Welcome to a publishing marriage of convenience.
Thornton Wilder’s Cabala is 43,000 words in length, The Bridge of San Luis Rey 33,000, and The Woman of Andros 23,000, or just over half the size of The Cabala. Editor and critic Edward Weeks once suggested that a length of 60,000 words defines the upper end of a short novel. If that is the case, the word count of Wilder’s three early novels, published between 1926 and 1930, reveals an author headed resolutely toward the extended short story or novella—and, in Wilder’s case, a form of written expression requiring even fewer words, drama.
Wilder’s ever-growing “habit of compression” (his phrase at the time) forced his publisher to play the usual tricks of the trade—the use of wide margins, large type, thick paper, and illustrations-—to fashion a book hefty enough to justify the charge of $2.50. It was all very successful, as these overviews will reveal.
The publishing problems caused by Wilder’s affinity for compression did not go away, of course. The Penguin (UK) paperback edition of The Woman of Andros, all of eighty pages, was wafer thin. When it came time for a uniform edition of Wilder’s fiction in the 1960s, his United States publisher, Harper & Row (now HarperCollins) employed another trick—the book you hold in your hands. This combined edition of the two novels, tipping the scale at a mighty 206 pages, was first published in 1958.
Housing these two early novels in one volume is a good solution. Thanks to Thornton Wilder’s encounter with compression, readers now get a two-for-one deal in a physical form that will not fall between the cracks. Who ever said a marriage of convenience is not convenient?