24 The Henry James Review The Henry James Review 22 (2001): 24–40. © 2001, The Johns Hopkins University Press “Utterly, insurmountably, unsaleable”: Collected Editions, Prefaces, and the “Failure” of Henry James’s New York Edition By Eric Leuschner, University of Missouri-Columbia “Can Prince Posterity resist a novelist whose collected works are handed down to him in a form so beautiful as this and under an editorship so thorough as this, so careful, and so loving?” “Patent soap, mustard, liver pills, and novels are nowadays in the same category.” —review of the Edinburgh Edition of The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson 1 The story of Henry James’s New York Edition is fairly well known. After seeing a sales slump around the turn of the century, James spent the years 1905 to 1909 preparing a collected edition of his novels and tales in an attempt to recreate his public literary image. 2 But even after the effort of revising his earlier works and writing the long essay-like prefaces, the project was a commercial failure. 3 Despite that failure, the New York Edition has progressively received critical attention with the prefaces attracting the most commentary, coming to speak for James’s novels and theory of fiction and becoming both figuratively and literally James’s “art of the novel.” 4 Herschel Parker has questioned the iconic status of R. P. Blackmur’s collection of the prefaces and notes that “the mere existence of the wonderfully