American Historical Novels:<br>Scribner’s Catalogue 115 Revisited
- by Bruce E. McKinney
A great catalogue will be used. This one is very worn.
By Bruce McKinney
In 1938 Scribner’s Book Store, on its way to issuing about
175 catalogues during its corporate life, issued #115, American Historical
Novels:Fifteenth to Nineteenth Century.This is an engrossing survey of books that
their rare book department felt to be both readable and often valuable.When I first saw this catalogue I was struck
by the catalogers’ knowledge of the material and their evident appreciation of
the 228 items offered.Here is an
example.In describing No. 12, a lot of
two books, Jane G. Austin’s Standish of
Standish and Betty Alden's, The First
Born Daughter of the Pilgrims they wrote, “To our mind the best tales of
the Plymouth Colony ever written; the historical background is excellent, Miss
Austin rigidly verifying every particular.”Of Elizabeth Keckley’s Behind the Scenes; or,
Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House, published in 1868,
their cataloguer wrote, “A bizarre tale by a newspaper woman who flitted in and
out of the Civil War White House and wrote the “inside story” of an effort by
Mary Todd Lincoln to sell secretly the rich clothes she had worn as First
Lady.The author was Jane Swisshelm, Washington’s
trail-blazing newspaper-woman – an abolitionist sobster.An important work.”I found myself hooked on their knowledgeable perspective
and decided to see what has happened to these titles in the sixty-five years
since this exceptional catalogue was published.Some of them should be available and it turns out they are.Well over half of the titles are on ABE and
certainly they are on the other listing sites as well.Firsts aren’t all rare books as 150 copies of
Edna Ferber’s Cimarron( No. 227), 82
copies of Thomas Dixon, Jr.’sThe Clansman (No. 216) and 117 copies of Walter D. Edmonds’s Drums Along the Mohawk (No. 87) confirm.Of course there are incorrectly described
items included in these online numbers but there are plenty of copies even
including the erroneous entries.
In the Scribner catalogue there are 228 items with a total
price of $6,725, an average of $29.42 per item.The most expensive is James Fenimore Cooper’s The Water-Witch Or The
Skimmer of the Seas printed in Dresden
in 1830 (No. 41).Their price is
$285.For reference they also offer a
first American edition published in Philadelphia
the same year for $15.There are seven
copies of the American edition today on ABE for prices ranging from $204.39 to
$788.The Dresden
edition is not so easily found.
The second most expensive book is a fine copy of Stephen
Crane’s Red Badge of Courage (No. 196) in its first edition, 1865, and in its
original dust wrapper.This gem costs
$250.Today Bauman Rare Books offers a
similar, if not identical copy, for $3,000.
There are two books tying for third place at $175. One is Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Twice Told Tales
(#61), the first edition in original black cloth printed in Boston
in 1837 that they describe as “slightly foxed but far above the average
condition for this book.”The other is George
Lippard’sLegend
of the Black Rangers, 1844.
![Sotheby’s: Ernest Hemingway. Three Stories And Ten Poems, [Paris], (1923). First edition of Hemingway’s first published book. $75,000.](https://ae-files.s3.amazonaws.com/AdvertisementPhotos/acf970a0-a15d-4c79-aa24-5e8e414cb465.png "<b>Sotheby’s:</b> Ernest Hemingway. <i>Three Stories And Ten Poems,</i> [Paris], (1923). First edition of Hemingway’s first published book. $75,000.")
