Thomas B. Mosher, 1911,
Portland Maine; printed by Smith & Sale, Portland, Maine, USA.
Octavo;
hardcover, marbled boards half-bound in gilt-decorated calf, two raised bands
on the spine, with gilt titles and decorations in compartments, and marbled
endpapers; 164pp. [4 blank + i-xxxivpp. + 1-118pp. + 8 blank], top edge gilt,
most pages opened, with chapter colophons, red titles and title decorations.
Mild embrowning of the endpapers and page edges; top hinge worn but still
strong; mild stains to the upper board; some pages roughly opened. Very good.
The
story of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
is a strange and wonderful one, which takes in all sorts of aspects of the
publishing industry and of book production. For a relatively slight book (purely
in terms of its physical dimensions), it really made an impact.
Edward
FitzGerald published his translation in 1859, using the services of Bernard
Quaritch, a London printer and bookseller. The slim volume of poetry fared
poorly in terms of sales, and eventually, Quaritch consigned it to a
wheelbarrow out the front of his premises along with a bunch of other
poor-starters, and flogged it off at tuppence a go. If friends of Dante Gabriel Rossetti
hadn’t mooched along and found it, the entire remaining print run would have
been returned to the bindery, pulped, and re-used to make paper for another
job. In the book trade, this process of winnowing out the duds is called
‘remaindering’ and it happens a lot with text books, which is why the world is
cluttered with books referred to as ‘academic remainders’.
Nowadays,
remaindered books are easily spotted: first they’re cheap, sold at a price much
less than the one printed on their covers or wrappers; secondly, they usually
have a mark of some kind to indicate their status as cut-price books. This
ranges from a felt-tip pen mark on the text block edge, to a hole punched
through the cardboard cover. A lot of secondhand booksellers take pains to
obscure these marks as a means of justifying a higher price – this is an illegal
practise, but, as is true of so many similar things, it is not generally
enforced.
The
Pre-Raphaelites glommed onto FitzGerald’s translation with a vengeance and
saved it from obscurity. Or at least, they convinced Bernard Quaritch that
perhaps the remaining copies should be rescued from that wheelbarrow and put
back on the shelves. Rossetti’s crowd tossed the poem back and forth between
themselves for a bit and some correspondence with FitzGerald was entered into
(which convinced him to have another crack at the translation). Between them
all, they created a ‘nine-day’s wonder’ in London, raising Omar’s profile a
little in the reading community but not creating the sensation that was to come.
The bomb was about to go off; but it was going to explode on the other side of
the Atlantic.
The
American settlers have always had an ‘us and them’ mentality; the first waves
of white settlers seemed hell-bent on putting as much distance between
themselves and Mother England as possible. Ironically, it seems that they’ve
been trying to get back ever since. Often this is expressed as an ‘anything you
can do, we can do better’ mania, which, in seeking comparison, comes across as
a yearning for acceptance. American millionaires buying European, especially
English, structures and shipping them wholesale to the US; the American
fascination for royalty and for anything Medieval – it all speaks to a craving
for a lost heritage.
In
the publishing world, things were a little more clear cut. Like the Spanish and
the Portuguese, dividing the globe between them in days of yore, the American
publishers drew a line in the sand of literacy: Britain was Britain; America
was America; what got published in one zone bore no claim to anyone or anything
published in the other. This was all very well, except for one thing: whatever
caused a sensation in London got smuggled out of England and was swiftly
pirated by the American presses.
American
editions were easily spotted: English paper at the end of the Nineteenth
Century was made of pulped paper (from remaindered books, for example) and rags. This meant
that it was more substantial, wore better, was resistant to the types of damage
to which books are heir and stayed whiter for a much longer time. Rag-and-bone
men patrolled the cities of England, collecting worn-out clothing and old
newspapers to sell to the printers, just so this high-quality paper could be
made. In America, on the other hand, paper was made largely of wood-pulp and
other vegetable matter. This type of paper turns brittle in a very short time.
As well, it goes brown very quickly and is hugely prone to foxing and other
fungal and microbial blooms. American books were not made to last.
In
terms of Omar’s work (and FitzGerald’s translation of it), spies in London
caught the excitement of the Pre-Raphaelites’ discovery and soon, copies of the
poem were shipped back to America. Whereas in London, the interest had been
mild, in America the reading public was taken by storm. They loved the carpe diem tone of the poetry and it
synched well with the frontier mentality that Americans had of themselves, of seizing
the moment and making it their own. Soon any publisher worth the name brought
out a version of the Rubaiyat, some
of them very luxe editions, like this one.
Today’s
copy is a Maine edition gifted to me by my sister, and incidentally the latest
addition to my collection. In terms of production quality, it has all of the
bells and whistles: leather, high-quality paper, gilt titles, marbling. It was
produced by the publisher Thomas B. Mosher of Portland in 1911, and is their
tenth limited edition, restricted to only 925 copies. By this time, notions of
copyright wrangling had started across the Pond, and the sheer luxuriousness of
this edition was probably either a thumbing of the nose to the Brits, or a last
hurrah before payment came due. A constant feature of the Rubaiyat in publishing is its size: most publishers produced the
work in small formats, either duodecimo or sextodecimo, because smaller meant
more copies could be printed for the same amount of paper. This limited edition
is set up for one of these small formats, but has not been cut down to size,
leaving wide margins on each octavo page. Such a gratuitous waste of
paper-trimmings, which would normally have been pulped and re-used, is a
hallmark of the sumptuous in publishing.
(Incidentally,
Mosher is also the name of my current publisher here in Australia, and the
Mosher family, deriving originally from the South of England, have a long
tradition of working with print that continues today. Hi Jenny!)*
Demand
for copies of the Rubaiyat in America was huge and the poem was soon on a roll
(even if FitzGerald earned nothing as a result). But this was early days: the
interest would become incandescent with the arrival of a little-known artist
named Elihu Vedder...
*Moshpit
Publishing
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