The Great Rehearsal, Carl Van Doren, Viking First Printing, 1948

The Piece

A first printing of Carl Van Doren's account of the Constitutional Convention, issued by The Viking Press in January 1948. The book is bound in salmon cloth over boards, with a dark green panel across the spine ruled in gilt and lettered in gilt, the title in a flowing script and the author and publisher in small capitals beneath. The front board carries a single stamped device, a quill pen drawn as one continuous looping line, set low and at an angle across an otherwise bare field. The rear board is plain. It is a quiet, confident piece of mid-century American trade binding, the kind Viking did particularly well, where one ornament and a band of color carry the whole design.

The text block is clean and tight in the binding, the paper lightly toned at the edges with the top edge tinted. Chapters open with a large drop capital and a rule of small linked circles, the same ornament that frames the title page. The copyright page records the book as set in Caledonia, Bulmer and Bank Script by Ruttle, Shaw and Wetherill, and printed by the Kingsport Press of Kingsport, Tennessee.

History & Provenance

Carl Clinton Van Doren was born in Hope, Illinois in 1885 and died at Torrington, Connecticut in 1950. He took his doctorate at Columbia in 1911 and taught there until 1930, edited the book section of The Nation from 1920 to 1922, and won the 1939 Pulitzer Prize for Biography for his life of Benjamin Franklin. In 1941, working with Howard H. Peckham through British Army headquarters papers, he published The Secret History of the American Revolution, the book that laid out the documentary record of Benedict Arnold's treason. His younger brother was the poet and critic Mark Van Doren. The list of his works facing the title page in this copy sets all of it out in a single column.

The Great Rehearsal was written at a particular moment and for a particular argument. Van Doren was a declared world federalist, and he put the Philadelphia convention forward not only as American history but as a worked example of thirteen quarrelling sovereignties agreeing to be governed together. Time magazine, reviewing the book on January 26, 1948, picked up exactly that point and reported the author's suggestion that the United Nations might emulate the convention. The United Nations was then three years old and the Cold War was beginning, and the title itself makes the claim plainly. Philadelphia was the rehearsal. Something larger was supposed to follow.

The dating here does not rest on style or on an absence. The copyright page states first publication by The Viking Press in January 1948, with simultaneous publication in the Dominion of Canada by The Macmillan Company of Canada, and it carries no later printing line. That statement is the way Viking firsts of the period are identified, and the Time review of January 26, 1948 independently confirms the month. The book is offered as a first printing on that evidence. It was published at $3.75 in xii plus 336 pages. The dedication reads for Bradford and Anne Bevans, Andrew Ross and Joanna Klaw.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

Salmon and forest green with gilt is an unusually good color pairing on a shelf, and this is a book that earns its place by looking like something rather than by hiding behind a jacket. Shelve it spine out in a stack of mid-century cloth bindings and the green panel does the work. Lay it flat under a lamp and the quill on the front board reads as a small piece of graphic design, which is what it is.

It also happens to be a good book about a subject that keeps returning. Van Doren wrote the Convention as a story with people in it, arguing and conceding and nearly walking out, and he wrote it for readers who had just watched the world try to build something similar and were not sure it would hold. That gives this copy two lives at once. It is a well made American trade book from 1948, and it is a document of what 1948 hoped the Constitution might still be good for.