Castle Hill Press

CATALOGUE

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Works

Seven Pillars of Wisdom, The Complete 1922 Text

Military Report on the Sinai Peninsula

First public edition, 2008

The Mint, 1928 text

Hardback, 2009

The Mint, 1955 text

Translation

The Forest Giant

Letters

T. E. Lawrence Letters series

Page updated
3 May 2009

T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, The Complete 1922 Text

Subscribers' Library Edition
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.

Seven Pillars of Wisdom 1922 Text

Cloth, quarter-goatskin, full goatskin

Background to this one-volume 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 an 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 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 quickly 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.

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 Doubleday, part of Random House, who are the American publishers of the subscribers' abridgement of Seven Pillars could issue the 1922 Text. But they have little business incentive to do that, so long as their shorter version continues to sell.

Our legal advisers took the view that we could not make our edition available for sale by bookstores in America, since two thirds of it was closely paralleled (albeit with amendments) by the subscribers' abridgement of which Doubleday owns US copyright. As things stand, therefore, it seems unlikely that booksellers located in the United States can legally sell the 1922 text. US residents can, however, legally order copies of our edition from UK-based sources such as amazon.co.uk.

Without sales in US bookstores, the global market for an English-language edition of the 1922 Text was more than halved.

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 would 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?

Under our contract with the Seven Pillars of Wisdom Trust, we undertook to produce if possible a one-volume hardback edition. Our conditions were, first, that the original 1997 edition must succeed, and secondly that a one-volume edition must be commercially viable.

In preparation for a one-volume edition, we re-set the 1922 Text in a smaller page format, reducing the page-count by running the chapters head-to-tail. We also added a scholarly index by Hazel K. Bell. This produced a book of 896 pages. To that, we 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. A professional editor reviewed the punctuation.

Hazel Bell's index went on to win the Wheatley Medal, Britain's major indexing award. 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.

PRICE

T.E. Lawrence Seven Pillars of Wisdom, The Complete 1922 Text

Subscribers' Library Edition

1,000 copies in cloth

Out of print. A two-volume paperback reproducing the Library Edition setting will be available shortly.