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PRINTED AT THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY

form p-3 11-25-18 146]

BULLETIN

OF THE

NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY

ASTOR, LENOX AND TILDEN FOUNDATIONS

VOLUME 22

FEBRUARY 1918

NUMBER 2

THE PLATES OF THE WINTHROP BOOKS

BY ELBRIDGE COLBY

HERE are in The New York Public Library, in the collection of manu

TH

scripts by American authors, several fat volumes, the originals of the books of Theodore Winthrop. Some previous study has resulted in the publication of a fairly complete bibliography of Winthrop (Bulletin of The New York Public Library, January, 1917), and of a sketch on the editorial changes made in the original manuscripts (The Nation, June 29, 1916).

It is my purpose in these few pages to comment on the bibliography and to tell exactly how the books, both the plates and the sheets, passed from publisher to publisher during a period of nearly forty years. I do this because I consider it an interesting commentary on American literature of the last half of the nineteenth century, when publishers could import British bestsellers more cheaply than they could issue new American successes. In this case, as it turns out, they found it possible to print cheap popular editions of an American author who had sold well, and to print them cheaply because they printed from the same old and battered plates which had been used for the first impressions during the Civil War.

Speaking with a number of persons who are in what we may call the present generation, I have found Theodore Winthrop almost unknown to them as a class. On the other hand, conversation with older people, with people who have lived through somewhat more than half of the years since the Civil War, revealed a very widespread knowledge of his life and of his works. His popularity seems to have died with the close of the century. But during the thirty years immediately following the battle of great Bethel, the sale of his

works was positively stupendous. On their first publication the novels ran through three editions in a week, five editions in ten days, and seven editions in two years, respectively. The sale kept up. In three years, there were seventeen editions of Cecil Dreeme, eight of Edwin Brothertoft, fourteen of John Brent, and eight of The Canoe and the Saddle. The publishing firm of Ticknor and Fields was changed to Fields, Osgood, and then to J. R. Osgood and Company. In 1876, as a result of a public auction in New York of plates and publishing rights of books owned by J. R. Osgood and Company, the Winthrop books were transferred to Henry Holt and Company. They brought an extremely small price, something less than one hundred dollars for the five books, subject, however, to a small royalty to the author's heirs.2

This would seem to indicate that the demand for them had practically ceased at that time. But such was very evidently not the case. Beginning in April, 1876, printing from the original plates, Henry Holt and Company started to put the books on the market in their Leisure Hour Series. They were kept busy publishing reprints until 1889, issuing nine editions each of Cecil Dreeme and John Brent, and three of each of the other three. This New York firm also published in March, 1884, The Life and Poems of Theodore Winthrop,3 compiled from letters and journals, and edited by his sister.

In 1890 the Holt company sold "the plates and stock" to a Mr. James S. Packard, who was an agent for J. W. Lovell and Company. John W. Lovell and Company and the United States Book Company, which succeeded it during 1891, published at least one edition of each of the five books in the Lovell's American Authors Series, but how many more it is not possible to determine.* When the United States Book Company failed in 1892,5 it was suggested to Dodd, Mead and Company that they purchase editions of three of the books. This they did and issued them in April, 1899. They purchased two thousand sheets of each and bound up the last of the John Brent sheets in March, 1908, Canoe and Saddle in 1905, and Cecil Dreeme in November, 1908. The company was at that time in the hands of a receiver and the plates were returned to him. These were the last editions printed. I have seen and examined specimens of the editions of each of the different publishers, and it appears

1 S. A. Allibone: Critical Dictionary of English Literature, vol. iii, p. 2798.

2 Letter to present writer, from Mr. Ferris Greenslet, of the Houghton Mifflin Company.

3 Letter to present writer from Henry Holt and Company.

The present writer has communicated with Mr. Lovell and Mr. Coryell, sales-manager, United States Book Co., but the records were destroyed and memories fail. The books were issued serially, numbered and mailed as second-class mail matter, but the New York post office records yield no information.

5 Letter to present writer from Mr. Coryell, January 15, 1913. other information is (in my opinion) more reliable than Mr. Lovell's. Letter to present writer from Dodd, Mead and Company.

Mr. Lovell says 1893, but Mr. Coryell's

very evident from the details of the printing, broken letters, etc., that the original plates were used throughout."

When the United States Book Company went into a receivership in 1892, it was reorganized as the American Publishing Corporation. This company also went into a receivership, and in its turn was reorganized as the Publishers' Plate Renting Company. This last company went out of business several years ago and all the plates were sold.8 Street and Smith purchased The Canoe and the Saddle, Cecil Dreeme, and John Brent plates which were, however, in such bad condition that they could not be used. They were "stereos" and were all battered down, so they were melted up for old metal. As the three other firms to whom plates of this company were sold have advised the present writer that they purchased no Winthrop plates,10 and as Mr. Coryell says that "all plates of the United States Book Company that could not be sold above the price of plate metal, were sold for old metal," we close with the assumption that the Life in the Open Air, and Edwin Brothertoft plates were thus destroyed. The coincidence of the three titles, the plates of which Street and Smith bought, with those of the sheets Dodd, Mead and Company purchased and issued, leads us to a further assumption that the Life in the Open Air, and Edwin Brothertoft plates were destroyed earlier than we can obtain record, since their unfitness for printing was probably the reason Dodd, Mead and Company issued only three titles, and those the three they did, namely, Cecil Dreeme, John Brent, and The Canoe and the Saddle.

There was but one printing of the Life and Poems volume; and, though the edition is exhausted and though the Holt's still keep it listed in catalogue,11 it has never been reissued. There was also but one edition of Mr. Waddy's Return which Henry Holt and Company published in October 1904.12

Life said (Feb. 23, 1905): "A novel by Theodore Winthrop is a startling thing to find among the newest books...and one reads...with something of a Pandora-like feeling that used to accompany the opening of old trunks in the twilight garret." So it must have seemed. Yet, on looking the book over again, after the lapse of years, it appeared to his sister, Miss Elizabeth W. Winthrop, too good to let die; and, according to a publisher's note prefixed to the volume, it was placed in the hands of Mr. Burton E. Stevenson to give it such revision and condensation as it may be presumed that the author, had he lived, would have given it himself.

'Mr. Lovell says: "Editions were printed from original plates. None were printed from type or new plates." Letter to present writer, February 10, 1913.

'Letter to present writer from Mr. Coryell, January 15, 1913.

'Letter to present writer from Street and Smith, January 17, 1913.

10 Hurst and Co. in letter dated January 20, 1913. A. L. Burt Co. in letter dated January 21, 1913. W. B. Conkey Co. in letter dated January 23, 1913.

11 The item is marked "out of print," in the 1912 catalogue.

12 Mr. Stevenson who edited it says: "It attracted very little interest when it was published and its sale was very small." Letter to present writer, December 22, 1912.

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