New Draft Pages: Nabokov’s Dozen

We move on with the next set of draft pages for the revised and updated bibliography: Nabokov’s Dozen, a collection of 13 stories written originally in Russian, French, and English, along with a bibliographic note from the author. It was first published in 1958 by Doubleday and went through nine further editions. These stories are now subsumed in the complete collection of 68 stories, The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov. Nabokov’s Dozen was A32 in the 1986 bibliography.

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  1. Jerry Boyajian’s avatar

    For what it’s worth, the numbers you note as being printed on p. 214 of the Doubleday issues are informally referred to as “gutter codes”, and indicate the week of the relevant calendar year the book was printed in. So, the “31” in the first printing indicates that it was printed in week 31 of 1958 while the “46” of the second printing would indicate week 46 of the same year. Doubleday started this practice in mid-1958. A good description of the gutter codes can be found at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database’s wiki (http://www.isfdb.org/wiki/index.php/Gutter_Codes).

    Some paperback publishers did something similar by having a printing date (usually of the form mm-yy) on the last story page of the book. With respect to Nabokov’s books, two of the publishers that did this at one time or another are Fawcett and Popular Library, though I can’t off-hand say if this applies to any of their Nabokov titles.

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    1. Michael Juliar’s avatar

      Thanks for the further information. “Gutter codes” in fact do appear in other Nabokov publications besides Nabokov’s Dozen. I’ve found them in Doubleday’s issues of Pnin, A Hero of Our Time, and Poems. (I don’t find any codes in Fawcett and Popular Library paperback reprints of Nabokov works.) In a non-first printing of Doubleday’s Pnin, for example, there is a code of “A12”, meaning a March 1959 printing. That is possibly the earliest use of a letter-number code combination. I’ll update my draft pages to reflect this information.

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