In the hushed corridors of rare book dealing, where whispers of provenance matter as much as price, certain volumes occupy the realm of legend.
The first London edition of Wuthering Heights is such a book, surfacing perhaps once in a decade, commanding prices exceeding £200,000, and vanishing almost immediately into private collections or institutional vaults. For most collectors, it remains an unattainable dream, admired from afar but forever out of reach.
This month, however, Bayliss Rare Books in London has unveiled something extraordinary: a first American edition of Emily Brontë’s sole novel, offered at £18,500.
Published by Harper and Brothers in New York in 1848, mere months after the London edition and during Brontë’s lifetime, it represents the earliest obtainable version of this literary masterwork. That it has survived 177 years in original condition makes it remarkable. That it arrives just as filmmaker Emerald Fennell prepares her adaptation makes it prescient.
The World of Interiors and
Country Life published more information about how this edition resurfaced, from all places, in Hollywood:
Nearly 200 years later, as Emerald Fennell prepares to showcase Wuthering Heights on the silver screen, one of the few surviving copies of that anonymous first American edition – ‘by the author of Jane Eyre’ – has resurfaced, as if it could sense the timely groundswell of interest in the story, with all of its historical context baked into the near-perfect-condition cloth cover. It is one of only two examples available in the original state, and this is by far the finer.
The intrepid discoverer is London-based book dealer Oliver Bayliss, who happened upon it largely by chance. He recently found himself in Los Angeles in the pursuit of a collector who apparently possessed a rare first edition of JRR Tolkien’s The Hobbit. ‘The photos he had sent me over email were truly awful – pixelated, blurry, the works. Still, I took a gamble,’ Oliver says, and despite having ‘the photography skills of a potato’, he flew out to meet the collector in Hollywood.
Unexpectedly, The Hobbit was worth Oliver’s own there-and-back journey for more reasons than one. It was during a discussion with the collector about other books of note that Oliver mentioned in passing that he was also on the hunt for a first edition of Wuthering Heights. ‘He said: “I have one! In the original cloth.”’ It had never been on the market, sitting quietly in California all these years. ‘I can truly say I got goosebumps,’ Oliver adds, ‘so I flew home with my Hobbit, and then a few days later, the Wuthering Heights arrived in London.’
When he first opened it, Oliver was floored. ‘It’s so, so rare to find one like this,’ he explains. ‘The UK first edition is a unicorn at this point, but the first American edition is also a notorious rarity, especially in the original cloth.’ It was cheaply made for a mass audience, which contributes to its scarcity – it was never intended to last. ‘You’re seeing it exactly as the first readers did. It felt a bit like unearthing a ghost.’ (...)
The British first edition of Wuthering Heights, published in London in December 1847, has become mythical among collectors. Copies are virtually unobtainable today and command more than £200,000 when they surface, once in a decade. The Harper & Brothers first American edition is the earliest obtainable version for collectors (at least, says Oliver, the only one you can lay your hands on ‘without remortgaging the house, selling the car, and perhaps even a kidney’). For Oliver, the story of this specific edition mirrors Emily’s own. ‘It was printed without her name, sold under another’s, and for years misread. Yet it is through editions like this that Wuthering Heights first began its journey from obscurity to immortality.’ (Elly Parsons)
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