0.1 Afterword  (Page 3/9)

After inquiring about the drawings, Copeland and Day turned to the issue of the book’s general design.

The form in which we intend to print The Black Riders is more severely classic than any book yet issued in America, and owing to the scarcityof types it will be quite impossible to set up more than a dozen pages at a time. Of course you wish to see proof for correction, but we would ask whether you wish the punctuation ofcopy followed implicitly or the recognized authorities on pointing of America or England?

The passage clearly shows that Copeland and Day were thinking of a design that keyed off the design Ricketts created for The Sphinx . The decision to print the entire text in small caps made it “impossible to set up more than a dozen pages at a time.” Each of the book’s “lines” wouldbe set high in the page and headed with a Roman numeral in large caps. The English influence is particularly clear in the query about whether Crane wanted to follow American or Englishpunctuation conventions.

The publishers held off typesetting until they had a reply from Crane. After some delay he wrote (10 December) an important andrevealing response:

I have grown somewhat frightened at the idea of old English type since some of my recent encounters with it have made me think I was working out a puzzle. Please reassure meon the point. . . . (letter of 10 December)

Crane was clearly misinterpreting Copeland and Day’s remark about a “more severely classic” design. Hethought they were referring to the highly ornamental style (“old English type”) that he would have known, for instance, from their own recent Kelmscott-influenced edition of Rossetti. But thatgothic approach to design was precisely what Copeland and Day were veering away from, and why they saw the book as unlike “any book yet issued in America.”

Evidently Copeland and Day succeeded in reassuring Crane, for on 16 December he wrote back that “The type, the page, the classic form of the sample suits me,” and he gave thepublishers leave to choose the style of punctuation. Typesetting began in December and continued for some months, with surviving proofs showing trial variations on their “classic” approach.

They also began working with Crane’s friend, the book artist Frederick Gordon, on drawings for the covers, a title page, and a possible frontispiece. In lateJanuary or early February, Gordon submitted a stunning design for spine and covers with an orchid motif, adding in his letter that “The orchid, with its strange habits, extraordinary forms and curiousproperties, seemed to me the most appropriate floral motive, an idea in which Mr. Crane concurred before he left New York. . . . Will you kindly let me know whether it suits your requirements?”( Correspondence I. 89n. The publishers wrote back that they wanted the design modified, but Gordon’s schedule prevented him from undertaking the revisions, so thetask fell to an artist chosen by Copeland and Day.

Typesetting and proofing of the text carried on into late January and perhaps beyond, as did proofing of the art workand the printing of the publication announcements. An edition of five hundred copies was ordered (price $1) with fifty extra specially bound copies on Japan paper and printed in green ink. The bookwas announced in Publishers’ Weekly on 11 May 1895. Sometime in 1896 a second edition was issued—called the “THIRD EDITION” on the verso of its title page—with atitle page imprint “BOSTON COPELAND AND DAY MDCCCXCVI | LONDON WILLIAM HEINEMANN.” Actually the secondedition, it was perhaps so identified because of the fifty copies printed on Japan paper. On 14 November, Heinemann released their own edition (price 3 shillings) from sheets printed in the UnitedStates but with their own title page and half title.