University of Virginia Library

VII
A CONTRIBUTION TO A BIBLIOGRAPHY

Below will be found a list of such editions of "Charlotte Temple" as have become known to me while the present edition was in preparation. Altho it contains one hundred and four editions, the list is still incomplete. It may serve, however, as a beginning for some future bibliography more worthy of the name, and with that hope it is given here. As it stands, the list probably does not contain more than three-fourths of the extant titles and imprints.

Copies of the book are not plentiful anywhere, mainly because it has been issued in small and perishable forms. In the Astor and Lenox branches of the New York Public Library may be found eleven old editions. Several of these

came to the library as a gift in recent years,[28] and some are curious, but none is earlier than 1811. In the British Museum, altho the book has often been reprinted in England, only five editions are preserved. None of these is the first, and four have American imprints. The first American edition (1794) may turn up at auction once in several years, but not oftener; while the first English edition, published four years earlier, seems to be quite unknown in this country.

A search for copies of the book has been made in libraries other than the New York Public and the British Museum. After consulting some twoscore printed catalogs, English as well as American, five libraries out of the forty were found which had one edition each, and two others which had two edition. These copies, added to the eleven in the

New York Public, and the five in the British Museum, give a total of only twenty-six copies of the book. With two exceptions the editions found were fifty or more years old, a circumstance which is to be accounted for by the almost general absence in later times of new editions bound in something better than cheap paper.

On going to the sales catalogs of important private libraries, no better results were accomplished. At the Astor nearly two hundred catalogs, embracing the most notable sales of thirty years, were consulted, but the number of copies found in them was only eight. This of course merely shows that "Charlotte Temple" has not been a collectors' book. But who shall say it might not have been, had collectors known the excessive and increasing rarity of early editions.

Nor does one fare better when he makes a tour of the little second-hand shops. Here in the outdoor stalls may be

found cheap, and often well-worn, paper editions, but rarely can one discover the stalls or inside the door an edition, new or old, in leather, boards, or cloth— forms once so common, but now rapidly disappearing off the face of the earth. Some fifty of these shops exist in the Manhattan Borough of New York. The proprietor of each was asked if had the book.[29] Exclusive of cheap paper editions, nine copies were thus discovered.

What is true of New York is also true of other cities. A large house in Cincinnati, in reply to an inquiry, wrote: "We have not, nor can we find in any of the second-hand shops of this city, an old edition of 'Charlotte Temple,' either in cloth or paper." No copy could be obtained from a Washington dealer, and none from Albany, while from a large

second-hand Philadelphia house only one was secured, and from Boston only two.

Roorbach's "Bibliotheca Americana," covering the period 1820 to 1855, names only two editions, and Sabin's list, altho the longest heretofore printed, enumerates only sixteen.[30] In the Publishers' Weekly, the trade organ of American publishers and booksellers, an advertisement has brought to light three copies. In the Saturday Review of Books, published by the New York Times, readers who had copies of the book were asked to send descriptions of them, the result being the discovery of nineteen copies in private hands.

Such, then, are the fruits of a systematic search for a book which Sabin describes as "the most popular romance of its generation." Mrs. Rowson's first biographer, Mr. Knapp, writing in 1828, said: "Three sets of stereotype plates

are at present sending forth their innumerable series of editions in different parts of the country," while Joseph T. Buckingham, in his "Personal Memoirs," published in 1852, describes it as having had "the most extensive sale of an work of the kind published in this country." Trubner, in his "Bibliographic Guide to American Literature," published in 1859, describes the popularity of the book in this country and England as being quite as remarkable as that of "Uncle Tom's Cabin," and attributes to a similar cause— "its appeal to the softer feelings of our nature." He adds that "many of the scenes are quite as ably described."

Considering all the circumstances, the subjoined list, incomplete tho it be in the number of editions named, and often very inadequate in the descriptions, may have interest, as I have already said, as a beginning for a bibliography.