Census of Known Copies of Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Edition for the Million

This is a draft post. I’m not concerned with the financial value of these copies, unless I’m trying to buy one. They are interesting to me for their publication history. But if monetary value is your interest, see the note to booksellers and collectors at end of post.

I am preparing a census of known copies of the Edition for the Million! (1852/1853) version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Below is an in-progress snap-shot of the search, which lists those copies of which I am currently aware. No system of ordering or arranging the copies is yet settled upon, though the post concludes with a reflection on what such a system would require, if built as a database.

Personal Copy I
Title page slug has 193,000 copies sold. Printed title paper present. Rear end papers are missing. Spine absent. Text block fair to good. Untrimmed.

Personal Copy II
Title page slug has 153,000 copies, 306,000 volumes. Paper wrappers, both title and end papers, are missing. Spine absent. Text block fair to poor. Trimmed very close, sometimes edging text block.

Personal Copy III
Title page slug has 183,000 copies. Paper wrappers present. Spine absent. Text block good. Trimmed but with wide margin. Some pencil markings.

University of Miami, Ohio, Special Collections
Reported in online catalog. OCLC No. 1107483. 153,000 COPIES, Rebound, paper cover missing, advertisements present. Free endpapers. Prominent waterstain from front wrapper to page nineteen. Many discolored pages, including four leaf pressings.

University of Miami, Ohio
Bound with Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Institutional copy not held by Special Collections. No LOC record.

University of Chicago Library, Lincoln Collection
Reported in online catalog. No number statement. (OCLC 26297218, Call No. PS2954.U5 1853)

SUNY Morrisville
Three hundred and fifth thousand. Bound with A Key. (OCLC 1107483)

Stowe-Day Foundation Library
810.016 S892, bound with Key. No number statement. (OCLC 03796420)
Rare Books 810 S892, (1852), 163,000 copies — 326,000 volumes. (OCLC 29289660)
Rare Books 810 S892, (1852), 153,000 copies — 306,000 volumes. (OCLC 17762356)
Rare Books 810 S892, (1852) “203,000 copies already published in America. / Two hundred and thirty-third thousand.” (OCLC 29289787)
Rare Books 810 S892, (1852) “223,000 copies already published in America. / Two hundred and thirteenth thousand.” (OCLC 29289700)
3 Copies, no number statement in catalog (OCLC 26297218)

Hartford – Connecticut Historical Society Library
1 Copy, no number statement in catalog (OCLC 26297218)

Dartmouth College, New Hampshire
Reported in online catalog. Bound with A Key, Boston, 1853. (OCLC 79203208)

Kenyon College
Reported on OCLC, 1107483. But copy does not appear in online catalog. Query made to librarians in January. No response.

Seton Hill University, Reeves
Reported in online catalog. Bound with A Key, Boston, 1853. Two hundred and thirteenth thousand. (OCLC 1107483)

Georgetown University, Lauinger.
Reported in online catalog. Bound with A Key, Boston, 1853. No number statement. (OCLC 26297218)

University of Iowa
Reported in online catalog. Bound with A Key, Boston, 1853. No number statement. (Listed in OCLC 26297218, but link to WorldCat broken. See System Number 000598815)

University of Virginia, Small Special Collections
Reported in online catalog. 245th Thousand, 1853. Publisher’s advertisements. (OCLC 1107483)

Reported under same OCLC Number 1107483
Chicago History Museum
Hamilton College Library
Lawrence University
Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library
Trinity College
Western Illinois University
Missouri History Museum
Brown University
Wellesley College
Brandeis University Library
Atlantic School of Theology
Miami-Dade Public Library System
University of Texas at Austin, Harry Ransom Center
California State University, Long Beach

Note: It is unlikely that all would be marked 245th thousand. Not mis-cataloged, exactly, but further investigation is needed of each individual copy.

OCLC No. 9158851
Case Western Reserve (2 copies)

OCLC No. 32937105
Wittenberg University (bound with Key, two hundred seventy-fifth thousand)

OCLC No. 1107483
State Library of Ohio (Bound with Key, Three hundred and fifth thousand)

University of Miami, Ohio, Special Collections
OCLC No. 3796420 (Bound with Key, no number statement)

Notice the variety of OCLC WorldCat numbers for bindings and number sold statements on this “edition”:
03796420
05428664
1107483
17762356
26297218
29289700
29289787
32937105
3796420
79203208
9158851

Search So Far

The search is based primarily on OCLC WorldCat. I have also consulted Parfait, for which notes below.

Claire Parfait in The Publishing History of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 1852–2002 (2007) reports the following printing slugs on title pages, some based on Margaret Hildreth in Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Bibliography (1975), designated MH: 153,000, 163,000 (MH), 173,000, 193,000, 203,000 (MH), 213,000, 223,000, 230,000 (MH), 233,000, 245,000 (NUC). According to Parfait, cover and title pages after 213,000 bear different imprint dates (1852 or 1853). After 295,000, volumes bear date 1853.

I am cautious about Parfait’s results. Parfait appears to base some work on personal examination, but her statement on sources does not distinguish those slugs based on personal examination and those based on catalogs. Also, the work relies in part on the National Union Catalog, which has been superseded by WorldCat. I also hesitate to trust Hildreth’s biography.

For the original census, I believe that the most thorough system is the arrangement by OCLC catalog number. However, such a system will not serve for what I need to do, to examine multiple printings. In choosing those, I need to be certain of what the title page slug says about the number printed. Librarians may not necessarily group same printing slug under same catalog number, so this temporary system will need to be revised. I believe that this will require something closer to a database record. And these will be the fields:

Print Date (1852, 1853, or other?)
No Printed Slug
Number of Pages
Cover Present
Bound with Key
Ad Pages
Institution
Bibliographic State (1, 2, 3, etc., if applicable)
Institutional Location
Available for ILL
OCLC Catalog No.
Description
Damage Level (Bookseller Categories, supplemented by text field?)

Note to Booksellers and Collectors: If you have a copy of the John P. Jewett’s paperback printing of Uncle Tom’s Cabin dated 1852 or 1853, booksellers often sell it as an “affordable alternative” to the two-volume edition. This work is preliminary, but it seems clear that libraries hold 40-plus copies of the paperback printing. Affordable is relative, as prices at present moment (early 2009) range from $40 or $50 to upwards of $300, depending on condition. Booksellers seem not to distinguish between early and late printings in assigning values. But if you’d like to, my belief is that the title slug 153,000 probably represent the early printings of paperback. I’m curious about paperback printings later than 245th thousand, and I’d welcome queries about privately held copies.

American Literature: The State Department History

The State Department has published a “Revised Edition” of “Outline of American Literature,” by Kathryn VanSpanckeren. In the section on the fiction of 1820-1860, Walt Whitman, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson, and the Transcendentalists represent the first great literary generation [...].”

On Stowe, not one of the greats, the essay has inaccuracies and curious emphases. VanSpanckeren emphasizes Uncle Tom’s service to St. Clare and belittles sentimentality–”The most touching scenes show an agonized slave mother unable to help her screaming child and a father sold away from his family. These were crimes against the sanctity of domestic love.” The mother in the first case is presumably Cassy (Aunt Hagar and Lucy and Dinah are also torn away from children, though “screaming child” not part of those scenes) and the second Tom. The phrase “crimes against the sanctity” seems aimed to demean Stowe’s politics. UTC does not “represent” the first great “literary” generation because it appeals to emotion and an ideology which affirms reform that originates from religious conviction and domestic transformation. So why, exactly, should that disqualify the work from “greatness”?

A partial explanation of why one group of literary figures is “great,” and another is not, may reside in a comment on Michael Wigglesworth’s Day of Doom: “It is terrible poetry — but everybody loved it.” Now that sounds to me like a good reason to read it. We face one of the legacies of industrial book publication and Modernist suspicion of popularity: those works which are loved by the public, such as those written by Hawthorne’s “scribbling women,” must be terrible. Since popularity equals badness, the State Department survey does not seek to determine whether likes and dislikes from past moments might lead us to question whether our current definitions of artistic excellence reflect not timeless judgments but our historical context. Or maybe the strange citation that serves as judgment on Dickinson explains the ideology of literary appreciation from the State Department, from R. P. Blackmur, that her poetry “sometimes feels as if a cat came at us speaking English.’ ” As Stowe said of young George St. Clare, our literary critic is “dangerously witty.” Blackmur is clever, and one can pardon a slip–Homer nods and all–but a quip that seems at best obfuscatory highlights the contradictions in identifying “great” literature without investigating why some works are excluded from the concept of greatness. If a poem impersonates a cat speaking English, then it’s great?

While the essay acknowledges that works like Harriet Wilson’s have been “overlooked until recently,” it persists with generic categories of “great literature” and fails to inquire whether works characterized as outputs of particular identity formations–Stowe, Wilson, and Douglass are in category “Women Writers and Reformers”–might invite a reconsideration of the category of literary quality. The profession of American literary and cultural studies has moved to a study of a wide range of texts from authors formerly forgotten, dismissed because female, dismissed because popular, dismissed because regional, dismissed because ethnic. And such a range of interests befits a multiethnic, multicultural, and multilingual society. Yes, the United States (and the land masses on which the political entity formed) is multilingual, and it always has been. See Marc Shell and Werner Sollors’ Multilingual Anthology of American Literature. In the State Department version of literary history, multiculturalism is a recent development, part of Contemporary American Literature.

Stowe is not alone among newly recognized writers to receive short shrift. When discussing realism, Twain is a writer in his own category. But I would think that the category of “Black Writers” deserves revision. Charles Waddell Chesnutt may be called black for the same reason that Barack Obama is called black. But like Obama he’s also white. To categorize Chesnutt as black says as much about America’s continuing legacy of racial concepts as it does about Chesnutt.

The essay is certainly serviceable as an introduction to American literature. But the scholarly canons of pre-20th-century literature have been re-shaped by the same trends that make 20th-century literature multicultural. The survey could be improved, both as a representative of the contemporary study of American literature and as a product of the State Department–whose purpose might be to foster dialogue with other nations–if the essay offered more attention to multicultural American literature and less emphasis on those works whose distinctive Americanness is taken as a mark of greatness. It may be that the works that represent vibrant multicultural traditions will be enduring as well.

And dear sub-sub aide to Madame Secretary, if by some freakish coincidence your department has become aware of this brief comment, this is not a guide for a thorough revision. Please appoint a committee with an advisory board of eminent scholars in American literature. Tell them to get right to work. In my dream-fantasy, the next mid-term election will turn on the State Department’s most recent revision of the history of American literature.