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Notes
Jerome McGann, The Textual Condition, Princeton Studies in Culture/Power/History (1991), Chapter 7 passim, especially 154 — 160. The specific comment regarding the number of decorated Ts occurs on 159. Throughout his discussion McGann is careful to refer only to "Rodker's printer," but offers no evidence for the involvement of anyone besides Rodker. G. S. Tomkinson mentions no other person in his description of the Ovid Press, which he describes as "founded in 1919 by Mr. John Rodker. . . . His object in founding it was to learn the technique of printing and to produce the work of his friends" (A Select Bibliography of the Principal Modern Presses Public and Private in Great Britain and Ireland [1928], 141). The colophons of both Mauberley and Ara Vos Prec state "printed by John Rodker." Finally, J. H. Willis refers to Rodker's "one-man private press" in Leonard and Virginia Woolf as Publishers: The Hogarth Press, 1917 — 41 (1992), 70. Therefore, I have referred to Rodker as the printer, but am quite willing to substitute "Rodker's printer" for Rodker thoughout, should further evidence come to light. For an appreciative summary of Rodker's life, see J. Isaacs' obituary in The Times, 11 October 1955, 11.
Due to an error on Eliot's part, the title-page of Rodker's edition reads Ara Vus Prec, but the correct title appears on the binding labels. The full explanation can be found in Donald Gallup's T. S. Eliot: A Bibliography (1952; rev. ed. 1969), 26.
McGann actually claims that "according to the design program evidently decided upon, the printer needed five decorated Ts" (158). In fact, as the tables below indicate, Pound's text requires six initial Ts. McGann overlooks the T needed on page 10, perhaps as a result of his dangerous reliance on a "composite set [of proofs] with two pages from an earlier proof" (157), but the logic of his argument holds equally well for six Ts.
I have been able to consult the following copies of Rodker's editions: Hugh Selwyn Mauberley: #27 — Huntington Library, Stevens Coll. 440771; #63 — Library of Congress, PS3531.O82H8 Rare Book Coll.; #189 — Houghton Library, *AC9/P8654/920h; out of series — Huntington Library 354201. Ara Vos Prec: #4 — Houghton Library, *fAC9/El464.920a; #9 — Library of Congress, PS3509.L43A69 Rare Book Coll.; #10 — Houghton Library, *fAC9/El464/920aa; #11 — Huntington Library, Stevens Coll. 431654; #109 — Clark Library, Press Coll. Ovid; #145 — Houghton Library, *fAC9/El464/920aab (A). I have listed the texts in order of numbering for convenience; the actual order of production is less certain than the numbers would indicate, as discussed below.
This table represents the location of Ts in what I consider the second state of Rodker's edition of Mauberley (copies #63 and higher). See the discussion below for full details. The collation formulae are provided for reference, since Gallup does not include this information in his bibliographies of Eliot (cited above) and Pound (Ezra Pound: A Bibliography [1983; rev. ed. of A Bibliography of Ezra Pound, 1963], 29 — 30).
I can offer no good explanation for why Rodker used the damaged version of the decorated initial T on p. 22 of Mauberley and pp. 30 and 43 of Ara Vos Prec when only one T was required. I suspect he simply did not notice or was not concerned about the damage.
If Rodker was using other decorated initials simply as placeholders, the question arises as to why the correct letter appears on p. 22. Its correct placement there may imply that Rodker only had enough type to set a forme at a time, but I do not possess enough evidence to reach a firm conclusion about this matter.
Rodker does not appear to have learned from his mistakes, since in Ara Vos Prec (#109) five of the page references are incorrect, two items appear in the wrong order ("Boston Evening Transcript" and "Conversation Galante"), and one item has a variant title ("Rhapsody of a Windy Night" in the table of contents; "Rhapsody on a Windy Night" on p. 45).
Some examples of minor changes to punctuation and spacing include: A5r, l.4 — No, hardly] ˜˄˜ A5r, l. 17 — events",] ˜," A6v, l.2 — believing,] ˜, A7r, l.4 — civilization.] ˜, These typographical changes seem to be confined to sheet A, though B exhibits some changes to margins and some raised spaces (see below).
I should caution once more that my hypotheses are based on a very limited number of copies of each text. Altered leading occurs on pages 12 and 13 — on p. 12 the distance between the page number and the top of the decorated initial is increased, while on p. 13 the leading between lines of the poem is reduced; furniture is rearranged to alter the side margins — on p. 13 and p. 27, the text block is moved closer to the gutter, while the text is shifted toward the outer margin on p. 17. All of the copies numbered higher than #27 agree, so far as I have been able to determine without a full mechanical collation, in all cases; the only differences are the presence of raised spaces, which appear and disappear, indicating some looseness in Rodker's justification and perhaps movement of the forme, which might imply that printing took place over more than one occasion.
I am unable to suggest a mechanical explanation for this error other than incorrect imposition.
Eliot apparently numbered the books himself, as he states in a letter to Rodker (1 Feb. 1920; The Letters of T. S. Eliot, vol. 1 — 1898 — 1922, ed. Valerie Eliot [1988], 360), but he presumably expected Rodker to deliver the books in order for numbering.
Nor is Wadsworth's other artistic work, represented in Rodker's sixth book, The Black Country (1920), at all traditional.
Rodker's colophon identifies Mauberley as "the third book of the Ovid Press" (29), but both Tomkinson (141) and Will Ransom (Private Presses and Their Books [1929; rpt. 1976], 373) identify three earlier works. Ransom seems the more carefully documented bibliography, providing dates from the colophons where possible. By his reckoning, Twenty Drawings from the Note-Books of H. Gaudier-Brzeska, Ara Vos Prec, and Hymns. By John Rodker all preceded Mauberley. Because Fifteen Designs. By P. Wyndham Lewis does not bear an exact date, it is not possible to verify Tomkinson's claim that this work was also printed before Pound's poem.
While I concur with Robert Beare's description of Rodker's Ara Vos Prec as "an elaborate and . . . badly printed volume," I do not agree that Rodker's work is "rather tasteless" ("Notes on the Text of T. S. Eliot: Variants from Russell Square," Studies in Bibliography 4 [1957], 30). Nonetheless, it is clear that Rodker found the printing of both Eliot's and Pound's work difficult.
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