. . . is all about the devil you know. In thinking about the Christmas season, I’m reminded of the Cleveland years. The eastern side of Cliffview Road near the corner of Weston was a sequence of nearly identical tract houses built in the late forties for homecoming veterans and their new families. Our neighbors to the left were the Downings, a couple with two daughters: Holly, the oldest, who often babysat for my brother and I, and Regan, my age. While Regan sometimes joined the boys in neighborhood play, the Abbotts and Downings never consorted as families. There was, however, an identity among the four of them, a gravitational pull toward center that I envied. It was so unlike the vague desperation at home.

I suspect one of the reasons we didn’t mix socially was that Mr. Downing was the complete opposite of my father who, as unsocial as he was, ruled our event calendar. Or, rather, Mr. D was the opposite of my father in every way but one: they were both loners who had nothing in common with the rest of the world. Now that I think of it, they both also generated fear in their children. Then there was the veneer of superiority they both carried around with them. Okay, maybe they were two hateful peas in a pod. Like Mr. Downing, my father was quiet and sinister, a red-faced ball of anger and resentment with a violent streak. There were rages from room to room. Silences. Biting language. Not to mention the time he . . . but I see I’m going off track here and should go more deeply into this some other time.

What I wanted to tell you was that on Saturdays after mowing the lawn, Mr. Downing relaxed by putting jazz records on the hi-fi. Then he would turn the speakers out to the patio and play an assortment of pot- and pan lids with a set of wire drum brushes. Drum brushes. As if he was in a smoky downtown club and everyone was hep. Only he was playing his wife’s kitchenware, it was a patio on Cliffview Road, and it was only us kids. For such a cool cat, he was darkly fierce about this activity; it was not only his damn right, but something he was compelled to do. We were under strict instructions not to disturb him while he was playing. I know, right? Ruin his solo or something.

We were under strict instructions not to disturb his lawn, either. If anyone started across it after a winter snowfall, he’d tear open the front door like a mad little demon and shriek, “Get off my snow!”

Snow. That’s why I’ve remembered all of this. We’ve just had a pretty good snowfall here in Connecticut. My family and I invite you to walk all over it. Merry Christmas!

. . . Anne Sexton’s letters is that, even as she types a blue streak to her correspondents, spiraling up and down about her flaming inner life —

“ . . . sometimes I am a little crazy (withdrawn for a time and then flashing into a manic excitement, wild words, wild talking) . . . and yet not quite as crazy as all that . . . ”

— she thinks in poetry. Here is a fragment of a letter from 1962, word for word, ellipses and all, but unprosed:

At night the dump was lovely,
burning in gray and scarlet fires out over the water.

I remember most the rain, the rain, the rain.
It was sept, october, november and december and
it rained. I had never seen
Christmas lights up over the streets in the rain . . .

I drove out to the coast in five days . . .
stopping seldom except once
at Reno where I won about 50 bucks . . .
it was a wild ride.

I love the mountains and those huge trees, the redwoods.

Christmas at the Grandparents’ Table

Every day at noon and supper our collation
was a kind of silent service. They sat there
giving and giving and finally giving way
to all they felt about our fine situation at home.

It wasn’t easy. There were tears
and the lesson of separation to be learned —
parting the confusion of opposites —
but every word of it dead-end proper Catholic.

A dark romantic wash of the Agony
tipped down from the wall over the table. The kitchen
was a shrine-dark blue-black place
where the only light was cheeks
and knuckles drained white in supplication.

After meals it might seem cozy, as I read story after story
feverishly conjuring Christmas; but enigmatic,
like mother and child divided how on three ships.

When last we saw our bibliographic victim, he was anxiously awaiting the delivery (from France) of an 1846 edition of A Christmas Carol. Here is his story.

You’ll recall (or if you don’t, see below) the situation regarding the purchase of a Bradbury & Evans 1846 printing of the Dickens book, which the French-based bookdealer Vladimir Komar cited as, perhaps, an eighth edition.

A few days after sending the order, a small package turned up in my mailbox with an origin address in France, customs stickers all over it. You cannot imagine how carefully I removed the many layers of packaging, tape, and bubble wrap, until the only thing left was the small volume, wrapped in newspaper, inside a tight cardboard sleeve. I sniffed it before opening. It smelled slightly chemical, as if there were some preservative. An unsettling sign. The aura dissipated when I removed the newspaper and held in my hand one of the most exquisite copies of the book I had ever seen. Even without looking inside, I knew it was without doubt an early edition and not a fraud.

But the exceptional condition of it! First of all, the binding was tight, with no cracks or chips on the outside cloth. It was slightly cocked, which is the term used to describe what happens over time to make the pages slant to the right so that the front cover is farther right than the back cover. This is a common problem with the Carol and to me another indication of this book’s age. The gold edges were bright. The cloth itself was of the bright red (not the dun or salmon or even brown of the very first bindings), which told me it was indeed a later printing. I turned to the title page.

Ah . . . one mystery solved. Not an eighth at all, but an eleventh edition. Still, a Bradbury & Evans eleventh? Osborne comes to the rescue again. Inexplicably, Chapman & Hall and Bradbury both produced eleventh and twelfth editions. C&H’s eleventh appeared in 1845, B&E’s the following year. My book was the latter edition. Osborne notes in his indispensable “Chart of the Textual Variations of the Carol” that the B&E eleventh “is the cleanest and freshest printed of all the editions.” Lucky me. I had purchased sight-unseen a very fine example (en bon etat) of what the catalog of the Gimbel collection at Yale calls its “forty-first copy.”

I’ll describe the inside state of the volume in more detail in another post, except to note here an oddity that I believe no one has yet catalogued, at least not in the bibliographic studies of this book with which I’m familiar.

On the verso of the title page — which in other printings states, in blue ink, in what must be 4pt type:

LONDON:
BRADBURY AND EVANS, PRINTERS, WHITEFRIARS

— in my B&E eleventh edition appears, also in blue ink:

LONDON:
BRADBURY AND EVANS, PRINTERS, WHITEFRARSI

WHITEFRARSI is such a bizarre error in itself, but it points to other particulars of this book, like the relative positioning of certain type, which may prove that this edition had more type reset than is commonly noted.

Another tiny point: the text blocks of both the Preface and the Contents pages are set oddly low on the page, a fault which had been corrected by the B&E twelfth edition three years later. I know this because Dickens unbound a B&E twelfth to prepare his so-called “Prompt-Copy,” the version he used as his aide-memoire when he performed the work in public. This has been reproduced in facsimile and published by the New York Public Library (1971).

The 1846 B&E is indeed a bright and clean printing and mine is the prize of my tiny collection. Since it came into my house, I have added a very early edition of The Chimes (1845) and a beat-up, back-cover-less 1846 (first?) copy of the third Christmas book, The Cricket on the Hearth.

Ah . . . Christmas!

In print!

NATIVITY
after a poem by Antione Favre (1557-1624)

Retreat into the heart, its straits of blood
and anguish, for a proper meditation
on the introit of the lord
into flesh: is it our devotion

to these cold houses, our cool martyrdom,
staunch in white frost and snow, that mutes
our cries for his love, that seeks no bedlam
of rapture at his birthplace-set-in-filth?

Frozen heart, if not for love
or sorrow, I pray that fear will make you weep
true tears of blood, to show him as I stoop

at his bed, one heart in number with them,
the weeping pageant of his retinue,
crazed sinners jutting on the scene of him.

PUER NATUS EST

Light now well-gone, white ash flakes
whirl under the sash, dampening the laced
cloth on the bed table; the mattress creaks
and quiets to begin our pious feast —

that grail romance, the lost room in the fir wood,
its old ordeal-to-death and Christian riddle-dream —
the somnium coeleste of the child
as he would have it, darkening the time

round Christmas. But see right here!
Civility is hosting its own delights
at the foot of the stair —

a comic extravagance, all dazzling toys
beneath the tree, and small bright wares,
and balsam scentings, and the ruddy light.

For a long time I have been “most occupied” with the first edition of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, and have yearned to own one. Of course, with only some 6,000 copies of the true first, and far fewer of the so-called “test printings,” having been produced, prices have always been far too dear to make it practical.

One extreme joy in a December a few years ago, while researching an essay I’ve still to finish, was to consult some half dozen first editions at the Beinecke Library at Yale. These included one of the very scarce volumes signed by Dickens and dated with its official publication day of December 19, 1843. Holding these books was like cradling history in my hands. To touch a thing once held by a great man! And such a glow leaving the Library to walk through the cold, bricky streets of New Haven! The acquisitive sense is a strong one (a symptom of the addictive personality?), but I contented myself with collecting several of the far cheaper facsimiles that had been produced over the years and now have four or five excellent ones from 1920 on.

Then, four years ago, while I was writing Kringle and in full Christmas mode, the part of my brain that governs bibliography was whipped into a frenzy by the appearance on the Internet of a sketchily described volume from a French bookseller. This was their abe.com entry:

Description:
London BRADBURY and EVANS 1846 with the Title-Page Printed in Red and blue Small octavo. [8], 166, [2, ads] pp. Four hand-colored steel-engraved plates by and after Leech and four wood-engraved text illustrations by W.J. Linton after Leech,good copy original red cased binding,front cover decorated,gold edges,cartonnage percaline rouge,1er plat decore,dos lisse orne,tranches dorees;bon etat

Bon etat. So, the volume was in a good state? I emailed the vendor the following:

Hello. I am interested in this book. Can you tell me what the number of the edition is cited on the title page?
Thank you.

To which the reply was:

not clear write,perhaps eight ?
cordialy
V.Komar

My heart stopped. Common knowledge has it that no eighth edition was ever produced. In his 1937 The Facts about A Christmas Carol (and some conjectures), E. Allen Osborne states: “None of the people most occupied with this book has ever seen the eighth edition.”

Another puzzle was that the publisher and date of the volume for sale was listed as Bradbury & Evans 1846, although Chapman & Hall was well known as publisher of the first twelve editions (although B&E were the printers). Then again, the book’s early printing history is fraught with bibliographical oddities (partly the reason it is so coveted), and a surreptitious eighth published by B&E could be just the reason it has escaped notice for 165 years. Add to this that the edition statement on the title page was printed in a tiny Gothic font perhaps unfamiliar to a French (or Russian?) bookdealer with sketchy English. Or, perhaps, the edition identification was somehow obscured (either accidentally or intentionally to fool a buyer). Did the dealer honestly not comprehend the extreme rarity of such a volume? Or was I being taken? Though I couldn’t explain the Bradbury & Evans imprint, the price was irresistable, a few hundred dollars, and I could not possibly dally or someone else would scoop it up. So I took the plunge and bought it.

As I waited for its delivery, the question devoured me — is the single eighth edition in the entire world its way to me?

To be continued…