13th December 2005
The Macmillan Editions Book & the British Library
Early editions and print records for Lewis Carroll’s Alice’ Adventures Underground and Alice’s
Adventures in Wonderland have recently been acquired by the British
Library.
They are part of the earliest “Editions”
Book, a large bound volume of 946 pages in which were recorded print orders for
books published by Macmillan & Co from 1843 up to approximately 1910. They contain unique information on the early
print records of the company and include books by eminent Victorian writers
such as Thomas Hardy, Thomas Hughes, Henry James, Charles Kingsley, Rudyard
Kipling, F T Palgrave, Christian Rossetti, Alfred
Lord Tenyson, H G Wells, & Edith Wharton. Apart from a few very early records, which
are missing, it includes all titles, which had been published by the company
when the accompanying index volume was compiled and are of particular interest
to scholars researching publishing history of books published by Macmillan
& Co Ltd during their first 67 years.
Records of books published after 1910 were entered on a card system and
are also recorded in later editions volumes already held by the British
Library.
The first 566 pages of the book are in alphabetical
order of author, and most of the book is beautifully entered in the same hand,
that of James Foster, the company secretary, who also compiled Macmillan’s
Bibliographical Catalogue (1843-1889) published in 1891.
The Editions Book and Index were beginning to
deteriorate with regular use and Macmillan Publishers wanted to be able to
create an electronic facsimile, so that they could be conserved. The books were scanned by Datapro
Data Preparation Ltd, based in Brighton, who have been operating in information capture for over thirty
five years. They used specialist
planetary camera technology to enable images of each page to be captured in
full colour with no damage to the books.
Advanced software then smoothed out the images to virtually eliminate
the curvature of the pages and produce a very high-resolution colour image,
which can be viewed on screen.
The books and electronic facsimile have
now joined the latest collection of the Macmillan Archive, which was sold to
the British Library in November 2004, covering mainly the mid twentieth
century. This included correspondence
with eminent writers such as C P Snow, Rebecca West, Barbara Pym, Storm
Jameson, Pamela Hansford Johnson, Arthur Koestler, Joan Robinson, Sir Alfred Ayer, E H Carr, Joyce
Grenfell, Margaret Laurence, Jane Duncan and other key writers of the
period. There is a large collection of
letters from Sean O’Casey and a letter from Philip
Larkin praises the work of Barbara Pym.
He says “I
should like to add my voice to the chorus…of recommendation”.
The acquisition last year also contains a
continuation of papers already held by the British Library including outgoing
letter books, centrally filed until the 1960s, as well as 37 volumes of bound
readers’ reports. The readers’ reports
provide fascinating reading and include reports by well-known authors such as C
P Snow, A C Pigou & E H Carr. The most entertaining are by Sir J C Squire,
who read all the important literary offerings to Macmillan from the 30s almost
to his death in 1958. Of C P Snow: The Masters he says, “I found the thing a bore. ……I shall be astonished if this book has any
success”. Whereas on Nirad
Chaudhuri’s Passage to England he enthuses “Do publish
it; it is long since I have read a manuscript that so entranced me”. Also of note are various typescripts
including miscellaneous works by W B Yeats & Lord Baden-Powell’s Sketches in Kenya & a signed letter from George Bernard Shaw.
The Editions book and recent acquisition joins the
earlier Macmillan publishing papers which are already held in the national
collection and which were bought by the Library in 1967 & 1990. The archive is already an invaluable resource
to scholars researching literary and publishing history and this addition will
enhance the collection further.
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