University of Virginia Library

The Clowes firm was a major London book house (address here W. Clowes and Sons, Stamford Street). The three 1861 Low crown copies of The Woman in White in the Parrish Collection and the Jarndyce copy of the 1865 Smith, Elder crown issue (see note 17 above) also have a Clowes imprint; I have failed to locate a Low foolscap (2s.6d.) copy (such copies were first published about ten months before the transfer to Smith, Elder).

PC actually specifies cloth here, perhaps for want of information; there are Smith, Elder adverts in PC for all items except Antonina and No Name but they do not specify the binding (the listings in PC give references to the adverts).

The copy of The Woman in White dated 1865 and located by the NUC (0552588) at the Library of Congress may be of this issue but has been missing since 1906 (the LC card catalogue specifies Smith, Elder).

Rebinding entries suggest that some copies received from Low were already bound in Low boards; there is a rebinding entry (style unspecified) of 1 July 1865 for 101 further copies (and there is an entry of that date for binding 750 further copies in boards).

The Surrey firm of Billing (address here Billing, printer and stereotyper, Guildford, Surrey) evidently printed (as J. Billing, printer, Woking, Surrey) the first edition of Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (3 vols 1848) for T. C. Newby (who printed many of the novels in his 1840s list himself) – see my "Signatures and Dashes in Novels Printed by T. C. Newby in the Eighteen-Forties," Studies in Bibliography 34 (1981), 253–258 (p. 258). The two 1861 Low crown copies of Antonina in the Parrish Collection also have a Billing (Guildford) imprint. I have failed to locate a Low foolscap (2s.6d.) copy, though there was one in Jarndyce, Catalogue XCIII, no. 19, in original boards (such copies were first published about two and a half months before the transfer to Smith, Elder).

The English Catalogue (another Low publication and presumably based on PC) in its annual volume for 1865 lists Antonina in boards at 2s.6d. as published by Smith, Elder in May, but there must be confusion here with Low’s own 2s.6d. Antonina, which is listed in PC, 16 May 1865, p. 258 (Topp rightly questions a May date for the Smith, Elder issue). The confusion is almost certainly carried over into the 1863 –71 cumulation of The English Catalogue but disguised by the absence of month dates in cumulations prior to 1890–97. (For some corroboration of Smith, Elder’s 2s.6d. price see note 26 below.)

Smith, Elder’s expectations for Antonina seem to have been no greater in 1865 than some fifteen years earlier when they had refused it in manuscript – see Leonard Huxley, The House of Smith Elder (London: Printed for Private Circulation, 1923), p. 152 – and they probably did not report it to PC; the next binding entry, however, is for 200 copies in boards (1 July 1866). Collins in turn had refused George Smith’s 1860 offer of £500 for the first British book edition (and copyright?) of The Woman in White (Huxley, pp. 152–153, in this case quoting Smith’s recollections dictated in 1899 – see Huxley, pp. 196–197).

The advert includes a "New Edition. Fcap. 8vo. 2s.6d." of The Woman in White, with the following note in italics under the entry: "New Editions of all Mr. Wilkie Collins’s Works, uniform in size and price with ‘The Woman in White,’ will shortly be published." Whatever Smith, Elder intended here, I believe my checklist of their Collins items at 2s.6d. in boards (again the advert gives no style) is complete. The only other evidence for any addition seems to be an advert in The Athenaeum of 3 November 1866 8(see Topp, V, 202) for After Dark (already available at 2s.6d. in cloth) at 2s.6d. in boards, but the signs from the ledgers are that Smith, Elder were re-advertising here and that confusion arose about the binding: there is an entry of 2 November 1866 for 1000 (+15 surplus) further copies of the foolscap 8vo After Dark (1859 edition) printed and another of that date for binding 250 further copies in cloth (cf. note 20 above).

Smith, Elder’s printing capacity (address here Old Bailey, E.C. – so in the checklist’s Hide and Seek and Basil) dated from 1855 when they took over the printing house of Stewart and Murray in Little Green Arbour Court (15 Old Bailey). In 1872 they made over this capacity to Spottiswoode and Co. in exchange for future printing services – see Sir Sidney Lee, "Memoir of George Smith" [1901] in The Dictionary of National Biography, I (1968 impression), xxi-lix (p. xxxiv); Huxley, pp. 84–85.

PC specifies cloth again here but boards for the remaining items.

The copy of The Dead Secret dated 1865 and located by the NUC (0552128) at the Library of Congress has been missing since 1906 and is not further identifiable.

The address here is Billing, printer, Guildford, Surrey – so in the Low foolscap (2s.6d.) copies at Emory University (Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library) and the National Library of Wales (Low foolscap copies were first published about five months before the transfer to Smith, Elder). The 1862 Low crown copy in the Parrish Collection also has a Billing (Guildford) imprint.

This was Sadleir’s own copy – the Sadleir Collection at UCLA includes the majority of his own items listed in vol. II of XIX Century Fiction (call numbers correspond basically with his numbering).

On the front cover, in a heart-shaped frame above the price ("HALF-A-CROWN"), three elderly men and a young woman are seated at a candle-lit table; the rear cover advertises New Works for Railway and Home Reading (Sampson Low) and has an Edmund Evans imprint (address engraver and printer, Raquet Court, Fleet Street) at the bottom – description from color photocopies. The Emory and NLW Low foolscap (2s.6d.) copies (NLW respined) show these cover details too (for the importance of Evans in the development and production of text-derived pictorial boards see Sadleir, "Yellow-Backs," pp. 141 –142, 147–149, and XIX Century Fiction, II, 3).

A rebinding entry (56 copies, style unspecified) of 1 July 1866 suggests that some copies received were already bound in Low boards, but I believe that hybrids such as the UCLA copy (cf. Sadleir, XIX Century Fiction, no. 3693) result from receipt of unused binding cases and their employment on unbound copies (with a substitute title-leaf or preliminary gathering) rather than from a substitution job on bound copies. (There is also an entry of 1 July 1866 for binding 750 further copies in boards.)

There is an entry of 9 [sic] July 1866 for 1000 (15 surplus) further copies printed and one of 1 July 1866 for binding 750 in boards. (The printing and binding figures in this article are complete to the end of July 1866 for Collins 2s.6d. boarded items.)