Books

FIRST EDITION, ENGLISH ISSUE, comprising the American sheets with a cancel title-page. New blue three-quarter morocco over blue cloth-covered boards with marbled end-papers. New fly-leaves. Though trimmed when rebound, the book is still a quarter of an inch taller than the American issue, as the sets of sheets sent to England were uncut. There is some spotting to the preliminaries and the fore-edge of the text block is a trifle darkened in places. With signature mark 14 present (no known priority). A true rarity. One of only three copies that I have been able to trace. In 1922, pioneering Melville bibliographers Michael Sadleir and Meade Minnigerode doubted that "copies of [The Piazza Tales] were ever actually issued in England, despite the fact that Sampson Low and Co. [had] advertised the book." Sadleir speculated that, "at the most, copies may exist with an English cancel title, but even this is improbable in view of the joint imprint on the New York edition." Less than a year later, though, such a copy was reported by a Leicester bookseller named Edgar Backus, and described in the expanded Sadleir bibliography appended to Volume XII of the Constable Edition of Melville's Works (The Confidence-Man, 1923). Decades later, though, when no corroborating copy had come to light, the editors of both the Bibliography of American Literature (BAL, Volume 6. 1973), and the Northwestern Newberry edition of Melville's Writings (NN-PT, 1987), dismissed the Backus isolato, its whereabouts unknown, as a myth. It was once again concluded that the "only edition of The Piazza Tales published during Melville's lifetime was that of 1856. It was distributed in England by Sampson Low, Son & Co.; this firm's name was included, BELOW THAT of Dix & Edwards, in the imprint of the American edition, and NO SEPARATE ISSUE of the book appeared in England" (NN-PT, emphases added). Ironically, the lone institutional copy I could find to refute this is at the Newberry Library itself. In a further coincidence, the Newberry copy is almost certainly the Backus copy, as it contains the bookplate of Sydney A. Gimson, an early Melville collector from Leicester who, at the least, was acquainted with Backus. From Gimson, the copy passed to the American banker Albert H. Wiggin, and then descended to Wiggin's daughter, Marjorie W. Prescott. The Newberry acquired the book when the Prescott Collection was sold at Christie's in 1981. The only other known copy of the English issue of The Piazza Tales was in the personal collection of the bookseller William S. Reese, who acquired it from the Hermitage Bookshop in Colorado thirty, or more, years ago (Reese: Collecting Herman Melville, The Gazette of the Grolier Club, 1993). It remains in private hands. Even the most comprehensive institutional Melville collections, such as those at Harvard, the University of Virginia, and the New York Public Library, are without a copy. BAL 13669 (for the American issue).

The Piazza Tales is a collection of short stories by American writer Herman Melville, first published in 1856. The collection includes the following stories: "The Piazza", "Bartleby, the Scrivener", "Benito Cereno", "The Lightning-Rod Man", "The Encantadas", and "The Bell-Tower".