ASSOCIATION COPY
This term, often scoffed at by laymen, is applied to a copy which once belonged to, or was annotated by, the author; which once belonged to someone connected with the author or someone of interest in his own right; or again, and perhaps most interestingly, belonged to someone peculiarly associated with its contents. Its extension to mean any book owned by a famous person can only be excused by establishing some point of real contact, other than the simple fact of possession. The catalogue note will generally explain the nature of the ‘association’,
which may vary from the obvious to the remote.
An example of the former is Herman Melville ’s copy of The Narrative of the Most Extraordinary and Distressing Shipwreck of the Whaleship Essex of Nantucket (New York, 1821), with 18 pages of notes in his hand. A subtler one would be the copy of Maugham’s Cakes and Ale 1930 from the library of Hugh Walpole, who has generally been identified with one of the characters in the book. But only a cataloguer who despaired of selling a first edition of Norman Gale or F. W. Bain on its merits would dress it up as an ‘association copy’ on the grounds that it had (say) John Drinkwater’s signature on the flyleaf. If an entire section of a bookseller’s catalogue is devoted to ‘association books’, it will often include presentation and inscribed copies; but this is a loose application of a term which has its own proper and useful connotation.
A thoroughly bogus use of association copy, and one which should be actively resisted by collectors, is its application to a book of no importance in which there has been inserted (by an unknown hand) a letter by a person of some importance. A recent manual for book collectors, for instance, described as ‘an important item of Wildiana’ a volume of old sermons in which someone had pasted, without visible connection, a letter in Oscar Wilde ’s hand. This is stretching the meaning of ‘association’ well beyond the breaking-point.
Previous ABC’s of Book Collecting posts
Carter, John & Nicolas Barker
ABC’s of Book Collecting. 8th Edition
New Castle, Delaware : Oak Knoll Press, 2004
Thanks to Oak Knoll Press for permission to reprint