This article details the Joseph Conrad Collection in the Syracuse University Special Collections. Diverse in origin, Syracuse University\u27s collection of Conradiana, housed in the George Arents Research Library, has more printed than manuscript materials

Stape, J. H.

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Syracuse University SURFACE The Courier Libraries Spring 1988 The Joseph Conrad Collection at Syracuse University J. H. Stape Follow this and additional works at: https://surface.syr.edu/libassoc  Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Stape, J.H. "The Joseph Conrad Collection at Syracuse University." The Courier 23.1 (1988): 27-32. This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Libraries at SURFACE. It has been accepted for inclusion in The Courier by an authorized administrator of SURFACE. For more information, please contact surface@syr.edu. SYRACUSE UNIVERSITYLIBRARY ASSOCIATESCOURIERVOLUME XXIII, NUMBER 1, SPRING 1988SYRACUSE UNIVERSITYLIBRARY ASSOCIATESCOURIERVOLUME XXIII NUMBER ONE SPRING 1988The Forgotten Brother: Francis William Newman,Victorian ModernistBy Kathleen Manwaring, Syracuse University Library 3The Joseph Conrad Collection at Syracuse UniversityBy J. H. Stape, Visiting Associate Professor of English, 27Universite de LimogesThe Jean Cocteau Collection: How 'Astonishing'?By Paul J. Archambault, Professor of French, 33Syracuse UniversityA Book from the Library of Christoph Scheurl (1481-1542)By Gail P. Hueting, Librarian, University of Illinois at 49Urbana~ChampaignJames Fenimore Cooper: Young Man to AuthorBy Constantine Evans, Instructor in English, 57Syracuse UniversityNews of the Syracuse University Library and theLibrary Associates 79The Joseph Conrad Collectionat Syracuse UniversityBY J. H. STAPEThe collection and preservation of Joseph Conrad's work in Amer,ica has a long history. John Quinn, a wealthy New York lawyer whobegan collecting Conrad manuscripts in 1911, was the first and ex,elusive purchaser of Conrad's original documents until 1918, whenConrad on the sly began to sell manuscripts to Thomas J. Wise, thefamous bibliographer and-as later revealed-notorious forger. Quinn,who had undertaken to keep his collection intact, in turn broke hisword, and the sale of his collection in New York brought prices un,matched even today. Conrad could quite rightly launch his ironicquery: "Did any of the bidders faint? Did the auctioneer's head swellvisibly?" 1 Quinn's sale allowed A. S. W. Rosenbach, the renownedPhiladelphia book dealer, and George T. Keating to form the nu,eleus of their important collections, the former still in Philadelphiaat Rosenbach's home (now the Rosenbach Museum and Library) andthe latter in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at YaleUniversity. Diverse in origin, Syracuse University's collection ofConradiana, housed in the George Arents Research Library, has moreprinted than manuscript materials.FIRST EDITIONSSyracuse University holds all of Conrad's novels from Almayer'sFolly (1895) to The Rover (1923) in either first English or first Amer,ican editions and, similarly, complete collections of the six short'fiction titles and five non,fiction prose works. Among these are pre'sentation copies of Youth (first English, 1902) inscribed for Sir Ed,mund Gosse and The Arrow of Gold (first American, 1919) presented1. Conrad to F. N. Doubleday, 20 November 1923, Joseph Conrad: Life and Letters,ed. G. Jean~Aubry (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page, 1927), 2:324.Syracuse UniversityLibrary Associates CourierVolume XXIII, Number 1 (Spring 1988) 27to a Mrs. Demerest. Conrad's collaborations with Ford Madox Ford-The Inheritors (1901), Romance (1903), and The Nature of a Crime(1924)-are also represented by first editions.PRIVATELY PRINTED AND LIMITED EDITIONSAlthough Syracuse University holds only one pamphlet-London'sRiver (1919)-of the six privately printed by Clement K. Shorter andnone of the twenty pamphlets privately printed in two series (1919and 1919-20) by Thomas J. Wise, the collection is particularly strongin limited and privately printed editions issued after 1920. It con,tains copies of the dramatization of The Secret Agent (1921), TheDover Patrol: A Tribute (1922), and John Galsworthy: An Appreciation(1922) printed by H. J. Goulden. The dramatized version of TheSecret Agent is also here in a private printing of 1923 by T. WernerLaurie. Strangeway & Sons private printings include Geography andSome Explorers (one of thirty signed copies) and Richard Curle's edi,tion of Conrad's "Congo Diary" (1926). Also enriching the collec,tion are the 1902 private issue of the preface to The Nigger of the"Narcissus" printed by J. Lovick, the private printing of Conrad'spreface to his wife's Simple Cooking Precepts for a Little House (1921),the first separate printing of Conrad's first story, "The Black Mate"(Edinburgh: The Dunedin Press, 1922), and Jerome Kern's 1925 pri,vate printing of The Admiralty Paper.Of particular interest are two copies of the "privately printed" is,sue of Notes on Life and Letters (London: Dent, 1921) distributed toreviewers and to friends of the publisher. This "private printing"-in fact identical with the trade issue aside from the certificate on theverso of the title page, its olive (rather than dark green) binding,and lighter paper-was unauthorized by Conrad, and his forcefullyexpressed displeasure led Dent to destroy a number of copies. Thus,it appears that of the thirty,six copies so issued only sixteen survive.The collection also contains a signed copy of Conrad's collectedprefaces, Notes on My Books (1921), one of 250 copies issued underthe Heinemann imprint. (Doubleday, Page of New York, which alsoissued 250 copies, in fact printed the whole run. ) Two limited edi,tions of One Day More, Conrad's dramatized version of his 1902 shortstory "To,morrow", are held: two copies printed in 1919 by the28Joseph Conrad with a visitor at "Oswalds", his home near Canterbury, 1924(From a snapshot in the Syracuse University Library).Beaumont Press, London (an edition limited to 274 copies) and asigned copy of the first American edition (limited to 377 copies)issued in New York by Doubleday, Page in 1920. The posthumouslypublished works, Suspense (1925) and The Sisters (1928), are at Syr,acuse in American limited editions. Conrad's play Laughing Anne,based on his short story "Because of the Dollars", is also held in asigned limited edition (London: Morland Press, 1923).LETTERSAmong the more significant Conrad holdings in the Syracuse Uni,versity collection are nine items, in holograph or typescript, of cor,respondence from Conrad to business connections, acquaintances,29and friends. 2 The earliest letter, that of 14 January 1898, to T. FisherUnwin, his first publisher, concerns a possible separate Americanpublication of the short story "The Return". A letter of 19 April1898 addressed to the editor of The Academy (Charles Lewis Hind)evidently accompanied proofs of Conrad's review of Hugh Clifford'sbook of Malay tales Studies in Brown Humanity (published in TheAcademy on 23 April 1898). Letters to friends include that to R. B.Cunninghame' Graham, addressed as "Tres cher ami", thanking himfor books, and a letter of 18 December 1915 to Sydney Colvin, afriend who directed One Day More in 1905. There are also: a noteof 6 May 1909 to an unidentified recipient to whom Conrad sent aholograph leaf of A Personal Record, and a letter of 12 April 1916that pledges support to the poet Edward Thomas in his applicationfor a Civil List pension. Two letters of 1918 are of particular inter,est-that of 11 June to Sir Edmund Gosse, the well,known man ofletters, offering a defense of Nostromo, and that of 2 July to Mrs.[Elizabeth] Dummett, Cunninghame Graham's companion, accom,panying a signed presentation copy of the second English edition ofNostromo (London: Dent, 1918).3 The latest letter--6 October 192~is to Captain J. G. Sutherland, commander of the HMS Ready, a Q,boat in which Conrad had made an expedition in 1916.The collection also includes three letters from Mrs. Jessie Conrad:to [Christopher] Sandeman dated 13 August 1924; to Peter F. So'merville dated 16 July 1928; and to a Mr. Partridge dated 28 June1936.2. The following letters have been published: to Unwin in The Collected Letters ofJoseph Conrad, ed. Frederick R. Karl and Laurence Davies, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cam,bridge Univ. Press, 1983); to Hind in j. H. Stape, "Conrad and The Academy: AnUnpublished Letter", Conradiana 20 (1988), in press; to Cunninghame Graham inJoseph Conrad's Letters to R. B. Cunninghame Graham, ed. Cedric T. Watts (Cam,bridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1969); to an unidentified recipient in j. Szczypien,"New Light on the Composition of joseph Conrad's A Personal Record", Notes andQueries, n.s. 34 (March 1987): 50-51; to Gosse and Dummett in George M. Bar,ringer, "joseph Conrad and Nostromo: Two Letters", Thoth 10 (Spring 1969): 20-24.3. On Mrs. Dummett, see Cedric T. Watts and Laurence Davies, CunninghameGraham: A Critical Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1979), 258-59.30Unique manuscript page from "Some Reminiscences" (1908-09), later A PersonalRecard, Chapter VI. Joseph Conrad Collection, Syracuse University Library.MANUSCRIPT AND TYPESCRIPT MATERIALSIn addition to the letters mentioned above, the most importantitems in the Syracuse University Conrad collection are a holographleaf of A Personal Record and a forty~five~page typescript of the essay31"Autocracy and War", the latter the gift of William Pearson Tolley.The leaf from A Personal Record, an autobiographical work origi~nally published in The English Review from December 1908 to July1909 as "Some Reminiscences" and first issued in book form underthat title, is the only known evidence of the existence of an originalmanuscript and as such provides essential information for the textualcritic.Similarly, the typescript of "Autocracy and War", Conrad's 1905essay on the Russo,Japanese War written while he was on a workingholiday in Capri, is all that survives of his original work on thispiece. The Syracuse typescript appears to be the copy marked by aneditor for the essay's printing in The North American Review in July1905. (The essay also appeared in London in The Fortnightly Reviewin the same month.) The typescript bears the epigraph "Sine ira etstudio" (Without anger or partiality-Tacitus, Annals, 1.1), whichappears only in the American serial printing and is corrected in pen~cil for a printer. The placement of the by,line "Joseph Conrad" isindicated on the first page, and an end~signature--in the same hand-is added on the last. While none of the changes or corrections arein Conrad's hand, the typescript is nonetheless an important docu~ment in establishing the text's transmission. It is preserved with acopy of the July 1905 number of The North American Review.MISCELLANEAThe Conrad collection also contains a few photographs and firsteditions of various collections of letters as well as some related works.Among the more interesting items belonging to this group are: apresentation copy from Jessie Conrad to Richard Curle of Conrad'sand Ford's The Nature of a Crime; an inscribed copy of Curle's editionof Conrad's letters, Conrad to a Friend: 150 Selected Letters (1928);and two copies of Curle's Into the East, Notes on Burma and Malaya(1923), for which Conrad wrote a preface. Of the last, one copy isan inscribed presentation copy and the other bears a note in Curle'shand. A rare item is a privately printed letter-Joseph Conrad onStephen Crane (Yselta, Texas, 1932)--one of thirty copies, this witha manuscript note attached by Vincent Starrett, one of Crane's earlybibliographers.32

The Joseph Conrad Collection at Syracuse University

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The Joseph Conrad Collection at Syracuse University

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