In November 2010 I visited for a day the Hornbake Library at the University of Maryland, College Park, to work with the Frances McCullough papers. Recently browsing through the notes made there, I was reminded about a "Did you know..." post that I wanted to write. So it only took me 12 years... The UK edition of Plath's Winter Trees  was published on 27 September 1971. The American edition was issued 51 weeks later on 20 September 1972.  In working with the proofs of the book that are there, I noticed some additional text in the preliminary pages of one of these editions. Did you know... the US edition prints a caution opposite the "Note" by Ted Hughes which is absent from the Faber counterpart? Faber Harper & Row CAUTION Lawless Americans!

The Letters of Sylvia Plath may have dominated your attention this autumn, but Faber and Faber reissued two classic Sylvia Plath poetry books on 5 October: Crossing the Water and Winter Trees . Both of these first appeared in England in 1971 and serve as a bridge of poems between The Colossus  and Ariel  to Plath's growing legions of readers and fans. The contents of these editions varies between England and the US and it is all really rather too involved to go into now for the purpose of this blog post, which is to encourage you to buy these two books! Faber's reissue reset the text for both books and made other house-style changes such as, for example, bringing their covers up to their current design. They are gorgeously sleek and clean looking. You can see the historical covers over on my main website for Sylvia Plath, A celebration, this is . One small change to note, though, involved updating the poem title of "Small Hours" to "Barren Woman...

A couple of years ago, I learned and reported that the first edition print run for a Victoria Lucas Bell Jar  (Heinemann, 1963, pictured right) was 2,000. This is an interesting number to know because it helps us recognize the scarcity of Plath's novel. The number was described in Stephen Tabor's incomparable  Sylvia Plath: An Annotated Bibliography as a "token quantity". Recently I learned from a bookseller in England, Giles Bird O.B.E. of BAS Ltd. in London, that the first printing of Plath's 1960 volume of poetry The Colossus was a number far less than that of The Bell Jar . (He in turn, it should be said, was provided with the figure by the amazing Jean Rose, an archivist at Random House Group UK which holds Heinemann's archives.) Anyone want to take a guess as to the number? My first reaction was shock. However, shock might have been a premature evaluation. After all, Heinemann was not normally a publisher of poetry. And in light of the fact that t...

This years Boston International Antiquarian Book Fair did not dissapoint when it came to getting to see and touch rare and valuable Sylvia Plath books. There is the perennial first edition of The Colossus signed by Plath to fellow poet Theodore Roethke that I am glad seems impervious to selling from the fine bookseller James S. Jaffe Rare Books . At $50,000 it is the Mercedes Benz of books. Only, people buy cars. If only they realized that a book will not depreciate so swiftly... If anyone out there feels so inclined, I am more than open to receiving this book as a gift. Thank you. Jaffe also brought a stunning first Faber edition of Ariel ($4,000) as well as a signed, limited edition of Birthday Letters by Ted Hughes ($850) . On a side note: please for the love of sanity, alphabetize your displayed books. This persnickety peruser refuses to detail your Plath books if you do not alphabetize. Thank you. Paul Foster brought their copies of Plath limited editions: The Green Ro...

For the last week, many visitors to the blog have come via the keywords "Sylvia Plath's last book of poetry". In order to help you out with this, here is a summary of Sylvia Plath's "last book of poetry". The Colossus : This was Sylvia Plath's first published book of poetry. It was also the last book of poetry published in her lifetime. Ariel : this was the last book of poetry Sylvia Plath prepared for publication before her death. It was also the last book of poetry published under her name in the 1960s. Winter Trees : This collection was the last book of poetry published - not including limited editions - in the 1970s. The Collected Poems was, for four years, the last book of Sylvia Plath's poetry published until the Selected Poems was published in England in 1985 and in the US in 1998. Ariel: The Restored Edition , published in 2004, is the last book of poetry by Sylvia Plath prepared to be published. The Collected Poems was re-issued in 2008 b...