Henry James’s Letters: Why Publish Them?
Henry James was a prolific epistolarian: it is estimated that he wrote as many as 40,000 letters in his lifetime. While many are lost, editors currently have access to more than 10,000 letters, and the University of Nebraska Press has recently published the first three volumes of what will exceed 140 volumes of letters! (Volume 1, Volume 2 and Volume 3; a review of the first two volumes in the London Review of Books.)
I find the currently available collections of Henry’s letters interesting, and would love to read more. But what’s the point of publishing 140 volumes of his correspondence, especially when the first two volumes are available at $90, $95 and $125 respectively. One commenter wrote, about these first two volumes, “[T]he general public has been deprived of James’s full epistolary record until now…”
Can one really say that these books are for the general public? Those with bank accounts like Croesus, perhaps, and Methuselan life-spans as well; at the rate of publication, it will take decades for this set to be published. These books are certainly not for the common reader, but rather for scholars, and for libraries. In today’s world, what sense is there in publishing such texts in book form, especially when additional letters will be found in the future, which will not be able to be inserted in to the books in the correct chronological order? After all, the academics behind this project don’t make any money from it; why not just publish it on the Internet, and, eventually, on CD or DVD?
No, there’s something perverse about this. While I would welcome the chance to read some of these letters, there seems no logic in making expensive books, and killing trees, to provide them merely to a handful of scholars. It’s a shame that academe is so behind the times: this sort of work should be available on the web, for free, to all those who are interested, not just to those in ivory towers with the means to have their university purchase them.
The Darwin correspondence website is such a model of how this would be done in an ideal world. Is the problem that the internet is still not regarded as a suitable publication place? The Darwin letters are published first by CUP and only after a suitable profit-making interval are placed in full on the website.
Why must purchase be a condition of reading? One could borrow the volumes from a library.
That’s a fair point. How many people have libraries that would have such books? Other than university libraries, I doubt many libraries will have them. And, with libraries having financial problems, my guess is they’d be very hesitant to pay such prices for books that few people would want to read.
But my point remains: why not just publish them on the Internet? If the goal is knowledge for the sake of knowledge, why turn this into a commercial venture that is doomed to fail? (Or one that will simply make money for a university press?)
Use interlibrary loan if your library doesn’t have something you want to read. The internet isn’t the answer to everything. And to use it you have to have a device (computer, smart phone) and access.
That’s certainly an option for some. But living, as I do, in a village in the French Alps makes that a bit difficult. Also, I’m told by friends in the US that more and more libraries are charging for inter-library loans, and these charges can be relatively high.
Where are these people and what are the charges? I live in the US and I’ve never heard of this. Is your internet service free?
Kirk,
A friend led me to this thread.
First, thank you for including our books in your blog. The fourth volume has just been published–and it’s more expensive that any previous ones! (The editors, of course, have no control over pricing.) Second, the Complete Letters edition is only for “the general public” to the degree that anything written by Henry James is for that audience. Their cost as print books is related to the expense of production, excluding editing. Scholarly books are expensive. I wish that this weren’t the case, but it is. About electronic publication: the fact is that my original plan for the edition included an e-edition (letters to be sold individually like songs from iTunes–this before iTunes) and we’ve done a fair amount of work on one. But in the end, we haven’t found an affordable and reliable way to publish the kind of edition Pierre and I have developed in a digital format. We’ve worked with two digital/internet publishers to create such an edition, but one fired us and we fired the other. There’s a lot to say about this, but we describe the aims of the edition in our General Editor’s Introduction. Anyone who comments on this subject should read the introduction first. In short, the limitations in browsers and screen technology (similar to the representational problems of the Kindle) prevent us from offering an e-edition right now that wouldn’t simply be a pdf version of the print edition. We could, of course, offer a clear-text version of the letters. But clear-text is not what we’re interested in doing, or we would have done that already. Anyone who has seen the print version of the Complete Letters has been impressed by its representation on the edited text page of the original documents. The degree of precision in the rendering is very difficult, in some cases impossible, to achieve on the computer screen. In addition, should a browser not represent a letter as we need it to be represented, if a font isn’t available or line endings are not maintained, then the apparatus will not function as it should. Line references in the annotation, that is, will not be maintained. And so on. Finally, the print edition is beautiful in the page and book design. It was the last project of the great designer, Richard Eckersley, who designed Avital Ronell’s The Telephone Book, for example. The letters edition is a composite of many of Richard’s contributions to book design and is, thus, a tribute to his great career. This is not to diminish the thread, but only to shift its emphasis.
Thanks again for highlighting the books. I hope you can find a way to read them. HJ would be proud to have them read where you live. We’re very proud not only of the edited letters, but of the textual and informational notes too.
Greg Zacharias, project director
Greg, thanks for posting such detailed comments. I didn’t mean my post to be a criticism of your work, but rather of the general university press “industry” that breeds such prices. I would love to be able to read Henry’s letters, and I certainly understand that beautiful books are valuable. If there were to be, say, ten or fifteen volumes, I’d even consider buying them. But since you project, what, 150 volumes, the thought of the total cost is just prohibitive.
It really only makes sense to make these available on the internet. As you say only university libraries could afford these books and besides who has got room on their bookshelves or time or the inclination and dedication to read 140 400-page volumes of letters?