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Notes
Allan Wade, A Bibliography of the Writings of W. B. Yeats (3rd ed., revised and edited by Russel K. Alspach, 1968), p. 24. Wade number 4. The envelope is headed: 'SHP Projected works. YEATS, W. B. John Sherman and Dhoya. [8. 1906?] 63.' I am grateful to Mr. Robert Bearman, Senior Archivist at the Records Office, for help in locating these papers, and to Dr. Levi Fox, Director of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, for permission to discuss them.
The 'second edition' is a simple reissue of the first, without textual alteration. Wade, Bibliography, quotes A. J. A. Symons, A Bibliography of the First Editions of Books by William Butler Yeats (1924), to the effect that the first edition comprised 1644 copies in paper and 356 in cloth. This issue was, it seems, almost immediately exhausted; Yeats writes with delight to John O'Leary about the financial success of his first venture into prose fiction (see The Letters of W. B. Yeats, ed. Allan Wade [1956], pp. 167, 181.)
The date is interesting. Wade, Bibliography, says the first edition appeared in November, 1891. If this is correct, and if Yeats's dating is accurate, the second edition must have been available almost immediately. Finneran, p. 33, notes that review copies of the first edition must have been available 'by at least October of that year'. Possibly Unwins were encouraged to reprint on the strength of favourable review opinion.
'Ganconagh' is the pseudonym under which Yeats first published the two stories; he made little attempt, however, to conceal his authorship, regarding the pseudonym as merely a whim of the series of books to which he was contributing.
Finneran, p. 102, misses this emendation in collating the first edition against the Collected Works.
Finneran, p. 34; for Professor Brendan P. O'Hehir's learned but not unhumorous exposition of the word's meaning, see Finneran, p. 131.
Wade, Letters, pp. 485-486. I am grateful to Mr. Paul Morgan of the Bodleian Library for information, as yet unpublished, on Bullen's conduct of the Shakespeare Head Press. Mr. Morgan indicates, in detail, that Bullen's practices were anything but businesslike. Yeats's exasperation had a genuine basis.
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