Looking for books that don’t exist
What could be more frustrating? You spend years searching for a book, only to discover that actually no such book exists or has ever existed. It sounds perhaps unlikely, but in the areas of book collecting that I’ve dabbled in, it can be surprisingly common. I’ve tended to collect series of books, usually paperbacks, and often series that are poorly documented, giving rise to all sorts of problems.
Take the UK Services Editions, for example. There is a series of 231 Services Editions in Guild Books, or at least there are books numbered from S1 to S231. I have evidence for at least 217 of the books, but that still leaves another 14 books that may or may not exist. I think they do exist, but I don’t know the titles or authors and have never seen a copy, or know of anybody else who has seen one. If anyone can offer evidence of Guild Services Editions numbered S5, S13, S33, S34, S37, S39, S57, S60, S62, S70, S78, S98, S113 or S174, I’d be delighted to hear from them.
For the series of Services Editions issued by Nicholson & Watson, on the other hand, I do know the titles and authors of all of them. They’re handily listed on the back cover of each book, all twelve of them. There are though only four Nicholson & Watson Services Editions that I have ever seen and one of those is not even included in the list. After more than 30 years of looking for them, I suspect that I’ve been wasting my time. Nine of the twelve advertised books have either disappeared without trace or more likely were never issued. The four books that I have seen are none of them particularly rare and they’re printed on reasonable quality paper, making it unlikely that all copies of nine other books would have disappeared.
Penguin regularly announced books that were never issued and left gaps in their numbering sequences that were never filled. In general though, their publications are so well documented and so much researched that most of the anomalies have by now been sorted out. It’s well known for instance that there is no Penguin first printing numbered 61 (the number was used for reprints of ‘The mysterious affair at Styles’, the first printing of which appeared as number 6) and that there are no Penguin Specials numbered S23, S42, S43 and so on. Collectors are unlikely to waste too much time searching for them.
But what should they make of the announcements on the dustwrappers of early examples of Penguin Bound Editions? There is a list of the first five books issued as Bound Penguins, together with a second group of five to be issued later in 1951. Four of the second group certainly appeared, although not on the timescale suggested, but I have never seen or heard tell of a Bound Edition of ‘The archaeology of Palestine’ by W.F. Albright. I assume it never appeared, but so far as I know Penguin never issued a full list and this series is not numbered as such, so it’s hard to be sure.
Hutchinson, one of Penguin’s main competitors, had similar problems. In their ‘Crime Book Society‘ series of paperbacks, volume 66 was originally advertised as ‘Phantom in the house’ by Andrew Soutar and lists that include this title can still be found on the internet. The book that was eventually issued as volume 66 however was ‘The lone crook murders’ by Clive Ryland and I don’t know if the Soutar book ever appeared in the series. I suspect that anyone searching for it is likely to be disappointed.
In the Toucan Novels, also published by Hutchinson, volumes 25-28 are widely shown as ‘Green shoes of April’ by Rachel Swete McNamara, ‘The broad road’ by Annie S. Swan, ‘Silken Sarah’ by Margery Lawrence and ‘Blow the man down’ by Thomas W. Broadhurst. These titles appear in lists on the back of apparently much later volumes, up to volume 46, giving the impression that the books had been issued quite some time before. However so far as I can tell, none of these titles were ever published in the series and from volume 47 onwards the list was updated to show the real titles that were eventually published under those numbers.
Even more frustrating though are titles that have been deliberately invented to confuse, a practice that is far from unheard of. Lists of the early US Penguins often show as volume 556 a book called ‘The Myceniad’ by C. Everett Cooper. I don’t believe there is any book with this title, or even that the word Myceniad exists in anything other than this made-up title. So far as I know, C. Everett Cooper exists only as a pseudonym for Michael Roy Burgess, an author and bibliographer who was not even born when the early US Penguins were being published.
I think the explanation is that Burgess, in his bibliographical work, compiled a list of the US Penguins and invented this title to fill in a missing number in the series, as a way of checking whether other people were pirating his work. Any later list that included this title could be traced back to him. It’s possible that I’m doing him a disservice (sadly he died in 2013), but I suspect that book collectors have lost a lot of time looking for a book that doesn’t exist.
Is that one of ours?
On the Home Front in Britain, it was one of the most vital questions of the Second World War. Was that plane you could hear and see overhead, friend or foe? Your life might depend on the answer.
So aircraft recognition books became one of the major publishing successes of the war, selling in huge quantities despite the restrictions of paper rationing, poor quality of paper and war economy standards. Penguin, of course, was a major player, publishing two volumes of ‘Aircraft Recognition’ by R.A. Saville-Sneath in the Penguin Specials series in March 1941 (Penguin S82) and August 1942 (Penguin S112), as well as a series of hardbacks by the same author towards the end of the war.
But Penguin were not the first in this area and probably not the most important either. They were almost certainly beaten to it by Hutchinson, who sold something like three quarters of a million such books. Hutchinson paperbacks are not as well researched and documented as Penguin, so it’s hard to be sure exactly when they were issued and which is the first printing, but there are enough clues for quite a lot to be inferred.
The first volume in ‘Hutchinson’s Complete Illustrated Record’ seems to have been a 96 page booklet called ‘British Aircraft’. I think it’s likely that the copy illustrated below, priced at 1 shilling and described as the ’30th thousand’, is the first printing from 1940. Standard Penguins at the time were still selling at 6d, so it was a relatively high price, but justified by the high number of photographs and the quality of the paper used. In any event it must have sold well as it was regularly reprinted, going up from 30,000 to nearer 300,000 copies. As the war went on of course, the quality of paper went down, as did the number of pages and the price went up. I have a later copy marked as 226th thousand that has just 80 pages and is priced at 1s 3d.
A second booklet, ‘German & Italian aircraft’, was published possibly at the same time, or possibly shortly afterwards, together with a combined edition of the two volumes. The booklet was similarly priced at 1s and had 96 pages, but the earliest copy I have seen is the 55th thousand. Does an earlier copy exist, or was the success of the British Aircraft book already clear, so that a longer initial print run was ordered for the second booklet? Certainly it too was very successful, going on to reach at least 281,000 copies, although despite these huge print numbers, the books are relatively scarce today. As with ‘British Aircraft’, later printings priced at 1s 3d, were cut down to 80 pages, effectively a Second Edition.
The combined edition, initially a hardback priced at 2s 6d, is almost literally made up of the contents of the two paperbacks bound together and still separately paginated at 96 pages each. The dustwrapper lists other recent Hutchinson publications, all published in 1940, so publication in late 1940 seems likely. A later edition, marked as 45th thousand, is bound in a more flexible cloth-covered card and the price has increased to 2s 9d. Although the print runs for these combined editions were much lower than for the individual paperbacks, the format means they have tended to survive better and may now be rather more common.
A third paperback volume, ‘American Aircraft’ followed in 1941 and so far as I know only exists at a price of 1s 3d, with 64 pages and on the lower quality of paper, so consistent with the Second Edition of the two earlier titles. The copy pictured below is 95th thousand, but advertises the 246th thousand of the British book and the 231st thousand of the German and Italian one.
The appearance of this third volume also triggered a new combined edition of all three books, now called ‘British, American, German & Italian Aircraft’. This time though instead of a hardback edition, selling at a small premium to the combined price of the paperbacks, it was a paperback, selling at a small discount. The combined volume sold at 3s 6d, with each of the individual volumes available for 1s 3d. Demand for the combined volume must have been limited though by the number of copies of the two first volumes already sold. I have a copy marked as 10th thousand, which is almost certainly a 1st printing, and which has a handwritten ownership signature dated 10th December 1941. My best guess then is that both this combined book and the individual ‘American Aircraft’ volume were first published towards the end of 1941.
Hutchinson then went on to extend the series to cover ships, tanks and guns as well as planes. These were presumably of less general interest, given that the average person in Britain would have seen few enemy ships and tanks, or even British ones. Print runs and sales were almost certainly much lower, although there are printings of both ‘Ships of the Royal Navy’ and ‘Aircraft of the Unites States Army’ that show ‘100th thousand’, still an impressive number. So far as I know, all of these books exist only in editions priced at 1s 3d and probably first appeared around 1942. Most of them refer to the series title simply as Hutchinson’s Illustrated Record and drop any pretence of completeness.
By 1944 you might have thought that the market had been saturated and that interest might anyway have been waning as the end of the war approached. Penguin clearly didn’t think so though as they chose that moment to launch another new series of aircraft books, again by R.A. Saville-Sneath, author of the earlier Penguin Specials. It is noticeable that none of the Hutchinson books referred to above had a named author, whereas all the Penguins did.
Saville-Sneath’s second effort in the genre, started with two volumes of ‘British Aircraft’ in Penguin’s ‘Aircraft Recognition Series’, hardback books of over 200 pages each, published in 1944 and sold at 5s per volume. At that point they were two of the most expensive books that Penguin had ever published. Two further volumes of ‘Aircraft of the United States’ followed in 1945 and 1947, again at 5s each, making the four volumes a hefty investment at a total price of one pound. It seems unlikely that they sold in the hundreds of thousands. Aircraft spotters guides had come a long way from slim paperbacks at sixpence or a shilling.
Services Editions on the radio
The Radio 3 series ‘The Essay’ runs 15 minute episodes on a different theme each week and the theme over the last week, tying in with the 80th anniversary of VE Day, has been books and reading during World War 2. Wednesday’s episode, which can be heard on BBC Sounds, was based on the UK Services Editions. In particular it featured a selection of books from the collection of Services Editions I recently donated to the Imperial War Museum, introduced by one of the Museum’s Librarians.
Other episodes in this week’s series focused on the bombing of Paternoster Row during the Blitz, on the wartime use of lending libraries, particularly by women, on the operation to send books to prisoners of war, and on wartime recipe books under rationing.
Presenting a positive image of the US in Europe – the Transatlantic Editions
Towards the end of World War II (in the days when the United States cared what Europeans thought of it) the Americans carried out what might be seen as a major propaganda exercise in continental Europe, publishing American books in large quantities, principally through the Overseas Editions, issued in English, French, German and Italian. My post on this series from almost a decade ago can be seen on this link. Books were of course only one arm of American propaganda, particularly in the occupied countries, where newspapers, magazines, radio, even theatre and cinema were tightly controlled. And to be clear, the Americans were not the only ones engaged in propaganda. The British were at it too, as were the other occupying powers, particularly the Soviet Union.
American and British books sold into Continental Europe at the end of the war
The Americans had a number of different aims. Perhaps the most charitable of these was the recognition that books in Europe were in short supply. Wartime restrictions on paper had limited the availability of books and Nazi censorship had severely restricted what could be published anyway. So there was a real hunger for books and in particular for books that presented an alternative way of life. In that sense the Americans were very much pushing at an open door. They were concerned though that many Europeans had a relatively negative image of Americans, perhaps driven by Hollywood films, that saw them as uncultured, perhaps even unserious. They wanted to present a more positive image of the American way of life and of American participation in the war.
There were certainly commercial motives at work as well, driven by US publishers, through the Council on Books in Wartime. They were keen to open up new markets for American books and envious of the overseas markets that Britain had traditionally dominated in the British Empire. They were conscious too that there might only be a limited window of opportunity for American books to establish a presence, before the local publishing industries in Europe could rebuild themselves. So by October 1944, when delays to the planned programme of Overseas Editions were becoming evident and there were even fears that it might have to be abandoned, alternative possibilities were urgently considered.
The difficulties with Overseas Editions arose from a number of constraints that had been specified for the series, in particular that the books should be printed in the US, with a minimum print run of fifty thousand copies and within tight financial parameters. There were also long discussions over the choice of titles, the languages to be used and the commissioning of translations. A partial and temporary solution to some of these problems could be found through another series that would be printed in the UK and in smaller quantities. That went ahead as a series called Transatlantic Editions, published in French and in Dutch. In the end of course the Overseas Editions were also published shortly afterwards, including many of the same books, so that they ended up as rather strange parallel editions almost competing with each other, particularly in the case of the French language editions.
Perhaps the biggest difference between the two series was that Transatlantic Editions were printed in the UK, although published in the United States. That avoided the problem of having to ship copies across the Atlantic, although they still had to produce the books using paper imported from the US, given the severe rationing in the UK. There were problems to be solved in that area, as well as the translation, typesetting and proofreading problems of publishing in foreign languages, but it was possible in a relatively short space of time to get together a list of 10 titles in French and 10 in Dutch, which began to be delivered in early 1945 (although the early books are dated 1944).
For each of the French titles between a minimum of twenty thousand copies, and up to forty thousand were printed and for the Dutch ones ten thousand. It would have been difficult for the Dutch speaking markets in the Netherlands and Belgium to absorb even 20,000 copies, never mind the 50,000 minimum for the Overseas Editions, so it was only the ability to achieve economies of scale on a lower print run in the UK for Transatlantic Editions that made Dutch language titles practical.
Physically the books are quite attractive for wartime publications and are less obviously US Government-backed than the Overseas Editions, which featured the Statue of Liberty on the front cover as well as, on all but the German editions, a statement about ‘Axis aggression’. The Transatlantic Editions have no cover illustration and essentially nothing of the typical look of US paperbacks, even relatively little of UK paperbacks of the time. In format and design they are much closer to French or Dutch books and on the shelves in local bookstores would have fitted in fairly naturally. They don’t hide their American origin though, with a prominent statement of purpose on the half-title, ‘New York’ as the place of publication on the title page, and content that clearly comes from an American perspective.
The same book in Dutch as a Transatlantic Edition and in French and German as Overseas Editions
Essentially the titles were chosen from the same pool selected for the Overseas Editions and indeed most of the titles also appeared in other languages as Overseas Editions – although never in the same language. There were no Overseas Editions in Dutch and no direct crossover between the French language titles in Transatlantic and Overseas Editions. Almost all the titles were clearly chosen to present the United States in a favourable light, highlighting American achievements, the American way of life and America’s contribution to the war. I don’t think it’s unfair to see them as essentially propaganda and those involved with the programme would not have disputed that description. They had not though been written purely as propaganda – they were chosen from books that had been published and sold successfully in the US market before being selected as suitable for foreign markets.
And importantly they were sold, not given away, so presumably to willing buyers and there seem to have been plenty of those. John B. Hench, whose book, ‘Books as Weapons’, covers much of the story of the Transatlantic Editions, quotes some early sales figures from Belgium, where sales began on March 12th 1945 and within ten days, 10,843 copies had been sold. There are no prices printed in the books, although price stamps on some of the copies I have, suggest that some of the more substantial Dutch books may have sold for 1.25 Dutch florins, which would not have been a low price – certainly much higher than the typical 25c price for US paperbacks.
One subject that the Americans seemed to be particularly proud of was the Tennessee Valley Authority, judging by the fact that two of the ten French Editions and one of the Dutch ones dealt with this project. They lauded it not only as a major economic success and a triumph of man over nature, but also as a prime example of successful Government planning (the current US administration might be less keen on that aspect of it). Perhaps surprisingly, one of the TVA books was written by a British writer, Julian Huxley (and incidentally at least one other British writer, Denis William Brogan, contributed to the Overseas Editions). Amongst the Dutch language Transatlantic Editions there is a particular focus on the war in the Pacific, accounting for five of the ten titles, a choice reflecting the Dutch interest in Indonesia and the American desire to retain support for the ongoing war against Japan.
The full set of Transatlantic Editions – French language on the left, Dutch on the right
Penguins, but not paperbacks
Penguins were and are paperbacks. In Britain, the two words used to be almost tautologous. The whole point of Penguins was always that they were paperbacks, at a cheap price, but still with a certain air of quality about them. To start with they were all reprints too – books that had already been published in hardback by another publisher, and Penguin bought only the paperback rights.
So what is this? A hardback published by Penguin, and one that is making the opposite journey – having already been published in paperback.
The story really goes back to the creation of Pelican Books in 1937 as a non-fiction imprint of Penguin. Pelican number one – Bernard Shaw’s ‘The intelligent woman’s guide to Socialism, Capitalism, Sovietism and Fascism’ was essentially a reprint of a book that had been published in hardback in 1928. But it had two new chapters written specially for the Pelican edition – in one sense Penguin’s first steps into publishing new material. Volume 6 of the Pelican series, ‘Practical Economics’ by G.D.H. Cole, actually published at the same time, was though a complete new work specially written for the series and really the first new work published by Penguin. Cole was a distinguished economist and a prominent socialist, although in the end perhaps better known for the detective stories he wrote with his wife Margaret (as G.D.H & M. Cole).
From then on, driven by Pelican and by the Penguin Specials, Penguin very quickly moved to the point where by 1941 they were publishing more new works than reprints and that continued throughout the rest of the war years. This created a long list of works for which Penguin effectively held the hardback rights, or at least had first refusal on them. The launch of Penguin Classics, with E.V. Rieu’s translation of ‘The Odyssey’ in January 1946 added further works to this list. The original texts of the Penguin Classics were long out of copyright, but the translations had been commissioned by Penguin.
The authors of these new works and the translators of the Classics were no doubt proud to see their works published in Penguin paperbacks. It guaranteed them relatively high sales, far higher than would typically be achieved by a scholarly work first published in hardback, as well as a certain national prominence. It was an honour to be a Penguin author. But paperbacks, even Penguins, were flimsy things, essentially transient and impermanent, often treated with little respect and starting to disintegrate after any significant use. In comparison, for an author to see his or her work published in hardback, ensured a sort of literary permanence, even if sales were relatively low. What author didn’t want to hold a hardbound copy of their own work in their hands or to see it on the shelf?
So most authors of new works first published in Penguin would probably have been keen to see a hardback edition, even if the payment they received was relatively low. Penguin too may have been seduced by the idea of the greater prestige that came from hardback publication. Hardbacks potentially offered higher margins and higher royalties for the author per copy than paperbacks did, but the number of copies sold would be much lower and sales first had to reach a certain minimum level before there were any positive margins at all. In order to reach this minimum level, most hardback publications had the benefit of at least 6 to 12 months of sales, often much longer, before they had to compete with cheaper paperback editions. Hardback copies of books first published as paperbacks, would not have that luxury. They would be sold alongside the paperback alternative right from the start.
So perhaps tentatively at first, Penguin took the plunge into hardback publishing in 1951 with the first five titles in a new series to be known as Bound Penguins. There were two Pelicans, H.D.F. Kitto’s ‘The Greeks’ (Pelican A220) and ‘Buddhism’ by Christmas Humphreys (Pelican A228), both new titles that had appeared in paperback earlier that year, and two Penguin Classics, Rieu’s ‘Odyssey’ (Penguin L1) and J.M. Cohen’s translation of ‘Don Quixote’ (Penguin L10). ‘Don Quixote’ was a recent paperback publication, but ‘The Odyssey’ had already achieved very large paperback sales in the five years since its first publication, as had the fifth book ‘A dictionary of Science’ by Uvarov & Chapman (Penguin R1), first published in 1943.
The books were promoted in a leaflet sent out with issue 14 of Penguins Progress. A promotional photo showed the first five volumes without their dustwrappers alongside a single copy with dustwrapper and a very 1950s looking table lamp. By showing them without dustwrappers, the photo makes clear that the bindings are colour coded – green for Pelicans, red for Penguin Classics and blue for Reference Books. The dustwrappers do have the same colour coding, but it’s much more discreet and wouldn’t have been very obvious in a shop display, which rather undermines the point of it. The titles and authors’ names are coloured as is the small Penguin logo on the spine, but otherwise the dustwrappers are in a standard lined design in browny-grey.
The books are of standard Penguin size, but printed on higher quality paper. Four of the initial five books were priced at 6 shillings, in comparison with the paperback versions that I think would have been one shilling and six pence at the time. The much longer Don Quixote, with over 900 pages, was priced at 10 shillings and six pence in hardback, but five shillings in paperback.
Another five titles followed, although which titles they were to be seems to have been constantly changing. The dustwrappers of the first titles announced that ‘The archaeology of Palestine’ by W.F. Albright (Pelican A199) would be in the next group, but by the time the promotional leaflet was issued, that had changed to ‘Justinian and his age’ by P.N. Ure (Pelican A217). Both dustwrappers and leaflet announced Apuleius’s ‘The Golden Ass’ translated by Robert Graves (Penguin Classics L11) and ‘A dictionary of pyschology’ by James Drever (Penguin Reference R5), but neither were in the next batch. Graves and Drever did eventually see their work published in Bound Penguin, but Albright got no satisfaction in that respect.
The pattern of issuing batches of five titles at a time continued for a while, but then gradually broke down, although the general mix of titles from the Pelican and Penguin Classics lists, with the odd reference book thrown in, remained fairly constant. By the time Penguin issued its Autumn 1952 Classified List, the number of Bound Penguins issued, or shortly to be issued, was approaching 40. It was probably also by that time clear though, that sales were not going as well as had been hoped. Selling hardbound books alongside paperback copies of the same titles at sometimes a quarter of the price, turned out to be quite hard. The flurry of new Bound Penguins in 1952 was followed by none at all in 1953 and only a handful in 1954.
Meanwhile the stock of existing titles was taking a long time to shift. Even by Penguin’s 1958 Classified List, over 20 of the Bound Penguins were still available. So far as I can tell, only one of them, Rieu’s translation of The Odyssey, was ever reprinted, so they were sitting around as old stock for a long time.
There was though one offshoot of the series that seems to have been more successful. That was the hardback editions of the ‘Buildings of England’ series, edited by Nikolaus Pevsner, which started off as Bound Penguins, but went on to establish a life of their own and are still published today, although no longer by Penguin.
The first two Bound Penguins from the Buildings of England Series appeared in late 1952 (BE3 – Middlesex and BE6 – London except the Cities of London and Westminster). They were followed by three others in Bound Penguin format in 1954, but after that they effectively became a series in their own right. The second London volume covering the cities of London and Westminster was published in a Bound Penguin style binding in 1957, presumably to match with the binding of the first London volume, but its dustwrapper reflected the Buildings of England branding rather than that of Bound Penguins. Three other late Bound Penguins (‘The four gospels’, published in 1952, ‘Primitive Art’ by Leonhard Adam, published in 1954 and ‘Grasses’ by C.E. Hubbard, published 1954) also appeared with non-standard dustwrappers, as the series effectively ran down.
Only one main series Penguin ever appeared in the series (they had after all almost always already appeared in hardback editions before being published by Penguin), but volume 763 – Four English Comedies, edited by J.M. Morrell, contained 17th and 18th century plays that were long out of copyright and so could and did appear in the series.
My own collection of Bound Penguins, which included all the volumes I know about with the exception of Voltaire’s ‘Candide’ (Penguin Classic L4), was donated to the Penguin archive at Bristol University a few years ago, together with other Penguin hardbacks.
A Nobel Prize winner in Tauchnitz and Albatross
In its early days the Nobel Prize for Literature was a very European affair. Starting in 1901, the first winners in order came from France, Germany, Norway, France, Spain, Poland, Italy, the UK, Germany, Sweden, Germany, Belgium and Germany. The sequence was broken by the nomination of the Bengali writer Rabindranath Tagore in 1913, but after that it continued France, Sweden, Denmark, Denmark, Switzerland, Norway, France, Spain, Ireland, Poland, the UK, Italy, France, Norway/Denmark, Germany until in 1930 the prize finally went to an American writer, Sinclair Lewis.
Some might say that the Euro-centricity of the Literature prize continues today, but there is at least now more recognition of writers from other continents and in particular from the United States, which can now count 13 Laureates, fewer only than France. If we go back though to the early years of the 20th century and indeed further to the 19th century, the idea that American writers were subordinate to the giants of European literature was a time-honoured one and it was honoured too in the name of the series that dominated English-language literature in Continental Europe – the Tauchnitz Collection of British Authors.
In practice the series included works by American authors almost from the start – volume 5 of the series was ‘The Spy’ by James Fenimore Cooper – but it was not until volume 4477 in 1914 that the series title on the wrappers was changed to include American authors and it was to take another 16 years before the half-titles were brought into line.
‘Collection of British Authors’, even as late as 1925
Tauchnitz of course published works by all the early Nobel Prize winners who wrote in English, including Rudyard Kipling, who won the prize in 1907, Rabindranath Tagore (1913), W.B. Yeats (1923) and George Bernard Shaw (1925). In passing I note that the first two of those are more associated with India than with Britain and the latter two more with Ireland, so that arguably core British writers were overlooked just as much as American ones.
There were several authors published by Tauchnitz who might have been considered candidates for the Nobel Prize and some did indeed go on to win it, as Sinclair Lewis did. Lewis’s satirical novel ‘Babbitt’ appeared in Tauchnitz in 1922 (volume 4590), the same year that it was published in America, and it was followed shortly afterwards by his earlier work ‘Our Mr. Wrenn’ (volume 4617) that had been first published in 1914. The first Tauchnitz printing of ‘Babbitt’ is dated December 1922 on the rear wrapper and that of ‘Our Mr. Wrenn’ is dated December 1923.
Both books seem to have sold relatively well over the next few years, with many different impressions recorded in the Tauchnitz bibliography. So it’s perhaps surprising that Tauchnitz never published ‘Main Street’, the most notable and most popular of his earlier works. They did publish his next major work ‘Arrowsmith’, shortly after it appeared in the US (vol. 4694, first printing dated July 1925) and it again went through several impressions.
But that was it – no ‘Elmer Gantry’, no ‘Dodsworth’, despite their commercial success in the US and despite the apparent commercial success of Lewis’s other works in Tauchnitz. When Lewis won the Nobel Prize the firm printed a bookmark advertising the three works that they had already published, but they still failed to capitalise on the market opportunity it offered, by publishing any more of his works.
Perhaps Lewis was unwilling to sell the Continental copyright, or was dissatisfied with the terms offered, but Tauchnitz also failed to publish many other important works in this period, particularly those from modernist authors, so the unwillingness may well have come from their side.
That was one of the failures that opened the way for Albatross to mount their devastatingly effective attack on Tauchnitz’s market position when they launched in 1932. It was not the only failure, but it opened up the possibility for Albatross to launch with a list that in its first ten titles included works by James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Aldous Huxley. But the author leading the Albatross charge was none other than Sinclair Lewis, with two of those first ten titles. The failure of Tauchnitz to seize the marketing gift of a Nobel Prize for one of their authors, was coming back to bite them.
‘Mantrap’, published as volume 3 of the new Albatross series, had been relatively unsuccessful when published in the US, so there might have been a case for Tauchnitz overlooking it. But ‘Dodsworth’, published as volume 10, a satirical novel looking in particular at differences between American and European societies, looks like an almost perfect case for European publication. And like all those first ten Albatross publications, it sold well when eventually taken up by Albatross.
Perhaps slightly oddly, but possibly for copyright reasons, Albatross chose to build on its success with Sinclair Lewis by going back to his early works. ‘Free air’, first published in 1919 appeared as volume 39 of the series in late 1932, followed by an even earlier novel, from 1915, ‘The trail of the hawk’, published as volume 74 in 1933.
Then in early 1933 Lewis published in America ‘Ann Vickers’, his first novel since the award of the Nobel Prize. Albatross of course wanted to publish it, but for them it came at a difficult time. Book burnings and banned lists were coming to Nazi Germany and Lewis’s novel featured a young woman who becomes pregnant by a Jewish man, has an abortion, then later after an extra-marital affair with a controversial judge, has a son born out of wedlock. On the personal front too, Lewis’s position was becoming more difficult. His wife, Dorothy Thompson was a journalist, based in Berlin, who had interviewed Hitler in 1931 and been less than impressed. In 1934 she became the first American journalist to be expelled from Nazi Germany.
After signing contracts for ‘Ann Vickers’ to be published by Albatross, Lewis almost backtracked, in a protest against the attitude of the Nazis to censorship. In the end though the book appeared as volume 93 of the series in early 1934. It’s possible that for a short period it sold freely in Germany, but at least by late 1934, when Albatross published Lewis’s 1920 bestseller ‘Main Street’ as volume 235, it’s likely that the position had altered.
The literary climate in Germany was changing rapidly for writers such as Lewis and sales in Germany were becoming impossible, whether for Tauchnitz or for Albatross. There had been regular reprintings of the three Tauchnitz titles throughout the 1920s and early 1930s, but the last one recorded by Todd & Bowden was an impression of ‘Arrowsmith’ dated September 1933.
After that sales of modernist literature in Germany became impossible and it became at least unadvisable, if not illegal, for such books to be sold by a German company outside Germany. By the autumn of 1934 Tauchnitz and Albatross (a non-German company) were being managed effectively as one business and so the decision was taken to move controversial titles previously published by Tauchnitz across to Albatross. They would still be printed in Germany, but only for export, and this seems to have been enough to satisfy the Nazi regime.
Lewis fell into this category, as did D.H. Lawrence and Aldous Huxley. ‘Arrowsmith’ was the first to be moved across, appearing as volume 248 of the series in 1935, although under the title ‘Martin Arrowsmith’. It was followed later in the same year by ‘Our Mr. Wrenn’ (vol. 265) and ‘Babbitt’ (vol. 284). To almost complete the set of Lewis novels in Albatross, ‘Elmer Gantry’ was also published in 1935 (vol. 272) and another early work, ‘The job’ in 1936 (vol. 297).
The series of Albatross volumes could hardly be described though as a complete works of Sinclair Lewis as it excluded ‘It can’t happen here’, perhaps now the most celebrated of his books. A dystopian novel that describes the election of a fascist to the American presidency, publishing it in Germany, or even printing it in Germany in the 1930s would have been a step too far.
Where Todd & Bowden got it wrong
The Todd & Bowden bibliography of Tauchnitz Editions, first published in 1988, was an astonishing achievement. It has been pretty well my constant companion and my collecting bible for the last 30 years and more. Without it at my side I could never have put together the Tauchnitz collection that I have, and I would probably not even have tried. It would have been simply too daunting. In particular Todd & Bowden made it possible, for the first time, to recognise first printings and distinguish them from reprints. In so doing, they showed that most existing Tauchnitz collections had a high proportion of reprints. There was a gap in the market for a collection focused on first printings and I’ve spent a long time now trying to fill it.
But Todd & Bowden did not simply record and classify the myriad different variations of Tauchnitz Editions. They told the story of the Tauchnitz firm and not just as a dry recording of the facts. They had opinions! As far as Bernhard Tauchnitz himself was concerned, those opinions were very positive, to the extent that a 1994 review of the bibliography by B.J. McMullin had the title ‘The bibliographer as hagiologist’. I don’t have any issue with that – like Todd & Bowden I rather revere Bernhard Tauchnitz and what he achieved with his ‘Collection of British Authors’.
But Todd & Bowden also had their villain of the piece. They pointed the finger at John Holroyd-Reece, one of the directors of Albatross, accusing him of multiple sins in his administration of Tauchnitz between 1934 and 1939, following on from the ‘merger’ with Albatross. In particular he is accused of favouring Albatross over Tauchnitz in ways that would increase the profits of Albatross at the expense of Brandstetter, the legal owners of Tauchnitz. And Todd & Bowden didn’t hold back in describing his behaviour. The transfer of some titles from the Tauchnitz series to Albatross is described as ‘outright thievery’, other changes to the two series are described as ‘a systematic manipulation … to the exclusive advantage of John Holroyd-Reece’. He must stand accused, they say, of ‘gross malfeasance in his privileged position’. They even suggest that in the end Tauchnitz was ‘susceptible to defeat, not from any overtly hostile force without, but from an insidious penetration within: from a person entrusted with a certain editorial responsibility, but continually usurping more destructive powers’.
Those are pretty serious accusations, but they fail to take account of one major factor – the political conditions existing in Germany at the time and the rise to power of the Nazi party. That was a key factor in almost everything that happened to Albatross and Tauchnitz in that period and much of it has been exposed by Michele Troy in her book ‘Strange Bird: The Albatross Press and the Third Reich’.
Albatross had launched in 1932 and been a huge success. Their books looked far more modern and colourful than the rather drab and old-fashioned Tauchnitz Editions and their choice of authors and books was far more modern too. Tauchnitz was simply unable to cope with the new competition and within two years was close to collapse. Their position was not helped though by the new conditions of book burnings and banned lists in Germany. That affected a large number of the most popular authors and books in the back catalogue that Tauchnitz had built up over the previous ninety years and that had sustained them in previous periods of intense competition.
Without what was effectively a rescue by Albatross, it seems unlikely that Tauchnitz could have survived at all. Because of their Jewish connections, Albatross were not allowed to buy Tauchnitz, which was instead bought by the firm of Oscar Brandstetter, the printer of Albatross Books. The deal was that Tauchnitz would combine the two businesses and take effective control of both, while Brandstetter would take on all the printing work for Tauchnitz as well as Albatross. I don’t know how much Brandstetter paid for Tauchnitz, or whether they did so in expectation of significant future profits, but it seems likely that they were more interested in the very substantial additional printing work that they would pick up from Tauchnitz. They would have been well aware that what they were buying was a venerable firm with a long history, but one that had proved itself unable to compete in modern market conditions, and which without the intervention of Albatross would probably have collapsed with little or no value.
The Albatross management, and particularly John Holroyd-Reece, were then in a position to choose which books they published in the Tauchnitz series and which in Albatross. Presumably they could have chosen to publish everything under the Albatross brand, as often happens in mergers, and leave Tauchnitz with just its back catalogue. But they chose to maintain two separate imprints, and so had to have some criteria to decide which authors and which books would appear in which series.
Aldous Huxley – banned in Germany and moved across from Tauchnitz to Albatross
It made sense to have some distinction between them and the distinction that had clearly emerged in the two years before the merger, was that the Albatross series was publishing the more ‘modernist’ authors and titles. Writers such as Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Aldous Huxley, D.H. Lawrence, Sinclair Lewis and Katherine Mansfield had appeared in Albatross or moved across from Tauchnitz to Albatross well before the merger of the two businesses. Tauchnitz was left with what was effectively an earlier generation of writers – Arnold Bennett, Rudyard Kipling, John Galsworthy, Somerset Maugham, P.G. Wodehouse, J.B. Priestley.
Holroyd-Reece largely continued this distinction after the merger and maintained a substantial publishing programme under the Tauchnitz brand. Yes, the authors that appeared in Tauchnitz were a bit more old-fashioned and less cutting edge, although that didn’t necessarily mean less popular or less profitable. P.G. Wodehouse for instance, would no doubt have been both popular and profitable. But for the more modern authors, published in Albatross (as for Oscar Wilde, whom I looked at recently), there was the complication that many of their works could not be sold at all in Germany, the largest market for the combined business. It is perhaps surprising that they could even be printed in Germany, but Michele Troy’s research shows that the need of the Nazis for foreign currency was more important to them than their desire to suppress literature that they regarded as degenerate.
Certainly in practice, banned books could be and were printed in Germany, presumably for export only, although the practice may well have been permitted unofficially rather than by any explicit regulation. It seems likely though that it was more acceptable for such books to be published by Albatross, a foreign-owned firm, than by Tauchnitz, a German firm. It may never be possible to know whether the decisions by Holroyd-Reece to publish certain books under the Albatross brand rather than that of Tauchnitz, were made under direct pressure from the Nazi authorities or were simply the decisions of a prudent manager of the business, but ‘outright thievery’ is certainly not a fair description of them.
Penguin’s forced adaptation to the US market
Penguin’s first foray into the US market ended in what was almost a mutual lack of comprehension. Allen Lane could not understand why the management of his US branch had moved so far away from what he saw as the key principles of Penguin. They on the other hand were continually frustrated by Lane’s insistence on clinging to ideas that may have worked in the UK market but which to them seemed of limited relevance in the US.
Coming from a UK background where Allen Lane and Penguin have almost mythical status, I may have tended to sympathise more with Lane’s side of the argument. Penguin’s US branch seemed to pay scant respect to the heritage of the brand in Britain, albeit a heritage of only a few years, moving remarkably quickly away from almost everything that had made Penguin distinctive and successful. A few years ago I described this transition, particularly the transition to brightly illustrated covers, as Penguin losing its soul.
But now my sympathies are probably more with the position taken by the American rebels, and chief among them, Kurt Enoch, the George Washington of US Penguin’s revolution against its British masters. Enoch was a First World War veteran of the German army and one of the founders of Albatross. As a Jew though, he had been forced to leave Germany in 1936, emigrating first to France, from where he was then forced to flee again after the German occupation of Paris in 1940. He arrived in America in October 1940 and by the end of 1941 was working for Penguin in New York alongside Ian Ballantine. Given that Enoch was an experienced publisher and Ballantine was then just 25, it seems likely that it was Enoch who led the charge against Lane’s ideas.
He was though the most unlikely of rebels, particularly against the Penguin shibboleths of no cover illustration and no titles that were too down market (in Lane’ eyes). It was from Albatross that Lane had drawn inspiration for Penguin, copying its strong series branding, its non-illustrated covers, its use of colour to indicate genre, even its use of a seabird as logo and series title. And there was nothing downmarket about Albatross’s choice of titles either, indeed they were arguably quite a lot more up-market than Penguin.
So why on arriving in America would Kurt Enoch push back so hard and so rapidly against what Lane saw as the essence of Penguin? Surely it had been distilled from the essence of Albatross, with which Enoch was so closely identified? But Penguin’s success in Britain had come from a unique set of circumstances. It had happened so quickly that the whole market had had to adapt. Penguin effectively set the terms of competition in the market for several years to come, and others had to play by Penguin’s rules.
That was never going to happen in the US market. The market was too large and Penguin too small in it. Yes, Penguin’s bold tripartite covers were an interesting curiosity, but they didn’t stand out in American bookshops in the way they had in Britain and nobody else felt forced to adapt their product to meet the new competition from Penguin. Indeed many paperbacks in the US at the time were sold not in bookshops but on news and magazine stalls, and there Penguin’s lack of cover illustration seemed to be a clear disadvantage.
Enoch anyway, despite his Albatross background and despite the preferences of Allen Lane, seems to have very quickly come to the realisation that, particularly in the case of cover illustration, it was Penguin that was going to have to adapt. Step by step he pushed through the changes, so that by 1946, less than five years after Enoch’s arrival, US Penguins carried cover illustrations that were bright and distinctive, without straying over the line into gaudiness or salaciousness (although later on, they may occasionally have come close to it).
Ballantine had left in late 1944 or early 1945, going on to found Bantam Books, and in his place Allen Lane had sent Victor Weybright to partner Enoch, or perhaps more to act as a brake on Enoch’s revolutionary tendencies. But after an unpromising start – Enoch, probably with some reason, seems to have initially viewed Weybright as little more than a Lane stooge – the two men got on well, with Weybright joining the revolution.
And despite Lane’s reservations, the literary quality of Penguin’s US list in 1946 and 1947 was also relatively high, more than bearing comparison with the UK list at that time. Lane seems to have objected in particular to the publication of novels by Erskine Caldwell and William Faulkner, but Caldwell’s works certainly had some critical acclaim and Faulkner went on to win the Nobel Prize for literature. That must have left Enoch feeling some vindication, as must the commercial success that followed, particularly after Penguin’s American Revolution turned to Independence.
A walk on the Wilde side
My first post on this subject looked at the series of Oscar Wilde volumes belatedly published in Tauchnitz in 1908. They seem to have sold well in comparison with most Tauchnitz volumes, being frequently reprinted over the following twenty-five year period. That however takes us up to 1933, a significant year in German publishing history as the year when the Nazi party came to power, the year of the first book burnings and the first lists of banned books and banned authors.
It is not hard to see in that context how some of Oscar Wilde’s books might have been regarded as degenerate and might have been likely to appear on those banned lists. Indeed some of his books did appear on some lists. But the position was more complicated than that as Harald Pittel shows in his recent article on Wilde and Tauchnitz in ‘The Tauchnitz Edition and related paperback series’ (Ed: Mienert, Welz & Böhnke, Published by Palgrave Macmillan 2024). Wilde’s society plays continued to be performed, albeit in German translations that removed much of their subversiveness, to the extent that he became one of the most performed authors on the German stage in the 1930s. There were even three films of his works produced in Germany between 1935 and 1937.
Publicity for the 1935 German film of Lady Windermere’s fan (for attribution see https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=63379191)
Despite this, there seems to be some question as to which, if any, of Wilde’s works could continue to be sold in English. Most of his Tauchnitz volumes show a pattern that is familiar from the works of other authors banned by the Nazis. Take again the example of ‘A house of pomegranates’, mentioned in my earlier post. This book of fairy tales, influenced by the Brothers Grimm and at least on the face of it unlikely to corrupt German youth, was first published by Tauchnitz in February 1909. The Todd & Bowden Tauchnitz bibliography lists thirteen identifiable impressions over the next twenty years or so, including individual paperback copies dated February 1909, April 1909, June 1909, September 1909, February 1910, April 1910, December 1912, September 1913, Autumn 1920, November 1921, February 1922, December 1922, November 1924, February 1925, June 1925, January 1928, September 1928, April 1929, and June 1931.
Only the paperback copies are dated, and only a limited number of collections were examined by Todd & Bowden, so it seems likely that copies with other dates in this period also exist. But after June 1931, and in particular after May 1933, nothing – or at least nothing for the rest of the 1930s. In other words this book was continually in print and being reprinted as one of the best selling books in the series right up until the Nazi party came to power and then disappeared from view. The same pattern applies to ‘The picture of Dorian Gray’ (vol. 4049) and to ‘De Profundis’ and ‘The ballad of Reading Gaol’ (combined as vol. 4056).
Two of Wilde’s works had also been published in the Tauchnitz Student Series in the 1920s available for use in schools, including this excerpt from ‘A house of Pomegranates’. Were they withdrawn after 1933?
There are other complications here though. One is that Albatross was launched in 1932 as a competitor series. The Albatross volumes were much more modern and attractive to purchasers, making Tauchnitz volumes seem dowdy and there was an almost immediate effect on Tauchnitz sales. So the lack of new impressions of Wilde volumes may not date from May 1933 but from mid-1932 after the Albatross launch. Certainly the pattern of reducing impressions after 1932 is common to many Tauchnitz volumes, whether or not they were banned by the Nazis. For the titles cited above, as well as for ‘Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime’ (vol. 4096), ‘Salomé’ (vol. 4133), ‘A woman of no importance’ (vol. 4157) and ‘The Poems’ (vol. 4290) there are no impressions at all recorded between 1932 and 1939. That covers seven of Wilde’s 11 volumes in Tauchnitz. However for ‘Lady Windermere’s fan’ (vol. 4112), ‘An ideal husband’ (vol. 4113), ‘The happy prince and other tales’ (vol. 4141) and ‘The importance of being Earnest’ (vol. 4196) there are occasional impressions dated in this period, suggesting that they may not have been banned.
The next complication though is that Tauchnitz volumes were sold throughout Continental Europe. Some of Wilde’s works may have been banned in Germany, but they were not banned in other countries. Reprints dated in the 1930s might have been sold only outside Germany. We know from research by Michele Troy, author of ‘Strange Bird. The Albatross Press and the Third Reich’ (Yale University Press, 2017) that the needs of the regime for foreign currency from exports often trumped the desire for ideological purity. It was not impossible for books that were banned in Germany to be printed in the country but sold outside it.
From 1934 onwards though a rather more sophisticated arrangement seems to have been in place. It was in 1934 that Tauchnitz was for most practical purposes acquired by Albatross. The actual purchase of Tauchnitz by Albatross was not acceptable because of Albatross’s Jewish connections, so instead Tauchnitz was bought by Oscar Brandstetter, the Leipzig firm which printed Albatross Books. Albatross took combined editorial control of the two series with Brandstetter doing all the printing work.
Several of the books that had been published by Tauchnitz and then banned by the Nazis were switched across to the Albatross series, where they were presumably offered for sale only outside Germany. This was notably the case for several works by Aldous Huxley, D.H. Lawrence and Sinclair Lewis, all banned writers, and it happened too for Oscar Wilde. In some ways it was a cosmetic change, but it put an extra layer of distance between the publication and the Nazi authorities. The books were still printed in Leipzig, but for export only, and they appeared not under the imprint of Tauchnitz, a German firm, but under the imprint of Albatross, a foreign-owned one. Whether this was something insisted on by the authorities or a precautionary move by Albatross / Tauchnitz is unclear.
The collected works of Wilde were published in four volumes in Albatross in 1935 (vols. 255-258). Not only were the contents of 11 volumes squeezed down into four, but additional works not published in Tauchnitz were included, such as ‘Intentions’ and ‘The soul of man under socialism’. Three of the volumes were sold as ‘Extra volumes’ at a higher price, but even so the new issue in Albatross seemed much better value than the Tauchnitz Editions. The first volume, containing four plays, potentially could have been sold in Germany, as the evidence suggests these plays were not banned. But as there is also evidence of Tauchnitz Editions of some of these plays being printed after the Albatross publication and they could hardly be sold alongside each other when the Albatross Edition was so much better value, my guess is that all the Albatross volumes of Wilde were sold only outside Germany and Tauchnitz volumes of those works that were not banned were sold only in Germany.
Sales lists of Tauchnitz volumes available in the 1930s continued to list all 11 Tauchnitz volumes of Wilde (as they continued to list works of other banned writers), even though some of them seem to have been banned in Germany, and outside Germany had effectively been replaced by the new Albatross issues. One list in 1939 even included all eleven volumes in a Tauchnitz list of the ‘500 best titles’, where ‘best’ seems to be more a measure of sales than literary excellence. It seems fairly unlikely that any of them could have been amongst the best sellers at that time, but they may have been included on the basis of accumulated sales before 1933. Or conceivably on the grounds of their literary importance although that would seem unnecessarily provocative.
Then in an even more odd twist, several of the Wilde volumes seem to have been reprinted in Tauchnitz around 1940, so after the start of the war, including ‘Dorian Gray’, ‘A house of pomegranates’, ‘Lady Windermere’s fan’, ‘The happy prince’ and ‘The importance of being Earnest’. It is unclear where these can have been offered for sale, given the limitations on Tauchnitz’s market at that time. Was Wilde once again available in Germany, or were his books limited to areas of Europe outside Germany but in German occupation? It seems unlikely that the Nazis would have considered Wilde unsuitable for Germany but suitable for German-occupied France, but strange things happened in wartime.
Nothing to declare but his genius
At first sight it’s surprising that none of the works of Oscar Wilde appeared in the Tauchnitz Edition until 1908, eight years after his death and nearer 15 years after the peak of his literary and personal fame. Tauchnitz at that time prided itself on publishing the leading works of English literature as quickly after first publication in the UK or the US as it was able to, and in some cases simultaneously with them, or even before.
So why did ‘The picture of Dorian Gray’ or ‘The importance of being Earnest’ not appear in the Tauchnitz series in the 1890s? ‘The picture of Dorian Gray’ had been first published in the American ‘Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine’ in July 1890, just 5 months after Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘The sign of the four’ had appeared in the same magazine. Astonishingly both novels were commissioned by Lippincott’s at the same dinner in London which brought together Conan Doyle and Wilde with one of the magazine’s editors. That must have been quite a dinner, with two young men who were far less well known then than they later became.
Wilde’s work was controversial though and the editor significantly censored it before publication without telling the author. Wilde defended it robustly but did himself revise it substantially, cutting out some of the more controversial parts, before it was published in book form in 1891. Still it seems Tauchnitz were not interested. They were well beyond the reach of the UK censor, and certainly in later years, publication on the continent became a well-established route for more controversial works. Albatross, who later took on, and effectively took over, Tauchnitz, published both ‘Ulysses’ and ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ in plain covers in the 1930s.
But Tauchnitz in the 1890s were simply not that kind of publisher. Bernhard Tauchnitz himself was 75 in 1891 and a pillar of German society, as indeed the firm was. He may by then have lost some of the dynamism and risk-taking entrepreneurship of his youth, and his son, who was increasingly involved in the business, may never have had the same dynamism anyway. They were facing a new and determined competitor in Heinemann & Balestier, who had launched a rival series in early 1891 and they were seeing authors leave them for the competitor in significant numbers. Perhaps in other circumstances, publication of a controversial new novel could have provided just the publicity that was needed, but they were simply not up for it.
Heinemann and Balestier did publish ‘Intentions’, a collection of essays and dialogues by Wilde in 1891 and included in it an announcement that the short story collection ‘Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime’ was ‘in the press’, although in practice this never appeared. It seems that neither they nor Tauchnitz were at that time willing to touch ‘A picture of Dorian Gray’.
In 1895 Wilde was put on trial for gross indecency, convicted and sentenced to two years hard labour. At the end of his sentence he went into exile in France, where he died in 1900. ‘An ideal husband’ and ‘The importance of being Earnest’, both of which had been performed in London in 1895, were published in the UK in 1898 and 1899, but still there was no Tauchnitz Edition. It was only in 1908, when Methuen published a uniform edition of Oscar Wilde’s works, in a limited edition of 1000 copies, that Tauchnitz Editions finally started to appear. As (very unusually) advertisements for the Methuen edition appear at the end of several of the Tauchnitz volumes, their appearance was presumably the result of an agreement with Methuen.
Perhaps appropriately, the first to be published was ‘The picture of Dorian Gray’ in June 1908. ‘De Profundis’, Wilde’s letter from prison and ‘The ballad of Reading gaol’ appeared in a combined volume in July and then in 1909 they came thick and fast. A volume of poems published in 1911 completed the set of 11 Wilde volumes over a three year period. The first printing of each volume can be identified in paperback by the two column format of the back cover, or in hardback by the number of other titles by the same author listed on the back of the half-title (i.e. opposite the title page). The general rule is that only volumes published earlier should be listed – so the first printing of ‘Dorian Gray’ should list no other titles, the first printing of ‘De Profundis’ should list just one other title and so on, although this does depend on knowing the order in which they were published.
Front and rear wrappers of vol. 4056
The books seem to have sold very well and there were many reprints. To take one example, ‘A house of Pomegranates’ was first published as volume 4095 in February 1909. The Todd & Bowden bibliography lists 13 different impressions between 1909 and 1928. The first printing lists three other titles by the same author on the half-title verso, but there are reprints listing 5 titles, 8 titles, 9 titles, 10 titles and 11 titles, as well as several other variants.
Wilde’s books were also issued in ‘de-luxe’ bindings, sold as Gift Editions, and seem to have been popular in this format too. Most, if not all, of his works were made available in the first style of gift editions, bound in a soft light brown cloth and produced around 1909 to 1914 and at least some in the second style in red leather from 1929.
Even the First World War could not dent Wilde’s popularity on the continent. With Tauchnitz cut off from its supply of new literary works, as well as from many of its customers, it resorted to re-publishing excerpts from previously published works, and Wilde was a popular choice, accounting for four of the volumes in the Tauchnitz Pocket Library.
When the Nazi party came to power in Germany in the 1930s though, Wilde was once again at risk of becoming persona non grata. It is not hard to see how at least some of his works might have been regarded as degenerate and after the book-burnings of 1933 some did appear on lists of banned books and authors. But the position was much more complicated than that and I’ll come back to it in another post.
paperbackrevolution 
