Prefaces - Joseph Conrad (Hard-cover)
Bringing together the prefaces that Conrad penned for his various novels and stories, complete with Edward Garnett’s original introductory essay for the 1937 edition and a new foreword by eminent Conrad scholar Dr Owen Knowles, this publication restores the lustre of a lost treasure of Conradiana.
Bringing together the prefaces that Conrad penned for his various novels and stories, complete with Edward Garnett’s original introductory essay for the 1937 edition and a new foreword by eminent Conrad scholar Dr Owen Knowles, this publication restores the lustre of a lost treasure of Conradiana.
Bringing together the prefaces that Conrad penned for his various novels and stories, complete with Edward Garnett’s original introductory essay for the 1937 edition and a new foreword by eminent Conrad scholar Dr Owen Knowles, this publication restores the lustre of a lost treasure of Conradiana.
REVIEWS
“ A bibliophile's joy”
At first sight and touch, the physical fact of the 2016 edition of Edward Garnett's 1937 collection of Conrad's prefaces, edited and with a foreword by Owen Knowles, is a bibliophile's joy. Its black hardcover binding, rich and velvety to the hand, features on its front either a brigantine or a barque. Two masts, or two with a short gaff-rigged third, we cannot say.1 If the latter, the image may evoke intimations of the trim barque Otago, Conrad's first and last command. Through a sea mist under a pale gibbous moon the vessel close-hauled with topsails furled, rides, as it were, "stormie seas," symbolic, perhaps, of Conrad's weathering his inner and outer lives before his "sleep after toyle"2 in 1924, the publication year of his collected works. On the back, an image of chalk cliffs, with no Beachy Head lighthouse apparent, yet reminiscent of Conrad's many departures and landfalls in his ships, life, and art. At the not unreasonable price of US $21.00 advertised online at time of this review, this elegant volume will add aesthetic lustre to the Conradian's book shelf.
We have eminent Conradian Owen Knowles, the editor of this version, to thank for this revivifying of the 1937 classic, Conrad's Prefaces to His Works, edited by Edward Garnett, Conrad's loyal friend, mentor, and benefactor. Professor Knowles's Conradian publishing history, as impressive as it is enviable, proves him exceptionally qualified for this task: research fellow at the University of Hull, author, editor, and co-editor of some fifteen books of literary scholarship, including editorship and co-editorship respectively of the Cambridge Edition's Youth, Heart of Darkness, and The End of the Tether, and The Shadow-Line,3 he is also advisory editor for The Conradian (UK).
This volume of Conrad’s collected prefaces and author’s notes, beautifully bound and printed by Fire & Ash Publishers of Toronto, is a republication of an edition that first came out in 1937 and includes, besides a foreword by Owen Knowles, a rare essay on “Conrad’s Place in Literature” by Edward Garnett. The appendices also contain the original prefaces to A Personal Record and Victory.