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Robert Louis Stevenson in Tauchnitz Editions
The first of Robert Louis Stevenson’s works to be published by Tauchnitz was, of course, ‘Treasure Island’. It had been published in the UK in serial form in the magazine ‘Young Folks‘ in 1881/2 and then appeared in book form in November 1883. Tauchnitz were always on the lookout for promising young writers to add to their series and it wouldn’t have taken long to pick out Stevenson. W.E. Henley, the poet best known today for ‘Invictus’ (“I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul”), was Stevenson’s representative. He had also been at least in one respect the inspiration for Long John Silver, as a result of his own wooden leg.
Whether he was an effective negotiator on Stevenson’s behalf may be open to question, as the end result was a single payment of £20 for the exclusive rights to publish ‘Treasure Island’ in English on the European Continent. A copy of the contract, signed on 12th May 1884 appeared in the Tauchnitz 125th anniversary booklet in 1962 and is reproduced below.
Stevenson however was pleased, and a few weeks later, possibly after receiving a copy of the Tauchnitz Edition of his book, wrote to Tauchnitz on 13th June 1884: ‘I am pleased indeed to appear in your splendid collection and thus to rise a grade in the hierarchy of my art’. Being published by Tauchnitz was it seems an honour, regardless of the fee paid. In fact Stevenson had already, a year earlier, had a collection of short stories in two volumes under the title of ‘New Arabian Nights’, published in Asher’s Collection, the main rival to Tauchnitz. So there may have been competition for ‘Treasure Island’, with Stevenson choosing what he saw as the more prestigious series.
Even two years later, it still seemed to be Tauchnitz rather than Stevenson, who had his doubts about whether the transaction was a fair and profitable one. Writing to W.E. Henley on 25th June 1886 after publication of ‘Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’, Tauchnitz indicated that sales of Treasure Island ‘did not as yet answer my expectations’ (quoted in ‘A Stevenson library’ by George McKay (Yale University Library 1951 -64)). He had again offered just £20 for the combined rights to ‘Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’ and ‘An inland voyage’, published together in a single volume. He was however shrewd enough to want to take ‘Dr Jekyll’ anyway, and as both books were still selling in large numbers and being reprinted regularly by Tauchnitz 50 years later, there seems little doubt that in time he made a fine profit on them.
‘Treasure Island’ had appeared in June 1884 as volume 2255 and copies of the first printing (which should not list any other titles by Stevenson on the half-title verso) seem to be few and far between. The Todd & Bowden bibliography of Tauchnitz Editions lists only two known copies meeting this condition and as they differ in one other respect, only one can be a first printing. The assumed first printing is distinguished by the text continuing to page 287, with the colophon ‘Printing office of the publisher’ on page 288. In all subsequent printings the text runs only to page 286, with the colophon on page 287.
It’s also assumed that the wrappers of the first printing would have been dated ‘June 1884’, although no copy in first printing format is recorded in its original wrappers. There is a known paperback copy dated June 1884, but as this has the text running to page 286 only, it is assumed to be a reprint. Even if only the last few pages are affected, it’s not clear why Tauchnitz would have reset and reprinted the text so quickly if sales were not particularly good, so perhaps there is still some doubt about which came first.
‘Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’ together with ‘An inland voyage’ appeared as volume 2387, and for this there is no doubt that the first printing should show just one earlier title by Stevenson (Treasure Island) on the back of the half-title, and on the original wrappers be dated February 1886. After that Stevenson was under way and Tauchnitz was following him at almost every step. ‘Kidnapped’ and ‘The black arrow’ both appeared in Tauchnitz in 1888, the first as volume 2526 (dated July 1888) and the second as volume 2548 (dated October 1888).
‘The master of Ballantrae’ followed the next year (volume 2614, dated November 1889) and then in 1891 a volume of short stories, ‘The merry men and other tales and fables’ (volume 2755, probably dated August 1891). By this time Stevenson had settled in Samoa, but one of his early volumes of travel writing, ‘Across the plains’ was published in the UK in 1892 and almost simultaneously in a Tauchnitz edition (volume 2818, dated April 1892), to be followed by ‘A footnote to history. Eight years of trouble in Samoa’ (volume 2856, dated September 1892).
This book covered the civil war going on in Samoa at that time, involving three colonial powers, Britain, Germany and America, exploiting divisions between local clans. Stevenson was of course in a position to see at first hand some of the machinations and the effect on the islanders. Unfortunately for Tauchnitz, who again published it almost simultaneously with UK publication. he was also very critical of several German individuals, of a German business and of some of the actions of the German government, which did not take well to the publication of such criticisms by a German firm.
Tauchnitz was fined for publishing the book and ordered to destroy all copies of it. George McKay (in the book referred to above) reports that Stevenson offered to reimburse the firm, but Tauchnitz replied ‘we consider it merely our duty to bear the loss in question quite alone’. Quite how many copies had already been sold before stocks were destroyed, is unclear, but Todd & Bowden record three known copies in library collections (one of them in Germany), and there is a fourth in my own collection. There are many other Tauchnitz volumes for which fewer than four copies of the first printing are recorded (including Treasure Island’ as above), so despite the destruction order, the book is not necessarily particularly rare.
What did happen though is that Tauchnitz re-used the volume number for a subsequent work of Stevenson’s, almost to expunge any record of the book ever having been issued. There are therefore two different books published as volume 2856 of the Tauchnitz series, the second being ‘Island Nights’ Entertainments’, three stories of the South Seas.
‘Island Nights’ Entertainments’ did not appear until May 1893, by which time numbering had moved on to over 2900, so it was a very deliberate decision to go back and re-use the number 2856. In the meantime Stevenson had published another novel ‘The Wrecker’, written together with his stepson Lloyd Osbourne, who was living with him in Samoa. For some reason, this didn’t appear in Tauchnitz, but was instead published in the rival Heinemann and Balestier series, as was a later collaboration between the two authors.
As not only ‘Island Nights’ Entertainments’, but also ‘Catriona’ (vol. 2937, dated September 1893) were published by Tauchnitz in 1893, the decision to publish ‘The wrecker’ elsewhere, doesn’t seem to have been due to any falling out with Tauchnitz. It may just have been that Heinemann and Balestier made a higher offer for that particular book, hoping to tempt Stevenson away, or it may have been a desire for some separation between Stevenson’s solo work and this collaboration.
Robert Louis Stevenson died in Samoa in December 1894, leaving two unfinished novels, ‘Weir of Hermiston’ and ‘St. Ives’. The first of these was published in Tauchnitz as volume 3146, dated July 1896, still unfinished, while ‘St. Ives’ was completed by Arthur Quiller-Couch and appeared in two volumes (vols. 3257 and 3258) in January 1898. Stevenson’s books continued to sell well, and a further two works were published posthumously – ‘In the South Seas’ (volumes 3478 and 3479, dated February 1901) and ‘Tales and Fantasies’ (volume 3837, dated September 1905). In total that made 14 books (in 16 volumes) published by Tauchnitz, including the suppressed ‘A footnote to history’.
Just two months after publishing its final Stevenson volume, Tauchnitz published the first of five novels by Lloyd Osbourne, his stepson. Their collaborative works had appeared elsewhere, but in the Tauchnitz series their individual works achieved an almost seamless continuity. Indeed when the First World War brought an end to Osbourne’s publications in Tauchnitz (his last publication was in July 1912), Stevenson was there briefly to take up the baton again. Few British authors were acceptable to the German censors during the war, but perhaps oddly, Stevenson was one of them. Both ‘Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’ and ‘An inland voyage’, which had previously been published together, were extracted and published separately in the English Text-Books / Tauchnitz Pocket Library series in 1916.
Biblioteca Rojo y Azul
What on earth is this? The Biblioteca Rojo y Azul (Red and Blue Library). A series of Spanish translations of the works of predominantly German authors, from Tauchnitz, a German publisher best known for selling English novels in the original language.
Some context might help. The books appeared first in July 1921, less than three years after the end of the First World War. The war had put Tauchnitz on the other side to the suppliers of its main product, English literature, and to many of its customers as well, and had left it hugely weakened. Several competitors, notably Nelson’s Continental and the Standard Collection, had sprung up during the war to take advantage of Tauchnitz’s absence from the market. It was far from obvious that Tauchnitz, hamstrung by economic conditions in Germany and impending hyperinflation, could ever recapture anything like the dominant position it had had before the war in the market for English language books in continental Europe.
After publishing only a handful of titles in its ‘Collection of British Authors’ during the war, Tauchnitz had cautiously restarted its publishing programme in English with six new titles in 1919 and eleven in 1920. A further eight had been added by mid 1921, but these numbers were only a fraction of the numbers before the war and sales were almost certainly poor.
So perhaps it was concern about the position in its core market that made it think about possible opportunities elsewhere? Spain had been neutral during the war and its economy would not have suffered as badly as those of the combatant countries. It’s certainly possible that book sales were higher there than in other European markets, and that Tauchnitz with its Europe-wide distribution network could see this in sales of its English language titles. Did that encourage it to try to expand into other parts of the Spanish market?
But why classic German texts, almost all from the nineteenth century, translated into Spanish? The experience of Tauchnitz was in publishing contemporary novels in the original language, a specialist area of the market, shielded to some extent from domestic competition. German language editions in Spain might have been a more natural diversification, although there probably weren’t enough German speakers in Spain, or Germans travelling there, to sustain such a market. Even if they wanted to try translations, why not of contemporary German writers, rather than long dead ones? Other than the problem of copyright fees of course.
Two had been dramatised in Offenbach’s opera ‘The tales of Hoffmann’.
There might be a clue in the identity of the principal translator. When the first four volumes in the series appeared in the summer of 1921, it was remarkable that all four were shown as translated by Dr. Maximo Asenjo. Indeed a fifth book in the series was shown as ‘already published’, although it seems not to have appeared until 1922 and when it did, it too was translated by Dr. Asenjo. They’re not particularly long books, mostly under 200 pages, but producing five translations still sounds like quite a marathon piece of work that would have needed a long lead time. Had the series been planned a year or two earlier to allow time to commission translations. Or had the translator produced the work speculatively with no certainty of a publisher?
Maximo Asenjo seems to have had a rather unusual background for a translator. He was a Nicaraguan who had first come to Germany as a medical student in Munich and later become the Nicaraguan Ambassador to Chile. During the war he had attracted attention as the author of a series of articles supporting the German cause in the foreign edition of the ‘Hamburger Nachrichten’. These were then republished in book form in Germany as ‘Deutsche Kämpfer und deutscher Geist!’ (German fighters and German spirit).
The Tauchnitz series eventually ran to a total of ten volumes, seven of them translated by Maximo Asenjo, two by other translators, and one a Spanish language original text by a Guatemalan writer, Flavio Herrera. Only the final book by Herrera, and one earlier title by Rudolf Herzog, were at all contemporary. The other eight were all classic nineteenth century texts. Although the first book in the series was by a Swedish author and had been first published in Swedish, the translation is from the German.
It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that this was almost a personal series reflecting the interests of Maximo Asenjo, and the involvement of Tauchnitz was almost incidental. Was there some personal connection between Asenjo and Curt Otto, then General Manager of Tauchnitz? Or had Asenjo offered his ideas and his translations to other publishers before reaching agreement with Tauchnitz? That they were a German publisher with some access to a distribution network in Spain and even possibly in Central and South America, would have been an attraction to him. Was it in some respect payback for his support of Germany during the war?
I have no idea what the significance was of ‘Rojo y Azul’ (red and blue). These are not the Spanish national colours, or those of Germany, or even of Nicaragua. Did these colours have some other significance? The red and blue design of the books, or rather of the dustwrappers, looks relatively contemporary, certainly more so than that of the standard Tauchnitz Editions at the time, even though they had been redesigned only just before the war. Tauchnitz had never previously used dustwrappers on paperbacks, nor used covers overlapping the edges of the book block as these do. Both changes in a way move the books to be more like hardbacks than paperbacks, although the covers are only in thin card. They certainly don’t look as if they are made with any thought that they might be taken to a bookbinder, as the English language Tauchnitz Editions often were. That was very much a dying practice by the 1920s anyway.
The first four books all had a standard Tauchnitz catalogue bound in at the back, advertising its English language editions, with just the first page altered to contain Spanish language text. In the later titles these were dropped. Four more books appeared in 1922 and the last two in 1923 before the series was abandoned. It seems unlikely that it was a success in sales or financial terms.
More Mary Elizabeth Braddon in Tauchnitz
My post a few months ago looked at the early Tauchnitz Editions of Mary Elizabeth Braddon and particularly the difficulties in identifying first printings. That only covered though the first eleven books (each in two volumes), taking us through to 1868. There were still over 90 more volumes to come over the next 40 years, making Mary Braddon the single most published author in the whole series.
Her works continued to sell well throughout that period and her plots continued to enthral her readers, often based on the revelation of hidden secrets, in the ‘sensation novel’ style then popular. But she also wrote historical fiction and some supernatural stories. Tauchnitz published the vast majority of them at the rate of one or two novels a year almost every year from 1862 right through to 1900. Almost all her novels in this period appeared in two or three volumes in Tauchnitz, having been written for the ‘triple-decker’ market in the UK.
Identifying first printings is not quite as complicated as for the earlier novels and follows the usual Tauchnitz ‘rules’, although even those are far from straightforward. In particular the list of other titles by the same author on the back of the half-title should list only books previously published. As one example, ‘The golden calf’, published by Tauchnitz in two volumes in 1883 (vols. 2133 and 2134), was the thirty-second of Braddon’s works to appear in the series. So thirty-one other titles are listed on the half-title verso of volume 1 in the first printing. There is at least one later reprint that has a list of 45 other titles, and there may be other versions too.
Where copies are still in the original wrappers, then the wrapper date (and the wrapper style) gives a more reliable indication of the date of printing than the date on the title page, which never changes from the date first published. But paperback copies from most of the nineteenth century are relatively rare. Most copies found nowadays have been rebound and usually the two or three paperback volumes have been combined into a single binding, resulting in some quite dumpy-looking books.
As far as I can tell, most of the Braddon novels are not particularly rare in Tauchnitz Editions and they were probably printed in relatively high numbers because of her popularity. Having said that, there are still quite a few of the titles where I have not yet managed to acquire a copy in first printing (at a reasonable price) after 30 years of collecting, so they’re not exactly common either. Even for a popular author, the number of copies printed in Tauchnitz would only have been a few thousand, and time is likely to have reduced the number remaining to a few hundred, if not a few tens of copies.
Rarity though depends on both supply and demand. For most Tauchnitz Editions, demand is very low, so even if few copies remain, they can usually be picked up relatively easily and cheaply. That may be a bit less true for Braddon novels because of the continuing interest in her work and indeed in her life, which at times seemed to resemble the plot of one of her novels.
There’s the broken marriage – her father and mother separated when she was five. There’s the glamorous, but slightly racy, world she moved in as a young woman, starting out as an actress. There’s the hint of scandal when at the age of 25, she moved in with a married man more than 10 years older than her – the publisher John Maxwell, who already had five children. There’s the mad woman lurking in the background – Maxwell’s wife living in a mental asylum in Ireland. And there are the exotic foreign connections – her brother moved to India and then Australia, eventually becoming Premier of Tasmania. Enough for any author to get their teeth into.
But Mary Braddon’s ability to construct intricate plots was far beyond that of most authors and she went on doing it from her twenties through into her sixties and seventies. By about 1900, when she was 63, she was perhaps starting to lose some popularity and her rate of production of new works was starting to fall. There was a three year gap after publication of ‘The infidel’ in 1900, and then just four more titles from 1903 to 1908. ‘During Her Majesty’s Pleasure’, published as volume 4047 of the series in June 1908 was the last of her works to appear, 46 years after ‘Lady Audley’s Secret’ had launched her Tauchnitz career in 1862. And that debut novel continued to attract new readers, with reprints of the Tauchnitz Edition continuing at least as late as 1912.
By then though the torch had passed to her son, William Babington Maxwell, who saw his first novel published in Tauchnitz in 1904 and went on himself to have a total of 21 works in the series. Not bad, but hardly on the scale of his mother, who personally accounted for 58 works and a total of 116 volumes in the series over that 46 year period.
The early Tauchnitz Editions of Mary Elizabeth Braddon
The Tauchnitz Edition over its 100 year history included many both famous and prolific authors – Dickens, Trollope, Rider Haggard, Conan Doyle, H.G. Wells and Bernard Shaw among them. But no single author accounted for more volumes than the rather less well known Mary Elizabeth Braddon.
Rather less well known nowadays, is of course what I mean. In her lifetime she was extremely well known and popular. Although her reputation may have waned, there is still a good deal of interest in her works amongst academics and collectors as well as simply readers. Since 2013 the Mary Elizabeth Braddon Association has existed to promote interest in her life and works, and many of her books have been re-published.
Her breakthrough novel (when she was barely 27 years old) was ‘Lady Audley’s Secret’, first published in book form in 1862 after magazine serialisation. It was in the then popular ‘sensation’ style, usually based on some dreadful secret that is being hidden, before it inevitably comes out. In this case Lady Audley is a secret bigamist who has abandoned her child and doubles down on this by twice attempting murder.
It was phenomenally successful in Britain and inevitably attracted the attention of Tauchnitz, which brought out a continental edition at the end of 1862. The first printing in two volumes (vols. 635 and 636) should list no other titles by the same author on the back of the half-title. Braddon quickly followed it up with another sensation novel, ‘Aurora Floyd’, which surprise, surprise has another young lady heroine who turns out to be a bigamist. The Tauchnitz edition followed almost immediately as volumes 646 and 647, only three months after ‘Lady Audley’s Secret’.
Identification of the first printing is however fraught with difficulty. It would normally be expected to show one other title by the same author (i.e. ‘Lady Audley’s Secret’) on the back of the half-title, and certainly copies in this format exist (see below). Indeed one such paperback copy at the University of Western Ontario has wrappers that identify it as at least very close to a first printing.
However a hardback copy elsewhere is recorded as showing no other titles by the same author, and this is classified in the Tauchnitz bibliography as the first printing. That’s on the principle, generally applicable in other cases, that the fewer other titles listed, the earlier the edition.
Where the list shows all titles published to date that clearly makes sense. But in this case and in several other similar cases around this period, including other Braddon titles, the absence of any list of titles, when in fact Tauchnitz had already published other titles by the author, doesn’t necessarily tell you anything about the date of the edition. It just tells you that for whatever reason, Tauchnitz had decided to omit the list of titles.
My best guess from the evidence here and in other similar cases, is that around this time Tauchnitz printed copies of many books in both formats (i.e with a list of other titles and without a list) simultaneously, so that either may be considered a first printing. Possibly in some of the markets where Tauchnitz books were sold, the earlier books by the same author were unavailable or could not be advertised for some reason.
Over the next few years, new novels from Mary Braddon came thick and fast, all or almost all of them sensation novels, and all or almost all of them published in Tauchnitz, for whom she was becoming a key author. Another nine novels appeared over the next five years, each of them in two volumes and for six of them copies are known to exist with no titles listed on the back of the half-title. In five of those cases copies also exist with the ‘correct’ number of previous titles listed and these may well be first printings, although not classified as such in the bibliography.
The exception is the first of them, ‘Eleanor’s Victory’ published in 1863, for which no copies are recorded as having two other titles listed. It seems quite likely however that such copies do exist somewhere. On the other hand, no copies without a list of titles have been recorded for two books – ‘Only a clod’ (published 1865) and ‘Sir Jasper’s tenant’ (published 1866). Again it seems quite likely that copies in this format may turn up some day. From 1868 onwards though, the first printings of all Braddon’s novels have the ‘correct’ number of previously published titles listed, and no examples without a list of titles have been recorded.
There were though still many more Braddon novels to come and I’ll come back some other day to the rest of Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s publishing history with Tauchnitz.
An unusual dedication
One of my previous posts looked at the celebratory volume 500 of the Tauchnitz series in 1860, for which a special gift edition was produced. Copies exist, with dedications from Bernhard Tauchnitz to various friends or colleagues, of an edition bound in full leather with all edges gilt and a portrait of Tauchnitz bound in at the front. In comparison, the standard edition had no portrait and exists in the usual paperback and a range of other bindings, as well as in a green cloth edition produced for sale in the UK.
So what is this? A copy of the gift binding, or at least one very similar to it, with no inscription from Tauchnitz, but instead an inscription 41 years later from a Tauchnitz author. This copy has what seems to be a light-hearted dedication from Tighe Hopkins, author of six Tauchnitz works, perhaps most famously ‘The man in the iron mask’ (Tauchnitz volume 3491, first published in 1901). He inscribes it in that same year to Madge Jones as a Prize for the Ping-Pong (practice) tournament, and adds “Call this a prize!”, which he ascribes to Shakespeare, although it seems unlikely to have anything to do with the bard.
But how did Tighe Hopkins come to have this edition in any case? When the book was published, and presumably this edition was produced, he would have been only four years old, so I think we can rule out this having been presented to him at the time. He became a Tauchnitz author for the first time only in 1899, two years before this dedication and four years after the death of Bernhard Tauchnitz in 1895. Surely the firm did not still have a stock of the special gift editions 40 years on, that it was presenting to new authors? And on closer inspection of the binding, although very similar, it is not quite identical to the original gift binding. It looks like a slightly more modern version of it, so possibly bound up years later.
A clue though comes from an article published in Pall Mall magazine in 1901. There are twelve pages on ‘”The Tauchnitz” Edition – The story of a popular publisher’, written by Tighe Hopkins and illustrated by photos of the first and second Barons Tauchnitz and their home and office buildings. It is extremely complimentary to the firm and quotes extensively from the Tauchnitz archive of letters from authors, much as the firm’s own memorial volumes do. Indeed it’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that it could easily have been written by somebody from the Tauchnitz firm itself. Certainly if Tighe Hopkins was writing it, he was doing the firm a favour and he would have required personal access to the Tauchnitz archive.
So was he perhaps offered a specially bound edition of volume 500 as a thank you present? Or perhaps one of a few that had been bound up as gifts after the original stock had gone? It seems at least possible, although sadly if so, it was not signed by the second Baron. And perhaps equally sadly, Hopkins seems not to have placed great value on the gift, passing it on within months, perhaps to a young friend, or to someone who beat him at table tennis.
Elinor Glyn in Tauchnitz Editions
Elinor Glyn was not a typical Tauchnitz author. Her work had few literary pretensions. and she wrote light frothy romantic fiction. But what she did have was sex. Not of course anything very explicit – this was in the early twentieth century when Victorian attitudes still prevailed, but even underlying hints of sexual activity could be enough to excite readers in those times.
Tauchnitz 3504 ‘The visits of Elizabeth’ and its author, Elinor Glyn 
Her first work published in Tauchnitz created something of a literary sensation, becoming the sixth bestselling novel of 1901. ‘The visits of Elizabeth’ recorded the letters home of a naive young lady on a series of visits around the homes of relatives and friends. She sees a lot of goings-on, to which she is happy in her charming way, to assign the most innocent of explanations. The work appeared as volume 3504 of the Tauchnitz series and the first printing was dated June 1901 on the wrappers. For bound editions, the first printing should show no other titles by the same author on the back of the half-title.
So successful was it that it attracted imitators. Just four months later, as volume 3528, dated October 1901, Tauchnitz published ‘The letters of her mother to Elizabeth’. The book was published anonymously, but was by W.R.H. Trowbridge (a pseudonym for William Rutherford Hayes) and filled in the letters in the other direction that came between Elizabeth’s letters.
Not surprisingly, Elinor Glyn was less than impressed by this. In her next work to appear in the series, ‘The reflections of Ambrosine’ (vol. 3636), she is at pains to emphasise that she had not written either the Trowbridge book or another anonymous work. She was right to be concerned about this. Even today, over a hundred years later, various internet sources cite Elinor Glyn as the author of ‘The letters of her mother to Elizabeth’.
‘The reflections of Ambrosine’ is not written in letters, but is a similar style of first person narrative from a young woman, relating the goings-on in high society. The first printing in Tauchnitz is dated February 1903 on paperback copies, or on bound copies, should list just the one previous title by Glyn on the back of the half-title. It was followed by ‘The vicissitudes of Evangeline’ (vol. 3805, dated April 1905 and listing the two previous works on the back of the half-title) and by ‘Beyond the Rocks’ (vol. 3892, dated June 1906 and listing three previous works).
The next to come was ‘Three weeks’, published in July 1907 as volume 3978, and perhaps the work that more than any other, established Glyn’s name and reputation. It told the story of a three week affair between a young British aristocrat and a much older woman who turns out to be a mysterious foreign Queen. Their romps on a tiger skin led to the popular doggerel “Would you like to sin, with Elinor Glyn, on a tiger skin. Or would you prefer, to err with her, on some other fur’.
Suggestions that the book was based on an affair that Glyn herself had with a much younger man (Lord Alistair Innes Ker, brother of the Duxe of Roxburghe), would have done nothing to harm the sales of it. And it does seem to have sold well, with regular reprints and a continuing demand for new works.
Glyn was happy to oblige, coming back next to her first character, Elizabeth, and the same format of letters written home to her mother. ‘Elizabeth visits America’ (vol. 4124, dated June 1909 and listing five previous works) is much the same kind of thing, although Elizabeth is now older, married and a little less naive.
In the meantime, Glyn was herself pursuing another affair, with Lord Curzon, the former Viceroy of India and then Chancellor of Oxford University. To maintain this affair, cover her husband’s debts and keep up her standard of living, she had to keep writing. Five more works followed in the years running up to the first World War – ‘His hour’ (vol. 4230, December 1910), ‘The reason why’ (vol. 4305, January 1912), ‘Halcyone’ (vol. 4367, October 1912), ‘The Contrast (vol. 4427, July 1913) and ‘Guinevere’s Lover’ (vol. 4500, July 1914).
The war years of course interrupted any further publications in Tauchnitz and even afterwards it took several years for the firm to recover anything like its previous position. Elinor Glyn seems to have written less in this period anyway, but her career was starting to move in other directions. In 1914 a silent movie was made of ‘Three weeks’ and in 1920 she herself moved to Hollywood to become a scriptwriter. ‘Beyond the rocks’ was filmed in 1922, starring Rudolph Valentino and Gloria Swanson and although Glyn did not write the screenplay for this, she was involved in the production and worked with Swanson on other films. Two years later she did write the screenplay for a remake of ‘Three weeks’, from which she allegedly made $65,000 as a 40% share of the profits.
As Tauchnitz recovered in the 1920s, it was still keen to publish any new novels by Glyn. ‘Man and Maid’ appeared as volume 4577 in May 1922, followed by ‘Six Days’ (vol. 4631, March 1924), ‘The great moment’ (vol. 4678, March 1925) and ‘Love’s blindness’ (vol. 4732, May 1926), all appearing relatively quickly after UK publication. Then in 1927 came ‘”It” and other stories’ (vol. 4807, November 1927). By the time it appeared in Tauchnitz, “It” had been made into a silent film earlier in 1927, making a major star of its leading lady, Clara Bow, who became the first ‘It’ girl.
But the era of silent movies was coming to an end, and with it Elinor Glyn’s particular brand of slightly risqué eroticism. She returned to England from Hollywood in 1929, and later attempts at both screenplay writing and film directing were not successful. She continued to write, but her moment had passed. The 1930s were a different era and Tauchnitz with other problems of its own, had had enough of Elinor Glyn. Reprints certainly continued into the early thirties, but there were no more new publications after “It”, so she finished on a total of 16 volumes spread over more than 25 years.
A tale of two part-issues
Most of Dickens’ novels were first issued in serial form, either as monthly parts or in some cases serialised in his journals, ‘Household Words’ or ‘All the Year Round’. ‘A tale of two cities’ combined both of these forms.
Dickens used it as the lead story when he launched ‘All the Year Round’ in April 1859, running it in 31 weekly parts from April to November 1859, and so copies of ‘All the Year Round’ represent the true first publication of the story. It was printed in huge numbers and many copies were kept, so it’s not too difficult even now to pick up copies at reasonable cost. Many surviving copies are in bound volumes, but still offer an affordable way to own a Dickens ‘first edition’.
That though is not enough of a challenge for many book collectors. Dickens followed up publication in ‘All the Year Round’ by publishing it in eight monthly parts (six single parts and a final double one) from June to December 1859 and these are much rarer. One bookseller is currently offering a full set of the parts at a mere $30,000, for what is clearly neither the first publication nor the first book edition.
The first book edition followed in November 1859 and you can buy a copy for considerably less than $30,000 although maybe in the thousands rather than the hundreds of dollars.
But over the same period, the story was also being published in English in Continental Europe. Dickens was on friendly terms with the publisher Bernhard Tauchnitz in Leipzig, and offered him the choice of taking the novel either in weekly or monthly parts. Tauchnitz chose to issue it in monthly parts and publication of the first part was announced on 30th June 1859. It’s likely that the parts appeared shortly after the UK parts, although it’s possible that the Tauchnitz part-issues were actually ahead of the equivalent parts in the UK.
The print run would have been much lower than in the UK and surviving copies of the Tauchnitz part-issues might be expected to be much rarer. It’s a meaningless question to ask how valuable such parts might be, because no copies of them have ever been publicly recorded. Until now.
Copies of the first four part-issues of ‘A tale of two cities’ have recently been discovered by a book collector and blogger in Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia, where they had been held in a local library and were being disposed of. Some books were being offered free to local residents, but these ones had to be rescued from a dumpster, by someone who recognised their importance before they disappeared. They are now in his personal collection – a reminder of how narrow the line is between survival and destruction.
They’re certainly not pretty. Three of the four parts have been taped around the edges, which is really not a great look. Only Part 4 is untaped and only the first four parts are present. However they offer the first conclusive proof that such part-issues exist at all. The fourth part contains at the front preliminary pages so that the four parts could be taken to a bookbinder and bound up as a single book, which would be identified as volume 479 of the Tauchnitz series.
Tauchnitz itself then published ‘A tale of two cities’ in book form and it’s not entirely clear whether there’s any way of distinguishing copies issued by Tauchnitz as a single book, from copies that might have been bound up from the parts. One thing that the part-issues do make clear though, is that copies with ten preliminary pages, including a dedication and preface, are not the first printing in book form, as suggested in the Todd & Bowden bibliography. To qualify as a first printing in book form, copies must have only 6 pages of preliminaries, with the contents on pages v and vi. Sadly that means that copies in the British Library in London, the Bodleian in Oxford, in Frankfurt, Munich and in Stockholm, can no longer be considered first printings.
The second set of four parts could be bound up as volume 480, and Tauchnitz announced publication of the entire novel in book form in these two volumes on 22nd December 1859. This was about a month after first publication of the complete novel in the UK, although it’s likely, in line with previous practice, that the first Tauchnitz volume would have been sold on its own in advance of this, possibly from September or October.
When Todd & Bowden published their bibliography of Tauchnitz Editions in 1988 they were able to locate only a single Tauchnitz part-issue of any novel, in any of the major Tauchnitz collections, including those in national, state or university libraries around the world. In total 84 different parts are believed to have been published from a total of six novels, but the only remaining example they could find was a tattered copy of one part of ‘Little Dorrit’ in the Bibliotèque Nationale in Paris.
Since then copies of individual parts of ‘Bleak House’ and ‘Our mutual friend’ have come to light, followed by the discovery of a full set of 20 parts of ‘Bleak House’, although the location of these is now unknown. The discovery now of part-issues of ‘A tale of two cities’ means that parts are known of, for four of the five Dickens novels published in this way. No parts of ‘Edwin Drood’ are yet known, nor any of the one non-Dickens novel to be issued in parts by Tauchnitz – ‘A strange story’ by Bulwer Lytton.
More relations between Tauchnitz authors
My last post looked at the incestuous web of relationships between Tauchnitz authors, concentrating first on parents and children, husbands and wives. But there were many other close relationships.
Perhaps the most famous example of siblings as authors was the Brontë sisters and all three were published Tauchnitz authors, although two of them only posthumously. ‘Wuthering Heights’ by Emily Brontë and ‘Agnes Grey’ by Anne Brontë were published in a combined edition of two volumes in 1851, together with a biographical note by Charlotte, her sisters having died in 1848 / 1849. Four of Charlotte’s own novels appeared in the series.
So far as I know this is the only example of three sisters as Tauchnitz authors, but there were at least three other pairs of sisters who achieved that honour. The two Scottish sisters, Dorothea Gerard and Emily Gerard are reasonably easy to identify, as both wrote under their maiden names. They would have been more camouflaged under their married names as Dorothea Longard de Longgarde and Emily de Laszowska – both sisters married officers in the Austro-Hungarian army.
Irish sisters Agnes and Mary Sweetman are less easy to recognise. Agnes wrote a series of novels with her husband as Agnes and Egerton Castle, while her sister had a single novel published by Tauchnitz, writing as M.E. Francis. It’s not obvious either that Amy Lothrop and Elizabeth Wetherell are sisters, although there are perhaps clues in their jointly authored novel ‘Say and Seal’ (vols. 498/9). On the title page they are described only as the author of ‘Wide, wide world’ and the author of ‘Dollars and cents’. But the preface is signed by both using their pseudonyms, which they admit are their ancestors’ names rather than their own, and describe as a pair of gloves worn to shake hands with the public. Their real names were in fact Anna Warner and Susan Warner. Susan, writing as Elizabeth Wetherell, had four other books published by Tauchnitz as well.
Brothers are less of a problem to identify and examples include Edward and Henry Bulwer Lytton, Wilkie Collins and Charles Allston Collins, Charles and Henry Kingsley, E.F. Benson and Robert Hugh Benson. Brother / sister combinations include Marie Corelli and her half-brother Eric Mackay, and Hilaire Belloc and his sister Marie Belloc-Lowndes.
There are quite a few uncles and aunts. Sheridan Le Fanu, for instance, author of two Tauchnitz novels, was the uncle of Rhoda Broughton, who had a much longer list. John Addington Symonds was the uncle of ‘George Paston’, the pen name for Emily Morse Symonds, and Mary Cholmondeley was the aunt of Stella Benson. George Otto Trevelyan was not only the nephew of Lord Macaulay, but also edited ‘The life and letters’ of his uncle. Both men were historians, MPs and Government ministers.
The most complicated example of uncles and aunts comes from the remarkable Arnold family and spans three generations. In one sense it starts with another even earlier generation, as Thomas Arnold, headmaster of Rugby School, was not a Tauchnitz author, but a Tauchnitz character, featuring in ‘Tom Brown’s schooldays’ written by Thomas Hughes. His son, the poet Matthew Arnold, went on to have two books of essays published by Tauchnitz, and was the uncle of Mary Augusta Ward, writing as Mrs. Humphry Ward, who had many more to her name. She in turn was the aunt of Aldous Huxley, who contributed several more volumes to the family library of Tauchnitz Editions.
On then to grandchildren, of whom I can find three examples. Daphne du Maurier was the granddaughter of George du Maurier, Caroline Norton was the granddaughter of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and Christabel Coleridge was the granddaughter of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
Christabel was also more distantly related to Mary E. Coleridge, who was the great-grandniece of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, as well as to Charlotte Yonge. Yonge started an essay society for young women, called the Goslings, of which Christabel and other members of the Coleridge family were part, and which also included Mary Augusta Ward (see above).
We’re starting to get into more distant relationships now, which brings us on to Margaret Oliphant and Laurence Oliphant. They certainly both came from the same family of Scottish landed gentry, and are often described as cousins, but I think that may be distant cousins rather than first cousins. Margaret’s mother was an Oliphant and she was given Oliphant as a middle name, but then went on to marry her cousin and acquired Oliphant as a surname as well. With a naturally heightened sense of family history she then wrote a long memoir of the life of Laurence Oliphant and his wife, Alice Oliphant, also published by Tauchnitz.
In a similar category is Rose Macaulay, who was from the same family, the Macaulays of Lewis as Lord Macaulay, mentioned above, although the relationship was quite distant. And then there is Dinah Craik and the other Craiks. Dinah, the most prolific Craik author, acquired the name by marrying a nephew of George Lillie Craik, who became a Tauchnitz author only after his death. His ‘Manual of English Literature and of the history of the English Language’ was published by Tauchnitz in 1874, by which time both Dinah and his daughter Georgiana Craik were established Tauchnitz authors.
Other more distantly related Tauchnitz authors include Washington Irving and his grand-niece Julia Cruger (writing as Julien Gordon), Lloyd Osbourne, who was the stepson of Robert Louis Stevenson and E.W. Hornung and Arthur Conan Doyle, who were brothers-in-law. E.OE Somerville and Violet Martin (as Martin Ross) jointly authored several novels and were second cousins. They were also more distantly related to Maria Edgeworth, who had a single volume published in the Tauchnitz ‘Series for the Young’. Mortimer Collins, author of two novels published by Tauchnitz in the 1870s, was the step-father of the wife of Tighe Hopkins, who followed him as a Tauchnitz author some twenty-five years later.
I am sure there are other relationships that I’ve missed and in the end it almost feels that it would have been easier to list the Tauchnitz authors who weren’t related to any other authors. But there’s still one relationship that I feel should have been there, but wasn’t. F. Frankfort Moore, an Irish writer with more than twenty Tauchnitz novels to his name, was the brother-in-law of Bram Stoker. The two men were married to Alice and Florence Balcombe, two of six sisters from Dublin. Sadly none of Bram Stoker’s works, most famously ‘Dracula’, were included in the Tauchnitz series. And in another intriguing ‘might have been’ relationship, one of Florence Balcombe’s former suitors had been Oscar Wilde, of course a Tauchnitz author.
Tauchnitz authors – an incestuous lot
‘What’s the easiest way to make a small fortune?’ was the old question, to which the answer was ‘Start with a big one.’ That may be a bit too cynical, but it’s certainly true that the easiest way to become a billionaire these days is to have a parent who’s at least a multi-millionaire. Donald Trump may be a great businessman, but it didn’t half help that his father was very rich.
What was the easiest way to become a Tauchnitz author – that’s to say an author with a book published in the Tauchnitz series? At least in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, it was a pretty exclusive club. There was a real sense in which to become a Tauchnitz author was to be recognised as having reached a certain level in your profession.
The first step to joining the club was to get your book published in the UK or in the US. Tauchnitz only very rarely published new works independently. In almost all cases it was buying the continental rights for books that already had a UK or US publisher. Books from established writers might appear more or less simultaneously in UK / US editions and in the Tauchnitz Edition. But any new writer would usually have to demonstrate a certain level of either critical or sales success in the UK or the US first.
At least part of the answer to our question though, is that it certainly helped to have a parent, or a grandparent, or a brother or sister, or a husband or wife, or a cousin, who was already a member of that exclusive club. An astonishingly high proportion of new authors fell into that category.
Take parents first. Anne Thackeray and Florence Marryat were two of the most successful authors in the Tauchnitz series in the period from the 1860s right through to the 1890s. They certainly both repaid the trust put in them by Bernhard Tauchnitz, and in Marryat’s case ended up with far more novels to her credit in the series than her father did. But both entered the series only after their fathers had done.
Not many contemporary writers were more successful than those two, but two who perhaps might have been (in a period of dominance by female authors), were Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Ellen Wood (writing as Mrs. Henry Wood). Neither had an author for a parent, but they did both have sons who were to follow in their mother’s footsteps. Braddon’s son, W.B.Maxwell, went on to have more than twenty volumes published in the Tauchnitz series, well justifying his inclusion. Ellen Wood’s son, Charles William Wood, had a single volume, but would he have had even that in other circumstances? ‘Buried alone’ was published in 1869 as volume 1009 of the series. It appears to have been Wood’s first novel, written when he was quite young, but at a time when his mother was one of the most successful of Tauchnitz authors.
Other examples of parents and their children include Georgiana Craik (daughter of George Lillie Craik), E.M. Delafield (daughter of Mrs. Henry de la Pasture), Robert Bulwer-Lytton (son of Edward Bulwer-Lytton), Ella Hepworth Dixon (daughter of William Hepworth Dixon), Katherine Saunders (daughter of John Saunders) and ‘Lucas Malet’ (Mary St. Leger Kingsley, daughter of Charles Kingsley).
In a slightly different category, Alice, Grand Duchess of Hesse, whose ‘Letters to Her Majesty the Queen’ were published in 1885, was the daughter of two published Tauchnitz authors, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. Victoria’s ‘Leaves from the Journal of our life in the Highlands’ and ‘More leaves from …’ had been published the previous year and ‘The principal speeches and addresses’ of Albert had appeared almost twenty years earlier, after his death.
Also slightly different was Hallam Tennyson, who in 1899 edited a memoir of his father, Alfred Lord Tennyson. Much of the content consisted of letters and poems written by his father, and the memoir was described on the title page only as being ‘by his son’, with no mention of Hallam Tennyson’s name.
On then to husbands and wives. Victoria and Albert I’ve already mentioned as perhaps the highest profile example. But there were also Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Berta Ruck and Oliver Onions, Leonard Merrick and Hope Merrick, Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West. George Eliot managed the feat of having two partners join the club. George Henry Lewes, her long term (but married to someone else) partner had preceded her, with the publication of his novel ‘Ranthorpe’ in 1847. Then after Eliot’s death, her husband John Cross edited her papers, which were published as ‘George Eliot’s Life as related in her letters and journals’. A similar task was undertaken by Frances Kingsley, who edited ‘Charles Kingsley: his letters and memories of his life’ published in 1881. That indeed means that Lucas Malet was another Tauchnitz author with two parents as members of the club.
That’s probably enough for this post. But it’s far from the end of the story for relationships between Tauchnitz authors. I’ll come on next to brothers and sisters, grandparents and grandchildren, cousins and all sorts of other relationships. Authors were certainly not chosen, or created, at random.
Part 2 is now on this link.
Tauchnitz on Nazi service
The story of the relationships between Tauchnitz and Hitler’s Third Reich is a fascinating one, covered in some detail in Michele Troy’s 2017 book ‘Strange Bird. The Albatross Press and the Third Reich’. The rise to power of the Nazi party in Germany largely coincided with the collapse of Tauchnitz into the arms of its much more modern rival, Albatross. From 1934 until the outbreak of war, the two firms were run together under conditions that were extraordinarily challenging.
For almost a century, Tauchnitz had successfully spread both the English language and Anglo-American culture across Europe. Under Albatross control, and even with a Nazi Government in Germany that was publicly hostile to much of the literature that Tauchnitz and Albatross were publishing, they continued to do so. Michele Troy’s book shows how the Government’s need for foreign currency earnings often trumped ideological concerns.
Books by Jewish authors such as Louis Golding and G.B. Stern and by banned writers like D.H. Lawrence and Aldous Huxley, were printed in Leipzig and exported across Europe throughout the 1930s. Editorial control of the combined business was based in Paris and the more controversial books appeared in the Albatross series rather than Tauchnitz, but production of both series was carried out in Germany by the Tauchnitz owners, Brandstetter. Yes, there was an element of self-censorship and certain books could not be sold within Germany itself, but still it is surprising what they managed to achieve.
Astonishingly, even after the outbreak of war in 1939, both Albatross and Tauchnitz were able to continue selling English Literature in continental Europe, although the flow of new titles inevitably dried up. Even after the entry of German troops into Paris in June 1940, and the appointment of a Nazi custodian of the Albatross business, sales continued and the business continued to make a profit.
But the Nazis also had another purpose in mind for Tauchnitz. What it had previously done for English, they reasoned, it could now do for the German language and culture.
The result was a series of German language novels under the heading of ‘Der Deutsche Tauchnitz’. Instead of the usual notice saying that copies were ‘ not to be introduced into the British Empire’, these books now say ‘Nur zum Verkauf ausserhalb des Grossdeutschen Reiches’, or ‘only for sale outside the Greater German Empire’. They were not sold in Germany or the areas annexed into Greater Germany, including Austria, the Sudetenland and Alsace / Lorraine. But they were for sale in Belgium, Holland, France and other areas where the Nazis wanted to spread a Germanic culture.
In this context it’s worth remembering that the Tauchnitz editions in English were not launched by the British, or even by a Briton, in order to spread British culture. They were launched by a German to meet an existing market demand. Tauchnitz Editions in German though were very definitely launched by the Germans to spread German culture. Der Deutsche Tauchnitz was not a product launched to meet market demand. It was a product seeking a market.
That was not easy in wartime Europe. If there had been a natural market for German novels in France or the Netherlands, Tauchnitz might have been amongst the first to launch one, much earlier. The market for English language novels in peacetime had depended on British and American travellers in Europe, as well as on the significant number of speakers of English as a second language. But in wartime there was no demand from tourists and the number of people with German as a second language good enough to read novels, was probably lower than for English. So even without taking into account the natural resentment that many people would have had towards the occupiers, it’s apparent that the task would not have been easy.
The one natural market they did have was amongst the occupiers themselves. German soldiers in the occupied territories may have bought a relatively high proportion of the books that were sold. Certainly by one route or another, many of the copies found today are back in Germany. But that was not the point of these books. It was the local populations that were their target.
Physically the books look very like the pre-war Tauchnitz volumes in English. They have the same brightly coloured covers, colour-coded by genre, and they use the same circular symbol with a small crown over a ‘T’ that had been introduced shortly before the war. For the early editions there are dustwrappers in the same design as the book and the dustwrapper flaps have a short description of the book in English, German and French at the front and an explanation of the colour scheme at the back. Later on, these descriptions move to the inside of the covers, and the explanation of the colour scheme is dropped in favour of additional languages.
One small design change is to abandon the uniformity of style for the book titles on the front cover. Instead there is a profusion of different styles of lettering, giving each title some individuality within the constraints of an otherwise standard series design.
There is no price on the books themselves, or on the lists of titles inside, but the price quoted in ‘A strange bird’ is the equivalent of 1.2 Deutschmarks, which compares with a price of 2 DM for the pre-war Tauchnitz Editions in English. Start-up costs had been covered by the German Propaganda Ministry and Foreign Office, so that the books may have been sold more or less on a marginal cost basis. They may also have had quite long print runs to keep costs low, but with disappointing sales that led to a build-up of unsold stocks.
The series launched in April 1941 and had extended to 18 titles by the end of the year. Volume number 1 was ‘Effi Briest’ by Theodor Fontane, a classic German novel from a 19th century author, although not really typical of the rest of the series. Most of the books were by more modern authors and probably rather lighter, although there were a few other classics including Goethe’s ‘Faust’ and Wilhelm Hauff’s fairy tales. There are no dominant authors – in fact other than Goethe with two, no author seems to have more than one title published in the series. Readers were invited though to nominate their own suggestions for the series, using cards inserted in some of the books.
21 titles appeared in 1942, taking the series on to volume 139, although after volume 130 the dustwrappers were dropped, as they had been on paperbacks in Britain a year or two earlier. Wartime conditions were perhaps starting to bite and the quality of paper used began to deteriorate, although these are still relatively lavishly produced books in comparison with British paperbacks from the same era. Another twenty or so new titles were added in 1943 so that by early 1944 the series had reached volume 166.
Volume 164 was advertised in the list of titles as ‘Petja’ by Marissa von der Osten, although I have never seen a copy and I suspect it was never published. From here on, and not surprisingly given the progress of the war, things start to go rather downhill. I have seen no evidence of books numbered 167, 168, 169, 171 or 173 and I have been unable to find a copy of volume 174, which is advertised as Adalbert Stifter’s ‘Erzählungen’. Again it may well have never been published.
That leaves volumes 170, 172, 175 and 176 which certainly do exist, for a total of 69 confirmed volumes over a three year period from 1941 to 1944. On some of the later volumes though, I have seen examples where the phrase forbidding sales within the German Reich has been blacked out, presumably because access to other markets had been lost and copies had been repatriated to Germany towards the end, or after the end of the war.
Overall it seems unlikely that the series was a success in terms of its objective to spread German culture. It was not the only attempt though. Alongside the German language series, Tauchnitz also launched a series of French translations of German novels, including some of the same titles. I’ll come back to that another time.
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