States Rights

What, do you have an issue with that?

Just Posted to My Webstore: Subterrean Press editions of Philip José Farmer and Jim Butcher→please take a look.

I swore I’d keep this newsletter apolitical, but the time has come to wade into the red state / blue state issue.

Not those red and blue states. No, I’ve been puzzling over whether the red and blue cloth copies of William Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses represent states or issues of the first edition. Even though this question doesn’t involve electoral maps, the distinctions between states and issues can still fire up bibliophiles.

The bibliophile’s red state / blue state problem

For those new to these terms, book collectors focus mostly on first editions, that is, first printings.¹ Careful observers sometimes note differences in copies of the first printing, and they try to classify them. The basic hierarchy is easy enough: printings have issues; issues have states.

Issues mark significant changes. State tends to refer to minor variations. These differences can have big impacts on value, with second issues being worth much less (on average) than first issues. States, unless one is much rarer than the others, don’t tend to matter as much.²

The whole idea of states and issues is one of those deceptively simple classification problems that gets messier the deeper you go. Even experts argue at length about it. Fredson Bowers spent 100 pages on the subject in his 1949 Principles of Bibliographical Description. A generation later, G. Thomas Tanselle devoted 50 more pages refining Bowers’s work.³

On a good day, I can understand about 25% of Bowers and Tanselle, so I keep John Carter’s ABC for Book Collectors on my desk.⁴

Carter usually does a good job distilling complex concepts. But even he founders on the rocks of issues and states. His definition, first crafted in 1952 and repeated ever since, was already out of date when he wrote it. Bowers had conclusively rejected it as inadequate a few years before.

In a nutshell, Carter defined an issue as any change made after publication. He used state to refer to variations in copies made available on publication day.

This definition is straightforward, until you try to determine the publication date of a book from decades ago. Its strict application would also reassign many well-established “states” into “issues.”

Carter saw the mess coming, so uncharacteristically, he waffled. He wrote that the burden of proof “should lie like an iron weight on the conscience of anyone who begins to write the word issue.” He also hedged with the suggestion that all variants should be considered states unless proven otherwise.

Proven how? To a near-criminal-trial standard, apparently—which is rarely achievable in bibliography. Carter never convincingly explains why the burden should be heavier for issues than states.

Tanselle, like Bowers before him, rejects the publication-date focus Carter uses. His reframing of issue and state has been adopted by the Library of Congress, and that seems like a good reason for booksellers and collectors to follow along.⁵

In layperson-terms, Tanselle says that within a single printing, any deliberately distinct publishing units are issues. States are everything else—the variations the publisher didn’t intend to spotlight.

So, if a variation between copies is made intentionally to differentiate a batch of books, that’s an issue.⁶ If the change is just a correction or production quirk, that’s a state. Intent is the key. Unlike Carter, Tanselle doesn’t care when the change occurred.

That sidesteps Carter’s headache of dating changes—but introduces a new one: what did the publisher intend? Tanselle argues that bibliographers can answer that by looking at the physical evidence of the book itself, rather than relying on outside documentation (which often doesn’t exist anyway).

Take John Steinbeck’s To a God Unknown (1933). Ballou was the original publisher but went bankrupt, and Covici Friede took over. They replaced Ballou’s title page with their own. Both Carter and Tanselle call this the second issue, but for different reasons. Carter says it’s post-publication, so: issue. Tanselle says the new publisher wanted their name on the book, which signals a deliberate publishing decision.

Now imagine an error on a title page, fixed with a cancel title. This is the same kind of change as happened with To a God Unknown. Tanselle would call that a second state—just a fix. Carter would look at the timing: if it happened after publication, it’s an issue; before, it’s a state.

Dust jackets are another wrinkle. Consider the first printing of Stephen King’s ‘Salem’s Lot, which had three jacket variants. Most collectors call them states. Tanselle would agree. The differences were part of refining the product, not launching revised publications. Carter might agree too—except that we know the third variant, which corrects a character name, was created after publication.⁷ So, according to Carter, the first and second variants are states of the first issue; the third is the second issue.

As this example shows, Carter’s method is more fragile—new evidence can force you to reclassify states as issues, or vice versa. Tanselle’s is more stable: it’s based on what’s in front of you.

Reasonable people can disagree. Reasonable book people can disagree more than most. But once you pick your camp—Carter or Tanselle—stick with it. Let Carter’s iron weight lie on your conscience any time you use issue or state without double checking the definition.⁸ The best bibliographers in history spent their entire professional lives thinking about these questions. You can spend two minutes making sure you are using the words right.

So what about those red and blue copies of Go Down, Moses? And the seven other colors bibliographers have recorded? Traditionally, they’re called variants because Carter might classify them as states or issues, depending on when they were bound, which no one knows. Likely, as with the dust jackets on ’Salem’s Lot, they’re a mix.

But under Tanselle’s approach it’s easy. There’s no evidence the publisher considered the color differences meaningful or that they marketed them differently. That makes them states, regardless of when they were bound. If documentation surfaces about the timing of each binding color, that becomes an interesting footnote but it won’t change Tanselle’s stable, evidence-based classification.

If only all red and blue state problems could be resolved so easily.

—Scott Brown, Downtown Brown Books

1. I wrote about why First Edition = First Printing in “What Has Happened to the First Edition.”

2. I recently learned that James Lee Burke’s third novel, Lay Down My Sword and Shield, has three different bindings. More than two dozen copies of the book were for sale when I wrote this an not one seller mentioned there were variants.

3. “The Bibliographical Concepts of Issue and State,” in the Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, volume 69. You can find this on JSTOR. I was able to download a copy free from my public library. It is reprinted, with a postscript in Tanselle’s Descriptive Bibliography (2020). That book is a graduate course on the analysis of books. It’s hard sledding to get through, but if you are serious about books you should attempt it.

4. My criticisms of Carter to come in this essay notwithstanding, every book collector and bookseller should have a copy. Fortunately, the International League of Antiquarian Booksellers, of which I am an affiliate, offers a downloadable pdf version for free.

5. See p. 199 of the manual of Descriptive Cataloging of Rare Materials (Books) co-published by the Association of College and Research Libraries and the Policy and Standards Office of the Library of Congress.

6. Carter’s definition causes problems with cases where more than one version of a book is issued at the same time. Collectors and dealers usually refer to signed limited editions as “issues” even if they appear on the same day. Carter would make them states if published simultaneously and issues if they were released at slightly different times. Tanselle says the publisher considered them distinct so they are issues, regardless of the timing.

7. This evidence is reproduced in the 2015 Cemetery Dance reissue of the novel.

8. If you download the 8th edition (2006) of ABC for Book Collectors (free), you can have both definitions in one place. Nicolas Barker, who edited the journal The Book Collector for more than half a century, revised Carter’s book. He clearly recognized the problem with Carter’s “Issues and States” entry and added Tanselle’s definition to it beginning with the eighth edition. I was recently wrestling with a difficult issue vs. state distinction and grew increasingly confused trying to reconcile Carter and Tanselle. EventuallyI realized that Barker, in his understated British way, wrote that Tanselle offered the “best definition,” he was really telling readers to replace Carter with Tanselle. Now that I get it, I’m making the same suggestion to you, dear reader.