The Prize money generously granted by the Thomas Reid Prize for Book Collecting has not only enabled me to make many welcome additions to my personal research library, but also to make some donations to complement the already fascinating holdings that pertain to World War I in Special Collections at Aberdeen University.
My PhD thesis explores how American World War I writers held and represented complex, nuanced, and provisional reactions to World War I, which they expressed in a variety of written media, and not just the key texts they are remembered for. A central aspect of this project explores the ways in which publishing practices impacted on the availability, presentation, and textual format of American World War I writing. While some texts have not received a second printing, others have been reissued in a variety of guises. By adding new prefaces and cover images, removing illustrations or including new ones, selecting stories and passages to appear in anthologies, and even reordering the text, the actions of scholars and publishers have continually reconfigured the appearance and accessibility of American World War I writing.
My personal collection comprises, in addition to various volumes amassed through previous degrees and personal reading, a collection of first, or near-first, editions of American World War I novels, with a substantial volume of associated scholarship devoted to British and American World War I literature. I’ve been able to add considerably to this thanks to the Prize. I also donated five items to Special Collections, including a bound edition of Scribner’s Monthly issues from January to April 1934, in which F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night was first published. For the first printing of the novel (of which I purchased a facsimile copy for Special Collections), Fitzgerald changed various scenes and even the name of a central character, Tommy Barban. Ever since their publication in novel form, works like Tender Is the Night have been altered by publishing practices. A notable example of this was the 1948 edition of Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, which was issued with illustrations by Daniel Rassmusson and accompanied by a new introduction by the author – a copy of which I also donated to the collections at Aberdeen.
Most of the edits and supplementary additions to American World War I texts have occurred in reprints issued in relatively recent years. However, the most significant example of how developments in dissemination have influenced literary texts is the advent of digitisation, which has made thousands of American World War I texts widely and freely available. Even so, in many cases print versions are still the sole means of accessing these works, and I am grateful for the opportunity to purchase a first edition of Maxwell Anderson and Laurence Stallings’s Three American Plays (1926) and Stallings’s The First World War – A Photographic History (1933) for Special Collections at Aberdeen. Collecting books is not only a means to accessing texts, however. Acquiring physical works allows us to map the textual history of literary work, and to highlight the important point that the actions of publishers and academics often extend and redefine that narrative.
