Toni Morrison at work. Photo by Jill Krementz.

Both sides of Toni Morrison’s family left the deep South and settled in Ohio in the 1930s due to racial threats and lynchings. With this unsettling background left behind, Toni Morrison’s parents bore her into the diverse community of Lorain, Ohio. Italians, Polish, and Jewish immigrants, white people and black people all went to the same school together and played together. Unlike her parents and grandparents, Morrison felt she entered the world with little personal fear or distrust of white people. Morrison has become known for her ability to communicate a pure view of the daily life of African-Americans from the period of slavery to modern times.

Toni Morrison during her years as an editor at Random House (1970s). Photo by Jill Krementz.

Morrison studied literature at Howard University and completed her Masters at Cornell University. After seven years of teaching and the break-up of her marriage with two kids in tow, she took a job as a textbook editor. Later she became an editor at Random House where she championed black writers. Reflective of her upbringing, Morrison wanted for herself and other black writers to simply write as a black people. In a 1992 interview with The Paris Review, Morrison explains:

“It’s very important to me that my work be African-American. If it assimilates into a different or larger pool, so much the better. But I shouldn’t be asked to do that. Joyce is not asked to do that. Tolstoy is not. I mean, they can all be Russian, French, Irish or Catholic, they write out of where they came from, and I do too.”

In a recent interview with the New York Times, Morrison elaborates:

“What I’m interested in is writing without the gaze, without the white gaze . . . In so many earlier books by African-American writers particularly by the men, I felt that they were not writing to me.”

After the publication of “Beloved,” a group of black writers and intellectuals signed and published a statement in the New York Times admonishing the publishing industry for not honoring Toni Morrison with the National Book Award or the Pulitzer Prize. Though Morrison has never won the National Book Award, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1988 for “Beloved” and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993. She remains the only black woman recipient of Nobel Prize for Literature and the only American to have won the Prize since John Steinbeck in 1962.

At age 84, Toni Morrison has published 11 novels. “Beloved” was brought to mainstream readers when Oprah chose the novel for her book club and made it into a film in 1998. Over the years, Morrison’s early works, from “The Bluest Eye” (1970) to “Beloved” (1987), have become highly collectible. Because Morrison has made herself available for book signings and Knopf has offered select booksellers pre-signed books, signed first editions of Morrison’s later works have been accessible for collectors. However, as Morrison ages and readers appreciate her work more, signed editions may become harder to find and may increase in value.

Morrison’s new novel, “God Help the Child,” goes on sale Tuesday, April 21, 2015.

See all of Lemuria’s first editions by Toni Morrison here.

Written by Lisa Newman

The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway. Scribner and Sons, 1952.

The Old Man and the Sea first appeared as a 20-page insert in the September 1, 1952 issue of LIFE magazine. After Hemingway’s friend and Broadway producer Leland Hayward talked about the novel with enthusiasm at a LIFE editorial lunch, Hayward sent a manuscript to the editorial board at LIFE. Hemingway believed so strongly in the story of The Old Man and the Sea that he agreed to release the novel through a LIFE magazine insert two weeks before the book’s release.

Hemingway wrote to Daniel Longwell, LIFE Editorial Board Chairman:

“Don’t you think it is a strange damn story that it should affect all of us (me especially) the way it does? . . . I’m very excited about the book and that it is coming out in LIFE so that many people will read it who could not afford to buy it.”

Five million copies of the magazine sold within two days. Two weeks later the novel was issued in book form with a first edition printing of 50,000 copies and a simultaneous Book of the Month Club publication.

After winning the hearts of Americans, the Pulitzer and Nobel Prizes, Hemingway reflected on the novel in a December 1954 interview with Time magazine:

“‘No good book has ever been written that has in it symbols arrived at beforehand and stuck in,’ says Hemingway. ‘That kind of symbol sticks out like raisins in raisin bread. Raisin bread is all right, but plain bread is better.’ He opens two bottles of beer and continues: ‘I tried to make a real old man, a real boy, a real sea and a real fish and real sharks. But if I made them good and true enough they would mean many things. The hardest thing is to make something really true and sometimes truer than true.'”

Collectors of fine first editions should look for Scribner’s seal and the letter “A” on the copyright page as the notation for first printing. Be aware of the Book of the Month club edition: the jacket will be missing the $3.00 price and “Book of the Month” will be noted; there will also be a nick or embossment on the bottom right of the hardcover, near the spine. Signed editions greatly increase the value of the book.

See all of Lemuria’s first editions by Hemingway here. 

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

“The Silence of the Lambs” by Thomas Harris. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988.

Mississippi has a long history of producing some of the greatest literary and commercially successful writers. Consider William Faulkner, Richard Wright, Eudora Welty, John Grisham, and Greg Iles; and then add Thomas Harris, author of “The Silence of the Lambs,” to the list.

Thomas Harris was born in Jackson, Tennessee in 1940, but grew up in Rich, Mississippi—near Clarksdale—where his father moved the family to take up farming. Harris was a quiet kid who read everything he could get his hands on. His mother said, “’he is the most gentle person I have ever known’” in a rare interview with the author and his mother in New York magazine in 1991. So how did such a gentle man come to write such a brilliant blend of crime suspense and horror fiction?

Harris majored in English at Baylor University in Waco, Texas where his uncle was a physician. While in Waco, Harris worked night shifts at the Waco News, often covering gruesome crime stories. His colleagues noted his relentless pursuit of every angle to get the story right. Friends and colleagues also saw Harris’s undeniable talent in writing short fictional pieces for magazine publication. Upon graduation, Harris took another night shift at the AP office in New York where he also covered copious crime stories, but this time Harris and two friends/fellow reporters came up with an idea for a novel based on a true story. Putnam bought the story and the friends split the advance three ways. Eventually, Harris quit his job to turn the story into the novel, “Black Sunday,” which was released in 1975.

It’s 1981: Enter Harris’s disturbing Hannibal Lecter in “Red Dragon,” which was published with moderate success. Hannibal takes center stage in “The Silence of the Lambs” in 1988 as the book hit the national best seller list. The success of “Silence of the Lambs” only grew as the blockbuster film starring Anthony Hopkins and Jodi Foster won an historic five Oscars. (As a further honor, the film has since been preserved in the National Film Registry at the Library of Congress.) Harris received a five-million dollar advance for his next two books, “Hannibal” and “Hannibal Rising.”

Collecting Thomas Harris’s books is no easy task. Over the years, the shy author would rather be cooking gourmet meals or writing than giving interviews or book talks. His publishers have never issued any special signed limited editions, and the few signed books mostly come from random circumstances.

See all of Lemuria’s first editions by Thomas Harris here. 

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

“Atlas Shrugged” by Ayn Rand. New York: Random House, 1957.

Ayn Rand was a Russian-American novelist, philosopher and playwright best-known for her novels “The Fountainhead” and “Atlas Shrugged.” Rand was a pioneer of Objectivist philosophy—a system of thought which operates on the tenants of rational self-interest and happiness, and the pursuit of individual freedoms as exemplified in laissez-faire capitalism. Rand used fiction to bring this philosophy to a broad audience beginning with “The Fountainhead” in 1943. Since then, she has inspired both the most devout followers and the severest critics, but her passionate fervor for her work has fascinated individuals of all philosophical bents.

Despite the success of “The Fountainhead,” Rand was nervous about attaining a publisher for “Atlas Shrugged.” One passage of the novel featured a 35,000 word speech. Rand did not want any of it edited. Rand visited 15 publishers, including, Bennett Cerf at Random House. Unbeknownst to Cerf, Rand kept a chart of each publisher’s reaction, noting what was said at each meeting. Cerf reflected on their meeting in his memoir “At Random”:

“’I came out very high [on the chart] because I had been absolutely honest with her.’ I had said, ‘I find your political philosophy abhorrent.’ Nobody else had dared tell her this. ‘If we publish you, Miss Rand, nobody is going to try to censor you. You write anything you please, in fiction at least, and we’ll publish it, whether or not we approve.’”

Random House released “Atlas Shrugged” on October 10, 1957 with a limited number of promotional dollar-sign cigarettes. Critics sounded their disapproval of Rand’s philosophy. A small number of her fans, however, had the trade first edition individually rebound in a fine binding, often of full leather. The result is an undetermined number of one-of-a-kind bindings of “Atlas Shrugged.” These personal treasures are still very collectible.

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

“Where I’m Calling From” by Raymond Carver. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1988.

Raymond Carver died at the age of fifty but during his brief career he revived the short story form during the 1980s. His short story collection, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” made him famous and writers have sought to emulate him ever since—Tobias Wolff, Amy Hempel, Richard Ford, Ann Beattie, Alice Munro, Nadine Gordimer, William Trevor, and others. Scholars have compared their work to Somerset Maugham, Guy du Maupassant and Anton Chekhov.

Raymond Carver had a legendary relationship with his editor Gordon Lish, who took a heavy hand with Carver’s work. While editing “What We Talk About” Lish got ahead of him and the final manuscript was sent to Knopf before Carver could stop some of Lish’s significant changes. While Carver was upset he also expressed gratitude for Lish’s work and the collection set his literary career and brought great financial gain which he and his wife desperately needed.

Uncorrected Proof. Atlantic Monthly Press. 1989.

In contrast to “What We Talk About,” Carver’s final collection of stories, “Where I’m Calling From” was edited by Gary Fisketjon who worked at the Atlantic Monthly Press at the time. Fisketjon noted in Carver’s biography by Carol Skelnicka:

“’The main reason Ray and I wanted to do a ‘new and selected’ with Where I’m Calling From was to show how steadily his work had evolved and to shuck the moronic ‘minimalist’ label.’”

Limited Edition. Signed. Franklin Library Edition. 1988.

Fisketjon, who had read many of Carver’s stories in their earlier magazine versions, said, “Where I’m Calling From is the definitive edition of Ray’s stories. Those are the stories that Ray wanted to restore.”

Carver’s title story “What We Talk About” appears in the Oscar-winning film “Birdman.” During the film, the main character, Riggins—played by Michael Keaton, rehearses a play adaptation of Carver’s story. Whether you’ve seen the movie or not, it’s a great time to read Raymond Carver again, or maybe even delightfully, for the first time.

For reading, The Collected Stories published by the Library of America contains both Lish’s edit of “What We Talk About” and Carver’s version plus several insightful essays by Carver.

For collecting, the uncorrected proof of “Where I’m Calling From”–which contains the story “What We Talk About”–is particularly meaningful noting Carver’s literary journey and that he would pass away several months later in 1988.

See all of Lemuria’s collectible books by Raymond Carver here.