The Ploughman and other poems. (The extraordinarily rare publisher’s edition – one of only three known copies)

Sydney : Beacon Press, 1935. Octavo, cloth in illustrated dustjacket (edges chipped, the spine perished and replaced with plain brown paper, paper reinforcements to the folds), [76] pp., illustrations by L. Roy Davies, light offsetting to endpapers, a remarkably crisp and clean copy. Limited to 300 copies and 6 numbered Publisher’s Copies. This is Publisher’s Copy number 4A, signed by the publisher Harrie P. Mortlock on the colophon, with a copy of Mortlock’s calling card from The Beacon Press loosely enclosed, signed by Mortlock and inscribed ‘With compliments’.

One of three known copies from an edition of only six; at least some of the other three copies were almost certainly destroyed by the author.

The Ploughman and other poems, a collection of Patrick White’s poetry, was only the second book of White’s work to be published, following the now notoriously rare Thirteen Poems (1929/30), of which only four copies are known to exist. After the demise of the publishing house of P.R. Stephensen, who had initially agreed to publish the collection, The Ploughman and other poems was printed in Sydney by Boylan & Co. for the Beacon Press in an edition of 300 standard copies (Hubber & Smith, B1). Only a handful of copies are recorded in private and public collections. The rarity of this edition is explained by White’s admission, in a letter to the bibliophile Geoffrey Ingleton, that he had ‘burnt a suitcase full of the books and he hoped that he might find and destroy any other existing copies‘, due to the fact that White found the quality of his writing ‘embarrassingly bad‘ (Hubber & Smith, p 4).

The copy of The Ploughman we offer here, however, is of an order of rarity which exceeds that of copies of White’s ‘self-supressed’ standard edition. The colophon on the penultimate leaf is a variant of that in the standard edition (see Hubber & Smith, p 5), and reads: ‘The Ploughman and other poems produced by the Beacon Press of Sydney, N.S.W., and limited to 300 numbered copies, and 6 publisher’s copies, was completed in the month of February, 1935. This is Publisher’s Copy no. 4A‘. (The number ‘4A’ is inscribed in manuscript). This colophon – and therefore the existence of the six Publisher’s Copies – was not known to Hubber & Smith, and, until we acquired and sold a copy of the Publisher’s Edition in 2013, was completely unrecorded (that copy acquired by the State Library of New South Wales, see MRB/203).

In 2023, the National Library of Australia reviewed their copies of The Ploughman, and it was discovered that they hold copy number 1 of the Publisher’s Edition, although it had not been catalogued as such, nor recorded elsewhere. Apart from these three recently unearthed examples, we can find no record of any other Publisher’s Copy of The Ploughman, with this example being the only one known signed by the publisher. Given Patrick White’s intense focus on destroying copies of his early books, it may well be that the other three examples (of which no doubt he received at least one copy, if not more) were incinerated.

As such, it is a remarkable and fortuitous survivor, an exceptional copy of the earliest procurable book by Australia’s only Noble Laureate for Literature.

Reference: Hubber, Brian & Smith, Vivian. Patrick White : a bibliography. Auburn, Vic. : Quiddler’s Press, 2004.