A splendid copy of this collection of short stories by a sadly neglected writer. Russell banks who has written the preface to “The Hurly Burly and Other Stories,” by Coppard, published in March in the USA by Ecco wrote in the February 23, 2021 issue of the New Yorker: “How is it possible that an acclaimed twentieth-century master of the English short story, whose work was loved and admired by critics and writers as different and as demanding as Ford Madox Ford, Malcolm Cowley, Frank O’Connor, and Doris Lessing, could turn up all but lost to us today?”
Crosby Gaige started his career in the theatre, producing Broadway hits from which he made a fortune. Later he became a publisher and according to John Tebbel [1] in his history of American book publishing, none of the small fine presses of the time ‘could match the Crosby Gaige list for quality and sheer beauty’. Before the Crash in 1929 which wiped out his fortune, he had produced twenty-two titles, whose authors included, Siegfried Sassoon, A.E., James Joyce, Humbert Wolfe, Joseph Conrad, Carl Sandburg, Virginia Woolf, Thomas Hardy, James Stephens, and W. B. Yeats. Yeats’s The Winding Stair was the last title he produced – the publication programme was taken over by the Fountain Press, distribution continuing through Random House – it was by no means the end of Gaige. He was held in such high esteem by his friends, that following his financial ruin, they kept him in the manner to which he was accustomed for the rest of his life.
[1] John Tebbel, The History of Book Publishing in the United States, 3. vols. New York & London: R. R. Bowker, 1972, 1975, 1978. Vol.2, p.168.