WOOD (Mrs. Henry). Johnny Ludlow. Sixth series. London, Macmillan and Co., Limited; New York: The Macmillan Company, 1899. Blank before half-title; preliminary gathering, four leaves, a cancel on poor quality paper; likewise the last gathering of text and first leaf of the integral advertisements; 10pp. integral advertisements at end; olive green buckram, lettered black on front cover, gilt on spine, short rule gilt on spine. Slight rubbing of covers; poor quality paper of cancels embrowned; otherwise a very nice copy.

First edition, probable first issue: the Sadleir copy being apparently without the cancels. Sadleir, 3345; Woolf, 7276, recording only an edition dated 1901, which he appears to mistake for the first edition. Sadleir remarks: "A strange obscurity surrounds this book. No such work is catalogued by Bodley or the U.L.C. and it seems to have escaped general notice that the volume, although listed by Macmillan as No.34 of the ‘New Edition' of Mrs. Wood's works, was in fact a first edition. On the title-page are the words ‘Sixth Series' only, the additional phrase New Edition appearing only in the publisher's advertisement [on the final page]." One might hazard a guess at the reason for the cancels: Mrs. Wood's novels had mostly been published by Bentley who sold out to Macmillan late in 1898. According to the English Catalogue of Books the present volume appeared in April 1899 - which may mean a month or so earlier, but almost certainly not later. We hypothesise that it was in the course of production at the time that Macmillan's took over, and that some (perhaps advance) copies had been printed already, but not bound. The two cancel gatherings are strategically placed to remove all mention of Bentley from the volume. If the Sadleir copy was really without the rather obvious cancels present here, then later copies must have been printed all on a single quality of paper. If this were paper that matched the body text of the present copy, the only reason for putting cancels of poor quality paper in the present copy would be that the proper paper stock was not immediately available, and some copies needed to be bound up straight away. This would argue that they were probably advance copies. If the paper stock used for the Sadleir copy were uniform but different from that used for the body text of the present copy, then the present copy must be from a separate, and earlier, printing - and if the cancels are not of the same paper as that used for the Sadleir copy, then it still may very possibly be an advance copy. In our experience this is a very difficult title, however, in any issue.

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