Silent Spring (proofs).
Rachel Carson’s Masterwork:
One Of Only A Handful Of Proofs
Radically At Odds With The Published Text
Carson, Rachel. Silent Spring. Drawings by Lois and Louis Darling. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, (April 12-18), 1962.
8vo.; one page corner turned; printed on rectos only; green cardstock covers, paper label on cover, white plastic spiral binding; modestly sunned and edgeworn. In a quarter-morocco slipcase.
Rare uncorrected proofs, stamped “uncorrected proofs” on the cover; with a label affixed on the verso of the front cover with the tentative publication date and price typed in: “10/8/62; $5.00”; the actual publication was slightly earlier, in September. The pages bear “GAL” (galley) pagination numbers at the top, along with a date ranging from “4/12/62” to “4/18/62” in keeping with epistolary evidence that dates these galleys to mid-April: On April 5, Carson wrote to Dorothy Freeman: “Miss Phillips called today (H.M. editor) and said text will go to printer today or tomorrow. Galleys in 2 or 3 weeks then!” Page breaks for new chapters are indicated by brackets; the preliminary pages of the proof are out of order; the appendix is absent. Carson revised this text substantially before publishing portions of it as a three-part series in The New Yorker, and edited it again, slightly, for book publication. In most cases the passages that Carson altered after the New Yorker appearance had not been excerpted in their pages, leaving these galleys to stand as a rare example of the earlier version. It is certain that only a handful of copies—if that—were spiral bound at this early state.
Carson’s attention was drawn to the environmental hazards of industrial chemicals by a friend, who noticed that pesticides were killing local songbirds and urged her to help lobby for a court-imposed ban. Instead, Carson devoted her efforts to a journalistic campaign, envisioning an article for The New Yorker that would require a couple months of research and writing at most. As the project progressed—in lockstep with her cancer—she realized that the story was far more complex than she had anticipated, and substantially more threatening to the chemical industry. Sympathetic biologists, for example, offered assistance only on the condition of anonymity. Industry spokesmen routinely impeded Carson’s investigation, while their reaction to the New Yorker series was swift, furious, and predictable. It combined a public relations campaign extolling the benefits of chemical use with and a hurricane of threats to withdraw advertising from any periodical printing a favorable review of the book. The media melee, however, generated both sales—Silent Spring was selected as a Main Selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club—and political interest. President Kennedy ordered the Science Advisory Committee to study the effects of pesticides, and Congressman John V. Lindsay—later the Mayor of New York City and a presidential candidate—entered the first third of the New Yorker article into the Congressional Record. By the end of the year, over 40 bills had been introduced to regulate pesticide use in various states.
This uncorrected proof copy bears over 50 variations from the published text, some substantial, others smaller but just as revealing. Nearly all the changes served to mute Carson’s vitriol. In several instances, for example, chemical brand names were removed. In one case, an identifying advertising slogan was deleted; in another, the sum of money involved in a matter of litigation. Some of Carson’s conjectures (and those of her sources) were dropped or softened; probable but unsubstantiated cause-and-effect connections between chemical exposure and illness were left out or reworded. Throughout the rewrite between this state and the finished book, qualifying phrases were added and incendiary remarks were deleted: Carson was attempting to render her text unassailable, in anticipation of the attacks that were sure to follow. In addition, p
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