ISBN:
  Cloth: 978-0-89263-016-5
  Paperback: 978-0-89263-017-2
  Wirebound: 978-0-89263-018-9

The Black Riders and other lines

• About the Editor

The 1895 publication of Stephen Crane's The Black Riders and other lines was a milestone event in the history of American letters. Crane's was the first American book to be printed with a clear Modernist design — a look devised with the conscious intention to echo the sense of his text.

Copeland and Day, the publisher, was a new firm whose founders, Herbert Copeland and Fred Day, were devotees of the design revolution under way in nineteenth-century England. Beginning in the 1850s with the Rossetti circle, climaxing in the 1890s of Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley, and marked by such ground-breaking publications as The Hobby Horse, The Dial, and The Yellow Book, the movement promulgated the notion that a published work advanced its argument not only through its words but also through the look of its pages. Authors of the time came to be heavily involved in the designs of their books, regarding such matters as being of equal importance to their writing. Working closely with Crane, Copeland and Day built a design that came to be seen as the first public interpretation of the poet's lines.

Rice University Press is bringing Crane's breakthrough volume back to life in this new facsimile edition, part of our Literature by Design series, with an enlightening Afterword by the noted scholar Jerome McGann. Dr. McGann carefully explicates both the poetry and its presentation, leading the reader through an interpretation of the work that is also an interpretation of the pages themselves, along with a thorough account of the state and motion of the publishing industry in 1890s America.

About the Editor

Jerome McGann is the John Stewart Bryan University Professor, University of Virginia. His most recent books are Byron's Manfred and Are the Humanities Inconsequent?, both published in 2009. He is working on a study of the literature and culture of antebellum America. As a digital humanist, he was a co-founder of IATH (Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities) and of Speclab (Speculative Computing Laboratory), and was the founding director of NINES (Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-century Electronic Scholarship.