Modern Book Collecting by Robert A. Wilson

Author:Robert A. Wilson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.
Published: 2011-02-24T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TEN

BIBLIOGRAPHIES

Several times in this book I have recommended that collectors refer to author bibliographies in identifying first editions, as well as for other information. A great many bibliographies now exist for twentieth-century authors, although, sad to say, only a small handful of them are really accurate. Some, because of sketchiness or errors, are not even useful. Particularly noteworthy for their excellence are those compiled for Ashbery, Auden, Cummings, Eliot, Frost, Hemingway, James, Kerouac, Lawrence, Pound, the Sitwells, Stevens, Wilder, William Carlos Williams, and Virginia Woolf. I will immodestly include my own bibliography of Gertrude Stein in this list. There are, unfortunately, many important twentieth-century authors who are widely collected, but who have not as yet received the attention of a serious or competent bibliographer. And there are also a great many so-called bibliographies that need total revision to be of any real use. Bibliography is a field with a great many opportunities for good, solid work to be done. This chapter lists all the bibliographies currently available for modern authors. I begin with a handful of general works that comprise, in the main, short title checklists of a large number of authors in one or more volumes. Of these, the most useful single volume ever produced in the United States for the aid of collectors is Merle Johnson’s American First Editions, which first appeared in 1929 and was periodically revised and updated in 1932, 1936, and 1942, the latter two under the aegis of Jacob Blanck following Johnson’s death in the early thirties. (Curiously there seems never to have been a comparable British volume.) All editions of Johnson have long been out of print, including a small pocket format reprint of the 1942 edition which appeared in 1962. This was quickly sold out and is much sought after. Many dealers will have a copy that you can consult, and (if it hasn’t been stolen) most major libraries usually have one on their reference shelf. The book covers the first editions of approximately two hundred American authors, beginning with the post-Revolutionary literary pioneers such as Robert Bird, Hugh Henry Brackenridge, and Philip Freneau, proceeding through all the nineteenth-century giants, and ending by doing yeoman service on the moderns who rose to prominence in the first three decades of this century. While there are, of course, some curious omissions, and even more curious deletions (the 1942 edition dropped Hart Crane, Gertrude Stein, and Ezra Pound “as there is not sufficient interest in these authors to continue listing them”), there are very few errors of fact. American First Editions is still one of the most reliable volumes for quick, handy reference.

Blanck did not issue another revision of Johnson for the simple reason that he had become involved in a far more extensive project—the multivolume definitive Bibliography of American Literature, commonly referred to by its initials, “the BAL,” or sometimes by its editor’s name, “Blanck.” Mammoth in scope, it proposes to cover in minute detail every known printing of every book or pamphlet by any American author of any degree of literary merit who died prior to 1930.

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