HARDY FORUM ARCHIVE H0068 8/28/00 "THE COMPLETE POEMS- AVAILABILITY" ========================================================== From: James Gibson, Date: Mon 28 August 2000 13:08:16 +0100 Subject: The complete Poems of Thomas Hardy Dear Group Members, Ê Some of you will know that almost unbelievably, Macmillan, who have made millions out of selling Hardy's books, and who claim to be so proud of being Hardy's publisher, let his Complete Poems go out of print last year, and it is at present unavailable. Ê For those who are unaware of it, Hardy's poems were first collected together in 1919 as The Collected Poems of T.H. which contained all the poems published in his first five books of verse - Wessex Poems, Poems of the Past and the Present, Time's Laughingstocks, Satires of Circumstance and Moments of Vision.ÊÊ Further editions of Collected Poems were published in 1923 (when Late Lyrics and Earlier was added), in 1928 (when Human Shows was added) and in 1930 (when Winter Words was added). Ê Collected Poems was a remarkably successful book of poetry which stayed in print with numerous reprintings (in the 1960s alone there were four), until 1976.ÊÊ In 1974 I pointed out to Macmillan that the later reprintings had suffered considerably from deterioration of the metal print, and I proposed that I should do a complete recension of the text and add some thirty poems which had not previously been included. Ê Complete Poems was published in 1976 and was warmly received.ÊÊ At £5 (hardback) it sold over 5,000 copies in its first year (excluding sales in U.S.A.) and must have provided a good deal of profit for its publisher who had rewarded my editorial work of some four months with a flat payment of £250.ÊÊ The hardback had several reprintings (1976, 1978, 1979, 1981, 1983, 1991, 1994 among others) and each reprint led to a substantial increase in price until finally it reached a ridiculous £30 in the 1990s, and increase on its first price of something like 500%. Ê A paperback edition appeared in 1981 at £5.95 and I have a note that it had sold more than 18,000 copies by 1992 but, again, the avarice of the publishers was such that the price was steadily increased until it reached a staggering £17.ÊÊ With each new printing Macmillan made some economy - smaller margins, inferior paper, inferior cover, for example. Ê But nemesis was drawing near.ÊÊ Wordsworth, a publisher of very cheap editions of books out of copyright, took advantage of Hardy's coming out of copyright in 1979 by publishing in 1994 at £2.50 what is virtually a facsimile of the 1964 Collected Poems.ÊÊ They were able to do this because, almost unbelievably, the print of a book comes out of copyright in twenty-five years.ÊÊ So both the words and the printing of the words came out of copyright.ÊÊ Interestingly enough, Wordsworth have a copyright notice that seems to imply that they have copyright of the whole book, in spite of the fact that no copyright exists, except that of their inadequate introduction, and that was how they were able to publish the book so cheaply!! Ê It is perhaps not surprising that students, confronted with paperback editions of Collected Poems at £2.50 and Complete Poems at £17.00, chose the former in spite of its many deficiencies and, of course, sales of the latter, both hardback and paperback, fell away to such an extent that in 1999 Macmillan remaindered more than 100 copies of their hardback at a price which enabled the Remainder House to sell them at £10.ÊÊ Not for a moment did it occur to Macmillan that it was in their commercial interest to have a more competitive price.ÊÊÊ And so Hardy's Collected, later Complete Poems which he had asked Macmillan in his will to sell 'at a reasonable price so as to be within the reach of poorer readers' went out of print for the first time in its long life.ÊÊÊ Ê However, stand by for some good news!ÊÊ A change of staff at the Macmillan Academic Press has meant a change of attitude and our many letters and expressions of regret have been listened to.ÊÊ Macmillan have just informed me that they are bringing out a new paperback edition of Complete Poems later this year at a price of £12.50.ÊÊ This is perhaps not all that we could have hoped for - the hardback remains out of print - but it should help, and students will again have access to a corrected text.ÊÊ Hardy would have been pleased. Ê Ê James Gibson 28 August 2000 ========== From: "Tom Robertson" < tlr@bellatlantic.net> Date: Mon, Aug 28 2000 09:14:15 -400 Subject: Re the complete poems of Thomas Hardy Is there a complete Hardy available in electronic form? Tom Robertson ========== Date: Mon, 28 Aug 2000 10:13:48 -0400 Subject: Re: The Complete Poems of Thomas Hardy From: Rosemarie A Morgan Congratulations Jim! Your perseverance will not go unheeded by the world of Hardy lovers for whom you have kept alive the best collection of Hardy's poetry in existence. We are all immensely "pleased." Indeed, where would TTHA's poetry discussion group -- so superbly directed by Bill Morgan -- be without The Complete Poems? Thank you Jim for your wonderful work! With every good wish, Rosemarie ____________ ......... However, stand by for some good news! A change of staff at the > Macmillan Academic Press has meant a change of attitude and our many > letters and expressions of regret have been listened to. Macmillan > have just informed me that they are bringing out a new paperback > edition of Complete Poems later this year at a price of £12.50. > This is perhaps not all that we could have hoped for - the hardback > remains out of print - but it should help, and students will again > have access to a corrected text. Hardy would have been pleased. > > > James Gibson > 28 August 2000. ========== Date: Mon, 28 Aug 2000 10:27:09 -0400 From: Robert Schweik Subject: RE: The Complete Poems of Thomas Hardy Tim, to the best of my knowledge, no. There is a lot of Hardy's poetry available on the Web--close to two hundred different poems--but most of the texts must be used with caution. For what's available, see the "Links" pages Index pages III, IV, and V, which index the e-texts linked. Apart from the extensive number of sites that have one or more individual poems, Bartleby.com (Links A 29) has put up the whole of the text of the first edition of Wessex Poems and Other Verses, London and New York: Harper, 1898 (without the illustrations), and Mark Simons (Links A 22) has put up the whole of Satires of Circumstance. And, of course, there are is the splendid Martin Ray Concordance on compact disk. Bob Schweik ========== Date: Mon, 28 Aug 2000 10:19:55 -0700 From: Bettyn Cortus Subject: Re: The Complete Poems of Thomas Hardy Good news indeed Jim! My old paperback copy, bought in the early 1980s is finally falling apart after many years of heavy use. Betty Cortus ========== From: Dennis Taylor Subject: Re: RE: The Complete Poems of Thomas Hardy Date: Mon, 28 Aug 2000 18:48:32 -0700 The Chadwyk -Healey Poetry data base used to have the Complete Poems (1930 edn, I think). But it's not available on their online version, but may still be available on their CD version that we have to use on site at the library. In any event, I downloaded this volume, and have it in a MS Word document, about 1 megabyte, that I am happy to send (in RTF format?). It is not a fully accurate copy (for example the line indentations did not carry over), but I found it enormously useful to search for things. I'd be happy to "donate" it to the Hardy Association, and perhaps someone would like to "edit" it. Whaterver Best PS I tried offering it to Gutenberg, but somehow we couldn't connect Dennis Taylor ========== Date: Tue, 29 Aug 2000 19:20:53 -0400 From: Rosemarie Morgan Subject: Re: RE: The Complete Poems of Thomas Hardy Dear Dennis, Thank you for the invaluable information below. TTHA is most certainly interested in your proposition and will be getting back to you by private e-mail. Best, Rosemarie ==========