Turn About

by FAULKNER, William

$25,000 · Offered by Biblio

First edition · In dust jacket

[NY]: Saturday Evening Post. 1932. A previously unknown Faulkner "A" item -- an offprint from the March 5, 1932 issue of the Saturday Evening Post. In long-accepted Faulkner lore, the first and only separate edition of Turn About was the 1939 edition published by W. L. Massiah of Ottawa, Canada, which has been considered Faulkner's scarcest "A" item, with approximately seven known copies. Offered here is a 1932 offprint -- 7 years earlier than the Massiah edition -- with no other known copies. Faulkner's story "Turn About" was first published in The Saturday Evening Post on March 5, 1932, with two bibliographically significant markers: the second paragraph includes a description of one character as having "a pink-and-white face and blue eyes, and a little dull gold mustache above a mouth like a girl's mouth," and the text is broken up into 10 parts, each identified with a Roman numeral, from I to X. The earliest book publications of the story -- in O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1932 and in Faulkner's collection Doctor Martino and Other Stories, published in 1934 -- leave out both the "gold mustache" and the text breaks. The former change seems likely to have been authorial, rather than editorial, which means that Faulkner changed the text of the story, removing the "gold mustache" phrase, before the end of 1932, when the O. Henry collection was published. The 1939 Massiah edition includes the phrase, which is how it was concluded that it had been printed from the t

  • Publisher: Saturday Evening Post
  • Year: 1932
  • Edition: First Edition
  • Printing: first
  • Binding: unknown

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