In Quest of Thick Books for Thin Billfolds

The Library of America is that sturdy, even formidable-looking series of books up front, at least in the better book stores. I’m sure you know the ones I mean even if you’ve never bought one. They have black jackets, a famous name in white along the spine and can only be described as just plain thick. The Library publishes the collected works of America’s foremost authors, they say, in uniform hard-cover editions. These are books that don’t hesitate to announce they are serious books for people who are serious about reading. Speed readers need not apply.

The Library has been publishing for just over seven years, and while septenaries are not usually celebrated, the Library has become a feature of, and monument to, American publishing--a kind of literary Mount Rushmore--so quickly, it might not be out of place now to recall its roots. Actually the comparison to Mount Rushmore is not so fanciful as it might at first seem. This October the Library will issue a volume of the collected writings and speeches of Abraham Lincoln, which is the first Library effort to receive that accolade of American publishing: designation as a selection of the Book of the Month Club.

The idea for the Library was born in the 1960s in the fertile mind of Edmund Wilson, a name whose notoriety may be fading, as literary reputations tend to do. Wilson was, from the 1920s through the 1960s, one of the country’s leading critics and litterateurs. Not everyone agreed with him--he once wrote a famous essay damning to hell that icon of Los Angeles literature, the detective story--but there were few nooks and crannies of writing and publishing unaffected by Wilson’s thinking.

Shortly before his death, Wilson called attention to the fact that many of the classics of American writing were languishing out of print. Among those available, many were marred by typos and other imperfections, the result of less than dogged attention to the correctness of the text. This, he insisted, was a scandal. The classics should always be in print, available in inexpensive, readable editions. He cited the French series, La Pleiade, which reprinted the masterworks of that culture in editions students could afford to toss in their knapsacks to read over croissants.

Wilson’s inspiration was one of those great ideas it’s hard to argue against. The main problem was finding the money for what was an ambitious undertaking. The commercial publishing industry generally is adverse to the kind of philanthropy the Library of America implied. Selling the classics does not, with very few exceptions, make money, and it never makes the kind of big money those with their noses pressed to the best-seller lists expect. Moreover, government tax policies which have come into being since the time the Library first was conceived have made matters even worse. Now, it’s a tax liability to maintain a warehouse full of backlist stock.

It was suggested that the public sector, the government, should step into the breech, but there, too, dollars are hard to come by. Moreover, when the Library was proposed, the powerful American Language Assn. (ALA), which tends the scholarship and teaching of American literature, had a somewhat similar project of its own underway and blanched at the competition the newcomer implied. After some elbow-jostling, Wilson prevailed. A quasi-public company was set up, aided by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Ford Foundation, and an ambitious plan of publishing was drawn up.

In 1982, the first four volumes appeared, devoted to the writings of Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Walt Whitman and Harriet Beecher Stowe. Each contained a variety of novels, stories and other writings and each weighed in at more than 1,000 pages. They have since been joined by editions of Henry Adams, Cooper, Crane, Emerson, Jefferson and William Dean Howells among others (28 in all, if I count rightly). One high point was the reprinting of one of the classic works of American history, Francis Parkman’s “France and England in North America,” which for action and adventure alone still stands up admirably.

When the Library first was suggested, the literary columns greeted the idea with extravagant praise. The New Republic thought the Library extraordinarily American in concept and impulse. It was the perfect expression of American technological and publishing savvy to bring out the best and the biggest, the finest-looking and the longest-lasting edition of its kind ever made. Newsweek lauded it as “All-American . . . imaginative, even adventurous,” and as the most important book-publishing project in the nation’s history. So much for the French and their Pleiades. It is touching to recall the days, not too long ago, when it looked as if American technology could do anything.

Gadfly critic Hugh Kenner had the temerity to suggest the Library might be literature by the pound. He wondered if the Library wouldn’t end up being an approved American canon, celebrating the greats of yesteryear. Who had the right to say who fit and who didn’t? Mightn’t it prove, like all canons, somewhat stifling? That concern has been answered by the recent inclusion of some Faulkner, Eugene O’Neill (the only complete edition of his plays) and Flannery O’Conner. In this, the Library can rightly be said to have addressed its critics.

There have been comments along the way about the ordering of priorities the Library represents, the answer to which will come only over time. They go like this. There isn’t much money for this kind of special publishing. The Library spends a lot of what money is available keeping the classics in print. But while we may not have been able to walk into a bookstore and purchase one or another of the classics, they’ve certainly always been available in libraries. Directing, even encouraging, people to use the public libraries is not a bad idea. The more people who are exposed to the libraries, the greater the possibility that as voters they’ll be interested in funding public libraries.

Moreover, it was part of Wilson’s original conception that Library editions be inexpensive. Yet now, the realities of publishing being what they are, each edition costs $25 to $30. That might be inexpensive in terms of value received, but isn’t in absolute terms. This isn’t publishing for the masses. The Library doesn’t (and maybe couldn’t) match the Little Books of Haldeman-Julius or Bennett Cerf’s Modern Library, issues of which at first cost $1 a book.

An important rationale for the Library has been its mission of presenting correct--and, if need be, corrected--texts: texts the way the author wanted them to appear before busybody editors and proofreaders set to work. This is a touchy area and one which generates great difference of opinion. Certainly it ought be done. But it’s an expensive undertaking and one that it is proper to question from the standpoint of how much it really adds to our understanding, much less enjoyment.

For example, the Library has reprinted three of Faulkner’s novels and re-inserted his idiomatic punctuation. Ellipses are traditionally three periods separated by spaces ( . . . ). Faulkner liked to add a few periods to his ellipses ( . . . . . ). Moreover, he dropped the apostrophes from his aints and didnts , not only by way of writing some vernacular but in his letter-writing as well. It was a philosophical statement. As he wrote: “I’m trying to say it all in one sentence, between one Cap and one period.”

Faulkner’s thought is inspiring and the Library’s effort laudable, but consider this: Dollars are limited. One of the groups which suffers in today’s megabuck-oriented publishing is new writers. Translation of foreign works is another area in which we don’t have enough resources. Americans don’t seem appreciative of other languages, and translations generally don’t sell well. Faulkner certainly was aware of the difficulties of understanding across cultures, and he may have respected, even at the expense of a few periods, an effort to get more new works and more works from elsewhere before the reading public.

But let me tell you my real gripe about the Library. Somewhere the dream got downright bulky. Wilson’s original scheme seemed to suggest works in editions which could be carried in a pocket or a backpack, on the order of the Penguin classics--books you’re not hesitant about marking and underlining. The Library of America editions are beautiful: flexible yet rugged covers, thin yet durable paper (and acid-free!), hand-sewn bindings that let you read in the middle of the book without tearing it to shreds. All those good things books used to be. But not pocket-sized.

And there’s something about opening up the Ben Franklin volume, looking for a few good words, and coming face to face with the totality of his thought. Couldn’t it be sliced a bit thinner?

Well, now it will be. Vintage Books has announced that it will, starting early next year, reprint Library editions in more manageable chunks. Not the whole Hawthorne but “The Scarlet Letter”; “Leaves of Grass”; “Souls of Black Folk,” and Emerson’s first and second series of essays, among others. It sounds chewable to me.

All in all, it is reassuring that the Library got dreamed up and actually came to be. We need to be reminded that the authors the Library represents are not just our antecedents, but our contemporaries. I’ve started “The Princess Casamassima” by Henry James, even though it’s in a volume with three other James novels. It’s about political terrorism. Somebody should send the new edition of William James, which includes “The Varieties of Religious Experience,” to Jim Bakker and a few others.

It’s cheering to see the acceptance Abraham Lincoln is getting, and doubtless some readers will wonder why, after the founding fathers, he’s about the only American president who ever wrote anything of any real and enduring value. Hopefully the Library and its Lincoln will continue to be a landmark, like Mount Rushmore, but one which isn’t just viewed from afar but taken in hand for the wealth it represents.