Turn About

Author: FAULKNER, William
Title: Turn About
Publication: Saturday Evening Post, 1932

Description: Near Fine.

A previously unknown Faulkner "A" item - an offprint from the March 5, 1932 issue of the Saturday Evening Post. In long-accepted Faulkner lore, the first and only separate edition of Turn About was the 1939 edition published by W. L. Massiah of Ottawa, Canada, which has been considered Faulkner's scarcest "A" item, with approximately seven known copies. Offered here is a 1932 offprint - 7 years earlier than the Massiah edition - with no other known copies. Faulkner's story "Turn About" was first published in The Saturday Evening Post on March 5, 1932, with two bibliographically significant markers: the second paragraph includes a description of one character as having "a pink-and-white face and blue eyes, and a little dull gold mustache above a mouth like a girl's mouth," and the text is broken up into 10 parts, each identified with a Roman numeral, from I to X. The earliest book publications of the story - in O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1932 and in Faulkner's collection Doctor Martino and Other Stories, published in 1934 - leave out both the "gold mustache" and the text breaks. The former change seems likely to have been authorial, rather than editorial, which means that Faulkner changed the text of the story, removing the "gold mustache" phrase, before the end of 1932, when the O. Henry collection was published. The 1939 Massiah edition includes the phrase, which is how it was concluded that it had been printed from the text of the Post story, rather than from one of the later book publications. The Massiah publication also retains the 10 text breaks, but rather than being identified by Roman numerals, the breaks are separated with a filigree design. The 1932 offprint offered here includes the "gold mustache" phrase, as well as the 10 text breaks of the original Post publication, with Roman numerals delineating the sections - the only place, other than in the original magazine itself, where Roman numerals are used in the text. Carl Petersen, the renowned Faulkner collector, did not have a copy of Massiah's Turn About in his collection when he published his 1975 bibliography. By 1991, when Peter Howard of Serendipity Books published the 643-page catalog of Petersen's Faulkner collection, he did have a copy, which Serendipity valued at $17,500, calling it "by far the rarest of Faulkner's published books." Christie's auction house called the Massiah edition "exceedingly scarce" and noted that "no copies have appeared at auction in at least 50 years" in a 2010 auction listing. As best we have been able to determine, this 1932 Saturday Evening Post offprint displaces the 1939 edition of Turn About as Faulkner's scarcest "A" item: it is previously unknown, contemporaneous with the initial story publication, and possibly, at this point, one of a kind. 28 stapled pages; one page corner turned; a handful of mostly marginal pencil markings ("x's"); near fine in stapled wrappers. Unless otherwise noted, our first editions are first printings.

Seller ID: 035975