Collins White Circle Authors Part VII

There is a fascinating wikipedia entry listing the top selling authors of fiction. The list ranks authors with estimated sales of at least 100,000,000 - some 80 in all. It seems to me that the list is as well documented as any such list needs to be.

Wm. Collins Sons & Co. Canada Ltd. published three of the list's authors in their White Circle imprint. Agatha Christie (2 - 4 billion sold - tied with Shakespeare at number 1) and Mickey Spillane (100-200 million - 36th on the list) have been the subjects of earlier posts. Here we'll look at the third author - Erskine Caldwell (80-100 million - 63rd).

Collins published three of Caldwell's 25 novels - Tobacco Road (first published 1932), Trouble in July (1940) and A House in the Uplands (1946). Tobacco Road is Collins most reprinted WC with six printings while Trouble in July has four printings and A House in the Uplands one. It is interesting to note that Collins didn't publish Caldwell's best selling novel - God's Little Acre. In Canada that was left to a small publisher, Anglo-American Publishing, to pirate the American edition. All cover art is by unknown.

White Circle 257 - 1946

White Circle 335 - 1948

White Circle 346 - 1948

Collins White Circle Artists Part XV - Margaret Paull (4)

Parts I, II and III presented the first 20 of the 67 signed covers that Margaret Paull did for the White Circle imprint published by Wm. Collins Sons & Co. Canada Ltd. Here are four more from 1944 plus one of her dust jackets for a Collins's hard cover. Paull was an employee of Collins and as such was in a very uncommon position. Most cover artists of the day were free lance commercial artists whose work might be seen largely with one publisher but also with others.

Paull's dust jacket is for one of Hugh MacLennan's lesser known works, The Precipice, published by Collins Canada in 1948. The cover is described in a Quill & Quire (November 1948, p. 17) story on Canadian dust jacket design as presenting "the contrasts between the warm if simple and humdrum life of the small Canadian town, and the bleak, skyscraper existence of the great American city." Never reprinted as a White Circle paperback, The Precipice can't have been as successful as Two Solitudes and Barometer Rising. The art is unattributed in the book.

White Circle 98

White Circle 112

White Circle 113

White Circle 114

Export Publishing Enterprise Ltd's Reprints Part II

In part I the first reprint of Export Publishing Enterprises Ltd's News Stand Library (NSL) imprint was discussed. Here is the second reprint, The Ravager by David Lord (series number 03).

For the first time Export published a reprint with a modified first printing series number. A "R" is added to the front of the number. Both numbers are on the spines. The first printing is 8mm wider and has a white line at the right edge of the front cover and left edge of the back cover. The reprint's copyright page states " First Printing, June, 1948 | Second Printing, October, 1948". The reprint's back cover does not have “Printed in Canada” at bottom right and “A LUSTY TALE OF MEN, WOMEN AND PASSION” at the bottom is printed in red. Back cover copy reset.

first printing front cover

first printing back cover

second printing front cover

second printing back cover

Export Publishing Enterprise Ltd's Reprints Part I

Among the three largest paperback publishers there was a clear hierarchy for the publishing quality of reprints. Harlequin Books was the best. Harlequin provided the year and month for first and subsequent printings. Wm. Collins Sons & Co. Canada Ltd was next. Collins, with one exception, never provided the publishing date for its White Circle first printings - just the copyright year which in most cases was the year the book was printed. For reprints the date was often but not always given. In some cases it is not clear which variant of a book is the first printing. Export Publishing Enterprises Ltd sits clearly at the bottom with reprints of their News Stand Library (NSL) imprint. Here we'll start to see examples of the vexed world of NSL reprints.

Thirteen of the first 32 books in the series had clearly marked reprints. Then only two in the next 124. It is difficult to believe that the first 32 books were so much more popular than the final 124. Export may have had trouble in the first months establishing adequate print runs. Or they just stopped marking reprints. It is a little suspicious that the final two books with marked reprints are so close together - 122 and 124. At any rate here is the first NSL reprint.

The first reprint is one of the first two unnumbered books in the series, Mark it With a Stone by George Victor Martin. The first printing is undated. The second printing states "First News Stand Library Edition May, 1948 | Second Printing, June, 1948" on the copyright page. The second printing is 8mm wider and has a red stripe down the right side of the front cover and left side of the back cover and a yellow overprinting of the blurb at the top of the front cover. On the back cover – “MARK IT WITH A STONE | GEORGE VICTOR MARTIN” and “Acclaimed … BARE” are in red vs. blue on the first printing.

first printing front cover

first printing back cover

second printing front cover

second printing back cover

French Canadian Paperbacks - Part I Arsene Lupin

I mentioned in an earlier post that parallel with the English Canadian paperbacks of the 1940s and 1950s were French Canadian counterparts. Here are a couple of examples from a 26 volume trade paperback series published in Montreal by Les Editions Varietes in the mid 1940s. Most of the books are by Maurice Leblanc and star his gentleman thief and detective Arsene Lupin. The imprint "Le Point d'Interrogation" translates as "The Question Mark". The publisher's address, 1410 rue Stanley is just below McGill University.

The first book is L'Eclat d'obus, first published in 1916 and published in the US as The Woman of Mystery and England as The Bomb-Shell. This is a non-Lupin story. The second is La Femme aux deux sourires (1933) and published in the US as The Woman with Two Smiles and England as The Double Smile.

The first book has one of the more violent and colourful covers in the series.

Published by Les Editions Varietes 1945

Published by Les Editions Varietes 1944

back cover of La Femme aux deux sourires