Novels

Novels & Romances

I guess the novel has a wider appeal to the general public than to any other form of writing. The novel as you may exerts a fascination over those in the highest and lowest intellectuals and social brackets

In its original form the word 'novel' meant a new and freshly told story, thus distinguishing it from the legends and fables of previous years. The novel still exhibits and mirrors life, both present, past, and future and no signs of flagging. The dreamer novelist still pushes and shoves for recognition and the manuscripts of that dreamer lies piles high on the tables and desks of publishers world wide.

The most important novels and editions of those writers who actually made the grade have been sought by collectors for many years. The well known authors and titles that have become household names will be costly acquisitions if looked for in acceptable state in the original bindings. Now your book-hunting skills and the patience comes into play and still not even your cheque-book will corner The Macdermotts of Ballycloran, 1847 by Anthony Trollope, or Wuthering Heights, 1847, by Emily Bronte, plus a number of other titles that have all but disappeared. So you may have to collect those who were despised and forgotten where no bibliographical catalogue of published titles exist. Most of the lesser none authors possibly fell into the paper pulp salvage during the two world worlds or were finished off on the garden bonfire,. but some escaped, safely hidden in the nooks and crannies, or cared for by elderly folks who looked after the books they inherited. these are the books, the quarry us collectors which often bring results for a small expenditure.

Mark Twain ( Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 1835-1910) can into writing Smiley and his Jumping Frog, 1865, and shortly after become a popular lecturer. When he went on a cruise in the Mediterranean in 1867 it influenced The Innocents Abroad, 1869 to be followed by Roughing It, 1872, the story of his life in Nevada. I guess his own childhood resulted in several great novels: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, 1876, Life on the Mississippi, 1883, and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Mark Twain may have been one of the great genius the West produced; but there was other remarkable literary talent at work during his lifetime. Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914) did the Tales of Soldiers and Civilians, 1891; while Jack London (1876-1916) who took part in the Klondike gold rush in 1897, made good use of his experiences in The Son of the Wolf, 1900, the fist of his tales set in the frozen north. The Call of the Wild, New York, 1903 and The Sea-Wolf can still be collected with a small outlay.

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-64) had published his Scarlet Letter at Boston in 1850, the scene of the story being in some town in the Puritan New England in the 17th century, The House of Green gables followed in 1851, published by Ticknor, Reed & Fields who do so many best-sellers of that time. Hermann Melville's Moby Dick, 1851, dealt with man's sin, as had Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter. Henry David Thoreau (1817-620, rebelled against the materialistic values of the modern society of his times and disappeared to a self-built cabin by Walden Pond. Walden; Life in the Woods, 1854, was an account of his life there, displaying an independence of thought , observations of nature and the rural world around him. His other works include A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers, 1854, The Maine Woods, 1864, and Cape Cod, 1865.

Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875-1950) came out with the first issue Tarzan of the Apes, 1914, published by A.C. McClurg & Co, Chicago, in a very long line of Tarzan books.

George Orwell's nightmare story of totalitarianism Nineteen Eighty-Four (US$1100), 1949, and Aldous Huxley's equally chilling Brave New World, 1932, are both difficult first editions to acquire.

James Fennimore Cooper (1789-1851) in his youth listed to the tales of the Indian wars told by his father Judge William Cooper, himself an author of A Guide in the Wilderness, 1810, and added color to his father's tales by his own expeditions into the backwoods. The Pathfinder, 1840, and The Deerslayer, 1841, continued the series of Leather-Stocking tales, The Last of the Mohicans, 1826, and The Prairie, 1827. Backwoodsman Natty Bumppo was the central character in these novels. Around the mid-1830's he became internationally famous went he created the legend of the redskin and the Paleface and the countless bow-stringed adventures that continued in the western novels and films to the present day.

Whatever reference book you choose such as collecting 19th-century fiction by the late Micheal Sadleir in XIXth Century Fiction, 1951, you will find representative first editions of novels that became household names by reason of their literary worth. from W. H. Ainsworth (1805-82), R. D. Blackmore, the Bronte sisters, Bulwer Lytton, William Carleton, Charles Dickens, Conan Doyle, George Eliot, Mrs. Gaskell, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, Henry Wood, and Emile Zola, there is a field so wide that you will need a keen sense of direction to guide your collecting. Unless you possess unlimited shelf-room and the resources to keep filling room after room, then certain disciplines must be observed. To try to collect the lot, even with limitations imposed by insisting on good to fine copies in original bindings, is to become hemmed in with rising walls of inconsumable fiction. This type of collecting all is better left to the Library of Congress or The British Museum. The private collector can make contributions to bibliographical studies by specializing in one or more aspects of novel collecting.
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