Tales of the Folio Club (1832-1836), title page and table of contents

Notes:

There is no title page or table of contents for the original book (and thus no page numbers). Only Poe's handwritten introduction and some letters which describe the varying contents survive. What is presented here is a reasonable reconstruction.

The full title of the collection given here is adopted from the two titles mentioned by Poe himself. As the full collection was not printed as Poe intended, and most of the manuscripts of this collection are lost, the versions of the tales used here are taken from the earliest appearance in print. The one exception to this rule is for “Epimanes,” which has been taken from the manuscript of 1833. (Although an early manuscript exists for “Morella” it seems to be a preliminary form and probably not the version Poe would have included in the proposed book.)

This selection and sequence is based on previous analyses by Mabbott and Alexander Hammond, and follows the list of narrators as given in the prologue, using the assignments noted above. Hammond speculates that Poe may have exaggerated when he said that there were seventeen tales, but this does not seem reasonable as seventeen has no inherent virtue over sixteen unless Poe actually had that many tales in mind. Had the offer been accepted, explaining the downward variance in the number of tales would have been awkward and there seems no reason to presume that Poe was reckless enough to take such chances with a book that had already been rejected by one publisher. Hammond's position seems to be based on Poe's statement that all seventeen tales had “appeared in the [Southern Literary] Messenger,” while in fact only fourteen of the tales had been printed there.

A major disagreement between Hammond and Mabbott is that Mabbott's 1978 selection of the eleven original tales includes “A Tale of Jerusalem.” instead of “Raising the Wind,” The latter being originally suggested by Claude Richard. Of the material Poe anticipated to use between the tales, Mabbott comments: “The burlesque criticisms never appeared — and I suspect were never written” (TOM, T&S, 2:201).

The seventeenth tale, referred to in Poe's letter of September 1836 has not been reliably identified. “Mystification” is offered here as perhaps the most likely candiate, for reasons both of date and tone. This tale was not published until June of 1837, but this late printing may have been caused by Poe's protracted, though ultimately unsuccessful, efforts to have the whole collection appear as a book. (In T&S, 2:203, Mabbott states that he does not think “Mystification” dates earlier than 1837.) In place of “Mystification,” another possible story is “A Dream,” printed in the Saturday Evening Post (Philadelphia) for August 31, 1831. This story, however, has only been assigned to Poe conjecturally. At any rate, it predates the other tales and seems unlikely as an addition at such a late date.