Heinemann, William

Undated photograph of William Heinemann, Wikimedia Commons

William Henry Heinemann (1863-1920) was George Moore’s English publisher as early as 1894, when Heinemann and Balestier of Leipzig brought out an English language European copyright edition of Esther Waters.

Starting in 1905 while Moore was living in Dublin, Heinemann’s firm in London published 24 titles, in multiple impressions and editions. Below they are listed with the first year of Heinemann publication:

The Lake (1905), Memoirs of My Dead Life (1906), Hail and Farewell. Ave (1911), Hail and Farewell. Salve (1912), Esther Waters: A Play (1913), The Untilled Field (1914), Hail and Farewell. Vale (1914), Muslin (1915), Lewis Seymour and Some Women (1917), A Mummer’s Wife (1918), Confessions of a Young Man (1918), Esther Waters (1920), In Single Strictness (1922), The Apostle (1923), Avowals (1924), Conversations in Ebury Street (1924), Daphnis and Chloe (1924), Héloïse and Abélard (1925), The Brook Kerith (1927), Celibate Lives (1927), A Story-Teller’s Holiday (1928), The Passing of the Essenes (1930), Aphrodite in Aulis (1930).

Memoirs of My Dead Life was the first title issued in what became Heinemann’s standard binding. It clones the front cover of The Strike at Arlingford (London: Walter Scott, 1893) designed by the artist Albert Joseph Moore (1841-1893); Albert was not related to George.

Albert Moore’s cover for George Moore’s The Strike at Arlingford (1893). Heinemann embossed the design on dark blue cloth, without gilt.

Heinemann’s canonical, 20-volume Uniform Edition of George Moore appeared in similar bindings — white paper label on a brown cloth spine with marbled paper-covered boards — but in slightly different sizes and different years. In the order of intial publication, the Uniform Edition includes:

A Mummer’s Wife, Muslin, Confessions of a Young Man, Esther Waters, The Untilled Field, The Lake, Memoirs of My Dead Life, Hail and Farewell (three volumes), The Brook Kerith, A Story-Teller’s Holiday (two volumes), Avowals, Héloïse and Abélard, Conversations in Ebury Street, Daphnis and Chloe and Peronnik the Fool (one volume), Celibate Lives, The Passing of the Essenes, Aphrodite in Aulis.

The cover of Heinemann’s Uniform Edition; this example is a reissue of Héloïse and Abélard (1930)

The Uniform Edition was posthumously reissued as the Ebury Edition in plain, slate colored buckram bindings.