White Collar – Dates and Edition sizes
The first three editions of White Collar were published without a publication date or edition size causing some confusion. However the following information can be relied on with some confidence:
1st Edition
- Published 1939
- self published
- metal (enamelled) comb binding
- 160 copies (numbered and signed in pen)
- $5.00 price
2nd Edition
- Published 1940 (one copy has inscription dated 12/25/40)
- stated “SECOND EDITION”
- self published
- wire twin loop binding
- 300 copies; signed in pen but not numbered.
- $5.00 price
3rd Edition (Trade)
- Published 1941
- Pisani Printing & Publishing Co.
- Heavy card cover; stapled; paper spine covering the staples
- 1000 copies
- $1.25 price
Ott, John:
Ott, John; Graphic Consciousness: The Visual Cultures of Integrated Industrial Unions at Midcentury
American Quarterly Vol. 66, No. 4 (December 2014), pp. 883-917;
Published By: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Labelled “A Home Made Book,” the 1939 graphic novel and the 1940 second edition, printed in runs of 160 and 300, were boutique publications, personally engraved, printed, bound, and distributed over three years by Patri and his wife, Stella.
Rockwell Kent told Patri he needed to go to the masses and not just the elite.
As Kent wrote to Patri about the novel:
“It seems to me that an inexpensive trade edition would have a wide appeal . . . . .Such an edition should have a different introduction from the limited one which is intended only for people who are already convinced of your thesis.”15
FAECT’s support made this change possible; in 1941 Patri was able to print a third edition of one thousand copies and, by using less expensive paper, lower the price from $5 to $1.25. And at Kent’s urging, he altered the introduction of the graphic novel to address a new union readership. The 1941 reprint featured a preface by Kent and an afterword by John Lewis, and it exchanged the earlier editions’ more personal dedication (“to the man who told me this story”) for a sharply political manifesto (“to the great progressive labor movement”).
Ott p.889
My dating of the first edition depends on the timing of its first notice in print: Joseph Henry Jackson, “Between the Lines,” San Francisco Chronicle, December 24, 1939, 21. Publication runs are detailed in Giacomo Patri to Rockwell Kent, January 5, 1941, box 1, “Rockwell Kent” folder, Patri papers; Kent to Patri, October 29, 1940, box 1, “Rockwell Kent” folder – Patri papers.
Ott Footnote 15
Later editions
- 1975 Celestial – perfect bound
- 1987 ?– perfect bound
- 2007 Col Blanc Divers Interforum – perfect bound
- 2016 Dover – perfect bound
