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<\/a>Poet H.D. (a.k.a. Hilda Doolittle) published her first novel, Palimpsest<\/em>, in 1926. It\u2019s an eye-catching object\u2014a bright red jacket with wavy blue lines and an inside hard cover decorated with what appear to be gold Egyptian hieroglyphics, or an artist\u2019s rendition of hieroglyphics. As is indicated on the jacket of the front cover, only 700 initial copies were printed in the expatriate\u2019s home country, the United States, despite her relative success as a modernist poet.<\/p>\nAn original copy of Palimpsest<\/em>, published by Boston\u2019s Houghton-Mifflin Company, can be found in Trinity College\u2019s Watkinson Library in Hartford, Conn., where I viewed it in February 2016. According to the WorldCat research database, as of March 2016, there only 111 of these American editions accounted for in libraries worldwide, with 3 copies available in Connecticut: one at Trinity College, one at Yale University library, and one at the Bridgeport Public Library.<\/p>\n It\u2019s immediately obvious that H.D.\u2019s pen name is gender neutral. What is interesting about Palimpsest<\/em> is that it preserves the ambiguity of H.D.\u2019s gender identity. \u201cIn its snaring of the elusive overtones of life this first venture into the novelist\u2019s field by one of the most distinguished of contemporary poets thrusts forward the established frontiers of prose fiction,\u201d touts the front cover of the book, avoiding any gendered pronouns.<\/p>\n The inside left jacket flap advertises a reprint of Willa Cather\u2019s My Antonia<\/em>, referring to the author as \u201cMiss Cather.\u201d The back jacket flap describes Godfrey Elton\u2019s The Testament of Dominic Burleigh<\/em>, referring to the author more than once as \u201cMr. Elton.\u201d We see no such mention of H.D.<\/p>\n Looking at Palimpsest<\/em>, it is also interesting to observe the name of the printer: \u201cPrinted at Dijon (France) by Maurice Darantiere.\u201d As it turns out, according to the State University of New York, Buffalo (which has a few original documents online<\/a>), Darantiere also printed modernist writer James Joyce\u2019s Ulysses<\/em>, which had just been published a few years earlier by Sylvia Beach<\/a>, owner of the Paris bookstore Shakespeare and Company, where modernist poets such as T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound spent time. (T.S. Eliot published one of the first review of Ulysses <\/em>in the October 1922 Vol. 1 of his literary review, The Criterion<\/em>, which is also available for viewing at the Watkinson Library.)<\/p>\n For a bit of local history embedded in Palimpsest<\/em>, the edition at the Watkinson Library contains a sticker of bookseller Edwin V. Mitchell, who had a store in downtown Hartford at 27 Lewis St., a store which at the time Palimpsest<\/em> was printed would have been a recently opened business. The Connecticut Historical Society has a digitized collection of scrapbooks put together by local resident Mary Morris, and the June 1920 edition<\/a> contains photos of Mitchell and information about the opening of his bookstore in 1923 (see page 102 of 189 in the PDF version of the scrapbook).<\/p>\n Mitchell\u2019s friend and business partner, James Thrall Soby, joined as a partner in the bookshop in 1929. His papers were published in the 1970s, and his piece titled 27 Lewis Street<\/em> is available at the Connecticut Historical Society. It is easy to envision Mitchell purchasing Palimpsest <\/em>when one reads Soby\u2019s description of Mitchell and the bookstore.<\/p>\n<\/a>Describing the muddled web woven among the writers, businesspeople, and lovers is fascinating. Although it\u2019s impossible for me to independently verify every piece of information available online about the printing of Palimpsest <\/em>without more extensive research of original sources, it\u2019s clear the web was very tangled. Ulysses<\/em> was initially typed and edited by Robert McAlmon<\/a>. According to rare book dealer Priscilla Juvelis, Inc<\/a>., Robert McAlmon is the one who sold to Houghton-Mifflin the rights to print 700 copies of Palimpsest<\/em>. McAlmon was, for some time (1921-27), the husband of Bryher (a.k.a. Winifred Ellerman), who, according to Poetry Foundation<\/a> (among others), was H.D.\u2019s lifelong female lover. (H.D. pens a dedication to Bryher at the beginning of Palimpsest.<\/em> See photo.)<\/p>\n