Annual publication

of Ada Lovelace A new form of literary work called the "Annual" was a fad from about 1823 through 1857 and became so popular that they were soon published up to 17 times a year. British royalty increased their popularity. They closely resemble many college literary "books" just produced for college campus today, except they contained many etchings of beautiful women from steel plates. They were the fashion magazines of the day. Later it became fashionable to watercolor the etchings and the "Annuals" became early coloring books. There was later a backlash against "beauty" and the fad ended, as did steel plate etchings for books. "The Annual" was a long-running fad from 1824 until 1857 which started in England, but spilled over into the U.S. Steel plates of the 1820s allowed book publishers to mass-produce pictures. What started out as an "annual book" or a gift for the holidays turned into something that had up to 17 editions through the year (yet were still called annuals). Countess Blessington and other royal women contributed to the works and altered fashion. This fad was sometimes referred to as "beauty", as books with plates of women defined the content. In one book, the steel plate was damaged and another picture of a woman was simply used as a replacement. The illustrations often had nothing to do with the text content. The content of the text was often of poor quality and "The American Book of Beauty" contained a story of prison torture with an illustration of a pretty woman with a lapdog. "The American Book of Beauty" also has several copies of the books with portraits in different orders. One edition of the "Heath's Book of Beauty" was a college project and contained poems, short stories, etc. 1826 was not a good year for the annuals, because of the Panic of 1825. Thomas Hood's sarcastic poem "The Battle of the Annuals" was published in the 1830s. Watercolor became popular in the 1830s and the black and white etchings were the coloring books of the day. In 1842, Volume 1, page 521 of the Illustrated London News, there are sarcastic pictures poking fun at the annuals. In 1844 there was an article referring to it as imbecilic mania and finally the "Obituary for the Annual" appeared in the Art Journal of 1857. The death of the annuals and new photo techniques replacing etching ended most engravers' careers. ==Yearbooks==

A yearbook is a volume that summarizes events of the past year. One of the earliest is The Annual Register, published in London since 1758. A forerunner is Abel Boyer's The Political State of Great Britain (38 volumes, 1711–29). Later examples include ''The Statesman's Yearbook (since 1864) and the Daily Mail Year Book (since 1901). Two early German titles are Europäischer Geschichtskalender'', founded in 1861 by Heinrich Schulthess and Gottlob Egelhaaf's Historisch-politische Jahresübersicht (28 volumes, 1908–1936). ==Comic books==

In the case of comic books, an annual is an extra issue that corresponds with an ongoing series, providing story material in addition to the customary 12 issues per year of a monthly series and filling holes in a publishing schedule that are usually created when a fifth release day falls in a month. Chase Magnett, for ComicBook.com, highlighted that "annuals are ultimately best defined by being what the monthly issues are not" and that "the only consistency surrounding the concept of these special sorts of issues is that they have been around in some form or another just about as long as superhero comics have been published". As a result, annuals are much less valuable as collectables than other comic books, since collectors do not view them as part of a complete series run. Comic book annuals originally were little more than reprint albums (for example Superman Annual #1, August 1960), representing stories that had first seen publication in their monthly counterparts, but eventually, this changed to annuals featuring primarily all-new material (the first example being Fantastic Four Annual #1, July 1963 Shoberl continued to edit the annual until 1834. A junior version called The Juvenile Forget-me-not was published from 1828 onward. For many years until the near-collapse of the British children's comics market, an annual would be published each year for each of the comic titles published by Thomson and IPC/Fleetway, featuring extra adventures of the comic's current and former characters, plus additional material in the form of puzzles, text articles, etc. Annuals were often even published for comics which had themselves ceased publication or been absorbed into other titles; for example, Scorcher annuals were still being published 10 years after the comic itself had been absorbed into Tiger. Today, this section of the market has been reduced to just a couple of surviving titles. In addition, annuals are often published centered on sports, toys, currently-popular celebrities, recently released films, and popular TV series. In the period of the 1950s to the 1980s, companies like World Distributors, Brown Watson, and Grandreams were known for publishing annuals based on licensed characters and properties. British annuals are also published featuring American characters such as Spider-Man, often with simplified content aimed at younger readers. As tastes in these areas change, so does the line-up of annuals released each year. The increasing emphasis in recent years on annuals of this type (as opposed to the "classic" line-up of annuals based on comics) means that sales remain strong, and, in fact, they doubled between 1998 and 2005. Some annuals have become extremely collectible, especially The Beano, The Dandy, Rupert and Eagle. ==See also==