Variant Covers of The Secret Rose1In Yeats Annual 13, ed. Warwick Gould
(London: Macmillan, 1998)
Virginia Hyde
Washington State University
Because W. B. Yeats's The Secret Rose (1897) has one of the most famous bindings in a decade of spectacular bindings--dark-blue stamped in gold with an ornate tree design--it is surprising to see its variants in red and brown, but both exist. The variants include a newly-discovered copy bound in brilliant magenta red in the Holland Library of Washington State University. Possessing a cover that does not fit the standard description of Wade 21, it joins two other copies of the book with non-standard covers, both mentioned in Appendix 5 of The Secret Rose, Stories by W. B. Yeats: A Variorum Edition.2 These include another magenta copy in the D. W. Weldon Library, the University of Western Ontario,3 and a brown copy (with a slight rust cast) in the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, the University of Texas at Austin.4 All three of the variant copies are bound in ribbed cloth. All bear the date 1897, and the publishers' names Lawrence and Bullen on the spine show that all were created before the dissolution of this publishing firm resulted in copies bearing only the name A. H. Bullen (see Wade 41-42).
Like standard copies, all three possess a distinctive cover design depicting a cabalistic (and biblical) tree of life, created by the Irish-born artist Althea Gyles whom Yeats knew in London.5 This design is familiar to some readers who have never seen the original cover because several Yeats studies have reproduced it.6 While Gyles was not a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn as Yeats was, she was clearly aware of some of its symbolism. The tree, with its roots entwined in the skeleton of a dead knight and its crown displaying three roses (echoing the central rose that represents a 'rosy cross' at the tree's 'heart'), is composed of Celtic interlace that culminates in an image of kissing lovers. The standard copy possesses continuous decoration, completed by the back design of the alchemical rose, a rose-cross contained in a diamond-like configuration of pointed spears and a circle, thus a 'squared circle'. But the Washington State and Western Ontario variants, while they have the standard decorated spines, lack the back design, as do all the copies for the American market,7 suggesting that all may have been printed very early, possibly before the lower-board design was available.
Washington State processed its book in 1974 while Western Ontario received its copy after the 1933 death of the donor Rufus Hathaway, a well-known Toronto book collector and author of articles on rare books. The Texas copy, part of the extensive Yeats collection (perhaps the largest ever) assembled by the bibliographer William Matson Roth, came to the HRHRC in 1949-50. The Roth copy's binding, aside from its colour, is otherwise standard; internally, however, it is the most unusual of the three books, lacking all seven of the illustrations in other copies--drawings by John Butler Yeats--despite the fact that the title page, like those of other copies, calls attention to the illustrations: THE SECRET ROSE/ by W. B. YEATS, WITH/ ILLUSTRATIONS BY J. B./ YEATS. Lacking these plates, the book has none of the slightly dual effect created in standard copies between the highly symbolic art of the cover and the relatively more realistic work of J. B. Yeats, modulated though it is to accommodate its myth-like subjects. But it is hardly likely that the book was contemplated without the inside plates, which in standard copies were 'tipped in' after binding and were possibly unavailable when this sample was bound. When the book was acquired by the HRHRC, it was listed as an early 'trade book'; but neither Wade nor Roth, in his Check-List of First Editions of W. B. Yeats in America and England (Yale, 1939), lists a trade copy with a brown binding. More significantly, the title page's reference to the J. B. Yeats illustrations would surely have been removed if the book had been intended for sale without them.
All three variants are evidently publishers' trial copies, not reflecting Yeats's own colour choices. While he expressed no colour preference before publication, he later found the dark-blue binding of The Secret Rose a model. A year and a half after its publication, when he disliked a 'proof' for the cover of The Wind Among the Reeds (1899), he wrote to publisher Elkin Mathews, 'The colour should be the same dark blue as my "Secret Rose"'; moreover, he later wrote Mathews how pleased he was with the blue cover that was eventually used on the published WAR.8 Even in 1927, when expressing a preference for the cover of The Stories of Red Hanrahan and the Secret Rose (with illustrations by Norah McGuinness), the Yeatses chose 'the darkest blue'--'a fine colour in itself'.9 Since Rosa Alchemica refers to 'Dante in the dull red of his anger' (VSR 127), Yeats might even have 'seen red' if he had known about the variants of The Secret Rose. Yet his covers were often far more diverse in appearance than readers imagine,10 and Allen Wade even confessed despair at "ever keeping track of the variant bindings of W. B. Yeats's earlier books" (Wade 58).
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Notes
1
I gratefully acknowledge the assistance of John Guido and Leila Luedeking at the E. O. Holland Library of Washington State University; John Lutman and John Martin at the D. B. Weldon Library of the University of Western Ontario; Cathy Henderson and Barbara LaBorde at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center of the University of Texas at Austin; and Thomas Taylor, dealer in rare books, Austin, Texas.2
See VSR, ed. Warwick Gould, Phillip L. Marcus, and Michael J. Sidnell (London: Macmillan, 1992), 276, n. 20.3
See Steven Winnett and Beth Miller, 'Addenda to Wade. Item 21: The Secret Rose', The Canadian Association for Irish Studies Newsletter 5 (November 1974).4
All three are designated by Library of Congress numbers, as follows: Washington--PR 5904 .S3 1897 HOL; Western Ontario--PR 5904 .S3 1897 DBW SPE; Texas--PR 5904 .S3 1897 HRC. The Washington State copy bears the book plate of one Paul Steinbrecher. In the inside cover of the Western Ontario copy is a handwritten note, evidently by Hathaway, about the book's red colour (which he believed was characteristic of an entire issue). The Texas copy contains pencilled notes, possibly by Victor Reynolds (whose name is also pencilled in with the date April 26, 1901) or by a bookseller, stating that the book is rare because of its brown colour and lack of plates. An additional pencilled note in another hand, probably a bookseller's, refers specifically to the 'Publisher's Trial Binding'. The Roth purchase included items belonging to Olivia Shakespear (see Warwick Gould, 'Books by W. B. Yeats in Olivia Shakespear's Library', YA 9 295-308), and one Washington State holding, a 1973 purchase from bookseller Thomas Taylor, was traced to her family (see Wayne K. Chapman, 'The Annotated Responsibilities: Errors in the Variorum Edition and a New Reading of the Genesis of Two Poems', YA 6 129-30); but these Secret Rose copies do not appear connected with her. I am indebted to Thomas Taylor of Austin, Texas, for information in a letter to me in 1993.5
See Yeats's 1898 essay on Gyles's art, 'A Symbolic Artist and the Coming of Symbolic Art' (UP2 132-137), his 1900 note on her for an anthology (P&I 118), and a prose sketch of her, though she is unnamed (Au 411-412).6
Besides VSR, first plate, see Fletcher, first plate; Richard Ellmann, 65, printing a drawing made by Mary Gelb; The World of W. B. Yeats: Essays in Perspective, ed. Robin Skelton and Ann Saddlemyer (Dublin: Dolmen, 1965), third plate; Richard J. Finneran, The Prose Fiction of W. B. Yeats: The Search for 'Those Simple Forms' (Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1973), first plate, showing a volume of the second issue, with A. H. Bullen on the spine; A. Norman Jeffares, W. B. Yeats: A New Biography (London: Hutchinson, 1988), 90; and Wayne K. Chapman, W. B. Yeats and English Renaissance Literature (London: Macmillan, 1991), seventh plate. In addition, see, for example, descriptions by Jacqueline Genet, 'Villiers de L'Isle Adam and W. B. Yeats', in Yeats the European, ed. A. Norman Jeffares (Savage, Maryland: Barnes and Noble, 1989), 63-64; Steven Putzel, Reconstructing Yeats: The Secret Rose and The Wind Among the Reeds (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan; Totowa, N. J.: Barnes and Noble, 1986), 22-25; William H. O'Donnell, A Guide to the Prose Fiction of W. B. Yeats (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1983), 90-91; and Joan Coldwell, '"Images that yet fresh images Beget": A Note on Book-covers', in The World of W. B. Yeats, ed. Skelton and Saddlemyer, 152-157.7
The standard copies for the American market (with Dodd, Mead & Co. named on the spine), were bound in ribbed blue cloth, had cancel titles, and were probably bound in London.8
See The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats, Vol. 2: 1896-1900, ed. Warwick Gould, John Kelly, and Deirdre Toomey; gen. ed. John Kelly (Oxford: Clarendon Press, forthcoming), entries for 25 October [1898] and 27 April [1899]. See also James G. Nelson, Elkin Mathews: Publisher to Yeats, Joyce, Pound (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 78.9
See VSR 284.10
In fact, there was, for example, a very small red buckram edition of The Tables of the Law/The Journey of the Magi, privately printed by Bullen in 1897 after he had excluded these two stories from The Secret Rose.