The Beinecke Library is pleased to announce the publication of American Publishing History: The Tanselle Collection by scholar and book collector G. Thomas Tanselle.
The work provides a detailed introduction to the Tanselle Collection of American Imprints at the Beinecke Library, a collection that brings together the output of more than fifty trade publishing houses operating between 1891 and 1930 in the United States. Represented publishers accepted innovative or socially progressive work–avant-garde, not welcomed by major, well-established firms. Representative authors include Sherwood Anderson, Theodore Dreiser, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Eugene O’Neill, and John Reed, as well as the first American publications of European authors such as James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, and E.M. Forster (READ more about the Tanselle Collection).
Of American Publishing History: The Tanselle Collection, Michael Dirda of the Washington Post writes: “For the past 60 years G. Thomas Tanselle, widely esteemed for his bibliographical scholarship, has been collecting copies of all the titles — and, even more ambitiously, all the printings of those titles — issued by 44 American publishers between 1891 and 1930. He has now donated his books, some 14,000 altogether, to Yale’s Beinecke Library, which has celebrated this formidable gift with “American Publishing History,” a 278-page overview of “The Tanselle Collection.”’
In his preface to the volume, Director E. C. Schroeder writes: “The Tanselle Collection provides a window into American literary publishing…identifying connections and trends that are not otherwise obvious. The collection’s comprehensive nature places bibliographically related items in dialogue and renders it a unique resource in allowing for the study of broader trends in publishing and book design.”
American Publishing History: The Tanselle Collection includes Tanselle’s extended description of his collection—including historical notes about publishing houses and biographical details about publishers and writers. The volume also reprints Tanselle’s important essays: “The Pleasures of Being a Scholar-Collector” (first delivered as the 2005 Nikirk Lecture at the Grolier Club) and “Collecting Publishers’ Imprints “ (previously published in The Book Collector as “Collecting Modern Imprints.”