The 'Failure' of Henry James's New York Edition - Eric Leuschner

You might not have heard of Coralie Bickford-Smith, but I can guarantee that as someone who's visiting this blog you've seen, and most likely coveted, her work (and I posted a link to her incredible Fitzgerald editions a few weeks ago). Reading through the first half of this essay I was reminded of Bickford-Smith's various Penguin editions, and wondered what exactly they say about the buyer and the work. Someone else in the course (I forget who, I'm sorry!) has suggested that the orange Penguin editions act as a kind of 'uniform' for the books, putting each text on a level playing field, at least aesthetically. On the contrary, I think all of Penguin's editions act in exactly the opposite way, by marking out a text as worthy. You can pick up any of these, they say, and you'll be on the money (the cultural currency money, that is). Bickford-Smith's editions go beyond that, and distinguish the texts (since she generally designs for older, well-established works like Oliver Twist, Moby Dick etc.) not only from other books, but from other copies of the same book. Her designs flatter not only your taste in books, but your aesthetic tastes as well. The hardcover copy of Great Expectations with the chandeliers all over says something quite different to the sombre black spined Penguin Classics paperback.

I'm talking about these editions here because I think they are the modern equivalent of the collected editions Leuschner is talking about. They allow you to put your own stamp on the author, to make a claim on the text, by choosing an edition that reflects you and your own tastes, and to a certain extent your own perceptions of what the text is. My understanding of what Great Expectations is will lead me to choose either the black Classics edition or the graphic clothbound Bickford-Smith edition. This way of looking at the notion of the edition was the only way I could comprehend how on the one hand Leuschner could be saying that the collected editions allow the collector to have the author 'visit', and on the other that this is a 'form that implicitly erases the author.'

At first I thoroughly disagreed with the latter argument. How could an edition of an author's collected works, with his monogram on the cover and his initials watermarked on every page, possibly 'erase' the author? Obviously the form elevates the author, in this case James, but it does so by selling him to a discerning audience. The book's physical form is clearly the most important marker in this commodity.

However, I wouldn't be as quick as Leuschner to write off the importance of binding, as he does in the first half of this essay by quoting rather facetiously from Victorian articles defending expensive editions over cheap paperbacks. Yes, an expensive or particularly attractive binding is a marketing ploy. But a cheap binding is one as well, and a book deserves decent binding. I've been complaining that I picked up the new Jonathan Franzen book and at $33 the cover still feels like the cover of a proof, cheap and flimsy. And that is a big book, it's going to take a beating. I'll still buy it, of course, because the content is more important than the cover, but I don't think books are such a sacred metaphysical experience that their physical trappings can be altogether ignored.

By the way, I thought the difference between the public Henry James, calling his readers 'monsters' and himself a 'conjuror', and the private James writing to his publishers, 'The whole is a perfect felicity, so let us go on rejoicing', was incredible. I know I'm not supposed to, but I find the figure of James himself completely fascinating, he seems such an intriguing character. Seriously, Henry James, what is he LIKE?