Tales of the Folio Club (1832-1836), title page and table of contents


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Title page:



TALES

OF THE

FOLIO CLUB

Eleven Tales of the Arabesque



———

BY EDGAR A. POE

———







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Table of Contents

[page v-vi:]

CONTENTS

• “The Folio Club” [prologue, 1833]
• “Lion-izing” (Mabbott assigns this tale as having been read by Mr. Snap, while Hammond assigns it to the narrator of the Prologue. In 1928, Mabbott suggeted that the reader for the tale was the new member, thus the narrator of the Prologue. For the purposes of the present list, this entry is accepted, as it Mabbott's 1978 assignment of the reader as Mr. Snap.)
• [Burlesque commentary — this text, if it was actually written, has not survived]
• “The Visionary” [“The Assignation”] (Mabbott (1928 and 1978) and Hammond both assign this tale as being read by Mr. Convolvulus Gondola. For the purposes of the present list, this entry and the assigned reader are accepted.)
• [Burlesque commentary — this text, if it was actually written, has not survived]
• “The Bargain Lost” [“Bon-Bon”] (Mabbott (1928 and 1978) and Hammond both assign this tale as being read by De Rerum Naturâ. For the purposes of the present list, this entry and the assigned reader are accepted.)
• [Burlesque commentary — this text, if it was actually written, has not survived]
• “A Tale of Jerusalem” (Mabbott assigns this tale as having been read by Chronologos Chronology, while Hammond considers it to have been written after the first set of tales. In 1928, Mabbott tentatively suggested that the reader was Mr. Snap. For the purposes of the present list, this entry has been accepted, but the reader is assigned as the very little man in the black coat.)
• [Burlesque commentary — this text, if it was actually written, has not survived]
• “MS. Found in a Bottle” (Mabbott (1928 and 1978) and Hammond both assign this tale as being read by Mr. Solomon Seadrift. For the purposes of the present list, this entry and the assigned reader are accepted.)
• [Burlesque commentary — this text, if it was actually written, has not survived]
• “Metzengerstein” (Mabbott (1928 and 1978) and Hammond both assign this tales as being read by Mr. Horribile Dictû. For the purposes of the present list, this entry and the assigned reader are accepted.)
• [Burlesque commentary — this text, if it was actually written, has not survived]
• “A Decided Loss” [“Loss of Breath”] (Mabbott (1928 and 1978) and Hammond both assign this tale as having been read by Mr. Blackwood Blackwood. For the purposes of the present list, this entry and the assigned reader are accepted.)
• [Burlesque commentary — this text, if it was actually written, has not survived]
• “The Duke de l ’Omelette” [“The Duc de L ’Omelette”] (Mabbott (1928 and 1978) and Hammond both assign this tale as having been read by Mr. Rouge-et-Noir. For the purposes of the present list, this entry and the assigned reader are accepted.)
• [Burlesque commentary — this text, if it was actually written, has not survived]
• “King Pest the First” (Hammond assigns this tale as having been read by the stout gentleman, while Mabbott, in 1978, acknowledging that it was written “earlier than ‘Morella’,” states that “the story has no appropriate narrator in the Folio Club.” In 1928, Mabbott considers the tale as being read by the stout gentleman, but is not sure that the tale was written early enough. For the purposes of the present list, this entry is accepts, as is Hammond's and Mabbott's 1928 assignment of the reader.)
• [Burlesque commentary — this text, if it was actually written, has not survived]
• “Epimanes” (Mabbott assigns this tale as having been read by the stout gentleman, while Hammond assigns it to Chronologos Chronology. In 1928, Mabbott suggeted this tale as having been read by Chronologos Chronology. For the purposes of the present list, this entry is accepted, as is Hammond's and Mabbott' 1928 assignment of the reader.)
• [Burlesque commentary — this text, if it was actually written, has not survived]
• “Siope” [“Siope — A Fable]” (Hammond assigns this tale as having been read by the very little man in a black coat, while Mabbott assigns it to the narrator of the Prologue. In 1928, Mabbott suggested that the reader might be the stout gentleman, but mostly by process of elimination. For the purposes of the present list, this entry is accepted as is Mabbott's 1978 assigned reader as the narrator.)
• [Burlesque commentary — this text, if it was actually written, has not survived]
[Additional tales included by August 1835:]
• “Berenice
• “Morella
• “Hans Phall
• “Shadow. A Fable” (Mabbott (1928 and 1978) assigns this tale as having been read by the very little man in the black coat, while Hammond considers it to have been written after the first set of tales. For the purposes of the present list, Hammond's dating of this entry among the later items is accepted.)
• “Von Jung, the Mystific” [“Mystification”]
[A seventeen tale was included by September 1836, assuming that Poe was not merely exaggerating:]
• “Why the Little Frenchman Wears His Hand in a Sling” (that this tale was composed this early is somewhat speculative)
[Additional, after 1836:]
• “Raising the Wind; or Diddling Considered as One of the Exact Sciences” [“Diddling . . .”] (Hammond assigns this tale as having been read by Mr. Snap, while Mabbott considers it to have been written about the time of its publication in 1843, and thus too late to be one of the Folio Club project. Hammond's position was initially suggested by Claude Richard, in his 1968 article “Poe and the Yankee Hero,” Mississippi Quarterly, 21:93-109). For the purposes of the present list, this item cannot be accepted as part of the original set of tales, not only due to the late date of publication but because it necessarily displaces one of the other tales that we know were written earlier.)

 


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Notes:

There is no title page or table of contents for the original book (and thus no page numbers). Only Poe's handwritten introduction and some letters which describe the varying contents survive. What is presented here is a reasonable reconstruction.

The full title of the collection given here is adopted from the two titles mentioned by Poe himself. As the full collection was not printed as Poe intended, and most of the manuscripts of this collection are lost, the versions of the tales used here are taken from the earliest appearance in print. The one exception to this rule is for “Epimanes,” which has been taken from the manuscript of 1833. (Although an early manuscript exists for “Morella” it seems to be a preliminary form and probably not the version Poe would have included in the proposed book.)

This selection and sequence is based on previous analyses by Mabbott and Alexander Hammond, and follows the list of narrators as given in the prologue, using the assignments noted above. Hammond speculates that Poe may have exaggerated when he said that there were seventeen tales, but this does not seem reasonable as seventeen has no inherent virtue over sixteen unless Poe actually had that many tales in mind. Had the offer been accepted, explaining the downward variance in the number of tales would have been awkward and there seems no reason to presume that Poe was reckless enough to take such chances with a book that had already been rejected by one publisher. Hammond's position seems to be based on Poe's statement that all seventeen tales had “appeared in the [Southern Literary] Messenger,” while in fact only fourteen of the tales had been printed there.

A major disagreement between Hammond and Mabbott is that Mabbott's 1978 selection of the eleven original tales includes “A Tale of Jerusalem.” instead of “Raising the Wind,” The latter being originally suggested by Claude Richard. Of the material Poe anticipated to use between the tales, Mabbott comments: “The burlesque criticisms never appeared — and I suspect were never written” (TOM, T&S, 2:201).

The seventeenth tale, referred to in Poe's letter of September 1836 has not been reliably identified. “Mystification” is offered here as perhaps the most likely candiate, for reasons both of date and tone. This tale was not published until June of 1837, but this late printing may have been caused by Poe's protracted, though ultimately unsuccessful, efforts to have the whole collection appear as a book. (In T&S, 2:203, Mabbott states that he does not think “Mystification” dates earlier than 1837.) In place of “Mystification,” another possible story is “A Dream,” printed in the Saturday Evening Post (Philadelphia) for August 31, 1831. This story, however, has only been assigned to Poe conjecturally. At any rate, it predates the other tales and seems unlikely as an addition at such a late date.


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[S:0 - JAS] - Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore - Works - Editions - Tales of the Folio Club (1832-1836)