White Buildings; Three Copies: First Issue, Second Issue, Second Impression

Crane, Hart

Edité par Boni and Liveright, New York, 1926

A propos de cet article

First impression, first issue with Allen Tate's name misspelled as "Allan" on the uncanceled title page. Dark blue cloth, very good in dustjacket with strengthened folds and chip to spine crown, else very good. First impression, second issue with cancellans title page correcting Tate's name to "Allen," very good, lacking jacket. Second impression (January 1929), very good, lacking jacket, with offsetting to the front free endpaper from a former dustjacket, the ghosted text "Second Printing $2.00" still legible. Hart Crane's debut collection established him as one of American modernism's most visionary voices, though the book's complex bibliographic history reflects the precarious economics of literary publishing in the 1920s. When Boni & Liveright completed the first impression in December 1926, the 500-copy run contained an error: Allen Tate's name appeared as "Allan" on the title page. Upon discovering the error after distribution had begun, the publisher printed a cancellans title page and tipped it into remaining unsold copies, creating two bibliographically distinct issues of the first impression. The first issue comprises copies that had already been bound and distributed before the error was detected?these escaped correction and went to purchasers with the uncanceled title page intact. The second issue comprises copies from the same 500-copy impression that remained in the publisher's inventory when the error was discovered and subsequently received the correction slip. Both groups derive from the same impression (same type-setting, same print run), but are differentiated by deliberate post-publication intervention to correct undistributed copies. The correction was not a variation occurring during manufacture (which would constitute a state difference), but rather a publisher's action taken after the book was published. The second impression, printed in January 1929 in an edition of 250 copies, constitutes a separate printing undertaken more than two years after the first impression. This printing employed new relief plates (technically making it a new edition by strict bibliographic definition, though commonly termed the second impression) and introduced alterations to the title page, copyright page, and paper stock. Second impression dustjackets bore the phrase "Second Printing $2.00" on the front flap, text which has offset onto the front free endpaper of this copy, providing physical evidence of a now-absent jacket. Having these three copies together provides a complete picture of the book's early publication history: the uncorrected first issue, the corrected second issue from the same impression, and the subsequent reprinting. The first issue's survival in jacket (however worn) is notable, as these dark blue wove paper jackets with metallic yellowish-white lettering proved extremely fragile and few have survived in any condition. The book's design features an oval device containing the initials "B&L" and the silhouette of a monk at a lectern, repeated on spine and rear cover.

N° de réf. du vendeur 80

Détails bibliographiques

• Titre: White Buildings; Three Copies: First Issue, Second Issue, Second Impression
• Éditeur: Boni and Liveright, New York
• Date de parution: 1926
• Édition: First Edition.
• Catalogues du vendeur:
  • Poetry