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Stephen A. Schwarzman Building > Collections & Reading Rooms > George Arents Collection A Brief SurveyBooks in parts may be defined as works by an author or authors which are published piecemeal over a period of time, each unit having its separate cover, usually paper or boards, and in many cases with the title-page and other preliminary matter for the volume or volumes at the end of the last part. Some books in parts, to be sure, were issued without title-pages or stitched without wrappers. But all were issued serially, at intervals of time. A novel in three volumes, although in three covers, is not a book in parts, for all three are issued simultaneously. On the other hand, a serialized novel appearing in a newspaper or magazine is not a book in parts, since considerable other material appears in each number, and the novel, when completed, is only a portion of the file of the periodical, and does not form a unit in itself. R. M. Wiles, in his recent authoritative work on serial publications before
17502, includes works appearing as
supplements to newspapers or magazines in his list of books in fascicules
or numbers, terms which he uses for books issued serially. I have employed
the word "parts" as more suitable to the type of books described in this
article, one class only of works published in instalments. Graham Pollard
in his survey of serial fiction3 makes the valid
point that the collector of first editions should be interested in the printing
of a novel in a magazine since it is so often the first printing, and since
the work, when issued later in volume form, sometimes differs materially
from the serial version. A commonly cited example of such a difference in
the periodical publication and book edition of a novel is Du Maurier's Trilby. At
first printed as a serial the story had an illustration and some text clearly
satirizing the artist Whistler under the name of Sibley. This was changed
when the novel appeared in book-form. It is undoubtedly true that the earliest form of an author's work has great significance for the collector of that author's works and for the literary historian. But the criterion of choice for the inclusion of an author's work in the Arents collection is not that such a work is the first printing in a periodical or the first edition in book-form, but that it is a book in parts, in its original state. One example will illustrate this. The pieces in Sketches by Boz by Dickens appeared in various periodicals in London from December 1883 to October 1836. Then Macrone, who had become the owner of the copyright of the sketches, issued them in book-form, the first series in two volumes in February 1836 and the second series in one volume in December 1886. These two were reprinted several times. Finally Chapman and Hall issued them in 20 parts from November 1837 to December 1889. This issue in parts is in the Arents collection; the earlier periodical printing and the volume editions are not. It is generally agreed that the reason for issuing books serially was to attract more buyers; the majority of readers were better able to pay a shilling or less for a monthly or weekly part, than a pound at one time for the complete book. Wiles (p. 2) quotes the Grub-Street Journal of October 26, 1732: "This method of Weekly Publication allows Multitudes to peruse Books in which they would otherwise never have looked." Such readers were to become far more numerous a little over a hundred years later when the adventures of the immortal Pickwick achieved an unprecedented and stunning success as published in 20 parts. Of the approximately 150 works listed by Wiles as issued in numbers before 1750 many are forgotten today. Some were never reprinted. On the other hand, editions of such great works as the plays of Shakespeare, Don Quixote and Defoe's Robinson Crusoe were issued serially at this period. Of the books before 1750 on the list only one is in the Arents Collection of Books in Parts. The reason for this is simple: they do not exist in their original condition, i. e., in parts, unbound or in wrappers. When they are to be found - an infrequent occurrence - they are bound as books, and only the long-established and largest libraries have them. Several of these works in volume form are in the Arents Tobacco Collection. Among these are Ward's The London Spy, 1698-1699, and Ralegh's The History of the World, 1735-1736. This collection contains bound volumes of the original numbers of The Tatler by Steele and The Spectator by Addison and Steele, works many times reissued and still read today.4 Most of the books in the Arents Collection of Books in Parts were published in England and America; it was not the intention to collect works in foreign languages printed on the continent of Europe or elsewhere. But exceptions were made in the case of about a dozen titles; six are translations of Dickens into German and Swedish, the others are in French and mainly interesting for their plates. In the collection are twelve books in two parts and one book in 350 parts; the others range in between these extremes; the favorite number of parts for the Victorian novelists is twenty. The earliest work in the Arents collection is Musica Transalpina, Madrigales
Translated of Foure, Five and Sixe Parts, by Yonge, London, 1588.
2 Serial Publication in England Before 1750 (Cambridge 1957). 3 "Serial Fiction," New Paths in Book Collecting, ed. John Carter (London 1984) 251-252. 4 These books are excluded by Wiles, apparently because he classes them as newspapers or magazines. He does, however, list Ward's London Spy, a publication which some writers on periodicals have compared to Steele's and Addison's works, e. g., Walter Graham in English Periodicals (New York 1980) 51. |