Since the development of literary culture, people have endevoured to reproduce text without changing the content; i.e. to reduce variations of the text itself to a minimum. The invention of the printing press was an enormous leap forward, but copies still differed from each other due to the rudimentary technique. It was not until the turn of the nineteenth century that the ambition was accomplished.
Around the same time a new phenomenon surfaced: books published in numbered editions; i.e. editions of which each copy intentionally was made a unique, traceable entity.
These editions are quite hard to find, library catalogues do not normally make any note of whether an edition is numbered, but they are possible to trace through newspaper articles, catalogues of bibliophile auctions, second-hand bookshops, etcetera. The goals of this project have therefore been twofold: the first to inventory numbered editions, published in Sweden and/or in Swedish and/or by Swedish printers and/or by publishers until 1915, and the second to make an analysis of the phenomenon and its function.
Among the close to 700 titles I have found, the very first numbered copies, two offprints, were published in 1819, but it was not until the 1840’s they began to be appear regularly. From then on, the practice became more and more common, rapidly increasing toward the end of the period; around 50 different editions and 10-20000 copies were published each year 1910-1915. (See the diagrams.)
Early on, numbered editions were primarily privately circulated, offered to individuals who shared a particular interest in a topic. As much as providing information or ideas, they identified and brought closer together a community. They functioned like membership cards to the authors like-minded peers, whose affinity were acknowledged through the books, for example about Sweden’s diplomatic history or about controversial etymological theories, etcetera.
In the 1870’s another larger group of editions was added to the first one, governed by the same logic, but used for slightly different purposes. This group consisted mainly of comedies, satires, and the like, written by and for students at the universities, printed in small numbers for the participants and their friends. These editions , like the first group,functioned as a confirmation of group membership, but because of the indecent, sometimes even lewd content, there was now also an actual need to control the distribution. This goes also for at least one volume with questionable religious content.
During the next decade editions connected to family and heritage became more frequent. First especially among the nobles, in books about their ancestry, the family’s art collections and heirlooms, etcetera, but over time family histories and genealogical tables were also published by commoners in numbered editions. Many of them included a printed list of the recipients, which emphasized each member’s connection to the family. They were thus able to contemplate their kinship any time they opened this page.
In the last decades of the nineteenth century, an interest for small, rare editions became more prominent among book collectors, creating a new niche market. This coincided with an increasing enthusiasm for ”bibliophile editions”, ”luxury bindings” and ”splendour bindings”, i.e. books as artefacts. As a consequence, any variance of a book became important: not only it’s binding, but also variations like different kind of paper in the insert. It is no coincidence that the very first book I found which was named a ”bibliophile-edition” in the newspapers was printed in 1878 in twenty-five numbered copies on eighteen different quality of and/or colours of paper.
Book publishers now began to print parts of the editions on better and/or larger paper, usually in expensive book bindings. They were quite often numbered, to profit on the air of exclusivity provided by the conspicuous rarity, and sold for a much higher price.
This coincided with developing criticism against the current state of the artistic and decorative elements of books: fonts, vignettes, bindings, etcetera. There was demand for a new, more deliberate aesthetic and improved workmanship, grounded in the specific national culture and influenced, at least in part, by the Art and Crafts-movement
The most significant response to the new demand was the founding of ”Bröderna Lagerström” in 1903, primarily inspired by William Morris’ Kelmscott Press and the Private Press-movement. The younger of the two founding brothers was deeply involved in all aspects of the development of printing and publishing: he organized education in typography, participated in interest groups, wrote articles and books, did printing, created new fonts, etcetera.
Their editions were regularly numbered, sometimes putting together several separately numbered editions of the same book with different quality of paper in different number sequences: ”Japanese”, ”Dutch”, linen paper, parchment paper, etcetera.
Their focus on books as artefacts can be illustrated by their publication of August Strindberg’s Antibarbarus 1906. The brothers asked for a manuscript from the famous author, any manuscript, and were offered an obscure scientific speculation no one in Sweden wanted to print. The brothers published it in a lavish leather binding, fully illustrated with vignettes and initials in red, with very little concern for the content of the text. It was a piece of art rather than a book, published in 299 numbered copies.
This is also a sign of the increasing polarization of the book market at the turn of the century. While artists were more and more involved in the creation of luxury volumes, and book designers became more and more prominent in the early years of the twentieth century, there was a parallel move to introduce series of very cheap books in large editions. The inventive head of the publishing company AB Ljus, Henrik Koppel, was one of the first to publish a series of numbered editions for the market in 1901: a number of monographs on famous artists. But in 1904 he ended that book series and introduced instead a very successful imprint of mass market books by well renowned authors in extremely simple design, printed on low quality paper in huge editions and sold at an extremely low price. While Antibarbarus would cost 30 S.kr. you could now buy Strindberg’s classic short story-collection Getting Married (Giftas) for just 1 S.kr.
The new mass market prints did not lead to the demise of the numbered or specialized prints. Instead, they proliferated to the point where it becomes almost impossible to track the many titles. However, all the main functions had been established when this inventory ends in 1915.
Stockholm: Kungliga Biblioteket , 2022, 1. , p. 247
numbered book editions, private press, collectors, bibliophilia, bibliphile, limited editions
Numrerade upplagor, bokhistoria, samlande, samlare, bibliotek, private press, bibliofilupplagor, bibliofiler