The Works (and Quirks) of Alexandre Dumas

It began when I was fourteen years old and read The Three Musketeers for the first time in my life.  I thought it was the best book I had ever read.  "I am going to read every word this man has ever written," I told myself, not knowing at the time what it was that I was promising to do.  I imagined that Dumas must have written at least a few other books, and I swore I would own them all.

My copy of The Three Musketeers comprised of two small blue cloth volumes from J.H. Sears and company, ancient-looking books to my inexperienced eyes.  I imagined a future in which I owned a whole shelf of similar romances, bound in leather or cloth with intricate gilt-tickled spines; my Dumas collection. 

Today I have over eighty books bearing Alexandre Dumas père's name, covering more than forty of his over 250 works.  That his oeuvre would be so big was an unexpected surprise, but a welcome one.  From the point of view of a young person without much disposable income, but who nevertheless loves nothing more than to spend long hours scouring the shelves, boxes, basements and hiding-places of used book stores, collecting the works of a prolific but popular author like Alexandre Dumas is a perfect project.  His works range from the staggeringly popular and ubiquitously available (Three Musketeers, The Count of Monte Cristo) to the completely obscure (Charles the Bold) and includes plays, short stories, travel diaries, histories, romances, a cookbook and more. Among his works one can find everything from the cheap and plentiful to the rare and expensive. 

Once the scope of Dumas' oeuvre had become clear to me, I established some collecting rules.  I did not simply want to buy books found and arranged by booksellers, sold to me at the fair price.  To me, it is the bookseller who has done the "collecting" in such cases, and I am doing nothing but buying it.  I take much greater pleasure in locating the books myself; putting together a hodge-podge little collection of books found one at a time in book stores all over the world. 

The first aim of my Dumas collection was simply to own one copy of everything Dumas ever wrote, regardless of edition or condition.  Because of this seemingly simple aim, my collection contains several books which might not be considered "collectable" to another book lover.  Penguin Classics' (2007) edition of Nutcracker and Mouse King / The Tale of the Nutcracker is a widely available paperback with no especially collectable features, but it is the only edition of this work that I have ever seen.  Similarly, the Librairie Générale Française 1973 pulp edition of  Les Mohicans de Paris looks better suited to an airport newsstand than a beloved collection, but it is the only copy I have ever encountered.  Unremarkable or damaged books are place-holders in my collection. They will serve until I find a more pleasing edition to replace them. 

To that end, the second aim of my collection is to own a collectable copy, one in French and one in English, of every work of Alexandre Dumas.  What constitutes a "collectable" copy is really something which suits my fancy.  First editions and first translations would be nice, or any other landmark in the history of the publication of the book.  But in their absence nice editions will do.  Older cloth-bound editions, well put together and in clean condition will suffice.  My goal when selecting "better" copies of books to replace placeholder copies is to secure a book which not only looks, aesthetically, pleasing, but which might have a story behind it.  My copy of The Eighth Crusade published by Hurst & Co. is a good example of such an edition.  The Eighth Crusade is, in content, the latter part of the romance more commonly published as The Whites and the Blues (Les Blancs et les Bleus).  To the best of my knowledge, this text was only published as The Eighth Crusade twice, and this Hurst edition is the last such publication, published in the first decade of the twentieth century.  So it is not the first English edition, but it will most likely be the last, as these chapters are now routinely included in The Whites and the Blues.