Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner. New York, NY: Random House, 1936.

William Faulkner’s ninth novel, “Absalom, Absalom!,” focuses on the life of Thomas Sutpen, a poor white Virginian who moves to Mississippi during the 1830s with aspirations of becoming a wealthy planter. Sutpen’s story is told through flashbacks narrated mostly by Quentin Compson. Quentin’s roommate, Shreve, at Harvard University listens and periodically offers suggestions and conjecture. It takes a long time to get Sutpen’s actual story as events are reinterpreted. “Absalom,” while it has been one of the most praised Southern novels of all time, is also one of the most challenging (yet rewarding) to read.

Certainly, no one was more aware of the complexity of “Absalom” than Faulkner himself. After much editorial work, Faulkner created three reader’s guides to appear at the end of the book: a genealogy, a chronology, and a map of Yoknapatawpha County. The map was special because the publisher had to pay extra to have it tipped in to the first 6,000 copies; the map was also printed in two colors. Random House was eager to make the book as beautiful as possible because “Absalom” was Random House’s first Faulkner book to publish. Earlier that year, Bennett Cerf of Random House had bought Smith & Haas, a small publisher that had been struggling to make a profit even though it had a line of great authors. Cerf wrote in his memoir “that getting [Faulkner] on our list was the best part of the deal.”

A tradition of issuing a signed limited edition had already been established with Faulkner’s previous publisher Smith & Haas. Blank sheets would be sent to Faulkner’s Rowan Oak residence and he would sign them and then the pages would be tipped in, or bound in, to a limited number of specially designed books. Faulkner was very particular about signing books. If he did sign a trade edition, he often inscribed them. In Joseph Blotner’s biography, Faulkner commented on signing books in a conversation with the famous publisher Alfred A. Knopf:

“’People stop me on the street and in the elevators and ask me to sign books, but I can’t afford to do this because special signed books are part of my stock-in-trade. Aside from that, I only sign books for my friends.’”

Faulkner reportedly signed just one of Mr. Knopf’s books.

When Faulkner received the blank sheets from Random House to sign for the limited edition of “Absalom, Absalom!,” he didn’t sign them. He had been hospitalized for drinking. Finally, he recovered enough to sign them. The first sheets were set aside for shaky hand writing, number one was inscribed to his lover Meta Carpenter “wherever she may be,” and the other 299 copies went up for sale. “Absalom” is one of the most beautiful of the limited editions with green and white decorated boards, a green cloth spine with gilt lettering, a hand drawn fold-out map, and William Faulkner’s signature.

See all of Lemuria’s first editions by William Faulkner here. 

Written by Lisa Newman,  A version of this column was published in The Clarion-Ledger’s Sunday Mississippi Books page.

“Breathing Lessons” by Anne Tyler. Franklin Library: Philadelphia, PA: 1988.

The Franklin Library of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania published some of the most beautiful leather bound books of the twentieth century. In operation from the early 1970s until 2000, the press published collectible books in three different styles: full genuine leather, imitation leather, and quarter-bound genuine leather. The books were released in several series: The 100 Greatest Books of All Time, The Great Books of the Western World, Pulitzer Prize Classics and the Signed First Editions series. Franklin Library provided an affordable way to enhance a library’s look and feel. Besides being aesthetically pleasing to many collectors, the fine craftsmanship of the books ensure they can be handed down from generation to generation.

The Signed First Edition series gave readers a way to have a signed book from authors that might otherwise be inaccessible. One example is “Breathing Lessons” by Anne Tyler. During the 1980s, Tyler was nominated twice for the Pulitzer Prize for “Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant” and “The Accidental Tourist.” The Franklin Library honored her in 1988 with a leather bound Signed First Edition of “Breathing Lessons,” for which she finally won the Pulitzer Prize. Tyler has always been a private author, declining book tours and rarely giving interviews. Although her publisher Knopf has worked over the years to distribute pre-signed trade editions, they are always of limited number. And a note for Anne Tyler fans–Tyler released her twentieth novel, “A Spool of Blue Thread” in February 2015.

Other beautiful books in the Signed First Edition series include: “Where I’m Calling From” by Raymond Carver and “Eva Luna” by Isabella Allende.

The Franklin Library also issued signed books which were not first editions but allowed the book lover the opportunity to collect a major work like “The Moviegoer” signed by Walker Percy.

Written by Lisa Newman,  A version of this column was published in The Clarion-Ledger’s Sunday Mississippi Books page.

Jubilee by Margaret Walker. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966.

Poet Nikki Giovianni described her good friend Margaret Walker as “the most famous person nobody knows.” While known for her signature poem “For My People,” her novel Jubilee was the first modern novel on slavery.

Walker’s parents were both teachers and always encouraged her to do well in school as they moved from Birmingham to Meridian to New Orleans. By the Great Depression, Walker had finished college at Northwestern and was working for the WPA Writer’s Project with Richard Wright in Chicago. Her collection of poems, For My People, was published in 1942 by Yale Press and she became the first black woman to be awarded Yale Younger Poets Prize. Her literary reputation was established.

Despite this literary success, Walker had an even greater and perhaps an even more personal ambition: to write a novel based on the life of her grandmother. Jubilee was a thirty-year labor of love for Walker. The novel was to span slavery, civil war and reconstruction. She immersed herself in historical records and slave narratives, collected the stories of her family and visited old home sites while juggling the responsibilities of teaching and raising a family with four children. Sadly, Walker’s grandmother died before the Jubilee was published in 1966.

Jubilee is significant because until the 1960s black historical fiction had hardly been attempted by black writers. Jubilee was the first novel to be written by a black writer from slavery to reconstruction from the daily perspective of the black population. That Walker took 30 years to research it from a historical perspective while maintaining the heart of the story gleaned from her grandmother’s stories is no surprise. Scholars have credited Walker with paving the way for other black historical novels like Ernest Gaines’s The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman and Toni Morrison’s Beloved.

Margaret Walker devoted her life to teaching and her community at Jackson State University for thirty years before retiring in 1980. As Walker was involved in her community, many may cherish signed copies of her work. For collectors, first editions of Jubilee can be found at a reasonable price though signed copies are scarce.

Learn more about Margaret Walker’s Centennial Celebration at the Margaret Walker Center.

Written by Lisa Newman,  A version of this column was published in The Clarion-Ledger’s Sunday Mississippi Books page.

The Wide Net by Eudora Welty. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co. 1943.

While Eudora Welty composed “A Still Moment,” one of eight stories in The Wide Net, the noise of World War II surrounded her. In 1941, the Royal Netherlands Military Flying School was located at Hawkins Field in Jackson. As a further reminder of the time, the 1943 first edition of The Wide Net and Other Stories bears an advertisement for war bonds:

“This book, like all books, is a symbol of liberty and the freedom for which we fight. You, as a reader of books, can do your share in the desperate battle to protect those liberties. Buy War Bonds.”

Three real-life characters converge on the Natchez Trace in “A Still Moment.” Itinerant preacher Lorenzo Dow in search of souls, James Murrell, a storied outlaw of the Trace, whose mission through murder and crime was to “destroy the present,” and John James Audubon, the great recorder of American birds in their natural habitats, meet beside “a great forked tree” and are transfixed by a snow-white heron.

As Dow, Murrell, and Audubon were in awe of the bird, so Eudora Welty must have been captivated by Audubon’s descriptions of travel and painting up and down the Trace and the Mississippi River during the early 1800s. While recording the birds of the deep South, Audubon visited Natchez where he painted $5 charcoal portraits to support his travels. Further south in Louisiana, he rested in the long-gone Bayou Sara—one of the largest shipping ports between New Orleans and Natchez before 1860–where his wife set up a profitable teaching practice for a short time. Audubon even stopped in Jackson on May 1, 1823 when the capital was only one-year-old. He described the village in the wilderness as “a mean place, a rendezvous for gamblers and vagabonds” in Life of Audubon.

First editions of The Wide Net and Other Stories are scarce in good condition and dust jackets are usually marred, in a somewhat charming way, by faded pink print on the spine.

Written by Lisa Newman,  A version of this column was published in The Clarion-Ledger’s Sunday Mississippi Books page.