University of Virginia Library

The two variants on page 49 were first discovered by Mr. Jacob Blanck (see Sinclair Lewis: A Biographical Sketch by Carl van Doren, with a Bibliography by Harvey Taylor [1953], pp. 102-103; the rest, I believe, have not been recognized. I am grateful to Mr. John Wyllie, University of Virginia Librarian, for suggesting this study to me and for helping me to work out the evidence, and to Professor Fredson Bowers for assistance in the preparation of this account of my findings.

Teste Mr. Gerald Gross of Harcourt, Brace & Co., to whom I am particularly indebted for much valuable information. I am also grateful to Mr. James T. Quinn of Quinn & Boden Co. (the original printers of the book), and to Mr. William Simon, Jr., of H. Wolff Co (printers of the Modern Library edition), for answering questions about the printing of Babbitt.

Extended search has failed to turn up any copy listing itself as the Second Printing on the title-page verso. It is not likely that one will be found since the time interval between this recorded second printing and the third printing is very likely too narrow for still another to exist.

The possibility that this stage of the plate alteration resulted from some error in the printing plant might be argued since it would seem that these particular plate alterations were never billed to Harcourt, Brace.

A collector concerned with 'points' will, of course, choose the Purdy-my state as the earlier. There is no validity whatever to the arguments of the bookseller Robert K. Black that since the Lyte-any readings are found in a copy autographed by Lewis on the day after publication (the copy is now in the University of Virginia Library), they must represent the state found in the author's advance copies and thus must be considered as "gathered and bound before any of the so-called 'first state' copies, so that in terms of priority of issue, though not of printing, it actually precedes them and is therefore more desirable" (see Mr. Black's List Number Forty-Five issued c. March 1956 from Upper Montclair, N.J.). In the first place, the copy cannot be proved to be from the advance copies sent Lewis. In the second place, the assumption that an author's advance copies represent the first copies off the binding machines is ordinarily wrong: it supposes that copies are shipped to the publisher in driblets from the bindery and that the publisher immediately breaks open a case and sends out the author's copies. In the third place, the order of pre-publication distribution of copies can have no bearing on questions of 'issue,' especially when mere press variants are involved. For a full discussion of this matter, see Bowers, Principles of Bibliographical Description (1949), pp. 409-411.

Mr. Feipel, who makes a hobby of proofreading published books to note their errors and inconsistencies, wrote Harcourt, Brace on November 6, 1922, enclosing a list of over seventy readings that in his view required alteration for consistency of usage or because of real error. In response to the question whether the spelling areoplane on pp. 19 and 85 was intentional, Mr. Donald C. Brace of Harcourt, Brace, acknowledging on November 9 Mr. Feipel's list, replied that the spelling was intentional, and added, "It may interest you to know that it was an effort, each time the proof was read, to keep the proof reader from changing it." Lewis's response to the list was in character: "J. Henry! This man Feipel is a wonder — to catch all these after rather unusually careful proofreading not only by myself and my wife but also by two or three professionals at Quinn's! . . . (Gawd, Feipel has me nervous about hyphens!)" (Lewis to Donald Brace, November 10, 1922, quoted from Harrison Smith, ed., From Main Street to Stockholm [1952], pp. 113-114. The change from benny (i.e., overcoat) to kelly (i.e., hat) was suggested by Keith Preston in his column "Hit or Miss" in the Chicago Daily News for Nov. 4, 1922, on p.8, in connection with a note, signed 'XYLOID,' about the glossary in the British edition of Babbitt.

The Hinman Collator discloses that type wear on pp. 188 and 196 present in the fourth impression does not appear in the later printings that were made from the duplicate plates of these pages. Hence one is barred from conjecturing that for some reason the original plates for these pages were held over for use in later impressions: it is certain that pp. 188 and 196 were printed from the duplicate plates, which must therefore have been altered. But why other plates were not also altered at the same time to conform to the fourth-impression corrections cannot be explained.

As a pendant to this commentary on modern textual transmission, one might point out that the single really substantive alteration that corrects something not clearly a misprint (except for the Purdy-Lyte alteration) was in fact made on the suggestion of an outsider (i.e., kelly for benny on p. 121).