A Library in the Hands

By Paul Gray

Four new-old volumes begin an American homecoming

Any good books lately? Well, there is a hardback collection of Typee, Omoo and Mardi, all by a young novelist named Herman Melville (1819-91). Nearly 33,000 copies have been printed, shipped and readied for sale. And that is not all. Three look-alike companions are also hot off the presses and speeding toward dealers: the complete poetry and prose of Walt Whitman (1819-92), the tales and sketches of Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-64) and three novels by Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-96). They will soon be available in U.S. bookstores, at $25 apiece.

Every publishing venture is a gamble, but this one seems a bigger flyer than most reissued works by 19th century American authors, offered at a late 20th century price. And the Library of America, the new publisher of these four new-old books, has already committed itself to a long roll of future bets. Next fall it will issue beginning collections of Mark Twain and William Dean Howells, and two volumes of Jack London; in a year, it promises another pair of books devoted to Melville and Hawthorne, plus two volumes of the writings of Historian Francis Parkman. The library lists 25 titles through the fall of 1984. Its $1.8 million bankroll from the Ford Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities may last just about that long.

The demiurge behind this outpouring of books is Critic Edmund Wilson, who died ten years too early to see it occur. During much of his long career, Wilson lobbied in print and in private for "the possibility of bringing out in a complete and compact form the principal American classics." He particularly admired the French Pleiade editions and wanted the work of U.S. authors similarly collected and displayed "in beautifully produced and admirably printed thin-paper volumes, ranging from 800 to 1,500 pages."

The first four Library of America books fit this description. And the need for such volumes has only grown more urgent over the years. Two decades ago, readers could amass complete sets of their favorite authors by mixing older editions with paperbacks. That is no longer as cheap or as easy as it once was. Bookstores have ever less shelf space to give to slow-moving titles; warehousing such items has become prohibitively expensive. Paperbacks blink in and out of print like fireflies. They also, as older collectors have ruefully discovered, fade and fall apart even more rapidly than their owners.

That will not happen to these books. They are printed on opaque, acid-free paper; unlike most volumes published after 1840, these will not slowly eat themselves up. Each one contains more than 1,300 pages, sewn together, not glued. Many uniform or limited editions try to stun with sheer size and ornate design, fancy letters marching across deserts of white space. Here, the money and care have gone into providing readable type, and plenty of it. These books are bound handsomely enough to grace any bookshelf; more important, their size (approximately 5 in. by 8 in.) and weight (about 2 lbs.) make them easy on the hands, which is where they belong.

Best of all, this series provides authoritative texts stripped of scholarly fussiness. During his last years, Wilson railed at the academic editing factories that sprang up across the U.S. in the mid-'60s; he argued that they were churning out editions of American classics unreadable by anyone but specialists. He had a point, but the work went on and eventually produced sound, if unspectacular, results. They are available to Libary of America editions. Many texts have been purged of errors that crept into them over years of reprintings. Some have grown. One research team found and restored 36,000 words excised from the manuscript of Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie; a forthcoming edition of Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage adds 5,000 words that were cut before publication. When the Library of America. gets around to Crane (spring 1984) and Dreiser, editors will have to decide whether such additions constitute improvements.

Also pending is the question of solvency, once the initial funds are gone. Will new subsidies appear? Or can the library somehow become selfsupporting? Answers are several years away. In the meantime, readers can watch Melville develop into the author of Moby Dick and observe Whitman tinkering with and expanding Leaves of Grass. All of Hawthorne's eerie, ambiguous short fiction can be tucked into a purse or briefcase. Harriet Beecher Stowe never looked better, nor did Uncle Tom's Cabin, the melodramatic novel that abetted a war. That is not a bad beginning for a publishing project resting on a slim but worthwhile hope: that the writers who helped define this nation can some day be given a comfortable and permanent home.

-- By Paul Gray

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