This offering is for THE NEW YORK EDITION of THE NOVELS AND TALES OF HENRY JAMES (1843-1916) Published in 26 volumes in New York by Charles Scribner's Sons. It is strictly limited to 156 numbered sets, this being No. 37, with each of the 156 sets containing an original manuscript item in James' hand tipped into the front of the first volume of each set. Volumes I - XXIV were published between 1907 and 1909, all 24 volumes (18 titles) containing significant new and inciteful Prefaces written for these titles by the author along with the author's Revisions of the texts. These are followed by Volumes XXV containing THE IVORY TOWER, and XXVI containing THE SENSE OF THE PAST which were published posthumously in 1917 and are often lacking from the sets. That said, please keep in mind that sometime in the last 100+ years Volumes X (10) containing THE SPOILS OF POYNTON. A LONDON LIFE. THE CHAPERON, and XV (15) containing THE LESSON OF THE MASTER. THE DEATH OF THE LION. THE NEXT TIME and OTHER TALES wandered away from their companions and unfortunately never returned to the fold. These last two titles were published simultaneously with the First Trade Editions. The Remaining 24 volumes herein are octavos measuring 6" x 9.5" uniformly bound in 1/4 white linen cloth with brown laid paper-covered boards and outside corners protected in like white linen, and with brown leather spine labels titled in gilt. Title pages are printed in red and black with a central monogram in brown and white and each with a facing frontispiece photograph by the renowned photogravure Alvin Langdon Coburn** printed in gravure and each having a protective letterpress tissue-guard. The books are printed on very supple Ruisdale hand-made laid paper with all 3 edges untrimmed and varying significantly in thickness, depending on the title. All but one of the volumes has an unused personal bookplate mounted on the front pastedown, Vol. VIII having the engraved bookplate of Reuben Jay Flick (See below) who was likely the original purchaser of the set and like the others,Vol. IV has a blank bookplate, but only tipped in along the upper margin allowing one to view the Flick bookplate beneath. Refs: BAL 10665; Edel & Laurence A64B
The Following are excerpts from the Britannica minibiography of James:
Henry James (born April 15, 1843, New York, New York, U.S.—died February 28, 1916, London, England) American novelist and, as a naturalized English citizen from 1915, a great figure in the transatlantic culture. His fundamental theme was the innocence and exuberance of the New World in clash with the corruption and wisdom of the Old, as illustrated in such works as Daisy Miller (1879), The Portrait of a Lady (1881), The Bostonians (1886), and The Ambassadors (1903).
By his mid-20s James was regarded as one of the most skillful writers of short stories in America. Critics, however, deplored his tendency to write of the life of the mind, rather than of action. The stories of these early years show the leisurely existence of the well-to-do at Newport and Saratoga. James’s apprenticeship was thorough. He wrote stories, reviews, and articles for almost a decade before he attempted a full-length novel. There had to be also the traditional “grand tour,” and James went abroad for his first adult encounter with Europe in 1869. His year’s wandering in England, France, and Italy set the stage for a lifetime of travel in those countries. James never married. By nature he was friendly and even gregarious, but, while he was an active observer and participant in society, he tended, until late middle age, to be “distant” in his relations with people and was careful to avoid “involvement.”
Recognizing the appeal of Europe, given his cosmopolitan upbringing, James made a deliberate effort to discover whether he could live and work in the United States. Two years in Boston, two years in Europe, mainly in Rome, and a winter of unremitting hackwork in New York City convinced him that he could write better and live more cheaply abroad. Thus began his long expatriation—heralded by publication in 1875 of the novel Roderick Hudson, the story of an American sculptor’s struggle by the banks of the Tiber between his art and his passions; Transatlantic Sketches, his first collection of travel writings; and a collection of tales. With these three substantial books, he inaugurated a career that saw about 100 volumes through the press during the next 40 years.
James’s reputation was founded on his versatile studies of “the American girl.” In a series of witty tales, he pictured the “self-made” young woman, the bold and brash American innocent who insists upon American standards in European society. James ended this first phase of his career by producing his masterpiece, The Portrait of a Lady (1881), a study of a young woman from Albany who brings to Europe her narrow provincialism and pretensions but also her sense of her own sovereignty, her “free spirit,” her refusal to be treated, in the Victorian world, merely as a marriageable object. As a picture of Americans moving in the expatriate society of England and of Italy, this novel has no equal in the history of modern fiction.
In the 1880s James wrote two novels dealing with social reformers and revolutionaries, The Bostonians (1886) and The Princess Casamassima (1886). In the novel of Boston life, James analyzed the struggle between conservative masculinity embodied in a Southerner living in the North and an embittered man-hating suffragist. The Bostonians remains the fullest and most-rounded American social novel of its time in its study of cranks, faddists, and “do-gooders.”
The final phase of his career led James to the writing of three grandiose novels at the beginning of the new century, which represent his final—his “major”—phase, as it has been called. In these 3 novels James pointed the way for the 20th-century novel. He had begun as a realist who describes minutely his crowded stage.
The first of the three novels was The Ambassadors (1903). This is a high comedy of manners, of a middle-aged American who goes to Paris to bring back to a Massachusetts industrial town a wealthy young man who, in the view of his affluent family, has lingered too long abroad. The “ambassador” in the end is captivated by civilized Parisian life. The novel is a study in the growth of perception and awareness in the elderly hero, and it balances the relaxed moral standards of the European continent against the parochial rigidities of New England. The second novel The Wings of the Dove, was published in 1902. This novel, dealing with a melodramatic subject of great pathos, that of an heiress doomed by illness to die, avoids its cliche subject by focusing upon the characters surrounding the unfortunate young woman. They intrigue to inherit her millions. Told in this way, and set in London and Venice, it becomes a powerful study of well-intentioned humans who, with dignity and reason, are at the same time also birds of prey. His final novel was The Golden Bowl (1904), a study of adultery, with four principal characters.
NOTE: The materialism of American life deeply troubled James, and on his return to England he set to work to shore up his own writings, and his own career, against this ephemeral world. He devoted three years to rewriting and revising his principal novels and tales for the highly selective “New York Edition,” published in 24 volumes. For this edition James wrote 18 significant prefaces, which contain both reminiscence and exposition of his theories of fiction.
Henry James’s career was one of the longest and most productive—and most influential—in American letters. A master of prose fiction from the first, he practiced it as a fertile innovator, enlarged the form, and placed upon it the stamp of a highly individual method and style. He wrote for 51 years—20 novels, 112 tales, 12 plays, several volumes of travel and criticism, and a great deal of literary journalism. He recognized and helped to fashion the myth of the American abroad and incorporated this myth in the “international novel,” of which he was the acknowledged master. His works were translated in many countries, and he was recognized in the late 20th century as one of the subtlest craftsmen who ever practiced the art of the novel. His rendering of the inner life of his characters made him a forerunner of the “stream-of-consciousness” movement in the 20th century.
Below I have attempted to transcribe, albeit not very successfully, the attached 4-page letter measuring 4.5" x 7" folded, and written on '34 De Vere Gardens' letterhead, where James lived for over 10 years from 1886-1898:
2 Wellington Crescent
Ramsgate
July 3d
My dear Findley,
I can’t lay down your visit to (Kaiser?) Bismark (sic) without immediately letting the hand that held it close about a grateful pen. Let me communicate to you my extreme appreciation of its interest and of the art and skill and taste with had been with you, & it was ____ of my rights in leaving town that I couldn’t come and discuss with you all your reminiscences and encounters. Kindly tell Evelyn, with my love, that in the way of adventures I am full of gladness for her that she should have had as great a one. --- her appreciation whereof shines so vividly in your pages --- I came down here many days ago, from sheer impossibility of which you have acquitted yourself of a task difficult to perform so gracefully in this refined retreat — The most sordid of seasides and the only one, consequently in which I can perfect hope from nothing any ___ a ____ of my fashion knows __ _ it has placed me again in large and thrilling relations. I knew you had been in Germany and that Evelyn London, to which I shall probably return for my sweet individual search about the first of August. Meanwhile I find here a little cavern below, for Ramsgate has really everything but drivers, parties, and h’s. But before coming up to stay I shall come up to tea in Chester Place. I want to extort from you all your article didn’t say. And I want to see Mrs. Smedley and Jocelyn, and every one. --- A short term since I published a decently goodlooking volume of essays/very light goods, to which I forbore to send you (I sent it to no one,) lest that act should seem a twitching of your nerve to read it in the imposition of some ____ note but I will send it, now ,I think if you will promise when I see you that I shall engender in you neither reading nor writing.
Yours, my dear Finley always
Henry James
**Alvin Langdon Coburn (born June 11, 1882, Boston, Mass., U.S.—died Nov. 23, 1966, Rhos-on-Sea, Denbighshire, Wales) was an American-born British photographer and the maker of the first completely nonobjective photographs.
Coburn began taking photographs when he received a camera as a gift on his eighth birthday, but it was not until 1899, when he met the photographer Edward Steichen, that he became a serious photographer. In the same year Coburn contributed to two important exhibitions: the New School of American Pictorial Photography exhibition and the Salon of the Linked Ring, a group of English photographers who worked to establish photography as an art.
In 1902 Coburn opened a studio in New York City to exhibit his prints, and in that same year he was elected to the newly formed Photo-Secession, a group of American photographers whose aims were similar to those of the Linked Ring. The following year he was elected a member of the Linked Ring. After working for a year in the New York studio of Gertrude Käsebier, a leading Photo-Secessionist, Coburn returned to Boston, where his style was influenced by his discovery of the ink paintings of the Japanese master Sesshū.
In 1904 Coburn left for London with a commission to photograph celebrities. Among the memorable portraits he made there were those of the writers George Meredith (1904) and Henry James (1906) and the sculptor Auguste Rodin (1906). He even made a nude portrait of George Bernard Shaw (1906) posed as Rodin’s well-known sculpture The Thinker. Coburn’s portraits were collected and published in the books Men of Mark (1913) and More Men of Mark (1922).
Reuben Jay Flick (1871-1940): He was born at Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, the grandson of Paul Flick who emigrated to America from Holland and founded Flicksville. On graduating from Princeton University (1894), he took a controlling share in his father's extensive coal mines but started his career as Treasurer and Business Manager of The Wilkes-Barre Times before serving as it President and Editor from 1905 to 1907. Through his father's business interests, he was President of the Pittston Gas Company; the Wilkes-Barre Lace Company; the Bethlehem Gas Company; Vineland (New Jersey) Light & power Company; Mahonoy City Gas Company; Consumer's Gas Company; and, Wyandotte Gas Company. He was a director of the Wyoming Valley Trust Company; the Ann Arbor Railroad; George W. Jackson Company; and, the Hazard Manufacturing Company. In 1918, he was director of the Bureau of Construction for the American Red Cross.
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