by the Bodley Head in 1960. The contract for the third and fourth Poldark instalments, titled “the next two historical novels to follow Cordelia ”, is dated 19 September 1949 and cancelled on 24 August 1960. Although the titles Jeremy Poldark and Warleggan had not been decided when the contract was signed, it shows that by 1949 Graham had a clear grasp of what it would take to complete his saga as then conceived. Jeremy Poldark and Warleggan were republished by the Bodley Head in 1961, followed by Cordelia in 1963, the original contract for which is also included here, dated 6 October 1948 and cancelled 7 February 1961. The Cordelia contract is significant as it is both the first to name A. M. Heath, who had recently taken Graham on as a client, and the first to secure him a three-figure advance. Audrey Heath’s literary agency, still operating today, represented him for the rest of his career. The agency was an unusual one, founded in 1919 by Heath and her colleague Alice May Spinks. They had originally worked as secretaries at Curtis Brown & Massie and ran the agency while their employers were deployed in the First World War. When the directors returned, the pair were reluctant to return to more prosaic duties, having been at the forefront of the agency and worked with some of the biggest stars in the literary firmament, such as Jack London and Edgar Rice Burroughs, and so broke off to establish their own firm. After Heath’s death in 1958, Michael Thomas took over responsibility for Graham, having answered a trade advertisement for a “‘Young Man With A View’, £10 per week”. The correspondence in the archive includes copies of two typed letters between Michael Thomas and Monica Bax, the assistant fiction editor at Ward, Lock, settling the cancellation of the original contracts between Ward, Lock and Graham. In the first, dated 26 May 1959, Bax writes to Thomas, confirming that the first two Poldark books “are now out of print and we have no plans for reissuing them as from June 1st of this year, and suggest the two contracts dated 24th August, 1945 and 17th December, 1946 be accordingly cancelled”; however, she notes that Jeremy Poldark and Warleggan were contracted together in a single document, and as Warleggan was still in print, neither could be cancelled. She asks if “the matter could be settled by this exchange of letters, with the necessary note made on the contract itself?”; Thomas’s reply, dated 3 June 1959, confirms “the matter be settled by this exchange of letters”. The first two Poldark books sold so well that the Bodley Head proceeded with publication of the
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74 GRAHAM, Winston. First four Poldark novels, file copies with the original publisher’s contracts. London: Ward, Lock & Co. Limited, 1945–46–50–53 A slice of publishing history: the Bodley Head saves the Poldark books from languishing out of print A superb collection, relating to the first four titles in the phenomenally successful Poldark series and the transfer of copyright from its original publishers, who had allowed the quartet to go out of print, to the Bodley Head, who republished the titles in a fresh format, helping establish its eventual adaptation on screen, first by the BBC in 1975 and again in 2015. This collection comprises the original publishing contracts signed by the author for the “Poldark quartet”, together with the contract for Cordelia , a historical novel outside the Poldark series; Ward, Lock’s archive copies of the first editions of the Poldark quartet; and correspondence between Graham, his literary agency A. M. Heath, and Ward, Lock regarding the cancellation of the original contracts for republication by the Bodley Head. Graham highlights the significance of this for his career in his Memoirs : “Had the first four Poldarks not been republished by Bodley Head in an attractive new format, they would have been out of print for years
. . . and much less likely to catch the eye of Robert Clark and other film-makers” (pp. 193–4). The film industry had shown only desultory interest until they were picked up by Robert Clark, the millionaire chairman of Associated British Pictures: “he at once declared an interest, which he never abandoned all his life”; it was he who persuaded the BBC to use the first four books for the first TV series Poldark , which hit the screens in the 1970s. Ward, Lock had published the first Poldark novel as the Second World War ended, followed by Demelza (1946), Jeremy Poldark (1950), and Warleggan (1953). In 1957 the publishers informed Graham that they were allowing all four books to fall out of print. The following year Graham’s friend Max Reinhardt, having recently acquired the Bodley Head, spoke to him on while on holiday. Graham recalled how “on the beach one day he said: ‘the Bodley Head has a fine backlist but I would like to add to it. Do you have any of your earlier novels which have gone out of print and would like to see republished?’ . . . I hesitantly told Max of these books and invited him to have a look at them . . . When he returned to London and read the books he said he would be happy to publish” ( Memoirs , p. 193). The series would eventually comprise 12 books but there was a hiatus of 20 years before Graham resumed the fifth instalment in 1973; Graham dedicated the final book in the series to Max and his wife Joan. The contracts for Ross Poldark , dated 24 August 1945, and Demelza , dated 17 December 1946, were both cancelled on 1 June 1959, and the books republished
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