In the “Tamerlane” extracts, as thus printed by Mr. Ingram, there were two textual misprints in the Preface, and five in the text; in the “Fugitive Pieces” there were at least five misprints, seriously affecting the sense. This assertion can easily be proved and cannot possibly be refuted. And now as to the claim to monopoly. Since the publication of his Belgravian article, shown to be valueless on account of its inaccuracy, nearly eight more years have elapsed, and until the announcement of the present venture, Mr. Ingram had made no attempt, and given no sign of his intention, to reissue the contents of Poe’s 1827 booklet, either separately or in any other shape. His claim to monopoly, therefore, is just as unreasonable and absurd as I have already proved his claim to discovery to be.

“There are several palpable errata,” as Mr. Ingram has remarked, “in Edgar Poe’s first book” (and which therefore all the more should have had no fresh ones superadded). These I have thought it best to correct, wherever they are perfectly obvious (a list of them and of proposed conjectural emendations is appended), and I have also reduced the orthography and punctuation to a uniform standard. The present case was not one where a facsimile reprint was desirable, — the typography, arrangement, size, and general appearance of the original edition being unsatisfactory in the extreme.

Should this attempt to perpetuate and preserve from destruction a little volume to which might hitherto have been applied the French bibliographer’s epithet of “introuvable,” prove acceptable to admirers and lovers of Poe, I hope eventually to have the opportunely of reissuing successively the hardly less rare volumes published by him at Baltimore in 1829 and at New York in 1831.

Richard Herne Shepherd.

 

P.S. — Mr. George Edward Woodberry, of Beverly, Mass., the author of an excellent “History of Wood-Engraving,” who is preparing a biography of Poe for the series of “American Men of Letters,” now publishing by Messrs. Houghton and Co., of Boston, writes to me (under date Jan. 1, 1884) as follows: —

“Of the original edition Mr. Ingram states that he has a copy, and thinks it unique because Poe stated that the edition was suppressed. I do not think it was suppressed, however, and as you may be interested in the matter I extend this note. The printer, Mr. Calvin F. S. Thomas, was a very obscure man, who had a printer’s shop at Boston only in that year; I have sought through all the Thomas families of Mass., Maine, Rhode Island, Maryland, Ohio, etc., to which he was likely to belong, and there is no trace of him. I can find no other book with his imprint. Consequently I suppose the edition to have been small and obscure. It was published between June and October, 1827, probably in June. It was not noticed or advertised, apparently, but it occurs in the North American Review’s quarterly list of new publications, in the October number, 1827 [vol. xxv. p. 471]. How Poe, a youth of eighteen, in a strange city, friendless and penniless as he was, persuaded this unknown printer to issue his volume, is a mystery to me. I have talked with old men, and had the printers and publishers who survive from that time interrogated, but though Boston was a small town, no one knew Thomas or ever heard of him. You may be sure, however, that the Mr. Ingram who seems to own Poe, is wrong in believing that the volume was only printed, and not published.