ADVERTISEMENTS
These have engendered as much heat and argument as any factor in
book-collecting. It is first necessary to distinguish between:
(a) Leaves of advertisement, usually, though not necessarily,
the publisher’s, which are integral to the gathering (or quire or section), i.e. printed in the same operation with, and on the same
paper as, and gathered for binding with, the sheets of the book
itself;
(b) Leaves of advertisement – publisher’s, wholesaler’s, distributor’s,
or other – printed separately from the book and often on
different paper, seldom peculiar to it, but bound up with all, or
some, recorded copies.
The former date from the 16th century and were common in
English books of the 17th and 18th. Their absence (discarded in
binding or torn out later) incommodes the reader no more than the
absence of a blank leaf or a half-title; for the text is not affected.
But they may be bibliographically significant, and since, even if they
are not, they are an integral part of the book, as intended by its publisher
and executed by its printer, a copy cannot be considered as
technically complete without them. It is worth noticing the practice,
normal in the hand-press era, of printing extra copies of the titleleaf
only to serve as advertisements in booksellers’ shops; few such
ephemera survive.
Inserted leaves of advertisements, usually in the form of publishers’
lists or catalogues, are uncommon before the end of the 18th century,
common in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and considerably less
common since 1915. Being wholesale appendages, they belong to
the age of edition-binding, whether in boards, wrappers or cloth.
The normal practice would be for a publisher (or before the 1840s the
wholesale distributor, who might not be the publisher) to provide his
binder with a supply of some current list, with instructions to insert it
either in specified books or in all his books as they came forward for
binding. If the binder had no supply when he was ready to start, he
would probably go ahead without; if the supply ran out, he would not
wait for more, but would simply continue without the catalogue; or if
he had a pile of an earlier list from the same publisher, he might use
these up without regard to their being out of date. The hazards and
permutations were as numerous as their results are often unaccountable.
Moreover, others besides the publisher whose name is on the
title-page may in certain cases have been responsible for the wholesale
binding, whether in boards, half cloth or (less often) cloth, of a part of
the edition. A wholesaler for the provincial trade, an exporter to the
colonial market, an Edinburgh or Dublin agent, a jobbing publisher
who had bought a ‘remainder’ of the edition – any of these might buy in quires, order his own binding, and insert his own catalogue (see
wholesaler’s binding, remainder binding).
And if anyone wants to see how often such alien catalogues are found in primary bindings,
especially of the boards period, he need only look through Michael
Sadleir’s XIX Century Fiction, where he will find dozens of examples.
As it has been a common practice since the early 19th century for
such publishers’ catalogues to be dated, their evidence in assessing
priority between two observed variants of a book is sometimes useful.
(It is obvious, for example, that copies of Trollope ’s The Warden 1855
with an 1858 catalogue cannot have been among the earliest issued.)
But it is evidence which must be used with great caution; and the classification
of one copy of a book as preceding another because, though
otherwise identical, its inserted catalogue is dated a month earlier than
that found in the other, is no more valid, without strong support from
other arguments, than the proposition that a third copy is incomplete
without any advertisements at all. An excellent example of a misleading
sequence of advertisements is Wells’s Tono Bungay 1909, which is
neatly dissected in Muir’s Points, pp. 23, 24. And if the collector insists
on having the publisher’s catalogue in his copy of Maugham’s Of
Human Bondage 1915, despite its absence from many demonstrably
early-issued copies, he should remember that the same catalogue was
used in half a dozen other Heinemann books published in the same
season but less esteemed today, and look carefully to see whether a
copy of one of these has not been deflowered to make him happy.
Books issued in parts present a special problem. For, casual as
edition-binders will often have been about inserting catalogues in
cloth books, the assembly line for a popular mid-19th century part-issue
must have been a nightmare, which experience suggests was only made
sufferable to its operatives by an attitude so easy-going as to have
amounted sometimes to levity.
Cataloguers and bibliographers (see, for instance, Hatton & Cleaver’s Bibliography of Dickens’s Novels issued in Parts) have scrupulously noted every conformity to, or departure from,
the complement of variegated slips, sheets, inserts and the like, which
has been accepted as the norm for any individual part in, say, Ask
Mamma or David Copperfield. But how is the norm to be arrived at? The
specialists have not always realised that the rarer the slip the less reason
to suppose it a genuinely requisite component – and parts are made-up
more freely, and with wider approval, than any other class of book.
A part-issue publisher would often farm out the contract for x thousand
insertions, probably through an agent, to advertisers of mackintoshes
and hair lotions, and the liability to confusion, casualness, shortages and
mishaps in delivery from a dozen jobbing printers to the bindery multiplies a hundredfold the difficulty of establishing with confidence, a century later, the basic constituents. Which slips were, and which were not, included in the earliest, or even the large majority of the copies of
some particular part, and with what degree of whose authority?
Part-issue collecting has its own special fascination, and its own
rules (more of them made by enthusiasts than by rationalists). The
general collector who wants a book in parts can either enter into
the spirit of the thing and insist on a set with the sprig of heather or
the bicycle clip in Part 19; or he can accept the more relaxed attitude
which has gained a good deal of ground in the last 65 years – that provided
you have correct text, plates and wrappers, plus perhaps any
publisher’s catalogue which ran steadily throughout the issue, the
miscellaneous extras are optional rather than essential. They certainly
had nothing to do with the author and, unlike the advertisements in
cloth-bound books, they had very little to do even with the
publisher, except as a source of revenue. It has to be admitted,
however, that many of them are uncommonly entertaining.
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