The King's Post

Tombs, Robert Charles, 1842-1923Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

2.8

Word count: 280K words
Chapters: 28

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.The King's Post by Robert Charles TombsAuthor: Tombs, Robert Charles, 1842-1923,Language: English, Class: HE: Social sciences: Transportation and communications, Release Date: Apr 7, 2009

Editor's review

This is an old work on postal history by Robert Charles Tombs, prepared by Project Gutenberg as a free electronic edition. Approaching from the angle of institutions and transport, it describes how the modern postal and courier system operated, covering route organization, delivery mechanisms, and communications management—a relatively niche field of transport and communications history. For today's readers its value lies not in lively narrative but in offering a primary text for observing the flow of information in modern society: how mail was organized, supervised, and delivered, with administrative capacity and transport conditions behind it. The prose has the typical style of Victorian-era writing, with high information density and a slow pace that requires patience. It suits reading as historical source material or as supplementary material for specialized research, and also suits readers interested in postal or transport history for casual browsing, to sense the operating logic before modern communications systems took shape. Reading it alongside relevant historical background is recommended to avoid understanding details in isolation.

Who it's for

A good fit for

University teachers, students, and researchers in postal history and transport/communications history
Readers in history and letters interested in modern institutional history and how society operated
Readers who enjoy primary sources and can accept old-fashioned English style
Those needing free public-domain English source material for topical reading or excerpt translation

Not a good fit for

General leisure readers hoping for light stories or entertaining popular science
Beginners who struggle with English and need a Chinese translation
Readers expecting a systematic general history or an illustrated stamp catalogue

Reading tips

Read the table of contents and preface first to grasp the postal stages and time span covered.
Read by topic in sections, summarizing the key institutional points of each chapter in a few sentences.
Read alongside background on modern transport and administrative history to reduce obstacles.
Mark unfamiliar terms first and look them up in batches rather than interrupting yourself constantly.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

FAQ

Is this book a novel or a work of historical source material?

Judging from the title, the author's identity, and the classification, it is a work on transport and communications history, not fiction. Its content concerns the organization and operation of the postal system, and it is better read as source material or a topical work than as a storybook.

Is an old English work hard to read?

The author lived from the nineteenth into the early twentieth century, and the prose carries the written conventions of that era, with long sentences and dense information. A basic reading level is enough to make progress, but the pace will be slower than with modern works; keep reference books and background material handy.

What are the practical features of the Project Gutenberg edition?

This edition is released by Project Gutenberg as a freely available electronic text, convenient for searching, excerpting, and copying. The formatting is mainly plain text, lacking the notes and introduction of modern publications, so readers need to supply background knowledge themselves.

Comments

Find this book

This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.

About the author

Tombs, Robert Charles, 1842-1923 Author · British · 1842–1923

Robert Charles Tombs (1842–1923) was a British writer and researcher of postal history. Public information about his life is limited; what is known is that he long took an interest in the historical development of the British postal service and postal routes, focusing his research on the concrete operation of local postal institutions. Two of his works are held in this collection: The King's Post and The Bristol Royal Mail: Post, Telegraph, and Telephone. The former examines the relationship between the Crown and the postal service, while the latter takes the Bristol Royal Mail as a case study and also covers the local development of post, telegraph, and telephone as three modes of communication. His writing draws largely on archival and practical materials, is plain and specific in style, and emphasizes the combination of institutional detail with local experience, offering a useful reference text for the study of British local postal history.