POE, Edgar Allan. The Conchologist’s First Book: or, A System of Testaceous Malacology, Arranged Expressly for the Use of Schools, in which the Animals, According to Cuvier, Are Given with the Shells, a Great Number of New Species Added, and the Whole Br…

Edgar Allan Poe on Seashells

POE, Edgar Allan. The Conchologist’s First Book: or, A System of Testaceous Malacology, Arranged Expressly for the Use of Schools, in which the Animals, According to Cuvier, Are Given with the Shells, a Great Number of New Species Added, and the Whole Brought up, as Accurately as Possible, to the Present Condition of the Science. Philadelphia: Published for the author by Haswell, Barrington and Haswell. 1839.

8vo. Original brown roan-backed pictorial boards; pp. 156; 12 unnumbered leaves of lithographic plates; small losses to spine at head and foot, joints cracked but firm, boards faded, bumped at corners, ink ownership inscription ‘Wm. H. Turney 1860’ to front free endpaper, scattered spotting throughout; a very good copy.

First edition of Poe’s possibly plagiarised ‘greatest hit’, the first English translation of Cuvier’s introductory textbook on molluscs and shells.

Poe ended up editing this version, intended for schools, of Thomas Wyatt’s Manual of Conchology (1838) out of financial necessity rather than conchological passion. He was paid $50 by the publisher for the right to put his name on the cover to encourage sales. However, Poe took the commission seriously, writing a preface and introduction, and altering Wyatt’s text. He also translated Wyatt’s quotations from Georges Cuvier from French into English and worked on the classifications of the animals.

The result was a very popular school textbook which sold out within two months. Of all of Poe’s works, it was the only one to merit second and third editions in his own lifetime. However, Poe attracted accusations of plagiarism from the Philadelphia Saturday Evening Post in 1846, which affected his reputation and his professional relationship with Harper, Wyatt’s original publisher and the firm that had published Poe’s novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838). His standing was further undermined when it emerged that Wyatt's original book was itself plagiarised from the British naturalist Thomas Brown’s The Conchologist’s Textbook (1837). Poe seems to have been aware that Wyatt, himself no conchologist, had leaned heavily on Brown’s work, as pencilled notes in his own copy of this book show, but the acknowledgement never made it into print. Even the cover design appears to have been stolen, being virtually identical to that of E.A. Crouch’s Introduction to Lamarck’s Conchology (1826). Poe’s rebuttal, laid out in a letter of February 1847 to George W. Eveleth, is unrepentant, and honest about publishing practices of the day: ‘I wrote it in conjunction with Professor Thomas Wyatt, and Professor McMultrie … my name being put to the work, as best known and most likely to aid its circulation. I wrote the Preface and Introduction, and translated from Cuvier, the accounts of the animals, etc. All School-books are necessarily made in a similar way.’

Despite all of this, Poe’s work has attracted some high-profile defenders. In his 1995 book Dinosaur In A Haystack, Stephen Jay Gould described The Conchologist’s First Book as ‘Poe’s greatest hit’ and praises Poe for the translation of Cuvier into English for the first time, his insistence on describing the soft body of each animal alongside its shell, and a ‘progressive, even innovative, arrangement of material’ that showed a modern scientific approach that raises the work beyond its sources.

Heartman and Canny’s variant ‘b’ with uncoloured plates. Plate 3 in BAL’s state ‘A’ reading ‘Parts of Shells.’

BAL 16131; Heartman & Canny, pp. 41–44; Norman 1720. See Gould, Dinosaur In A Haystack (1995); Ostrom, The Letters of Edgar Allan Poe (1966).

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