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A book collector since childhood, Humphries was well aware that a first edition of a distinguished author’s first book will always be eminently collectible. Whoever ran the store had put a cursory price on it, unaware of its value. Humphries bought it and went away happy.

Now a much-admired comedian and actor, he’s best-known as the physical embodiment of his own invention, the delightful lilac-haired Dame Edna Everage, a satiric monument to the age of celebrity. Humphries told the story of the Greene book over lunch in Toronto recently, during Dame Edna’s farewell tour.

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More than 150 years later, the publishing industry is in the doldrums, yet the novel shows few signs of digging into its past and resurrecting the techniques that drove fans wild and juiced sales figures. The novel is now decidedly a single object, a mass entity packaged and moved as a whole. That’s not, of course, a bad thing, but it does create a barrier to entry that the publishing world can’t seem to overcome. What the novel needs again is tension. And the best source for that tension is serialization.

The Pickwick Paperswasn’t the original serialized novel — the format had existed for at least a century prior — but it was the work that truly popularized the form. The first installment had a print order of 1,000 copies; by the time the final entry was published, circulation had reached 40,000. Buoyed by this success, Dickens serialized his work for the rest of his career, and scores of other notable Victorian novelists joined the publishing craze. It wasn’t until book production became cheap and easy, and new mediums such as radio arose to fill leisure time, that serialization slowly shriveled away.