BIRTH OF THE FIRST: AUTHENTICITY AND THE COLLECTING OF MODERN FIRST EDITIONS, 1890-1930 Madeleine Myfanwy Thompson Submitted to the faculty of the University Graduate School in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English, Indiana University July 2013 Accepted by the Graduate Faculty, Indiana University, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Doctoral Committee _______________________________ Christoph Irmscher, PhD _______________________________ Joel Silver, JD, MLS _______________________________ Paul Gutjahr, PhD _______________________________ Joss Marsh, PhD 24 May 2013 ii Copyright © 2013 Madeleine Myfanwy Thompson iii Acknowledgements One of the best things about finishing my dissertation is the opportunity to record my gratitude to those who have supported me over its course. Many librarians have provided me valuable assistance with reference requests during the past few years; among them include staff at New York Public Library’s Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, NYPL’s Rare Book Division, the Grolier Club Library, and The Lilly Library at Indiana University. I am especially indebted to The Lilly’s Public Services staff, who not only helped me to track down materials I needed but also provided me constant models of good librarianship. Additionally, I am grateful to the Bibliographical Society of America for a 2011 Katharine Pantzer Fellowship in the British Book Trades, which allowed me the opportunity to return to The Lilly Library to research the history of Elkin Mathews, Ltd. for my fourth chapter. I feel fortunate to be part of a family of writers and readers, and for their support, advice, and commiseration during the hardest parts of this project I am grateful to Anne Edwards Thompson, Gene Cohen, Clay Thompson, and especially to my sister, Elizabeth Thompson. I was also fortunate to be surrounded at Indiana University by smart, funny colleagues and friends, among them Melanie Brezniak, Ashley Miller, and Deborah Strickland. And with me all along the way were Adam Pence and our Louise and Melville, with whom I feel lucky to be part of a little team. Lastly, this project owes much to my dissertation committee: to Paul Gutjahr and Joss Marsh, whose comments and questions helped to shape my iv work; to Joel Silver, whose guidance and mentoring started me on this project; and finally, to Christoph Irmscher, without whom I never would have finished it. The frequency with which I found myself expressing my gratitude to Christoph over the past few years has been so great that when I type the words “thank you” into my email now, the auto-text feature I have set up there presumes that the next word will be his name. His thoughtful and prompt feedback, his own inspiring productivity, and his unstinting encouragement have helped to see me through to the end. v Madeleine Myfanwy Thompson BIRTH OF THE FIRST: AUTHENTICITY AND THE COLLECTING OF MODERN FIRST EDITIONS, 1890-1930 The last two decades of the nineteenth century saw the rise in Britain and America of what several contemporary critics dubbed a “mania” for modern first editions as book collectors trained their sights on authors who were contemporaries and, in some cases, still living. Prices for modern authors reached unmatched heights in the collectors’ market, and both bibliophilic publications and general interest newspapers and magazines closely covered the trend. Rapidly developing throughout the 1890s and booming during the 1920s, the so-called mania for modern firsts eventually peaked during the early 1930s. Drawing heavily on original research, my dissertation explores the collectors, booksellers, authors, publishers, and books central to this collecting trend. To some extent, I offer a history of the early practice of collecting modern first editions. At the same time, I propose that this form of book collecting signaled imperatives and desires central to the times and places in which it flourished. I thus consider how the modern firsts trend intersected with the development of modern literary scholarship, the cult of authorial celebrity, changing attitudes toward books, the history of the genteel tradition, and economic motivations of the book trade. Yet even as this constellation of factors points to the complex reasons for the trend’s development, a common vi preoccupation with authenticity runs throughout period’s literature on modern firsts collecting. Those writing about modern firsts dwelled not only on what marked a “true” first but also on what validated the collecting of one author over another; furthermore, they obsessed over the authenticity of collectors and what it meant to be a legitimately cultured person. The field of modern firsts and its inherently speculative nature raised questions about what books should be collected, who should be collecting them, and who had the authority to make these decisions. _______________________________ Christoph Irmscher, PhD _______________________________ Joel Silver, JD, MLS _______________________________ Paul Gutjahr, PhD _______________________________ Joss Marsh, PhD vii Table of Contents Introduction … 1 Birth of the First: The Emergence of Modern First Editions, 1890-1930 Chapter 1 … 19 “The Time and the Place And the Loved One All Together”: Scholars, Fans, and “The Nearness” of Modern First Editions Chapter 2 … 59 The True and the False: Thomas James Wise, William Harris Arnold, and the Authenticity of Modern Firsts Collectors Chapter 3 … 102 “Why Should I Not Have First Editions?”: The New Collector and the Promise of Modern Firsts Chapter 4 … 146 Trend and Trade: Authors, Booksellers, Publishers, and the Modern Firsts Market Coda … 192 The Future of Firsts Bibliography … 198 viii Introduction Introduction Birth of the First: The Emergence of Modern First Editions, 1890-1930 In March 1894, The Times reviewed a new manual for book collectors. Written by J. H. Slater, a prolific author on book collecting, Early Editions: A Bibliographical Survey of the Works of Some Popular Modern Authors provided basic bibliographic descriptions and typical auction prices for first editions by more than thirty authors, from Ainsworth and Arnold to Tennyson and Thackeray. Apart from observing that Slater’s work was “apparently a very painstaking compilation,” the review is generally unconcerned with evaluating the book itself. Rather, what preoccupies The Times reviewer is the book’s raison d’être: the collecting of modern authors in first editions. “It is not very easy to understand the mania which has taken hold of some people, otherwise sane, for collecting early editions of modern and contemporary authors,” the reviewer sniffed. “We neither share the mania nor understand it.”1 Indeed, beginning in the late 1880s and booming during the 1890s, the trend for collecting first editions of modern authors took hold in Britain and the United States, as the numbers of collectors seeking out modern authors, and the prices they were willing to pay, soared—so much so that publications from the Illustrated London News and the Cornhill to the New York Times and Chicago’s Daily Inter Ocean echoed the Times reviewer in diagnosing the “mania” for modern first editions.2 Although the frenzy for these books abated in the years 1 “Books of the Week.” 2 See Lang, “First Edition Mania”; Ellington, “Famous First Editions”; “The Sale in Boston”; “Mr. P. D. Armour’s Valuable Book.” Beside these, other publications to report on the “mania” during 1 Introduction before World War I, it would return even stronger during the 1920s, with expanded ranks of modern firsts collectors and record-setting values for works by modern authors, some of which, when inflation is taken into account, still have not been surpassed in 2013. This dissertation explores this history as it seeks to understand the origins and consequences, between 1890 and 1930, of the development of the modern firsts field in Britain and the US. To some extent, the initial tidal wave of interest in collecting modern first editions arose within a wider sea of enthusiasm for book collecting churning in the final decades of the nineteenth century. This period saw the founding of significant bibliophilic institutions, including the Grolier Club in New York (1884), the Bibliographical Society (1892), and the Bibliographical Society of America (1904). Several book collecting memoirs and handbooks appeared during this period, and a spate of book collecting periodicals sprang up to cater to the popular interest, such as Book-Lore (1884), Bibliographica (1895), American Book-Lore (1898), The Book Lover (1899), and The Literary Collector (1900). Mainstream newspapers in Britain and the US regularly reported on book sales and speculated on the trends they revealed. Those seeking further information on auction values could consult the newly begun Book Prices Current and American Book Prices Current, whose annual volumes swelled across the 1890s as the number of auction sales increased.3 the 1890s include the Fortnightly Review and the Bookman, where William Robertson and Thomas J. Wise debated “The First Edition Mania.” See chapters 1 and 2 for more on this. 3 When it began in 1895, American Book Prices Current recorded 6,025 book and manuscript sales for the year; by the time the 1900 volume appeared, that figure had increased to 9,662. See ABPC 6:v. 2 Introduction Yet, quite apart from this general interest in book collecting, what was so