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Re: RARA-AVIS: Group Reading



On Wed, 14 May 1997, Frederick Zackel wrote:

> I have a copy of Red Wind, "first printing March 1946", tower books
> edition, published by the World Publishing Company of Cleveland, Ohio.  I
> thought Knopf published Chandler throughout his career.  Is this a book
> club editon?

Cleveland's World Publishing Co. (which lasted well into the 1960s) was
similar to Philadelphia's Triangle Books and NY's Grosset & Dunlap in that
it simultaneously released more cheaply printed/priced versions of
best-sellers by bigger publishers.  A Knopf novel that sold new for $3.00
would be just $1.25 from World.  To keep costs down, they sometimes
economized on cover art, re-using paintings from pulp magazines that
didn't quite match with the book's content. The pages of
World/Triangle/G&D books are low in rag content and highly acidic, but the
text itself is identical to the original, and was often printed from the
original plates.

These books can be great bargains if you're looking for reading copies of
high-priced older fiction. At a book sale in Cleveland ten years ago, a
dealer had a first edition of Donald Henderson Clarke's _Louis Beretti_
(1929) for $40. Two tables away, another dealer had the Triangle printing
from the same year priced at a dollar.  I'm looking at it right now.

Kathy

Katherine Harper
Department of English
Bowling Green State University
Visit the W.R. Burnett Page at http://ernie.bgsu.edu/~kharper/

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