on the Floss
Harold Copping's The Pilgrim's Progress
J. Fenimore Cooper's The Pathfinder
Mark Twain's The Innocents Abroad
Harold MacGrath's The Man on the Box
Henryk Sienkiewicz's Quo Vadis [‎Nobel Prize in Literature in 1905]

The Readers Library, in the foreword of each volume, aspired to "bring the best-known novels of the world within the reach of the millions, by presenting at the lowest possible price per copy, in convenient size, on excellent paper, with beautiful and durable binding, a long series of the stories, copyright and non-copyright, which everyone has heard of and could desire to read.

Nothing of the kind has ever before been possible, even in the days when book production has been least expensive. To render it possible now it will be necessary that each volume should have a sale of hundreds of thousands of copies, and that many volumes of the series should in due course find their way into nearly every home, however humble, in the British Empire."

Further reference: Q. D. Leavis's Fiction And The Reading Public (1939), A Series of Series' Readers Library.