Memoir of John Wilkes Booth by His Sister - Rare London Edition 1938

Description

The Unlocked Door
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A Memoir of John Wilkes Booth
by his sister Asa Booth Clark
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1938 - First Edition
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Condition : Hardcover, in Good to Very Good Condition
Covers show light wear, black stamping on spine still clear.
Inside is clean, pages are just slightly tanned - not brittle at all.
This is, I believe, the true first edition.
Asa was living in England when this was written.
I believe it was printed again in 1938, in the U.S.
But, I cannot find any information on exact publishing order.
In fact, you seldom find the London edition at all.
I can find over 20 copies of the 1938 NY edition on the internet,
but at this time - no London editions for sale.
199 pages, 14 portraits and 2 photos of letters
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From a 2015 article in Smithsonian Magazine,
in reference to a 1996 reprinting of the book :
Asia Booth Clarke, sickly pregnant with twins at her mansion in Philadelphia, received the morning newspaper on April 15, 1865, in bed and screamed at the sight of the headlines: John Wilkes, her younger brother, was wanted for the assassination of President Lincoln.
Asia was married to an actor, John Sleeper Clarke. In their home, they kept an iron safe, where Asia’s brother often stored papers when he traveled. As the reality of Lincoln’s death took hold, Asia remembered documents that Booth had deposited during the winter and fetched them. In a large sealed envelope marked “Asia,” she found four thousand dollars’ worth of federal and city bonds; a Pennsylvania oil-land transfer, made out to another of her brothers; a letter to their mother explaining why, despite his promises, Booth had been drawn into the war; and a written statement in which he tried to justify an earlier attempt to abduct the president as a prisoner of the Confederacy.
Years later, Asia would describe these events—and attempt to explain her brother—in what is today a lesser-known memoir. Scholars have “delighted” in the slender book, says Terry Alford, a John Wilkes Booth expert in Virginia, because it remains the only manuscript of significant length that provides insightful details about Booth’s childhood and personal preferences. “There’s no other document like it,” Alford told me.
Asia wrote straightforwardly, often lyrically. (A stream “came gurgling under the fence and took its way across the road to the woods opposite, where it lost itself in tangled masses of wild-grape bowers.”) A few passages are tone deaf (her brother, she recalled, had “a certain deference and reverence towards his superiors in authority”) or objectionable: While the family did not share Wilkes’ Southern sympathies, Asia referred to African-Americans as “darkies” and immigrants as “the refuse of other countries.”
The handwritten manuscript totaled a slim 132 pages. Asia left it untitled—the cover held only “J.W.B.” in hand-tooled gold. In it, she referred to her brother as “Wilkes,” to avoid reader confusion about the other John in her life. She hoped the book would be published in her lifetime, but she died in May of 1888 (age 52; heart problems) without ever seeing it in print.
In a last wish, she asked that the manuscript be given to B.L. Farjeon, an English writer whom she respected and whose family considered Asia “a sad and noble woman,” his daughter Eleanor wrote. Farjeon received the manuscript in a black tin box; he found the work to be significant but believed the Booths, and the public, to be unready for such a gentle portrait of the president’s killer.
Fifty years passed. Eleanor Farjeon pursued publication. In 1938, G.P. Putnam’s Sons put out the memoir as The Unlocked Book: A Memoir of John Wilkes Booth by His Sister Asia Booth Clarke, with a price of .50. In the introduction, Farjeon described the project as Asia’s attempt to repudiate the “shadowy shape evoked by the name John Wilkes Booth.” The New York Times gave it a matter-of-fact review. In the Saturday Review, the historian Allan Nevins said it had been “written with a tortured pen.”
The original manuscript is privately owned, in England, according to Alford, whose research and introduction provide much of the contextual narrative detail given here. He thinks of Asia’s work as “diligent and loving,” and told me, “It’s the only thing we’ve really got about Booth. If you think about the sources, most are about the conspiracy. There’s nothing about him as a person, no context.”
Though an important commentary on Booth’s life, the text was unpolished and never “properly vetted for the reader by literary friends and a vigilant publisher,” Alford notes. Better to think of the memoir as “an intense and intimate conversation,” he wrote, “thrown out unrefined."
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