The Lucile
ProjectEmail address: sid-huttner@uiowa.edu
New Project: Publishers' Trade List Annual Index of Contributors and Advertisers, 1873-1947.
The Lucile
Project
The Lucile project is an attempt to recover the publishing history of a single 19th century book. Owen Meredith's Lucile was first published in 1860, by Chapman & Hall in England and as a Ticknor & Fields "Blue & Gold" in the United States. In England, it saw only a handful of editions over the next 40 years. In the United States, however, it remained in print until 1938, last offered as a surviving title in Burt's Home Library remaindered to Blue Ribbon Books in 1936. It went out of print in 1938 (although multiple digital and print-on-demand editions are now again available).
The main files at this website are linked from this home page. The major link is to the list of Lucile's publishers. Each entry in that list is in turn linked to one or more pages that record information on the publisher and on all editions of Lucile known to have been produced by that firm. I confess I am rather far behind in posting new acquisitions: my personal collection is currently just under 1100 unique copies!
Since Lucile was often one title in a uniformly bound series, it is possible to use the descriptions and images reproduced at this site to identify and date other turn-of-the-19th-century books. A series (or "Edition" or "Library") often included dozens, sometimes hundreds, of titles (as similar publishing efforts still do to this day: think of the Everyman's Library or Penguin Classics). This is particularly true for publishers who aimed at mass-market distribution of inexpensive (but often extravagantly bound) editions, among them Altemus, Caldwell, Conkey, Crowell, Donohue, Hurst, Lovell, and Worthington. Buyers were invited to acquire single titles, but whole series, or selected titles from a series, could often be purchased at a sharp discount. For a near contemporary comment on "gift books," of which Lucile is a prime example, click here.
During the 78 years 1860-1938, nearly 100 American publishers brought out at least 2000 editions and issues. Since many, even most, of these editions were not dated, we are matching descriptions and line drawings combed from Publishers' Trade List Annual (PTLA), 1873-1938, with 400+ copies currently held by The Book Arts Press (BAP) at the University of Virginia, with 1100 personally-owned copies (E&SH), and with records of copies reported by libraries across North America and by friends of the Project. The hope is to identify at least one surviving copy of each recorded edition.
For full bibliographical descriptions of items cited in abbreviated form in the head notes of publisher's files and elsewhere at this site, see references.
For a brief history of the project and acknowledgement of the help it has received, see brief history.
For a paper on the project read at the 39th Rare Books and Manuscripts Preconference, Getting Ready for the Nineteenth Century: Strategies and Solutions for Rare Book and Special Collections Librarians (Washington, June 23-26,1998), see "The Case of Lucile."
Click here for a plot summary; here for biographical information on Owen Meredith, and here for a comparison of two passages that Meredith changed quite dramatically for the 1868 second English edition -- and most if not all later American reprint editions).
Lucile has been digitized by Project Gutenberg: metalab.unc.edu/pub/docs/books/gutenberg/etext99/lucil10.txt and can be found on the internet in this and at least a dozen other downloadable digital versions (all of which appear to be based on post-1868 editions); it is also again "in print" by several print-on-demand publishers. Searching "Owen Meredith Lucile" in Google-Books will bring up a dozen or more "editions" that have been scanned and OCRed in one or another of Google's library partnerships. Lucile also has a recent "manifestation" as the base "text" for Journal, the Short Life and Mysterious Death of Amy Zoe Mason, a book created by Kristine Atkinson and Joyce Atkinson and published by Simon and Schuster in September 2006. The Atkinsons' collaged over a copy of an American News Company edition, leaving selected snippets of Meredith's text to play against the collaged materials. Much more information is available by Googling "Amy Zoe Mason."
Lucile was reviewed on 1860 publication in the New York Times, as well as other newspapers and magazines, and has been mentioned in later literature and scholarship. The Project welcomes "sightings" not mentioned on these pages.
Recently discovered oddities related to Lucile are Alphonso Hopkins's Geraldine (1881) and an American translation of George Sand's 1834 novelette Lavinia (on which Canto I of Lucile is closely based) titled Lady Blake's Love Letters (1884). In the early 1900s, there were also at least four dramatizations, and in 1912, Lucile was released in a three-part photoplay (3 reels) by the Thanhouser Company: Directed by Lucius J. Henderson from a scenario by Lloyd F. Longergan, the cast included Lucile played by Marguerite Snow, Vargrave by James Cruze, Matilda by Florence LaBadie, and William Russell as the Duc de Luvois. Regretably, it appears that no copy of the film has survived. Some sense of it is given by a synopsis in The Moving Picture World and selected reviews.
I welcome comments and suggestions about this site and how I might improve it. I am, however, keenly aware that the site shows its beginnings in the Internet of the mid-1990s. At that time, before search engines like Google were available to index all web pages, a key feature of web sites was a compact home page and an hierarchical arrangement of secondary pages. Consequently, it was rarely necessary to provide robust site navigation tools on each secondary page. While I have added some tools to each page, as I have time I hope to thoroughly re-engineer the site and perhaps move from "flat" html pages to a database structure.
Reports of copies of Lucile, particularly editions not found described in the publishers' files here, are much appreciated. Send scans or digital photos to my email addresss or photocopies of the binding (top cover and spine) and titlepage to Sid Huttner, Special Collections, The University of Iowa Libraries, Iowa City, IA 52240-1420. Gift copies which prove duplicate are sent to the Book Arts Press, The University of Virginia. This page, and all pages at this site headed "The Lucile Project", have been created by me, and I retain all copyrights to them individually and as a compilation. Others are welcome to link to them (acknowledgement is expected), but pages should not be copied to other sites without my approval.
Sid Huttner.... Head of Special Collections, The University of Iowa Libraries served for ten years (1993-2003) as Book Review Editor for The Guild of Book Workers Newsletter and was Book Review Editor of Rare Books & Manuscripts Librarianship (Chicago: ACRL), 1992-1998. He is joint author with Elizabeth Stege Huttner of A Register of Artists, Engravers, Booksellers, Bookbinders, Printers & Publishers in New York City, 1821-1842 (New York: Bibliographical Society of America, 1993).
Last revised: 13 October 2009