Faulkner, The Four Seas, &c.
fF
WHAT: F
WHEN: Pre-1900
WHO: Un-Gyve Press
WHERE: Boston
FAULKNER: William Faulkner's first book is published by The Four Seas in 1924 (Un-Gyve's Mario Scardino Motion & Sound Productions is developing Faulkner's As I Lay Dying for film). Four Seas had accepted Faulkner's collection of poems, upon his writing to them in June of 1923 with a manuscript entitled Orpheus, and Other Poems some of which may have been revised from earlier versions in Visions in Spring, Faulkner's typed, eighty-eight-page booklet he'd hand bound in 1921. Faulkner declined the offer to publish this manuscript, under The Four Sea's proposed royalty arrangement, because he could not afford to fund the manufacturing according to the standard agreement. Faulkner's benefactor Phil Stone (familiar with the press through other books of poetry published under the imprint including Sour Grapes, 1922, by William Carlos Williams, and Richard Aldington's Images Old and New, 1916) assisted in contracting the publication of a different set of poems from the originally submitted manuscript. Five-hundred copies of this first book, The Marble Faun, are printed, most of these soon remaindered.
THE FOUR SEAS COMPANY, BOSTON: In 1909 Mr. Edmund Brown incorporated his first publishing company, in Boston, The Four Seas, predecessor of the imprint under which Un-Gyve's founders cut their teeth (acquisitions, editing, design, typesetting, publicity and distribution). With the advent of the Depression, Mr. Brown subsequently incorporated Bruce Humphries.
FRANKLIN: Benjamin Franklin, first cataloguer in the United States, invented the mail order concept when he published the premiere catalogue, selling scientific and academic books. Benjamin Franklin is also credited with making the first mail order guarantee: "Those persons who live remote, by sending their orders and money to B. Franklin may depend on the same justice as if present".
N.B. The alphabet swatch colour is From Four Till Late from the Un-Gyve Palette.