The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night

There is no book club edition in the ordinary sense; the reprint problem here is worse than one, and it catches experienced buyers. Isabel Burton issued an expurgated 'Household Edition' after her husband's death, and from about 1903 the 'Burton Club' — the pseudonym of a Boston publisher — acquired the electroplates and issued a long series of undated reprints running well into the 1920s, printed from the original setting and reproducing the 'Benares' imprint verbatim. Penzer identified nine 'catch-word' Burton Club issues distinguished only by fictitious imprints — Benares, Mecca, Medinah, Aden, Baghdad, Samara, Bassorah, Shammar, Luristan — appearing roughly every two years after 1905, and no definitive list or sequence of them exists. Burton Club sets are undated, lack the stencilled subscriber's number and the Ellis Spear / Philip Justice copyright line, and are routinely catalogued and sold as '1885 Benares first editions'. Burton Society and later 'Manuscript Edition' sets (e.g. 99 sets with an autograph Burton leaf, ca. 1903, in red morocco) describe themselves openly in the limitation as transcriptions of 'the original edition dated Benares 1885' — read the limitation leaf before the title page.