It’s a truism of studies of books from the hand-press period
(roughly up to 1850) that no two copies of any book are alike – even if the two
come from the same print-run. The nature of inking and pulling, the slippage of
type and “furniture”, and of course the practice of proof-correcting sheets in
the middle of a run without discarding the previous (erroneous) sheets meant
that the permutations of variance between copies are legion.
And yet it would be a mistake to assume that the advent of
the machine press rectified these kinds of problems. A small subset of Tarquin
Tar’s Bookcase now includes several modern books that serve as peculiar
reminders of how technology can go awry, resulting in the production of unique
or at least highly rare copies of what would seem – on the surface –
unremarkable books.
The title on the spine of this week’s book is They Met at Gettysburg, a popular
account of the events leading up to and including the famed Civil War battle.
The book was written by General Edward Stackpole (founder of Stackpole Books in Harrisburg, PA)
and was first published by Stackpole in 1956; it even inspired a board
game version from Spearhead Games in 1996. Beneath the title on the spine
is the publisher’s name: Bonanza. According to WorldCat, the New York firm
Bonanza published their reprint of Stackpole’s third edition of 1982 in 1984.
The binding itself consists of blue cloth boards (some dealers describe them as
green) bearing some slight discoloration from moisture but otherwise in good
condition. It was originally sold in a dust-jacket, but my copy is without.
When the cover of my copy is opened, however, They Met at Gettysburg is not to be
found. Instead, the reader is greeted with the following title-page:
The contents of the book are the “Modern Revised Edition” of
Ignatius Donnelly’s 1882 classic Atlantis:
The Antediluvian World, as edited by Egerton Sykes and published by
Gramercy Publishing of New York (a division of Harper & Row Publishers).
Donnelly (1831-1901) was a Minnesota populist congressman, best-selling writer,
and futurist/conspiracy theorist widely known today as “The Prince of Cranks”.
In his 2005 article
on Donnelly in the magazine The Believer,
J. M. Tyree notes, “Donnelly represents the paranoiac streak in the country,
the Conspiracy Theorist, the Buff of Secret Theories that Explain Everything.
Donnelly was probably the greatest crackpot that ever lived.” His book
on Atlantis -- filled with fantastic contortions of geography, linguistics, archaeology, and logic -- is the source of many of today’s popular myths about the supposedly
lost continent and apparently also influenced the filmmakers of the 2009
blockbuster 2012. Many editions
followed the book’s first appearance in 1882.
The modern edition’s editor, British diplomat and
intelligence officer Sykes
(1894-1983), was also a conspiracy theorist with a particular expertise (so to
speak) in “Atlantology”. In addition to his foreword and commentary (which
takes the form of italicized passages inserted directly into the text of the
book following whatever text of Donnelly’s they comment upon), the Gramercy
edition includes twelve photographic plates (following page 170), an
“Appreciation of Donnelly” by conspiracy theorist H. S. Bellamy,
and a biography of Donnelly by Scottish folklorist, poet, and occultist Lewis Spence. This
prefatory material is paginated [i]-xix beginning with the half-title before
the full title-page; the remainder is paginated 1-355, with the 8 pages of
illustrations after p. 170 unnumbered. A blue-green endpaper is used for the
front and rear flyleaves. There is some slight water-staining on the bottom of
these flyleaves, but otherwise the interior is clean and undamaged. A dealer
has penciled a price ($3) and a note (“Wrong Binding!”) on the recto of the
front flyleaf. Above this there is an owner’s sticker: “F. B. Stevens / R.D. 1
/ New Woodstock, NY 13122”. I’ve had no luck figuring out who this is, though I
did purchase the book from a dealer in central New York.
The Gramercy edition was published in 1949 and, according to
the printer’s code on the verso of the title-page, my copy is likely of the
eighteenth printing of that edition. While this speaks to the popularity of the
book, it was not again published in the U.S. until 1976 by Dover. Despite my
best efforts, I can’t work out how it came to be that the binder of the 1984
Bonanza edition of Stackpole’s They Met
at Gettysburg accidentally inserted the full textblock of the 1949 edition
of Atlantis. What was Donnelly’s book
doing lying around in the binder’s shop? How many more of these are there? Why
did F. B. Stevens buy the book? Hoping for They
Met at Gettysburg? If so, what was his or her reaction when he or she
opened the book? It seems some real mysteries truly do lie hidden with Atlantis…just not quite the mysteries
that Donnelly and Sykes thought.
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