On Limited Editions

 

My first ideal in published books was the exquisite creations issued in the Eighteen Nineties, in which narrow rivulets of prose and verse seeped through the long white plains of the page. I admired the bon mot of the time about the poet whose verse got successively slimmer and margins wider until in the end he issued a book consisting entirely of margins, with no print to sully it. 

Though it was said in jest, the minimalist in me quite liked the idea. These books also appeared in very small runs, particularly by the standard of the industrious Victorians, usually of only a few hundred copies. So I felt an affinity with them, the more so as the stories I was writing aspired to have an aesthetical air to them.

I also admired those writers whose entire ‘catalogue’ of books was equally slim, their complete works consisting of no more than four or five volumes. I used to joke about the dangers to the artiste of a ‘chubby oeuvre’, consisting of far too many wearisome tomes. I had, and still have not quite relinquished, the idea that the true writer does not write all that much.

So it was consistent with these preferences that my first book of stories was itself a ‘slim volume’ and was limited to 200 copies. But this was also making a virtue out of a necessity. The publisher was fairly new and finding its way. This was the first collection by an unknown author who had only published so far about a dozen stories, all of them in zines or booklets which themselves had very small print runs, typically about 100. So it was already quite a risk to suppose that this number of readers could be doubled. Well, luckily, in the end, the 200 copies were sold.

By the time of the next book, four years later, the publisher had built up a reputation and had extended their usual print runs to 300. There was still some risk, however, in seeking a further one hundred readers for a still unknown author of somewhat peculiar work. Nevertheless the print run for this second volume of stories did eventually sell out, though of course it took more time than the 200 print run had.

It was five years before a further book of fiction appeared, this time again from a new publisher, in fact his first book. It is hard to know how many copies of this were printed, but it is probable the number was once more around 200. The three or four subsequent collections with this publisher also came out in numbers that remain a bit mysterious, one or two of them perhaps of only about 80-100 copies, but certainly not all that many.

Since the stories in these volumes had not received an airing that even I, minimalist as I was, thought was quite sufficient, I made a selection from them which was taken up by a third publisher who had recently progressed from booklets to hardbacks. He decided, with a generous confidence, to print some 400 copies. Alas, this audacity was not rewarded. 

It took over seven years to get rid of all these. Still, the experiment was useful from my point-of-view. I now knew the upper limit of interest in the stories. It appeared that 300 might be reasonably safe and maybe you could, at a pinch, push this up to 320 or even 350, but beyond that was certainly imprudent. (Oddly, though, a later sister volume of my stories from the same press sold its 400 copies in three years.)

I soon after reverted to my first publisher and made the experiment, kindly suggested to me by an eminent editor of ghost stories, of collecting my very oldest stories, fortified by a few newly written. These youthful stories are a bit rough around the edges, though perhaps they also have a certain vitality. I was doubtful myself whether any more than a few loyal or curious readers would want them, but in fact in due course even these eventually sold out.

By this time the earlier editions had begun to appear on the second-hand market, sometimes with improbable prices attached to them. This led some readers to complain that if they wanted to read these books they had to pay an awful lot of money. These lamentations caused me in the end, rather against my preference, to allow the books to be made available in paperback and electronically. But in fact, not many further sales resulted in either form. It was scarcely worth the effort of reformatting.            

The Alexandrian poet C P Cavafy, whose work I read often, used to have a few of his poems put together in slim booklets of about 20 copies, which he gave away to particular chosen friends. He resisted the suggestion that he should submit then for wider publication, which did not seem to interest him. There is a drily humorous edition of the letters exchanged between him and E M Forster, in which the latter, rather like an over-excited English spaniel, tries to cajole the poet into allowing his work to be translated into English and published by a major imprint in London and elsewhere.

Cavafy is unfailingly polite and sometimes wearily acquiesces but whenever he can he defers such suggestions or courteously deflects them. There is a nice phrase I once read about him: that he preferred to have only ‘selected readers’. To Cavafy the appreciation of a circle of discerning friends was enough.  I admire this approach while not being able quite to emulate it. Still, three hundred or so is still fairly selective: and indeed self-selected by the readers themselves. There is no evidence that more than about this number will ever succumb to the charms of my recherché prose. 

 (Mark Valentine)