COLLECTING YEATS AND PUBLISHING LADY GREGORY’S COOLE EDITION
in Declan J. Foley (ed.), Yeats 150, Dublin: Lilliput Press 2016, pp. 201-220.
Colin Smythe
The major part of Part 1 of this essay was published in the Spring 1971 issue of The Private Library, the Journal of the Private Libraries Association. Book prices in the body of the text are of course way out of date. I have added a postscript, made a few edits, and have added footnotes to update the text where necessary.
1
My interest in William Butler Yeats started in 1963, the year I graduated from Trinity College, Dublin. I had long been interested in mythology and I was in Hodges Figgis the Dublin booksellers one day when a friend bought a copy of Yeats’s Mythologies (1959).[1] It was the first time that I had realised that Yeats wrote about such things and I avidly started to read his prose writings.
I had gone through such squirrel activities as collecting stamps and rocks, but I had no active hobby at the time. I was introduced to Michael Walshe who ran the Rare Book Department of Hodges Figgis, which was virtually inaccessible if you didn’t know where it was, at the rear of the shop. He had brought out an excellent catalogue of Irish books in 1962 which contained a very comprehensive collection of books by Yeats, Cuala Press, Lady Gregory, Synge and anybody else you care to mention. Pricewise it was the last catalogue with bargains, but unfortunately most of its contents had been sold by the time I arrived on the scene and I was only able to buy one or two books from it.
The first Yeats first edition that I bought from Michael (for £10/-/-) was a copy of The Trembling of the Veil (1922), which I chose for its beauty as much as for its author. At the beginning I was almost too careful in what I bought, turning down many books because I thought the price was too high; for example, refusing to pay £10 for a complete run of The Yellow Book, and then rushing back to get it when I had discovered what it was selling for elsewhere. This sort of thing happened all too often when I later realised what the book I’d turned down was worth, so the tempo of my buying speeded up, as I realised that if I did not build up a good collection extremely quickly, I would not have enough money to do so. This was amply justified by future events. For example I bought the United Irishman edition of Yeats’s Where There is Nothing for £15 in 1965: I recently saw a copy in a catalogue for £250; similarly I paid about £25 for The Wanderings of Oisin (Wade 2); the latest copy fetched over £500. I bought from catalogues, at Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Hodgson’s, thereby getting a bad name with many dealers who thought I was cheating at the game and that I should have bought through them. However, the only time I really went for something big, I commissioned the firm of Bernard Quaritch to bid for me, and insisted that I remain anonymous should the Press get interested; I had no desire to see headings like ‘Dublin student pays £650 for Yeats’ first book’ across their pages. This sum I paid for a copy of his Mosada, plus of course Quaritch’s commission: it was a poorish copy in that the cover had torn down the spine and been stuck back together with adhesive tape which had badly yellowed. I spent hours removing the tape and cleaning the cover and I was fortunate in getting rid of most of the staining, and if it wasn’t as good as new, it was certainly much improved.[2] Incidentally I was not far out regarding the press. The Irish Times article, headed ‘Yeats’ First Edition’, stated that the buyer wished to remain anonymous, but Quaritch had informed them it would be in Dublin the following day.
I remember the first auction I sent in bids for. Having carefully discussed the likely prices with Michael Walshe (who I expected to turn up nice things for me practically every day), I sent off my list of bids for about fifteen items. I wanted them all very much so I placed bids which were about 50% higher than the last auction price, but to my surprise I only got one item, Yeats’s Poems Written in Discouragement, privately printed by the Cuala Press in an edition of fifty copies and inscribed by WBY with a note saying it was printed in November 1913. (In fact it was printed the month before, according to Cuala Press records.)
I also wrote to booksellers in the USA and got quite a large number of books offered at surprisingly low prices: I had expected far higher. On the whole I bought all that were offered me, kept the ones I wanted and sold the remainder for about what I paid for the whole lot. I was extremely fortunate in that I had Michael Walshe to advise me, as without him I would have made many mistakes, and his sources of supply also seemed limitless. He seemed to be able to dig up some rare and desirable book, magazine, or something, whenever he rummaged in the long line of cupboards under the bookcases. This back room was Michael’s undisputed territory for many years and it was only when Neville Figgis left university and came to work in Hodges Figgis as well, that the department became modernised and moved up front into the glare of the public gaze. Eventually Michael left to open a bookshop dealing almost exclusively in eighteenth century books and earlier. He and his partner Noel Jameson had a fascinating bookshop in Molesworth Lane where Michael was in his element.[3]
Soon after I started collecting the poet’s books as what might be termed a full time occupation, Michael suggested that I start collecting the first editions of Lady Gregory, which I did, using as my guide his original catalogue which had three and a half pages of Gregory items. For a long time it was the only guide to her publications other than a few library catalogues. Later I came across the John Quinn sale catalogue of 1923 which gave a great deal of valuable information. I was all too aware of the lack of an adequate bibliography of her publications such as Allan Wade had made for Yeats and I decided that if I could I would produce a similar work for Lady Gregory. I eventually got this accepted as my thesis for an M.Litt. degree at the University of Dublin (TCD), but it was never completed because publishing took up all my time from 1966 onwards.
In two and a half years I had gathered together a collection which contained about two thirds of all Yeats’s publications. Nearly all the items carry some story over their purchase or association, and the stories attached to some of the more interesting ones are given below.
When I bought Yeats’ Deirdre (Wade 69) I found slipped into it his Alterations to Deirdre (Wade 70) which was a four page leaflet handed out at Mrs. Patrick Campbell’s production of the play on the 27th November 1908. If you think how many people can fit into a drawing room, you can appreciate how rare this leaflet was and is. Obviously the bookseller had never noticed or failed to appreciate what it was.
I was also fortunate in getting a copy of The Golden Helmet (Wade 74) printed for that great man John Quinn in an edition of fifty copies.[4] When Yeats signed books, he normally put a pen stroke through his name on the title page, but in this case it seems that he cut the entire name out. People have asked me why I think that this was done by Yeats, to which my reply has been that the book has an inscription which goes thus: ‘To Mary D. M. Collenson | This play is a first draft of | my play, “The Green Helmet” | which is in verse & I hope a | much better play. Do not | judge me by this. | W B Yeats | August 29 | 1922’: who else would have been mad enough to cut up the title page? Maybe he’d made a mess of a signature.
In his later life Yeats became a close friend of the Duchess of Wellington, Dorothy Wellesley, and their correspondence was published in Letters on Poetry (Wade 325) in 1940. After Yeats died Wellesley continued to write letters on poetry to him and this very one-sided correspondence was published by her as Beyond the Grave. It stated on the title page that it could be purchased from the printer C. Baldwin of Tonbridge Wells, so I wrote off to him in the hope that he might have copies, but I received the reply that he had never sold any copies; it had been privately printed for the Duchess who had all of them. I wrote off to the Duke of Wellington and was informed that the only copy that he knew of was owned by his daughter: dead-end. Imagine my delight when a few weeks later, Neville Figgis offered me a copy of this book which had been inscribed by the author to his father, William Fernsley Figgis (1874-1956), known in the book trade as ‘W.F.’.
One other book that I prized was a copy of Katherine Tynan’s book of poems, Shamrocks, inscribed by her ‘To dear Willie Yeats, with the belief in him and affectionate friendship of the writer, May 30th 1887.’ Certainly she had no doubt as to his genius.
At one time Liam Miller of the Dolmen Press and I were going to do a bibliography of the Cuala Press, but unfortunately this never got completed.[5] Up to then, all that there had been was Maxwell’s bibliography of the Press, published in 1932 with the full co-operation of the Yeats sisters, who even provided the special Irish paper used for his edition. Unfortunately, as he only printed thirty copies, this is even more difficult to get hold of than the books themselves. Its format and binding are identical with the press books. I was fortunate in having one of Maxwell’s own copies with his bookplate, which Michael Walshe had bought at the Maxwell sale and I got it out of him by the promise of a bound xerox copy for his own reference, otherwise he’d have never parted with it.
One of the Press books, Discoveries, is inscribed by Yeats ‘Ben Jonson’s old title “Discoveries” | W B Yeats | PS. Unicorn was drawn by Robert Gregory’. It also has parts of three finger prints of the poet in the smudged ink.
Synge’s Poems and Translations was not only published by the Cuala Press, but also in a similar styled edition by John Quinn, for copyright protection purposes in the U.S.A. The Yeats sisters had no end of difficulties over their edition after they started setting on Friday the 13th. Unfortunately Synge died before it was published. I was fortunate in picking up both for the price of one: at the time Quinn’s printings were not at all appreciated and his publications/printings could be picked up for a pound or two, that is, those others not written by Yeats.
Estrangement was one of six proofed bindings I was given by the binders, Brindley & Co. of Eustace Street, Dublin. In the most extreme case, Elizabeth Corbett Yeats had cut the text block away from the casing and made a number of comments about the quality of each gathering, such as ‘This stitching shows badly’ or ‘This stitching looks rough’. She certainly had a high standard, but I wonder whether she expected every copy to be checked at the end of the binding process and discarded if they didn’t match her exacting standard.[6]
Of the Cuala Press books, not surprisingly I found that the privately printed items were the most difficult to get hold of and in some ways the most interesting. On the whole these editions were much smaller, often of no more than fifty copies. As with the Maxwell bibliography I had to get photocopies taken of E. R. McClintock Dix’s Printing in Armagh (1910) and Printing in Ennis, Co. Clare (1912) before Michael would sell them to me as a special privilege, after weeks of entreaties. Both these were published in editions of fifty copies. Among the privately printed items there were also two volumes of poems by Lyle Donaghy, At Dawn Above Atherlow (1926) and Into the Light (1934). Donaghy acted the Christ in Lady Gregory’s passion play, The Story Brought by Brigit, and was specially chosen for the part by her. Eileen Crowe played the part of the Mother. When Lennox Robinson’s History of the Abbey Theatre was published in 1951, these were virtually the only two parts in any of the plays where the players were not given.
Looking back through the list of Cuala Press books, I thought how the popularity of the Press has increased in the past half decade, and the prices that the books used to fetch. In 1964 Yeats books would fetch over ten times the price of some of the others. Edward Dowden’s A Woman’s Reliquary could not be sold for a pound then and Hodges Figgis might have four or five in stock at any one time which would not move. A Yeats would fetch £12 or more. Now Yeats is nearer £50 on occasion and Dowden closer to £20, a rather better increase in value on the part of Dowden’s title.
I was proud of my Cuala/Dun Emer Press collection, even more so than the Yeats. I had all the published volumes (77 in number) most of the privately printed items including Poems Written in Discouragement (inscribed); the complete run of Broadsides in 84 parts in their folders, which were published monthly from 1908 to 1915; the series of 12 published in 1935 under the editorship of Yeats and F. R. Higgins, bound and signed by the editors; and the 1937 series, edited by Yeats and Dorothy Wellesley, similarly bound and signed. I had a virtually complete set of the greetings cards, missing not more than five out of one hundred and fifty, and similarly a collection of the hand coloured prints, again missing only about five out of one hundred and thirty odd. To finish the collection off I had a number of Dun Emer leather and cloth bindings (the latter hand painted) and an eight by nine foot Dun Emer carpet with a William Morris style design.[7]
No collection would be complete without items to do with the poet, and this includes those that attacked him. I was fortunate in getting a copy of that scurrilous pamphlet Souls for Gold written by Frank Hugh O’Donnell, attacking Yeats’s The Countess Cathleen which quoted on the front cover the words of one of the devils in the play as Yeats’ own. O’Donnell had these pamphlets pushed through the letter boxes of many important people in Dublin and as a result there was an outcry against the play and even the Archbishop of Dublin said that, while he had not read the play, if it was as bad as people made out it really should be banned. Surprisingly few of these ephemera survived.
I haven’t always been lucky in getting what I want at auctions. This has not only been due to prices going higher than expected, but other outside influences have come into play. On one occasion there was a set of the Collected Works of W. B. Yeats (1908) with the Chapman & Hall imprint coming up at Sothebys and I had a premonition that I would not get there in time. The journey from my flat to Sothebys usually took half an hour, give or take a few minutes, so on this occasion I gave myself an extra three quarters of an hour for the underground journey, but the train got stuck between two stations for just over fifty minutes, and in spite of running all the way from Green Park station to the auction rooms, I arrived just as the lot I wanted was being knocked down. It really was most frustrating.
I got one book as a result of what I consider a psychic experience. While I was still living in a flat in Pembroke Road, Dublin, I was listening to a Michael Tippett opera when I must have dozed off for a moment, because I saw myself walking into Webb’s Bookshop on the Dublin quays. The following day, I went round there and told the manager that he had a book for me. He denied this, and I said: ‘You must have: go and find something for me.’ He duly went off and returned with a copy of Lady Gregory’s A Book of Saints and Wonders which was inscribed by Yeats to Maud Gonne, and it was going for just £5/-/-. Of course I bought it without a moment’s hesitation.
1965 was the year of the Centenary of Yeats’s birth and I agreed with Hodges Figgis to collaborate over a special exhibition, lending a large number of my major items for it. A special catalogue was prepared, in which both my and the other lenders’ assistance was gratefully acknowledged, but when the books were laid out, there was no indication as to whether an item belonged to Hodges Figgis or to a lender. Red markers were used both to indicate books on loan as well as books sold. This gave a very misleading picture as to who owned what, and if I had not been as retiring a person as I was at the time, I would have insisted that due acknowledgement to the lender by name should have been made under each of the relevant items. As I said earlier, I had kept quiet about buying Mosada and later when I sold my collection, it appeared as ‘the collection of a Dublin man’. Later, I became rather more publicity conscious when selling Colin Smythe Ltd publications.
During my burrowings about for Yeats items, I not unnaturally came across a number of hitherto unrecorded Yeats items and variants mostly sold to me by Michael Walshe, which I assiduously reported to Russell K. Alspach who was preparing a new edition of Wade’s Bibliography. Some of these he acknowledged and promised to put in his next Additions to Wade, such as an inverted blind stamping of the front cover design of the 1913 edition of Yeats’ Poems (Wade 99), a volume called The Voice of Ireland (1923), to which I had given the provisional number of Wade 314a, sending him both the bibliographical descriptions of the first and greatly revised second edition, and also a book called Irish Tales to which I gave a provisional Wade number of 215a. On getting my copy of the new edition of Wade, which appeared four years after our correspondence, I found that there was no mention of the inverted front cover design on Poems, only a bibliography of the second edition of The Voice of Ireland, which did refer to the existence of a first edition which Alspach said he had not seen, in spite of the fact that I gave a far more detailed description of both volumes than his own description of the second edition. Wade 215a was also in, but with an inaccurate (or poorly proof-read) description of the title page.[8]
Through force of circumstances I decided later in 1965 that I wanted to set myself up in publishing and I nagged a friend of mine into letting me publish a book he had written for school leavers called One for the Road. Its author Peter Bander joined the company first as joint Managing Director of Colin Smythe Ltd with me before concentrating on a separate publishing company, Van Duren Publishers. To provide working capital for this venture, I decided to sell my Yeats and Cuala Press collections, if possible as a whole. I held onto my Lady Gregory collection in the hope that I might be able to complete my thesis.[9] I went to Liam Miller of the Dolmen Press,[10] a good friend whose publications I collected,[11] and he put me in touch with the Dublin City Librarian Máirín O’Byrne.[12] She was immediately fired with enthusiasm for the idea and determined to get hold of the collection if she possibly could. The first thing was to agree on a valuation, over which I had the invaluable help of Neville Figgis. I first went through the list of over five hundred items and valued them individually, and then Neville went through it, checking my valuations and changing them where he thought them wrong. Although some things were higher at his valuation than at mine, and vice versa, in the end our valuations did not differ by more than £100 or so. The Library also got an independent valuation which, I am glad to say, confirmed ours, and a figure of £6,500 was agreed on as the sale price. Máirín then went about the difficult task of convincing the City Fathers of the wisdom of purchasing ‘a lot of old books’, as they were called by one. It took some time and I was away from Dublin when they finally came to a decision that it was a worthwhile investment. Events have certainly justified the wisdom of this decision as the collection’s value has vastly increased since then. The first I knew of the decision was a letter from her which read: ‘We’ve got it!! I am not really sober this minute with excitement.’ On my return to my Dublin flat, I had hardly set foot in my front door before she was round to collect the books, which took up over sixty feet of shelf space.
I am still collecting the works of Lady Gregory, of course, and hoard every edition and reprint and binding variant of her works that I can get hold of, to add to UCG’s collection.[13] Through the generosity of Major Richard Gregory I had a complete set of all the rare John Quinn limited editions of her works in perfect condition, and have also gathered together dozens of theatre editions of her plays. The Maunsel editions of Lady Gregory’s Seven Short Plays are extremely complex and the theatre editions of these plays are even more so: I had to evolve a progression table for the latter, giving all the variations, with which I can speedily place any of the theatre editions. Of course mavericks do turn up on occasion and make it necessary to modify my list. At present, although I cannot be sure, I suspect that there are a minimum of nine issues of each play, and I doubt whether I shall ever get a complete collection of all of them. I have just got twenty in six years, so I am less than a third of the way to my goal. I have found that my experience as a publisher has been of the greatest assistance in my bibliographical work and as a result I would always recommend that all bibliographers should have some publishing experience, especially on the production side, to get into the mind of the people producing the books: variations can so often be accidental rather than deliberate.
I was also extremely fortunate that during the time I was working on this bibliography, a friend of mine, Frances-Jane French was working on the bibliography of the chief publishing house of the Irish Literary Revival, Maunsel & Co. which was launched in 1904 and finally sank in 1924 at the hands of the Official Receiver. Her Bibliography of the Abbey Theatre Series, published by the Dolmen Press, was reviewed in The Private Library a few issues back.[14]
Before I left Dublin to come to live and work in England, I had met two of the three people who, in 1971, knew more about Lady Gregory than anybody else; Ann Saddlemyer, then at the University of Victoria, British Columbia, and Dan Murphy of the City University, New York. (The third was Elizabeth Coxhead, but I did not meet her until some time after I had moved to Gerrards Cross, when I found that she lived on the other side of the village.) I have been very fortunate in receiving a great deal of help from all three over my Gregory project. In 1966 the Dolmen Press published Ann Saddlemyer’s In Defence of Lady Gregory: Playwright, and the author wrote in my copy ‘With best wishes, and great expectations for “The Definitive Lady G”’. It was only when the Coole Edition of Lady Gregory’s works was well under way three years later that the prophetic nature of the dedication occurred to me. At the time I thought it referred to my bibliography, and then forgotten all about it.
When I lectured on Lady Gregory at the Yeats International Summer School in Sligo in 1968 at T. R. Henn’s invitation, some of the American lecturers[15] there suggested that I should republish her works. The idea then began to take shape: I got to know her grandchildren, principally Major Richard Gregory and his sister Anne, formally Mrs de Winton, whose book of childhood memories of Coole Park,[16] we were to publish. In 1964 Major Gregory sold most of his grandmother’s papers to the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library, but fortunately for me he had kept Lady Gregory’s own copies of her works, and it was in these that she had made her revisions for future editions, so our company’s edition is certainly the Definitive Edition.
The first action that had to be taken was to deal with the copyright situation. Many of the copyrights were still held by Putnams and I had to buy the remainder of their stock of The Selected Plays of Lady Gregory before they would release them.[17] We then checked up on the terms of Lady Gregory’s will and much to our surprise and consternation we found that the copyrights should have been handed over to the three grandchildren jointly by the executors when Richard had reached the age of twenty five. This had never been done, it seems, and as one of the executors, Thomas Kiernan, had died in 1967, a deed of conveyance had to be signed by Mrs Gough. Curiously, when Daniel Murphy was checking up on the copyright situation for his 1965 US Capricorn paperback edition of Our Irish Theatre, Mr Kiernan had told him that they had been transferred, but there was no documentary proof of this. When Major Gregory sold the collection in 1964 he was under the impression that he held the copyright and he sold all rights in the unique unpublished material to the Library. The only difficulty was that they were not his alone to sell. Not unnaturally the Library was in a state of considerable anxiety, and it took a year to tidy up the situation, but I am glad to say it has now been done.
I then set about asking leading figures in the field of Anglo-Irish literature to contribute forewords to the various volumes of the edition, which originally was only going to contain twelve volumes, but has now gone up to eighteen and may go even higher, because I continue to find hitherto unpublished material. I asked Dr T. R. Henn[18] whether he would be prepared to act as joint general editor of the Coole Edition and I am very glad to say that he agreed. It was he who had in 1965 got Dublin University to accept my Gregory bibliography as an M.Litt. thesis subject and we have been good friends ever since. Having gathered my list of foreword writers, I then approached Oxford University Press in New York to see whether they would be prepared to take a proportion of each edition to distribute in the United States, as without this sort of help I would not have had the sort of money required to finance the edition – Dan Murphy was convinced I’d lose my shirt on the project. I hoped their assistance would allow me to bring out the edition at a reasonable speed otherwise it would have taken years longer. Fortunately Oxford agreed.[19]
I called the series The Coole Edition for two reasons. Coole Park was Lady Gregory’s home from 1880, when she married Sir William Gregory, until her death fifty two years later. The second reason goes back to before World War II. Yeats and Macmillan were preparing a new edition of his Collected Works, and this was to have been called The Coole Edition. However, the poet’s death and the second World War put a stop to these plans. The sheets had already been signed for this edition and they were later used for Macmillan’s Definitive Edition of the Poems (Wade 209-210) published in 1949 in England and for a limited signed edition of the Variorum Poems (1957) (Wade 211n) in America.[20]
The Gregory family and I felt that the use of the name Coole was not altogether suitable to an edition of Yeats’s works, so I used it to make sure that the idea would not be revived some time in the future. As it was, after Lady Gregory’s death, her name had been dropped from the title page of The Unicorn from the Stars when it was included in Yeats’ Collected Plays, by accident or design.[21] Yeats’ reputation so overshadowed the other figures of the Irish Literary Revival that I half-seriously feared that one day in the developing myths, Lady Gregory might have been further written out of the story.[22] But I do not see how anybody could have justified the name of Lady Gregory’s home for an edition of Yeats’s works: the Sligo or Thoor Ballylee Edition would have been much more appropriate. After all, in his poem ‘Blood and the Moon’, Yeats had written:
I declare this tower is my symbol; I declare
This winding gyring, spiring treadmill of a stair is my ancestral stair.
I determined that The Coole Edition would not only be just a new edition of Lady Gregory’s works, but also be worthy of a collector, so I have been making it a uniform edition bound in dark blue buchram, blocked in gold, with light blue laid endpapers and top edges gilt, and the critics have been unanimous in praising the production, and the cover designs by Dara O’Lochlainn (whose father Colm founded the Three Candles Press and might also be called ‘The Father of Irish Typography’).
One day Elizabeth Coxhead asked me whether I wanted any copies of her biography of Lady Gregory. She told me there were just over a thousand available and if she did not take them, they were going to be remaindered in Australia. I said that I would take the lot, and sold them at just over half the original price, and paid Elizabeth a royalty on them.[23]
Having got the edition together, I then set about getting a suitable launching pad and I was fortunate that our Chairman, Sir Robert Mayer, (of Youth and Music and Children’s Concerts fame)[24] was a great friend of Erskine Childers, then Minister for Health and Tánaiste (Deputy Prime Minister) of the Republic of Ireland,[25] and we asked him whether he would be agreeable to launching the series, and this he was only too delighted to do. Through his help it was arranged that the reception would be held at the Irish Embassy in London on the publication day of the first three volumes, the 4th May. The printing schedules therefore had to work round this date, allowing for time for review copies to be sent off. Imagine my near hysteria when I first discovered that just as the copies were to be bound, Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland had been printed on the wrong paper, which would have resulted in books being half as thick as they should have been. On top of this, after the sheets had been reprinted, I discovered that Tonbridge Printers had hoped to fit the new sheets into the old casings, and had not ordered any more buckram so everything was terribly delayed and I was extremely worried that I would not get copies in time for publication. Fortunately they borrowed some buckram from Hazell, Watson & Viney and so got a few copies to me in time. For some reason Hazells, who were doing all the other volumes for me at that time, had to farm out Visions to one of the other companies in the British Printing Corporation group, and that was the start of my headaches. I wanted to use 11 pt Pilgrim type for the books, but they hadn’t got it so we had to make to do with Plantin type instead. Tonbridge also had to print the jacket again. First they printed it in four colours instead of three: well, I didn’t mind that if I only had to pay for three colours. However, I then discovered they had made the spine far too narrow, so I couldn’t have used them even if I had tried: it would have looked ridiculous. This book proved to be a great nuisance to Hazells and Tonbridge, both of whom lost heavily on it.[26]
In spite of all these worries and difficulties, Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland, Cuchulain of Muirthemne and Gods and Fighting Men all appeared on time and had a very good send-off from Mr Childers who had first read the books in his youth, and the critics have been unanimous in praising the edition, with the only negative comments coming from an Irish reviewer who wished that the book could have been produced in Ireland. But I have had experience of one of the largest Irish printers when I first started in publishing, and that is why they were printed in England.
So we progress: I planned for the four-volume Collected Plays to be published at the beginning of 1971,[27] to coincide with new productions of some of Lady Gregory’s plays at the Abbey Theatre and then a further three volumes in March, A Book of Saints and Wonders, The Kiltartan Books and Poets and Dreamers, and that is where we are at present.
2
The original 1970 article finished at this point. There were publishing delays to the last three titles mentioned, however: The Kiltartan Books only got published in early 1972 (though review copies got sent out, and copies were on sale before Christmas), and Poets and Dreamers and A Book of Saints & Wonders only appeared on 17 June 1974. The Coole Edition was then somewhat extended, with the number of volumes increasing from the original eighteen to twenty-one.
When Robert Gregory’s widow Margaret was placed in a nursing home in 1973 and her home in Budleigh Salterton was cleared, amongst the effects found was the typescript of Lady Gregory’s autobiography Seventy Years, which we added to the Edition as volume 13, publishing it on 1 July 1974. I also arranged with Oxford University Press and the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library, the owner of the typescript and MSS, that the complete two-volume edition of Lady Gregory’s Journals, then being edited by Daniel J. Murphy, and originally to be published by OUP, should also be included, as volumes 14 and 15. The first volume was only published in 1978 as checking the editor’s notes took me some time, and even longer for the second volume, which only appeared in 1988,[28] as the notes provided were incomplete and error-strewn, particularly those for Book 44, to which I added another 150. I also wrote an Afterword to the volume describing the chequered history of Lady Gregory’s unpublished works following her death, and Yeats’s problems with an over-zealous, over-protective and aggressive Margaret who was ignoring and over-riding all Lady Gregory’s spoken and written wishes.
The volumes of Shorter Writings are now being edited by James Pethica, Lady Gregory’s official biographer, whose edition of Lady Gregory’s Diaries 1892-1902 we published in 1996.[29] The nineteenth volume, Mr Gregory’s Letter-Box, was published in 1981. I had produced a biographical index for this, but am embarrassed to say that due to errors on my part, I had to issue a sheet of Errata and Addenda for it, most of the corrected and new information being provided by Richard Hawkins of the Royal Irish Academy, to whom I am most grateful. I am presently working on a biographical index for Sir William Gregory’s Autobiography (volume 19) which will use her original text rather than the pared down version used in John Murray’s 1894 edition.[30] The Robert Gregory volume has long been abandoned: the General Editors – then Tom Henn and I – over-estimated the amount of material we could use that had not or would not appear elsewhere, as has the volume of lectures, now to form part of the collection of shorter writings, and I plan to replace it by one edited by James Pethica, containing Lady Gregory’s first Irish Writings, written between 1883 and 1893, prior to meeting Yeats, including ‘An Emigrant’s Notebook’, A Phantom’s Pilgrimage, ‘A Philanthropist’ and ‘A Gentleman’.
As to the Yeats Collection in the Dublin City Library, I have since 1965 added a further 600 or so books to it (including about 200 translations), these being more recently published titles as well as books that fill gaps in my original collection. I continue to add to it when I can, so there are now over 1,100 items catalogued (though a number of the original entries, such as those for the Cuala prints and greetings cards each relate to over a hundred items).
Russell K. Alspach later recognised the errors he had made in the information I’d given him for the third edition of the Wade bibliography, and he made a conciliatory approach in 1979, apologising for not crediting me for the information I’d provided and asking me to assist him editing the fourth edition. He must have already been in ill-health, however, as I did not hear from him again and the next thing I knew was that he had died, and Oxford University Press, who had taken over the Soho Bibliography Series from its founder/publisher Rupert Hart-Davis, offered me the role of Editor of that edition. Russell Alspach had been a professor at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst and his colleague Professor David R. Clark met me when I was staying in New York the following year and handed over all the research notes Prof. Alspach had already prepared. The third edition took the Yeats publications up to 1965 and I was to update it up to 1980 and deliver it by the end of 1982. That seemed an easy enough job, until I started comparing the text of the earlier editions with what information I had started gathering, and found a lot of inconsistencies, errors and omissions. There were, for example, dozens of books with Yeats contributions that should have been in the first 1951 edition, and had not been picked up in the second and third editions. This did not bode well for the rest of the bibliography. I pointed out the problems to John Bell, my editor at OUP, saying that I needed to double-check every entry from 1885 to the present, and I was effectively given an open-ended contract. To see every single book mentioned by Wade and his editors and add page references to all the contributions to periodicals has taken a long time, and to that end I visited libraries and collections throughout the UK, Ireland, the US and Canada, finding as I did so many items unrecorded by Wade, Rupert Hart-Davis and Russell Alspach, quite apart from the results of the surge in overseas popularity in Yeats’s works in other languages.
I am using 31 December 1989 as my general cut-off date as that was the original termination date of copyright in the UK at the time – fifty years from the end of the year of the author’s death: after that the publishing floodgates opened as far as Yeats’s work was concerned. I am 400,000 words into the project, and still have some way to go. Oxford subsequently returned the Soho series to Duff Hart-Davis, Rupert’s son, without being aware that my contract was still operational. This initially put me in a quandary, but then I realised that as I had rewritten and often enlarged every single descriptive entry, I no longer had to worry about earlier copyrights. I severed my contract with Oxford and following discussions with the British Library it looked as if its publications department would take it, but I delayed too long, and the BL’s recent budget cuts hit hard, so many projects including mine were cancelled, and I am presently without a publisher. I think it likely I shall do a bit of self-publishing: it’s not as if I am without a little experience in the field.
Notes
[1] Bought on 11 June 1963. I still have the copy, and I can say that purchase redirected the course of my life.
[2] And it is one of only twenty copies known to still exist of the 100 printed. I have seen ten of these and most are in no better condition than my purchase. A review copy inscribed by Yeats at the time of publication and again by him to John Quinn was sold in 2014 for £100,000.00. A fine copy of The Wanderings of Oisin would probably fetch about £5,000 now. Today’s likely prices of other books listed here: the United Irishman edition of Where There is Nothing (Wade 41) £2,000; Poems Written in Discouragement (Wade 107) £3,000; Deirdre and Alterations to Deirdre (Wade 69 and 70) £1,250; The Golden Helmet (Wade 74) £3,000; Beyond the Grave (Wade 336a) £100; Discoveries (Wade 72) inscribed by WBY £2,000; the Quinn edition of Synge’s Poems and Translations (Wade 244) £1,250; the Dix titles, about £500 each); Souls for Gold, perhaps £500, while the copy of Lady Gregory’s A Book of Saints and Wonders inscribed by WBY to Maud Gonne, would go for £5,000, no problem.
[3] This was named Falkner Greirson & Co., respelling the names of two famous 18th century Dublin booksellers, George Faulkner (or Falkner) and George Grierson (both of whom had known Swift, with Falkner having been his publisher). Michael died in 1974, but Noel continued through various vicissitudes until his death thirty years later. (See http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/noel-jameson-6148573.html )
[4] As well as being a copyright protector and friend of Yeats, Lady Gregory and Synge, John Quinn (1870-1924) was a great collector of books and manuscripts, owning, among other things, the manuscripts of Joyce’s Ulysses and Eliot’s The Waste Land and many Conrad manuscripts. By the time he died, he had become the 20th century’s most important patron of living literature and art, having owned such famous pictures as Matisse’s Blue Nude, Picasso’s Three Musicians and Rousseau’s Sleeping Gypsy, to name but three. He sold his book collection in 1923, but unfortunately he was too much ahead of his time and the sale was unsuccessful, fetching only about 212,000 dollars, for a total of nearly 12,000 lots. Fifty of these (the Conrad items) raised about half the total sales figure.
[5] The bibliography was not to be. Without telling me he was doing so Liam wrote, and in association with the Cuala Press, published The Dun Emer Press, later the Cuala Press, with a List of the Books, Broadsides and Other Pieces printed at the Press (1973). It lacked a list of the prints and greetings cards and underestimated their number, as Liam did not check my erstwhile collection of these in the City Library. He mentions 97 prints and 129 greetings cards, while the City Library’s collection contains 130 and 145 respectively, and I know both sets are incomplete.
[6] Brindley’s allowed me to go through their Cuala Press accounts, and from these I saw that a number of the titles published between 1939 and 1943 had more copies printed and bound than their limitations stated (and this must have been standard practice with the other titles):
Title limitation number bound
W. B. Yeats Last Poems and Two Plays 500 525
Louis MacNeice The Last Ditch 450 500
Frank O’Connor (trs.) A Lament for Art O’Leary 130 160
W. B. Yeats If I Were Four-and-Twenty 450 500
C. Bax (ed.) Florence Farr, Bernard Shaw & W.B.Yeats 500 530
Frank O’Connor Three Tales 250 280
Patrick Kavanagh The Great Hunger 250 280
Elizabeth Bowen Seven Winters 450 480
Jack B. Yeats La La Noo 250 280
Frank O’Connor A Picture Book 450 480
Joseph Hone (ed.) The Love Story of Thomas Davis 250 280
I regret to say I made no note as to other titles they bound at this time. Did I not see entries for them, or did binding quantity and limitation match? I don’t remember. Embarrassing.
[7] Some years later the City Library had the carpet restored, at which time it was recognised as being a very early Donegal carpet and therefore rather more valuable than had it been a product of Dun Emer Industries.
[8] This I did find rather irritating, but as he hadn’t acknowledged my assistance the errors could not be laid at my door. I found later that Irish Tales was one of a set of three Ariel Booklets published by Putnam’s Knickerbocker Press. It had been derived from their 1891 two-volume edition of Representative Irish Tales (Wade 215). Wade notes that those were published in two different bindings, but there are more, including a pair in publisher’s deluxe full leather, copies of which I came across on eBay about ten years ago. Putnam also decided to reissue the collection under the title Irish Tales as part of its Ariel Booklets series, which measure 5½ x 3¾ inches, and are bound in red limp ecrasé leather. They were published in about 1903, as nos. 77-79 in the series, No. 77 containing the Carleton stories, 78 those by Maria Edgeworth and the Banim brothers, and 79 the Lover and Lever tales. Had Putnam been publishing these a decade earlier they would have published a four volume series, each story with Yeats’s original 1891 introductory essay, but in 1903, there was a problem. The story ‘Father Tom and the Pope’ which appeared in the second volume of Representative Irish Tales, with Yeats’s essay was in 1891 universally believed to have been written by William Maginn, but in 1895 Samuel Ferguson’s widow announced that her late husband was its author, so it was published over Ferguson’s name as Ariel Booklet no. 86, without any introduction. These Ariel Booklets are rare, and I have not yet been able to see a copy of the Lover/Lever volume, which is far, far rarer than the other two. Years ago, I found one copy listed in the National Union Catalog as being in the Ohio Wesleyan University Library, but it had gone missing prior to 1977 when the records of their holdings were computerised so, drawing from the layout and contents of the other two volumes I have created an hypothetical bibliographical description for it. I believe it will prove to be accurate when compared with a copy if/when one turns up, but in nearly forty years I have not come across another, and at the time of writing (November 2014) there is no copy to be found in any library linked to WorldCat, the NUC’s successor. Nor have I heard of any copy in a private collection. Frustrating.
[9] I still have not finished the bibliography, but I do intend to include it in the twenty-first volume of the Coole Edition. I sold my collection in 1975 to the Library of University College Galway, now called the James Hardiman Library, NUI Galway. Sadly their cataloguing now is still less detailed than that in the sale catalogue I made up, so it is of little use from the bibliographical point of view.
[10] Liam Miller was one of the greatest typographers of the 20th century and his Dolmen Press, which had started off as a private press before becoming a leading Irish publishing company, produced some of the most beautiful books published at that time. I had invested in the company in 1965, but it was only in 1987 after Liam’s death and the bankruptcy of the company that I discovered from the liquidators that I had been the largest shareholder in Dolmen after Liam and his wife. Colin Smythe Limited purchased almost all the book stocks – over 150,000 books – and still has a number of them in print nearly thirty years on.
[11] This collection is now in the Library of the University of Waterloo, Ontario.
[12] Born in 1919 and dying in 2008, Máirín had been appointed Dublin City Librarian in 1961, and Dublin City & County Librarian in 1967, a position she held until her retirement in 1984. A measure of the regard in which she was held amongst her peers was her election as President of the Library Association 1966-67, and was one of its honorary (life) vice presidents, an honorary fellow of the Library Association of Ireland, and a member of An Chomhairle Leabharlanna/the Library Council 1958-82.
[13] Though with less energy now than in the past.
[14] The Private Library, Second Series, vol. 2, no. 3, 1969, pp. 131-32. Frances-Jane French (1929-2002) was connected with this firm because a cousin of hers, Joseph Maunsell Hone (W. B. Yeats’s biographer), was one of its founders, and the company took its name from his own middle name with a variant spelling and a different pronunciation. She was also an Irish genealogist, and most of her later life was devoted to the subject. A Dublin ‘character’, she was, as the Daily Telegraph obituary of 16 November 2002 noted, ‘instantly recognisable in the city’s streets as her black-clad figure progressed in busy little steps with the determination of a battle tank’. She gained her M.Litt. degree in 1969 for her History of the House of Maunsel and A Bibliography of Certain of its Publications [those by J.M.Synge]’, coupled with A Bibliography of the Tower Press Booklets (First and Second Series 1906-1908) (1967, 1968) and The Abbey Theatre Series of Plays, A Bibliography (1969).
[15] The most vociferous was Professor Lester Conner (1920-2005) who taught at Chestnut Hill College, Philadelphia PA from 1962 to 1990, and was a long-time lecturer at the Yeats International Summer School, Sligo. His A Yeats Dictionary (which had, so he said, existed for decades as a collection of index cards in a shoe-box) was finally published in 1998.
[16] Anne Gregory, Me & Nu, Childhood at Coole, illustrated by Joyce Dennis (1973). Her husband, Brigadier Robert de Winton, commanding the British garrison, was assassinated on 10 February 1947 by Maria Pasquinelli over the Trieste agreement as he was about to ceremonially hand Pula (now in Croatia) over to the Yugoslav authorities. Considered a heroine by many in Italy, her death sentence by an Allied military tribunal was commuted to life imprisonment, of which she served seventeen years, and in 1964 she was pardoned by Italian President Antonio Segni, and released. She died in 2013, aged 100. Her motive was initially puzzling, until her confession was published in Corriere della Sera: ‘I rise in rebellion, with the firm intent of killing the man who is unfortunate enough to represent the Four Great Powers that, at the conference in Paris, in violation of justice, against humanity, and against political wisdom, have decided to tear out once again from the maternal womb the lands most sacred to Italy, condemning them either to the experiments of a new Danzig or, with a chilling sensibility and complicity, to the Yugoslav yoke – a synonym to our indomitable Italian people of death in foibas, of deportation, of exile.’ (Daily Telegraph, 8 July 2013.) Foibas, or foibes, were deep karst sinkholes mainly in Venezia Giulia, Istria and Dalmatia, into which many local Italians were thrown by Yugoslav Partisans from 1943-49. The term came to cover all Yugoslav murders of hundreds if not thousands of Italians.
[17] Long before I had even started publishing, I had visited Putnams’ trade counter in London, asked what Gregory titles they had in stock, and on 28 April 1965 I bought the stock of all the dozen or so individual plays that were still in print, including ten cloth-bound copies of Mirandolina (1924) which were described to me as being a limited edition, but I was doubtful of this. (But I do know to the day when they went out of print!) Dublin’s Talbot Press had also been very helpful in giving me the years that its Gregory titles went out of print – it often acted as Putnam’s Dublin distributor for her works, and in the 1960s still had their sales records.
[18] Thomas Rice Henn (1901-74), the doyen of Anglo-Irish literary critics of his time, CBE 1945, Senior Tutor 1945-47 and President 1951-61 of St Catharine’s College Cambridge, and among many other works of criticism, author of one of the first studies of Yeats, The Lonely Tower (1950), and editor of J.M.Synge’s works in 1963. He received hon. LittDs from Dublin University (TCD) and the University of Victoria, BC, Canada. I published his Last Essays, Mainly on Anglo-Irish Literature (1976) and Five Arches, A Sketch for an Autobiography, with ‘Philoctetes’, and Other Poems, as a double volume in 1980. Born in Albert House, on the outskirts of Sligo, his family home, Paradise, Co. Clare, was destroyed by fire in 1970, some years after it had been sold by his brother. I had met him in January 1965 when he spent a term as a visiting lecturer at TCD.
[19] I also agreed to an offer from Captain Tadhg McGlinchey of Irish University Press that it should publish a deluxe edition of 250 copies on special paper, with a special binding. I think he thought of it as a successor series to the Cuala/Dun Emer set. The sheets of each edition were to be printed at the same time as the Smythe/OUP sheets, and the first sets of sheets were sent to IUP, but my progress in the production of the series was too slow for him, and the deal was cancelled some time before IUP went into liquidation in 1974. A very few sets of sheets were bound in IUP bindings for display purposes, I think, and have since appeared on the rare book market, but the bulk I bought back from the liquidators, and a number of the volumes I then bound up with a slip giving our publication details. Tadhg had also suggested that IUP took over the distribution of all Colin Smythe Ltd’s titles, which would be stocked in Ireland, and we had serious discussions. Fortunately they came to nothing, as I would have been in a very difficult position when IUP collapsed.
[20] The Coole Edition was to have been published by Charles Scribner’s Sons in America rather than by Macmillan. Sheets of an engraved illustration by Edmund Dulac, also prepared for that edition, were mislaid, according to information given me by Charles Scribner III, and so were not transferred to Macmillan with the signed pages.
[21] I suspect that this can be traced back to Yeats’s annoyance with Margaret Gregory, Robert’s widow and sole heir, during the previous year over her failing to keep to the terms of Lady Gregory’s invalid 10 November 1931 codicil to her Will – it had only been signed by one witness instead of the legally necessary two – that stated ‘I wish the final decision as to arrangement and publication of any of the material left unarranged, to be made by my friend of so many years, W. B. Yeats, whose verdict would be final.’ He may well have felt it likely that if he included Lady Gregory’s name, Margaret might have somehow caused problems.
[22] I need not have worried: a fair number of critical writings and biographies, mostly of high quality, have been published over the intervening years:– Hazard Adams, Lady Gregory (1973); Elizabeth Coxhead, Lady Gregory, A Literary Portrait, (1961, revd 1966); Michèle Dalmasso, Lady Gregory et la Renaissance Irlandaise (1982); Anne Dedio, Das dramatische Werk von Lady Gregory (1967); Anne Fogarty (ed.) Irish University Review: A Journal of Irish Studies, vol. 34, no. 1, Lady Gregory (2004); Anne Gregory, Me & Nu: Childhood at Coole, with a foreword by Maurice Collis (1970); Judith Hill, Lady Gregory, An Irish Life (2005); Brian Jenkins, Sir William Gregory of Coole: A Biography (1986); Mary Lou Kohfeldt, Lady Gregory, The Woman Behind the Irish Renaissance (1985); Edward A. Kopper Jr., Lady Isabella Persse Gregory (1976); Sam McCready (intro. by James Pethica), Coole Lady – The Extraordinary Story of Lady Gregory (2006); E. H. Mikhail, Lady Gregory: An Annotated Bibliography of Criticism (1982); E. H. Mikhail (ed.), Lady Gregory, Interviews and Recollections (1977); James Pethica (ed.) Lady Gregory’s Diaries 1892-1902 (1996); Ann Saddlemyer, In Defence of Lady Gregory, Playwright, (1966); Ann Saddlemyer & Colin Smythe (eds.) Lady Gregory, Fifty Years After (1987); Colin Smythe, A Guide to Coole Park, Home of Lady Gregory, with a foreword by Maurice Craig (1973); revd, with a foreword by Anne Gregory (1983. revised 1995, 2003); Colin Smythe (ed.), Robert Gregory, 1881-1918 (1981); Colm Tóibín, Lady Gregory’s Toothbrush (2002).
[23] Very sadly, Elizabeth killed herself on the railway track at Gerrards Cross, aged seventy, in 1979 soon after I’d republished her Daughters of Erin, and I had the melancholy task of writing an appreciation of her for the local paper.
[24] Sir Robert, who had been born in Mannheim, Germany on 5 June 1879, died on 9 January1985. Founder of the Robert Mayer Children’s Concerts in 1923, he was knighted for services to music in 1939.
[25] He was later to be elected the fourth President of Ireland, succeeding Eamon de Valera, in 1973. Tragically he died the following year.
[26] Their financial loss was increased by the fact that whoever they had got to do the gilding of the top edges of the pages of Visions and Beliefs used real gold leaf, instead of a gold-coloured metallic foil, and they could only charge us for the much cheaper product.
[27] I planned to publish the Plays on 1 March 1971 and had been informed by J. C. Trewin, the Literary Editor of The Times (and father of Ion Trewin) that he had written a very favourable review that was to appear in the paper that day. Unfortunately its publication clashed with its printers’ one-day-strike, so the review was never printed, though I did get a proof of the text.
[28] This was published on 22 February 1988 because of delays over the top-edge gilding, and it was too late to insert a cancel title to change the copyright details which give the publication date as 1987.
[29] James Pethica is in fact the third editor to have been appointed. Donald J. Gordon was the first, and on his death, Mary Fitzgerald Finneran. She too died before doing any work on the project. I’m glad to say that I was able to publish James Pethica’s edition of Lady Gregory’s Early Irish Writings 1883-1893 in 2018, and I hope the first volume of her Shorter Writings 1882-1900, also edited by James, in 2022.
[30] I had Sir William’s Autobiography typeset in 1981, and at that time attempted the index, which was a failure. I, with James Pethica and others, attempted it again a decade later and advanced it considerably, but it has only been with the advent of the internet, Wikipedia and other sources that a comprehensive index can be attempted. But one has to face up to the fact that there are a lot of errors ‘out there’, so one is only half-safe as to accuracy. If there’s any doubt, one must double-check elsewhere. In one case, I was searching for details for an entry on Charles Elmé Francatelli (1805-76), a chef Gregory mentions as being at the St James’s Club, better known as Crockford’s, a gambling ‘hell’ in St James Street, when he joined it in 1842. There was considerable variance in the entries on the net about the important events in Francatelli’s life, such as the years he worked as chief cook to Queen Victoria, so I set out to search primary sources, principally the newspapers in the online British Newspaper Archive, a search that became a compulsion, and I ended up producing a 12,000 word article on his life and on Crockford’s, which was published in Petits Propos Culinaires 101 in 2014, about nine months after I had started my search, with another 6,000 words appearing in the following issue. At the time I type this, this index is over 27,000 words in length with some way to go, but I am hopeful the book will be published in 2015. This will depend on whether I succumb to further sidetracks – I very much hope not.