The Pick of the Pocket Editions

During the early 1970s I read most of Anthony Trollope’s novels. This was encouraged by my boss, Handasyde Buchanan, and by an American friend who read them at the same sort of pace and later assembled a wonderful collection of first editions. The novels provided us with infinite hours of pleasure and also introduced us to the perfect reading format for nineteenth-century novels, the World’s Classics, published by the Oxford University Press. The original World’s Classics were clearly printed on good-quality paper, bound ‘in superfine art cloth’, and they could be carried anywhere and everywhere in a pocket. They have also become my private litmus test for second-hand bookshops. If I find a couple of shelves, ideally including favourite titles like The Real Charlotte or The Nebuly Coat or Stanhope’s Conversations with Wellington, I can be fairly sure that the bookseller is a reader and that his stock is worth investigating. If I find obvious duds – the novels of Constance Holme, say, or odd volumes of English Critical Essays – that have probably languished on the same shelf for several years, or if there is no sign at all of the small dark-blue covers, I know I’m probably wasting my time.

For those like me who look out for, and sometimes even retain, useless knowledge, the first World’s Classic, published in 1901, was Jane Eyre; the last in the original pre-paperback series, published in 1973, was Crime and Punishment. The latter was No. 619, making the series many hundred volumes shorter than the original Everyman edition of classics, and many hundreds longer than the modern Everyman which started in 1992. If you had read even half of its remarkable range, you could consider yourself very widely read. It was the publisher Grant Richards who instigated World’s Classics, and Oxford only took over after the first sixty-six titles had appeared and Richards had gone bust. The Everyman series started soon after in 1906 with its first choice of fifty books, edited by Ernest Rhys. In Peter Sutcliffe’s informal history of the Oxford University Press, he makes an interesting comparison between these two products of ‘the golden age of reading’. World’s Classics inclined to be whimsical, ‘their small format not compatible with the reverential approach to Great Literature’, whereas Everyman ‘sought a solemn bond between publisher and reader’. Both series struck a popular chord, and World’s Classics helped to establish once and for all that Oxford was a general publisher. Trollope is responsible for thirty-seven titles in the series: thirty-five novels, Tales of All Countries which was called ‘First Series’ but never achieved a successor, and his vivid Autobiography. As committed Trollopians know, this is by no means the full oeuvre and it is interesting that several lesser-known novels like The Macdermots of Ballycloran (his first) and The Bertrams were published by the Bodley Head in a similar small format during the first years of the last century. In 1907 World’s Classics surprisingly chose The Three Clerks as their pioneer and, less surprisingly, waited until 1918 before they tried another, The Warden. Thereafter, with the enthusiastic support of Humphrey Milford who later became publisher to the Press, novels followed in quick succession, but they never included the Bodley Head titles; presumably Oxford felt that readers would have them already. Even so, this remained the best available run of Trollope until the complete set was published by the Trollope Society and the Folio Society between 1988 and 2000. My own Trollopes have always lived on the top shelf of a bookcase and my Tolstoys are on another top shelf elsewhere. The Tolstoys were left to me some years ago and date from the 1920s. They still have their original dust wrappers which not only protect them but also provide, on the verso, a list of the volumes of Biography, Essays, History, Letters, Criticism and Travel published in the series. And in case you miss this, a ten-page list of available titles, with extra information about ‘gift bindings’, is included at the back of each volume. The World’s Classics’ Tolstoys were translated by Aylmer Maude and his wife Louise. In contrast, Turgenev was being translated at the same time by Constance Garnett to appear under the Heinemann imprint in neat, dark green, as opposed to the Oxford blue, volumes. This means that you will only find one Turgenev in World’s Classics, A Nest of Gentlefolk, and one Chekhov for the same reason: Mrs Garnett had been commissioned by another publisher, Chatto & Windus, to translate his short stories and plays. The modern reader might speculate on what the Literary Great and Good would now deem to be World’s Classics. The original categories were alphabetically listed thus: Anthologies, Autobiography, Biography, The ‘Classics’, Drama, Essays and Belles Lettres, Fiction, History, Letters, Literary Criticism, Philosophy and Science, Poetry, Politics, Political Economy, Political Theory, Religion, Short Stories, Travel and Topography. Would you guess, even if you’d noticed three titles by Hazlitt in the first twenty-five published books, that, after Fiction, the most popular section was Essays and Belles Lettres? No category could be labelled ‘insular’ and the range of short stories, obviously popular with readers who travelled, is remarkably international. The first anthology was Polish Tales in 1921, followed by Persian Legends two years later. As suitable editors were found for different nationalities, so the collections appeared: Czech and Russian in 1925, Spanish and Austrian in 1928, French in 1932 and German in 1934. There was then a long gap before the first of two volumes of New Zealand stories was published in 1953, followed by two Australian collections, and single volumes devoted to Canadian, Yugoslav, Hungarian, Romanian and American stories, and Icelandic sagas. There were Welsh and Scottish collections too but not, surprisingly, any Irish ones. The authors who play no part in World’s Classics are those like Henry James, Hardy and Kipling whose pocket editions were minting money for Macmillan. Montrose was the only John Buchan, and Ivanhoe the only Walter Scott, presumably on the grounds that every educated gent had inherited at least one set of the Waverley novels. Nor did anything by Conrad appear until 1940, with Four Tales, which was later reprinted as The Nigger of the Narcissus and Other Tales. Edith Wharton has only one book in the series, The House of Mirth, whereas Mrs Gaskell and George Eliot were published in toto. Twenty-five years ago, Oxford University Press surprisingly decided to sell off its remaining stock of World’s Classics at £1 each. If Heywood Hill had had some extra storage space, we should have taken fifty copies of each of our favourite titles. We didn’t and I only remember the event because another American friend, more Dickensian than Trollopian, told me that his office was moving to Dallas, Texas, and that he would be needing large numbers of portable books to read while commuting from New York. He bought a copy of every remaindered title (there were well over 200), most of which he has now read. That tribute alone testifies to the taste of the editors over seventy years.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 6 © John Saumarez Smith 2005