An Issue Point for the first hardcover of Jack Finney's THE BODY SNATCHERS

Jack Finney's second novel, The Body Snatchers, was first serialized in shortened form in Collier's magazine in three parts, from 26 November to 24 December 1954. The full novel appeared as a pocked-sized paperback original from Dell, on 1 February 1955. The first hardcover edition came out in England from Eyre & Spottiswoode on 16 September 1955. The novel was filmed as Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and released in the US on 5 February 1956. Aside from a Beacon Books (London) paperback edition of 1957, virtually all of the later editions appear under the film's title.

Many book collectors are especially interested in the first hardcover edition of the book. It is known to exists in two issue points. One is the regular book in dust-wrapper (priced 10s 6d at the lower right of the front flap; the publisher does not seem to have released a remainder edition); the other includes an additional advertising band placed over the dust-wrapper. The question remains, is there a priority of issue? 

The advertising band is just an add-on to the book (click to make it larger).

 

The Body Snatchers was part of a series from Eyre & Spottiswoode that began in March of 1955. The series was called by the publisher "Thrillers of the Month"--which is confusing in terms of the monthly award for "Thriller of the Month" as given out by the London newspaper, The Star.  In the 8 July 1955 issue of The Guardian, Eyre & Spottiswoode published an advertisement listing the first eight books in their series, including The Body Snatchers at number six. 

The award from The Star, the London evening newspaper which ceased in 1960 when it was merged with its rival the Evening News, was apparently not a well-publicized award (at least beyond The Star). The first book I know of that won it was Marjorie Bremner's Murder Most Familiar (Hodder & Stoughton, 1953). The award was apparently overseen by Joseph Taggart, the book reviewer at The Star throughout most of the 1950s. In other newspapers of the time (I have not been able to consult The Star itself), some publishers would advertise their offerings as "The Star Thriller of the Month." Titles from 1955 so designated include Patricia Wentworth's Vanishing Point (Hodder & Stoughton, published 23 June 1955, advertised in July), Mark Corrigan's, The Big Squeeze (Angus & Robertson. published 31 August 1955, advertised in August and September), and E.R. Punshon's  Triple Quest (Gollancz, published 14 November 1955, advertised in November). Apparently, in comparison with these titles, The Body Snatchers would likely have been the September or October 1955 selection. 

 
The award was announced before the publication of The Body Snatchers on 16 September, so the question remains how, and under what circumstances, were the bands applied? They are generic for any book (i.e., the title of the winner is not mentioned) so one suspects that The Star supplied the publisher with the bands (the band promotes The Star, not any particular book).  We do not know whether this was done before publication or soon after. Thus the question of when books with the bands were issued may be unsolvable. Rare book dealers like to note that copies with the publicity bad are very rare (and that its presence justifies a significantly higher price than on copies without the band), but I'm not sure that having the band, as something initiated not by the publisher, and appearing only on some not all copies, is that desirable as a collectible item.  Sure, if one came on a reasonably priced nice copy of the first edition in dust-wrapper, I wouldn't object, but I wouldn't pay any premium for it, when it could easily have come from a copy of a different winner of "The Star Thriller of the Month", the band being married belatedly to the Finney book. My two cents. 

 

Haining Got Haininged!

Peter Haining (1940-2007) was a hugely prolific editor of single-author collections and multi-author anthologies, many of which appeared to dig up lost or forgotten stories by famous authors.  Alas such items were usually frauds--Haining would, for example, take some forgotten story by one unfamiliar author, and attribute it to a more well-known author, complete with falsified bibliographical statements. It is a shameful methodology.

Recently I have been studying the rare materials in Haining's Paths to the River Back: The Origins of 'The Wind in the Willows' from the Writings of Kenneth Grahame (1983). A lot of the stories appear to be mined directly from Patrick R. Chalmers's Kenneth Grahame: Life, Letters and Unpublished Work (1933). I am still in the initial stages of studying these books, but I have already found one fraud at the very beginning of Haining's book, and it has an interesting story. 

The fraud is the poem which Haining prints at the beginning  of his book, "Running Water," which Haining notes as "A poem by Kenneth Grahame written at Blewbury in 1915."

 page 9, Paths to the River Back

 

Haining lifted the poem from pp. 252-253 of Chalmers's book, which is curiously ambiguous about the authorship.

 Click on the pages to make them larger

 

Note that Chalmers writes "in the post-war years Kenneth Grahame" and "he could truly say 'Water first of Singers'; or . . " Then comes the poem. The keyword there is or. The poem expresses the sympathies of Grahame, but it is not by Grahame. In fact, it is by Grahame's biographer, Patrick R. Chalmers, and it had appeared in whole in Punch for 13 March 1929 (Chalmers was a regular contributor to Punch). 

What Chalmers used of his own poem is the final 7 lines, headed by the first four lines (which were repeated but slightly altered immediately before the final seven lines). 

Why did Chalmers do this? He was certainly having difficulties with the book, for Grahame's widow Elspeth used the book to right past wrongs and to erase facts from Grahame's life, leaving it a kind of hagiography, for which Elspeth claimed half the royalties for her meddling, according to Matthew Dennison's Eternal Boy: The Life of Kenneth Grahame (2018). Elspeth would go on in 1944 to publish First Whisper of Wind in the Willows, in which "she published misleading, saccharine 'memories' of her life as wife and mother . . . delusions had made Elspeth's marriage bearable" (Dennison, p. 243). 

Chalmer's implying a false source should not have been done. Nor should Haining's explicit extension of the first false source. Both are bad scholarship, and here, for once, Haining took someone else's fraud and made it new as his own: Haining himself got Haininged.  
 

 

 

A Mystery amongst Bibliomysteries

In 2014, Otto Penzler published Bibliomysteries: An Annotated Bibliography of First Editions of Mystery Fiction Set in the World of Books, 1849-2000. It's a useful book when one is hungry to read a  bibliomystery, for the entries often give a sentence or two about the relevant book or story to whet one's appetite. Thus, recently, I found this entry:

Frederick Irving Anderson's short story "The Jorgenson Plates" sounded intriguing.  The idea of "a publishing story with much about the technical aspects of publishing in England and America" is odd enough to attract my interest. Anderson's book, The Notorious Sophie Lang (1925), is particularly rare, so I looked for the reprint of the story that Penzler cites in Ellery Queen's anthology, The Female of the Species (1943).  And I read it. And it has nothing whatsoever to do with publishing in either England or America. Instead it is a convoluted tale of coincidences and revelations about Sophie Lang, the female jewel thief.  It was really a waste of time.  

But where, then, might I find the story that I wanted to read?  It doesn't appear to be in Anderson's collection, The Notorious Sophie Lang, and if it's a stray annotation by Penzler inserted into the wrong entry, it could go almost anywhere. Any suggestions?

 

G.K. Chesterton on Fairy Tales and Modern Novels

"Can you not see that fairy tales in their essence are quite solid and straightforward; but that this everlasting fiction about modern life is in its nature essentially incredible? Folk-lore means that the soul is sane, but that the universe is wild and full of marvels. Realism means that the world is dull and full of routine, but that the soul is sick and screaming. The problem of the fairy tale is--what will a healthy man do with a fantastic world? The problem with the modern novel is--what will a madman do with a dull world? In the fairy tales the cosmos goes mad; but the hero does not go mad. In the modern novels the hero is mad before the book begins, and suffers from the harsh steadiness and cruel sanity of the cosmos."

 G.K. Chesterton, "The Dragon's Grandmother," The Daily News, collected in Tremendous Trifles (1909)   

A Final Follow-up to: "All Fled, All Done": Redux on Robert E. Howard's Famous Couplet

In January 2019, I posted on this blog "'All Fled, All Done': Redux on Robert E. Howard's Famous Couplet", which mostly sorted out the inspiration of Howard's famous couplet as coming from a poem by Viola Taylor (later Viola Taylor Garvin). I reproduced the publication of the poem from 1912, and noted that it had probably first appeared in The Westminster Gazette. In 1926, Taylor/Garvin dated the original appearance to 1906. Herewith I can update this and complete the study.

The poem did appear in The Westminster Gazette, but not in 1906. Viola Taylor contributed around twenty poems to The Westminster Gazette beginning in 1902. "The House of Cæsar" appeared in the 25 June 1909 issue, on page two. It was the final appearance by Viola Taylor in The Westminster Gazette. I copy this version of the poem below:

 

Three months earlier, on 22 March 1909 (page four), The Westminster Gazette reviewed her first book, a small collection of poems, The Story of Amaryllis and Other Verses (London:  Sidgwick & Jackson, 1908). Published in December 1908, the book was clearly out before "The House of Cæsar" had been written. I append the review below. 

 

 

 

 

A Lost Charles Williams Poem?

I think I have happened upon a lost Charles Williams poem.  At least, after a cursory look in prominent sources on Williams, I find no mention of it.  I found it in an original compilation by Harry H. Mayer, The Lyric Psalter: The Modern Reader’s Book of Psalms (Liveright, 1940). Mayer notes in his short foreword that:

The poems of this book have all been specifically written for inclusion in this publication. They might rightly be classified as essentially a pioneer work. Woven around the psalms of the Bible they should carry a message old as the story of man, new as tomorrow's sunrise and covering the entire circumstance of living. The method of procedure followed by the contributing poets was left to their own discretion. When the poet's version of his assigned part had been accepted, it was criticized and such changes or re-writes as sometimes seem to be called for were agreed upon. . . . Not only with regard to procedure were the poets of the present volume untrammeled. They were allowed complete freedom with regard also to the substance and thought of their interpretations. 

The contributors range though traditional and modernist poets, including (alphabetically), among others,  W.H. Auden, Witter Bynner, Padraic Colum, John Cournos, Lord Dunsany, Louis Golding, Shane Leslie, Louis MacNeice, Thoma Moult, L.A.G. Strong, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Charles Williams. Some authors contributed more than one poem.

Williams's single contribution, a rendition of Psalm 146 under the title of "Put Not Your Trust in Human Strength" (pp. 292-294), is reproduced below.  His biographical sketch (pp. 349-350) follows after the poem. The whole book was reprinted in 1944 by Liveright under the title The Modern Reader’s Book of Psalms.

 

Tolkien on Mercury

 So I see that there is a crater named Tolkien near the north pole of Mercury.  What about Lessingham?