John Steinbeck: A Descriptive Bibliographical Catalogue of the Holmes Collection ed. by Kenneth and Karen Holmes (review)

This high-quality book is an indispensable acquisition for any Steinbeck scholar. Fortunately, its authors chose to publish it themselves, producing an attractive, durable product at an affordable price. Intelligently organized and carefully edited, it even features a CD-ROM containing the entire book in digital form along with useful supplements. At $40—including the cost of shipping within the United States—it represents the most appealing features of print and online self-publishing today: economy, user-friendliness, and a commitment to digital open-sourcing. Purchasers are urged to upload and share files but prohibited from reselling their contents or charging others for their use.

Reading and collecting Steinbeck is a passion that became all-consuming for this particular couple. As Kenneth Holmes explains in the book’s pre-publication brochure,

My wife Karen and I have been serious collectors of Steinbeck material for some fifty years, what dealers refer to as ‘completists.’ We are interested in anything by or about Steinbeck, seeking, for example, copies (hopefully the first printing) of every edition of every Steinbeck book.

I do not know the collectors, but as a new convert to Steinbeck, I would like to. It should not be difficult. As I discovered, they respond to e-mails and they live not far from Chapel Hill, where I received my Ph.D. in English before Steinbeck was in the canon of ambitious East Coast universities.

This eventually changed within most of the academic establishment, as evidenced by the abundance of books and articles about Steinbeck surveyed in this book. But with the possible exception of Shakespeare—whose ghostly identity has been pursued by generations of dedicated dilettantes—Steinbeck invites more attention from enterprising non-academics like the Holmeses and the late Roy Simmonds than any other writer studied in comparable depth by specialists. And as the accumulation of works in forty-three languages by the Holmes collection attests, Steinbeck Country was not really California, or even America, but the world—which makes it a pleasure to contemplate the Holmeses at home in North Carolina, carefully cataloging their Steinbeck collection, annotating each item with precision and personality, and discovering that their collection includes editions in twenty languages not found in Gladstone and Payne’s 1980 collectible classic, John Steinbeck: A Collection of Books and Manuscripts, their constant point of reference. When I took the required bibliography course in graduate school, describing editions of books by and about dead writers seemed a dry science at best. The Holmeses prove that it can be a living art for lovers.

Their achievement suggests an elegant principle of biology that probably appealed to Steinbeck too. Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. The evolution of each work through manuscripts and editions in the Holmes collection mirrors the arc of Steinbeck’s career; each work—unique in its form, function, and history—is shown to contain the seeds of those that follow. Like Sea of Cortez, the Holmeses’ book is more than a catalog of objects. Through their imaginative annotation of works by and about Steinbeck, it becomes a narrative of order, coherence, and interconnection. Read it for the joy of discovery. Then put it on your most accessible shelf.