I was given a beautiful hardback book entitled "Edgar A. Poe" on the cover, and "Poems Of Edgar Allan Poe With Memoir" on the interior title page and was published by Thomas Y. Crowell & Co. The copyright page simply lists the following: Copyright 1856, by J.S.Redfield 1876-1881-by W.J.Widdleton Copyright 1882, by W.C.Bush There is no 'printed' date and no indication as to whom authored the Memoir Of Edgar A. Poe. If anyone has any information (hopefully including but certainly not to be limited to the value or rarety of the book), or can lead me to a source who may have such information, please respond. Thank you in advance for your interest and assistance in this matter.

-- Anonymous, May 06, 2003

Answers

This is an edition of an 1850 book with a Memoir written by Rufus Griswold(estate executor and enemy) that really trashed Poe unfairly. This is the first post mortem attempt to collect Poe's works with another volume of his other writings. I am otherwise not an expert on value. I have this information from Mabbott's own book on Poe "Complete Poems" 1969. The slanderous Memoir was not removed until 1902.

-- Anonymous, May 07, 2003

I think that your volume is the Crowell 1882 edition of the 1850- Griswold posthumous collection of Poe's Poems to which were added in 1876 (from Ingram British- and Didier U.S.-editions), and without any acknowledgment, three more ones ("To Helen" -- 'Helen, thy beauty is to me...', "Spirits of the Dead", and "Alone"), supplemented with an original anonymous memoir (not the Griswold's one alluded to by our friend Mr Murphy, nor the Ingram's one, regularly used by Widdleton - successor of Redfield - from the Edimburgh 1874 Black edition, since 1876, Bush being the new proprietor of the copyright by 1882). If I guess right, your volume should hold 196 pp., and the copyright years imply only Poe's texts, not the "memorialist"'s one. No bibliography gives the name of the author of this new memoir (the propriety of Crowell, and never used elsewhere), and I have not yet been able to identify him. (In any case, not H. L. Williams, who, at almost the same time, was responsible of a new U. S. edition, with memoir, portraits, fac-simile documents, notes and several additions to the poetical corpus, all of them heavily, though again with not the least acknowledgment, founded on facts collected by Ingram in his 1880 Biography of Poe.) Your undated volume is probably some later reprint from the same plates. Not specially rare. No more for the moment. Yours sincerely, Raven's Shade (Belgium).

-- Anonymous, May 08, 2003