Birth of the first: Authenticity and the collecting of modern first editions, 1890-1930

• Main Author: Thompson, Madeleine Myfanwy
• Format: Dissertation
• Language: English
• Subjects: modern history; modern literature
• ISBN: 9781303535611; 1303535610

The last two decades of the nineteenth century saw the rise in Britain and America of what several contemporary critics dubbed a "mania" for modern first editions as book collectors trained their sights on authors who were contemporaries and, in some cases, still living. Prices for modern authors reached unmatched heights in the collectors' market, and both bibliophilic publications and general interest newspapers and magazines closely covered the trend. Rapidly developing throughout the 1890s and booming during the 1920s, the so-called mania for modern firsts eventually peaked during the early 1930s.
Drawing heavily on original research, my dissertation explores the collectors, booksellers, authors, publishers, and books central to this collecting trend. To some extent, I offer a history of the early practice of collecting modern first editions. At the same time, I propose that this form of book collecting signaled imperatives and desires central to the times and places in which it flourished. I thus consider how the modern firsts trend intersected with the development of modern literary scholarship, the cult of authorial celebrity, changing attitudes toward books, the history of the genteel tradition, and economic motivations of the book trade. Yet even as this constellation of factors points to the complex reasons for the trend's development, a common preoccupation with authenticity runs throughout period's literature on modern firsts collecting. Those writing about modern firsts dwelled not only on what marked a "true" first but also on what validated the collecting of one author over another; furthermore, they obsessed over the authenticity of collectors and what it meant to be a legitimately cultured person. The field of modern firsts and its inherently speculative nature raised questions about what books should be collected, who should be collecting them, and who had the authority to make these decisions.