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Notes
The sewing of this section in the early state is the same as that of all other sections (i.e., five long double stitches in the center of the fold), while that in the later state consists of sixteen quarter-inch single stitches, apparently catching the threads of the original sewing at the spine, with the inner margins of pages 91 and 106 lightly tipped to the adjoining sections to give greater holding power to the reprinted and insecurely-inserted section. In the one copy of the second printing (dated June 1930) examined, the sewing is normal throughout.
Ironically, the rewritten material follows immediately after Wister's account of Roosevelt's insistence that he suppress the episode about the gouging of a horse's eye from the story of Balaam and Pedro in his best-selling 1902 novel The Virginian.
The most conveniently verifiable point by which to distinguish the two states is the beginning of page 100, which in the first reads, "I went to my desk and re-wrote the page," and in the second, "Of Charleston at the time when Roosevelt came there." Merle Johnson, in the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th editions (1932, 1936, and 1942) of American First Editions, notes: "First state has Karow for Carow at head of prolog. P.100 begins: I went to my desk etc."
The offending episode, with its comparative lack of interest to the general public, was not singled out by reviewers, and it had been considered expendable from the account of the Charleston visit in the March 29th Saturday Evening Post.
Preserved in the Manuscript Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations. My thanks to Peter M. Rainey and other Division staff members who made it available to me.
The next day, in one of the most extraordinary aspects of the case, the client herself, Cornelia Calhoun, wrote from Chevy Chase, Maryland, congratulating Macmillan on their decision and announcing that under separate cover she was forwarding a copy of her own book (Autobiography of a Chameleon by "Daisy Breaux," printed that year by the Potomac Press in Washington) and that she would call on Brett when next in New York. Two days later she wrote that she was hoping he would publish her new novel, but a letter dated from New York's St. Regis Hotel on the first of July said that she had decided it needed some revision before he was to pass on its merits. No such novel is listed in the National Union Catalog, but her Knight of Liberty appears in the 1930 Catalog of Copyright Entries, Books, Group II (i.e., Pamphlets, leaflets, etc.), no. 26546, as published in Washington on the first of July and registered on the 23rd. The only Group I book registered by her between 1930 and 1949 was Favorite Recipes of a Famous Hostess in 1945.
E.g., at the end of 1970 Wesleyan, doubtless along with most other libraries, received a request from a New York attorney to return any first printing of M.R.D. Foot's S.O.E. in France (London, HMSO, 1966) in exchange for a copy of the second printing of 1968 in which certain allegations against his client and some of her colleagues had been removed. Not unexpectedly, except to the lawyer and his client, few libraries seemed to have complied with their first such request made two years earlier.
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