I was perplexed by this book. At a first flick through it appears to be a meticulously compiled illustrated catalogue of the works of American author, Sinclair Lewis. All 36 of Lewis' published works are identified, plus a few ephemera, from Hike and the Aeroplane (1912), through his famous works such as Main Street (1920), Babbit (1922), Arrowsmith (1925) and Elmer Gantry (1927), to World So Wide (1951), and adding A Sinclair Lewis Reader (1953) and The Complete Works (1984). Each title features a clutch of pages giving a prose introduction, photographs of dustwrappers and bindings, etc., a standardised itemization of bibliographic details such as pagination, size, binding, and number of copies printed.
So far, so good: such an arrangement works well. Before detailing my subsequent exasperation with the volume I must commend this book for the bibliographical detailing of Lewis' work and the prose introductions which give useful background. Take Dodsworth for example: “Next to Arrowsmith, this book is considered Lewis's finest effort as a writer... Harcourt [the publisher] had 900 copies of the book printed in orange cloth as advance review copies. It is thought that his original intent was to produce the book in a slipcase as a single limited edition, hence the odd ‘reverse color’ binding and the legend printed on the front free end papers, rather than as trade editions typically stamped.....This book is easy to find in good condition without dustwrappers and, as usual, difficult to find in a dustwrapper in a collectible condition” (p. 125).
The author is clearly a Sinclair Lewis bibliophile, “I approach his books as artefacts, things to be collected, coveted, admired and appreciated as things... The amassing of my own collection created a false sense of value at the time because suddenly booksellers were seeing numerous requests for Lewis's first editions (all from me) and because I bought up vast quantities of material (nearly 2,000 volumes in all), the market became spare and... prices rose, fortunately after my accumulation”. Clearly Pastore knows his Sinclair bibliography: “All my information is first‐hand; that is, I have personally handled every item....” The author's candour is welcome and refreshing and he probably achieves his objective: “This book, I hope, ends the drought of descriptive bibliographical research [into Sinclair Lewis]”. There is, however, much sniping at earlier writers on Lewis such as Carl Van Doren and Harvey Taylor, and this does set a rather self‐righteous and self‐obsessed tone.
Bibliographical information apart, this is a poor book. There are 110 page‐sized halftones to illustrate features of the books, but not one in colour! Any book purporting to provide detailed bibliographical descriptions of bindings, let alone dust wrappers, needs to be in colour. The black and white photographs are not even very good. The serious Sinclair Lewis scholar may not worry overmuch, but the endless succession of dreary half‐tones is no way to catch the interest of the lay or casual reader. The lack of information on Sinclair Lewis, himself, is also a missed opportunity to boost the worth of the book. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1930 and he also awarded the Pulitzer Prize (though refused it), but one would not know from a quick browse, although the information is probably buried deep within the entries somewhere. I had to go elsewhere even to find dates of birth and death (1885‐1951). There is no time‐line. There is no index, not even to the many titles covered (they are arranged chronologically). There is no bibliography or list of further reading. And in contrast to the author's mention of textual mistakes in identifying the various printings of Lewis' works, his own book is littered with them: for example, “1053” for 1953 (p. vi), “testual” for textual (p. 67) and numerous double full stops.
Bad also are the 76 pages of confusing clutter that relates to Miscellany. The Contents page under this heading lists: Dustwrappers; Reprints; Signatures, Inscriptions and Association Copies; and Miscellaneous Photographs. This refers to a mass of photograph‐to‐page half‐tones of book covers, foreign translations, title pages, etc., many relating to books already featured earlier in the volume. Explanations are minimal and often non‐existent. Maybe the author got tired at this point, but the section is a mess with no prose guidance. Despite the painstaking bibliographic detailing and undoubted knowledge the author has of Sinclair Lewis, this book is a disappointment.
