One-volume
Subscribers' Library Edition T. E.
Lawrence Seven Pillars of Wisdom
The
Complete 1922 'Oxford' Text Edited with an Introduction by Jeremy Wilson
"The Work is a masterpiece, one of the few very best of its kind in the world." Bernard Shaw, writing about the 1922 Text to Stanley Baldwin, then Prime Minister
Background to this second
edition
In 1997 we published a three-volume
limited edition of Seven Pillars of Wisdom, The Complete 1922 Text. The prospectus
set out the history of the 1922 text and discussed the differences between it and the later subscribers' abridgement. It is worth reading that
prospectus before going further. Publication
of the 1997 edition followed the example set in 1921 by Jonathan Cape and the Medici
Society. In order to get Charles Doughty's very long Travels in Arabia Deserta
back into print, they issued a two-volume limited edition, to which Lawrence contributed an introduction. Not only did we follow this example, but we did so for exactly the same reason. The 1922 text of Seven Pillars
is a large-scale publishing project, running to 334,500-words. No publisher contacted by the literary agency acting for the Seven Pillars of Wisdom Trust was
willing to issue
it on acceptable terms. Our
1997 fine-press edition recovered the major costs of editing and
typesetting the text. However, it went out of print and the price of
second-hand sets then rose steeply. Even
though the text now existed in printed form, the obstacles to a more
general edition remained far greater than they were for Travels in Arabia Deserta.
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Because of a
quirk in American copyright law, the subscribers' abridgement of
Seven Pillars will remain in copyright in the US until the
2020s. In principle, the American publishers of the subscribers'
abridgement could issue it, if they acquired the additional
rights. But they have little business incentive to do that so
long as their shorter version continues to sell. Therefore, booksellers located in the United States
cannot legally distribute the 1922 text. Enterprising US
residents will order copies from British-based sources but, without
sales in US bookstores, the global market for an
English-language edition is more than halved.
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The full 1922 Seven Pillars
is a third longer than the 1926 subscribers' abridgement, which
is widely available in cheap paperback editions. In a bookshop,
the two versions compete head-on. Because the
1922 text is so much longer, it will always be more expensive.
How long will it take book-buyers to realise that there are important differences between the two? Time will tell....
Under our contract with the Seven Pillars of Wisdom Trust, we undertook to produce if possible a
one-volume hardback edition of the 1922 Text. Our conditions were, first, that
the original 1997 edition must succeed,
and secondly that a
one-volume edition must be commercially viable. The intention to publish a
one-volume edition was stated in our prospectus for the 1997 edition. In
preparation for this second edition, we re-set the 1922 Text in a smaller page format than the 1997 edition,
ran the chapters head-to-tail, and added a scholarly index by Hazel K.
Bell. This produced a book of
896 pages. To that, we have added 16 pages of black-and-white photographs taken by Lawrence and others during the Arab Revolt.
We also re-checked the text against copies of the two source documents: Lawrence's
original manuscript in the Bodleian Library and his amended copy
of the 1922 proof printing. This has led to a number of small
improvements. Likewise, a professional editor reviewed the
punctuation. Hazel Bell's comprehensive index
won the Wheatley Medal, Britain's top award for
indexing. The index is, moreover, a "first" in the entire publishing history of Seven Pillars.
When the subscribers' abridgement was rushed into print in the weeks after Lawrence's death, there
was too little time to prepare a proper index. Instead, there are brief indexes of people and place-names. The omission
was never rectified.
Perhaps the publishers saw no need to spend money indexing a book that was already selling
well. No index was printed in the 1997 Castle Hill Press edition because a comprehensive index is to appear in the companion volume War Diaries and Letters.
Standard cloth Library edition and Trade edition
Special copies in fine bindings
The History of the Castle Hill Press Seven Pillars
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