The Sound and the Fury

This may be heresy, but I just don't get the attraction to Faulkner. I've tried reading some of his novels, but could never really make sense of them. Recently, I got The Sound and the Fury on tape and listened to it on a road trip. Even with someone else reading the book, it was very hard for me to follow.

But that exposure to Faulkner's novel got me interested in a bibliographical question that has intrigued collectors for many years. I started looking around and found some evidence that confirms the prevailing view.

According to Peter Howard of Serendipity Books, who cataloged the great Carl Peterson collection of Faulkner, an issue point on the just jacket for The Sound and the Fury was discovered in the 1980s. On most copies of the book, the ad for Maurice Hindus' Humanity Uprooted gives its price as $3.00. On a few copies - in the Peterson catalog, Howard estimates no more than 300 - the price is shown correctly at $3.50.

Howard argues that the $3.00 price is the "first state" of the jacket, as Humanity Uprooted was "eventually published" at $3.50. [I'd call it a first "issue," but that's another subject.] Peterson had what was then one of two known advance copies of the book. It came in a trial jacket, but unfortunately, the back panel, where the ads appear, was blank, offering no evidence one way or another.

Between the Covers, which has a web page devoted to The Sound and the Fury says, "Unfortunately, waiting five decades to begin to research an issue point is, well, mostly pointless. In all likelihood, the $3.00 issue precedes for a variety of reasons (the least of which is common sense, which should never be applied when dealing with publishers), but this is just an educated guess."

On AbeBooks, many, but not all, of the copies for sale also suggest jackets with the $3.00 price for Humanity Uprooted are the first issue. One copy's description says, however, "Most people are under the assumption that the $3.00 price is the true first, when in fact the publisher lowered the price on later dust jackets due to the stock market crash."

One of the key questions, as that last description indicates, is did the price of Humanity Uprooted get changed? I can, at last, offer definitive evidence that it did.

Jonathan Cape, the publisher, heavily promoted both Humanity Uprooted and The Sound and the Fury in the fall of 1929. The earliest advertising I have located appeared in the November issue of Forum (Vol 87, no 5). Forum was a casualty of the Depression, folding within a year, after a 44-year run. In all likelihood, the November 1929 issue of Forum was printed no later than early October. The lead book in the ad is Humanity Uprooted - priced at $3.00. This establishes without a doubt that the book was priced at $3.00 around the time The Sound and the Fury was published, lending credence to the idea that the first issue jacket on the novel bears the $3.00 price.

The next earliest ad I found (pictured left) ran in the New York Times Book Review on November 10, 1929 (page BR17). Newspaper ads have much shorter lead times than magazine advertising, so this ad undoubtedly reflects the prices about November 1. In it you can see that Humanity Uprooted is now priced at $3.50.

While it is possible that the price of Humanity Uprooted was lowered at some later point, as suggested by the AbeBooks seller quoted above, the evidence suggests that this is not the case. By March 1931, when Jonathan Cape began advertising Faulkner's Sanctuary, they were still promoting Humanity Uprooted, which was in its 11th printing, still priced at $3.50 (New York Times Book Review, March 22, 1931, page 12 - not pictured). Faulkner's publishing house dissolved later in 1931 and reorganized in mid-1932 as Smith and Haas and then merged into Random House. A small number of copies of The Sound and the Fury were bound during these intermediate years, but the known copies seem to be in jackets with Humanity Uprooted priced correctly at $3.50 (further evidence that this is the second issue). It is highly unlikely that the publisher would undertake to reprint the dust jacket with a lower price for Humanity Uprooted after the March 1931 ad, when the book was still $3.50, and before the publisher's name changed later that year. The theory that the price was lowered due to the Depression doesn't hold much water.

The evidence from advertising isn't definitive, but it strongly supports the idea that the first copies of The Sound and the Fury were printed with the wrong price on the cover.

Comments

[sumeet]

who cares?

[Jackson]

I, for one, care, since I own a copy of Humanity Uprooted. Jerk.