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Dear Dave & Val Major:

On your question regarding The City of Dreadful Night, your Young's Kipling
Dictionary is not very informative, but the standard Kipling bibliographies
(Martindell, Livingston and Stewart) provide more information.  The original
book was called The City of Dreadful Night and Other Sketches, and was
pbulished in brown cloth boards in 1890.  Kipling was then in a fight with
the publisher A.H. Wheeler over the publication of The Smith Administration
and Letters of Marque, and insisted that all be suppressed as unauthorized
use of his newspaper sketches.  City...and Other Sketches, printed in 3000
copies, was thus destroyed, although supposedly three copies survived.  Only
one of those is locatable today, which had been in Ellis Ames Ballard
collection, sold in 1942, and purchased by Stewart, the future
bibliographer.  While Stewart's collection was left to Dalhousie University,
he retained this particular copy for his estate with a couple of other
special items, and it is not clear where it is now, nor what happened to the
other two copies that were around in the twenties. Interestingly, while
Martindell and Livingston list and describe this edition, Stewart (or his
editor Yeats) did not.

There was then another edition, The City of Dreadful Night and Other Places
(note the difference in the last word), published by Wheeler in Allahabad in
1891, No. 14 of the Indian Railway Library, containing 11 sketches, 7 of
which had appeared in the 1890 edition, but 11 "Miscellaneous Sketches" from
the Civil & Military Gazette which had appeared in the first, suppressed
edition were not reprinted in this 1891 edition.  There was also an edition
published in London the same year, with the additional Sampson Low imprint
and the apology slip tipped in, saying sorry for using James Thompson's
poem's title--this is the copy you have, which is the first English edition,
in the gray-green wrappers used for the second, unsuppressed Indian edition.



David Alan Richards
Sidley & Austin
875 Third Avenue
New York, New York  10022
Telephone:  (212) 906-2305
Facsimile:    (212) 906-2021
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