Charles Darwin - On the Origin of Species - the first Polish edition and its variants.

Charles Darwin - On the Origin of Species - the first Polish edition and its variants.

About why the first Polish complete edition of Charles Darwin On the Origin of Species (Warsaw 1884-1885) has several title variants, as well as the estimated size of the Polish edition compared to the British edition

In the photos posted here, I have shown three copies of Darwin's most important work in three different variants that are found in the reading (and antiquarian) circulation: only the first title page; with the first and second title cards; only with the second title card. All copies are in period bindings, which is not without significance for the further discussion. The purpose of the following text is to explain the causes of such a "bibliophilic phenomenon".

[VARIANT 1.]

About the origin of species through natural selection, that is, about the maintenance of more perfect races in the struggle for existence. On the Origin of Species by means of natural selection, or the preservation of favored races in the struggle for life. Translated by Szymon Dickstein, Warsaw: Przegląd Tygodniowy Publishing House, at the Printing House of the Weekly Review, ul. Pure No. 2, 1884, censorship license from January 24, 1884, pp. [4], [5] -407, [I] -XVI, 1 sheet of table pic (woodcut); addendum: Darwin Karol, Instinct, pp. 408-437. Trans. [Nusbaum Józef]; contains a pre-title card with the words: Works of Charles Darwin.

[VARIANT 2.]

On the Origin of Species by means of natural selection, or the preservation of favored races in the struggle for life. Translated by Szymon Dickstein, Warsaw: Przegląd Tygodniowy Publishing House, at the Printing House of the Weekly Review, ul. Pure No. 2, 1884, censorship permit: Warsaw, 24.I.1884 [and] On the Origin of Species by means of natural selection, or the preservation of favored races in the struggle for life). Translated by Szymon Dickstein and Józef Nusbaum, Warsaw: Published by the Editorial Board of Przegląd Tygodniowy, in the Printing House of Przegląd Tygodniowy, ul. Czysta Nr.2, 1884-5, censorship permission: Warsaw, October 11, 1884, p. [6], [5] -407, [I] -XVI, 1 sheet of the table pic (woodcut); addendum: Darwin Karol, Instinct, pp. 408-437. Trans. [Nusbaum Józef]; contains a pre-title card with the words: Works of Charles Darwin.

[VARIANT 3.]

On the Origin of Species by means of natural selection, or the preservation of favored races in the struggle for life. Translated by Szymon Dickstein and Józef Nusbaum, Warsaw: Published by the Editorial Board of Przegląd Tygodniowy, in the Printing House of Przegląd Tygodniowy, ul. Czysta Nr.2, 1884-5, censorship permission: Warsaw, October 11, 1884, p. [6], [5] -407, [I] -XVI, 1 sheet of the table pic (woodcut); addendum: Darwin Karol, Instinct, pp. 408-437. Trans. [Nusbaum Józef]; contains a pre-title card with the words: Works of Charles Darwin.

The first Polish complete edition of Charles Darwin's epochal work On the Origin of Species (London: J. Murray 1859) was published in sections (so-called sheets) as a free supplement (so-called premium), intended for subscribers of the magazine Przegląd Tygodniowy. The edition was announced in no. 8. of February 12, 1884, attaching the first sheet to no. 9 of February 19. When informing about their intentions, the editors of the periodical emphasized: "In a number of our undertakings, we consider them [i.e. publication of the works of K. Darwin, J.J.] as one of the most important, and therefore we will do our best to ensure that the performance is equal to the task that we may be given to complete, because only a complete edition of the works will have the meaning we want to give it ... " .

The publishing plan was large-scale: "Darwin's works will be 8 to 10 volumes of large format ..." - in the end, only half of the project was completed (four Darwin's works in five volumes were released).

Linking Darwin's editions to pre-subscription freed the publisher from the financial risk of incurring printing costs without guaranteeing that the entire print run would be sold out. However, the plans for the Weekly Review also included making additional prints, which were to be used to fold the so-called sets, distributed outside subscription in the form of ready-made volumes: “Our editorial office does not have sufficient resources to allocate great capital in surplus copies, the number of which must be limited. (…) Subscribers of our magazine will find it easier to pay a small subscription fee than the price for a set, which must necessarily be quite substantial. ”.

The first sheet of the work, together with a title page dated 1884 and mentioning Simon Dickstein as a translator, was attached to the number of February 12, 1884. The title page has been printed on one sheet, including the beginning column of the main text, which begins with the Historical Overview (page [5]) and the 6th page of the text. The first sheet also had a pre-title card with all caps: KAROL DARVIN'S WORKS (unprinted, in the opposite). It was printed on one sheet together with the 7th and 8th pages of the text. It is worth noting that the verso title page shows the imprimatur of the Russian censorship of January 24, 1884. Censorship approval had to be granted on a promise basis, and the complete edition was certainly not presented to the censor for inspection, as the translation of the entire text into Polish - which we will return to later - was not completed at the time the opening parts of Darwin's work were made available to readers of the Weekly Review. In less than seventeen months, 57 sheets were printed and distributed, each numbered in the right corner of the bottom margin. The signatures of subsequent sheets followed the curator with the following text: Works of Charles Darwin. - On the Origin of Species. The last episode was published with the 27th issue of the journal on June 23, 1885. In the next Review, the editorial staff published a message that was surprising to the readers: “In the last issue [No. 27], we have completed the printing of the first and most important of Charles Darwin's works.

Originally, only Szymon Dickstein was to translate it, and his name appears on the title itself, as the translator. Sudden death did not allow this promising worker to complete the project to the end, and his friend - Józef Nusbaum - for the greater half of the translation. A simple reason of equity dictated and his name should be placed next to that of the predecessor. To this end, we re-attach the title page to today's issue, asking it to replace the title next to the first sheet of the work ... ”[my emphasis, J.J.].

The editors ignored the fact that the unexpected death of Szymon Dickstein (1858-1884) was the result of a suicide - the young naturalist took his life on July 6, 1884, leaving a farewell letter, published almost 75 years later in the volume of Ludwik Krzywicki's memoirs. In the letter, Dickstein expressed his will as follows: "The [Weekly] Review would do well to ask Nusbaum to continue Darwin." Nusbaum's "Darwin continuation" mentioned in his farewell letter could have been about several things: editorial corrections of Dickstein's translation, the completion of the Polish edition of On the Origin of Species, and the continuation of translations of other Darwin's works as part of the Publishing House's Weekly Review series, Works by Charles Darwin.

According to the findings of R.B. Freeman, the circulation of the first British edition of On the Origin of Species amounted to 1,250 copies, of which 12 were presentation copies, sent by the publisher John Murray to people named by Darwin; these copies were annotated with a handwritten entry From the Author, not by Darwin himself but by a publisher. Another 41 copies were earmarked for reviewers and 5 for the national archive at Stationers' Hall, which deals with copyright protection. As presentation copies, reviewed and archival copies were never sold in bookselling, it should be assumed that the number of copies that went on sale in November 1859 was only 1,192.

Estimating the circulation of the Polish edition of Darwin's epochal work, prepared by the Weekly Review, is not an easy task. In the second half of the nineteenth century, informing about the volume of circulation in the content of titles was rarely practiced by Polish publishers. However, in the text prepared by the editors of the Review, published in the journal at the end of 1890, significant statistical data was provided regarding the number of subscribers subscribing to Warsaw weeklies: "Tygodnik w Warszawie comes out 33 (...) they have about 22 to 23 thousand subscribers in Warsaw. and in the provinces by bookstores and expeditions - so that the total number of their subscribers reaches 40 to 42 thousand ... ”. Assuming the highest of the given values, it can be established that the average circulation of the Warsaw subscription weekly was approx. 1,270 copies - this was also the circulation of the premium editions free of charge for subscribers of the magazine. The publishers of the Review noted that in the case of the Origin of Species, a limited number of additional overprints were also made, distributed outside the subscription in the form of sets. The number of overprints probably did not exceed 200, because such a circulation, in the realities of the publishing market at that time, guaranteed the finding of recipients in a relatively short time. The editors of the Review - having reliable data from their own publishing practice - informed: "... each book is sold on average 200 copies in the first year of its publication ... giving 200 sales copies of each book in the first year of its publication, we presented a figure rather large than too small". The first publishing announcement, advertising the sale of the set On the origin of species, appeared in Przegląd Tygodniowy in no. 46 on November 3, 1885, barely six months after the end of distribution by subscription. The price of the volume was 3 silver rubles. Two years later, Darwin's work was still advertised and offered at the same price, which does not prove that this edition was too popular among buyers of the time.

Summarizing the above findings, it can be assumed that the estimated circulation of the first full Polish edition of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species was about 1,470 copies - about 1,270 of them were printed in sections, distributed with the subscription periodical, and about 200 were distributed outside the subscription in the form of ready-made volumes.

Complications related to the change of translator, the need to print two title pages and the decision to distribute the edition in different ways resulted in the fact that there were three different variants of this edition in the readership: option 1 - with only the first title page with the date 1884 and the name of one translator ( Sz. Dickstein); variant 2 - with two title pages: the first with the date 1884 and Dickstein's name and the second with the date 1884-85, listing two translators (Sz. Dickstein and J. Nusbaum), which was included in the book block in at least two known ways ; variant 3 - with only a second title page with the date 1884-85 and the names of two translators (Sz. Dickstein and J. Nusbaum).

Option 1 was created as a result of binding 57 sheets available by subscription - the additional title card was omitted, made available by Przegląd Tygodniowy after the end of editing in sections; option 2 was also created as a result of binding subscription sheets, supplemented with an additional title sheet; it should be noted that the owners of such bound copies did not follow the recommendation of the editorial office, which expected the back cards to be replaced (the first to be removed and the second to be left); the second title page was placed before or after the pre-title page, at the discretion of the bookbinder; variant 3 was created from subscription sheets, in which the first title page was removed before binding - in accordance with the editors' recommendation, and replaced with a sheet with the date 1884-85; Also, the volumes sold in the form of sets were equipped only with a later title page (as it is difficult to assume that the editors of the Review - when preparing ready-made sets for sale - would go against their own recommendations).

The most common copies of variant 2; copies in variant 1 are less frequent; the rarest are the copies of variant 3, because removing the title page dated 1884 was troublesome and required cutting the first piece of the text (few owners and bookbinders decided to do this), and the sets - prepared in this way at the request of the editorial office itself - were relatively few (according to with estimates, they constituted only 15% of the total circulation).

Thank you for your attention,

Jakub Jakubowski.

Jakub Jakubowski, PhD in hum science. in the field of bibliology (book history); historian of natural sciences, specializing in the history of natural science in Gdańsk in the 17th and 18th centuries; an active bibliophile for 20 years, looking for rare polonica in the field of broadly understood "natural history"; lover of Charles Darwin and Polish nineteenth-century Darwinians.

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