Abstract
‘I’m the only woman in England free to write what I like’, declared Virginia Woolf in 1925. ‘The others must be thinking of series & editors’ (p. 120). The Hogarth Press enabled Woolf to publish her own books with complete control over their textual and physical form. This practice initially restricted her to the coterie model of publication, with small print runs and books available by subscription. But by the later 1920s the demand for Woolf’s books was growing fast, and, in 1929, Hogarth launched a Uniform Edition of her works. The volumes were moderately priced (at five shillings) and the edition was widely advertised in the periodical press. As Lise Jaillant demonstrates, the Uniform Edition ‘was a new step in Woolf’s campaign to reach ordinary readers’ (p. 120), and it accumulated both financial and cultural capital for her. The books sold well, and the publication of a complete edition was a successful act of self-canonisation.
In Cheap Modernism Jaillant uncovers evidence that many of the major modernist authors were anxious to reach large audiences via cheap reprints. ‘[W]here oh where is the man to publish me in series’, wondered Gertrude Stein in 1916, in a letter to Carl Van Vechten. ‘He can do me as cheaply and simply as he likes but I would so like to be done’ (p. 134). Stein would not attract the interest of commercial publishers for another two decades, but other modernist authors were taken up sooner. Jaillant points out that books by James Joyce and D. H. Lawrence were among the first titles published in Jonathan Cape’s Travellers’ Library and Martin Secker’s New Adelphi Library, both launched in 1926, while Wyndham Lewis substantially rewrote his 1918 novel Tarr for inclusion in Chatto & Windus’s Phoenix Library in 1928. Ezra Pound, meanwhile, publicly abused the German reprint publisher Tauchnitz as a firm that ‘cares only for money but pretends to other aims’, whilst privately corresponding with them as part of his effort to widen the market for new and experimental literature; in a letter to Wyndham Lewis, he described his covert interaction with Tauchnitz as one of his ‘dark intrigues that might conduce to our ultimate glories’ (p. 98).
Cheap Modernism explores the tension between those who valued hardback reprint series as agents of democratisation (bringing great literature to large audiences), and those who saw them as a debased and exploitative form of publication. Tauchnitz, for instance, made a huge range of anglophone literary texts available in Continental Europe, allowing readers to encounter them in the original language. But the reprint rights were purchased outright, for relatively low sums, and no royalties were paid to authors. The books were not supposed to be sold in Britain or its Empire, but as the author Richard Aldington commented, ‘people travel so much nowadays that an early Tauchnitz edition is a mistake’. This was because many volumes were bought abroad and smuggled back to the UK, and Aldington confessed: ‘I myself have read Huxley and Garnett and Virginia Woolf in Tauchnitz editions recently, and feel I ought to send them the royalty on their English editions’ (pp. 101–2).
Scholars of modernism have always been preoccupied with the original moment of publication: the first edition or the little magazine serialisation. Bibliographies for major authors do not always include cheap reprint editions, while the series themselves have rarely been collected by libraries or documented by bibliographers. According to Jaillant, the growth of modernist print culture as a field of study ‘highlights the need for a renewal of bibliographic tools’ (p. 4). Her account of the research process for Cheap Modernism is illuminating – in addition to research in publishers’ archives, she also created new bibliographic records, and started her own book collections, drawing on the resources of second-hand dealers to fill gaps in library holdings.
It may seem as if the publication histories of controversial works such as Ulysses and Lady Chatterley’s Lover are already well known, but new aspects of these stories are revealed by Jaillant’s research. It was, we learn, Sylvia Beach, the original publisher of Ulysses, who first suggested that cheap editions of Joyce’s work should be brought out. An unexpurgated edition of Ulysses appeared in the Albatross Modern Continental Library in 1932, but under a specially created imprint, Odyssey Press. This protected Albatross from association with obscenity, whilst allowing the publisher, Max Christian Wegner, to reach a sizeable audience of readers keen to know more of Joyce’s works, which were much discussed but often hard to obtain.
Series such as Albatross, the Phoenix Library and the New Adelphi Library were willing to take risks on difficult or controversial books, since the publishers were (rightly) convinced that markets could be created for them. These series therefore differed from those established before the First World War, such as J. M. Dent’s Everyman’s Library and Wayfarers’ Library, with their emphasis on wholesome, clean, optimistic texts. But Dent’s basic model – publishing reliable texts in an attractive but inexpensive physical format – was retained in the newer series. Jaillant does not pursue the story beyond the 1950s, but it is interesting to note that the solidly respectable Dent series has survived into the present, while the more daringly modern ones all fell victim to the paperback revolution. Hardback Everyman’s Library reprints are still published, and there is also a paperback line of ‘Everyman Classics’ (though the two are no longer owned by the same firm).
Many of the texts which now form our canon of modernism started off in small, expensive editions which were far beyond the reach of the majority of readers. But Jaillant shows that modernist literature was very soon turned into a profitable enterprise by publishers. Print runs in the thousands or tens of thousands were typical for the books in the reprint series, and they were usually priced at three shillings and sixpence. A recent review of Cheap Modernism in the Times Literary Supplement generated a reader letter commenting on the contrast between this low price for a hardback reprint novel in the 1930s and the £75 charged for Cheap Modernism itself. Today, of course, copies of Ulysses or Mrs Dalloway can be obtained for a few pence, while the changing economics of scholarly publishing has made academic critiques of those novels unaffordable. Cheap Modernism is not cheap, and neither is it very long; but it is an intriguing, elegantly argued and thoroughly researched study: definitely one to recommend for purchase by your university library.