The Magic Mirror by Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath graduated Smith College with honors in June 1955. She had spent her senior year working on a special honors thesis which she titled: "The Magic Mirror: A Study of the Double in Two of Dostoevsky's Novels." Her originally submitted typescript is held by the Mortimer Rare Book Room at Smith College (a microfilm copy also exists). Additionally, a typescript carbon of the work, as well as her notes and note cards, are held in the "Smith College Memorabilia" (Box 11) of Plath mss. II at the Lilly Library, Indiana University (a list of Plath's archival collections, with links, can be found here).

Plath's thesis is one of those documents that garners continual interest. And, in 1989 it was published in a limited edition by the Embers Handpress in Wales, UK. Currently there are no copies available through book sites such as ABEbooks.com, thus proving it is a highly collectible book. There are 25 copies held in libraries around the world per WorldCat.

However, you may be surprised and interested to know that copies of the original edition of 200 are still available from directly the Embers Handpress.

I have emailed with Roy Watkins of the Embers Handpress and can say that he is a very fine, open man. In addition to Plath's The Magic Mirror, Embers has published two limited editions of short stories by Plath: A Day in June (1981)  and The Green Rock (1982). These stories were printed in the expanded, first paperback edition of Faber's Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams (1979), but were excluded from the American publication and thus have never been in print in America.

I recently asked Watkins how he and the Embers Handpress came to publish these texts. Waktins told me that has been "(now) almost a lifelong friend of the Hughes family - especially Ted's sister, Olwyn." Watkins says he "met her through Ted when he suggested that I send some things I'd written to her -she was acting as a literary agent then - and we became friends. When I started printing, Olwyn asked Ted to give us a little support. He was a great supporter of the small presses - almost as much as he supported young poets - and he gave us (gratis) the rights to the small editions we made of A Day in June and The Green Rock."

About The Magic Mirror, Watkins says "Hughes felt that it would have to be published, but ... that it was not [something] Faber and Faber or some other major publisher would publish” and saw it as something that would be better in a small press edition." I could not agree more, especially having seen Smith College's copies of both Plath's original thesis and the Embers edition. Watkins continued, "So we took it on."

The process of creating small books like A Day in June and The Green Rock is different to creating a 60-odd page monograph. Watkins said, "For such a small press (two of us - a little platen press - a few cases of type) it was a huge job...we couldn't possibly handle it from our resources, so we had the text set by Gloucester Typesetters - maybe the last letterpress service of its kind. I think they have gone now. But they were very good. Of course, that increased expenses. Everything else we've done was hand-set, mostly by Eve who is very quick. I do the title pages, layout, presswork and binding."

Asked how copies of The Magic Mirror remained unsold where other Plath titles sold out, Watkins remarked "Amazon shortly thereafter published a Plath bibliography declaring that the book was out of print, rare, unavailable etc." In reality, "we had barely begun to sell the copies - all bound by hand. That was one of the elements that drove us to quit printing and go back to itinerant lecturing around the globe. I do feel bitter about Amazon - they truly wrecked us. It is only now, after all these years, that we can continue to sell the original copies because they have increased in value."

Quantities of The Magic Mirror are limited and even though the price is higher than when originally published, this is probably the cheapest you are likely to find them for a long time. Unfortunately, Embers has no more copies of either The Green Rock or A Day in June...Copies of the limited editions of the two Plath short stories can be found via ABEbooks.com. If you are new to all this, a good place to start is on ABEbooks by reading "Collectible Sylvia Plath" by Beth Carswell.


My deepest gratitude must be extended to Roy Watkins for his helpfulness and also to Olwyn Hughes for verifying some of the bibliographic & publication history information in this post.