Public edition

SP was never reprinted in Lawrence's lifetime. A comment he wrote for Graves explained 'The reason that the Seven Pillars is not published is because it is a full-length and unrestrained portrait of myself, and my tastes and ideas and actions. I could not have deliberately confessed to so much in public: and so could have not written the book had there been any chance of its coming out. Yet to tell the whole story was the only justification for writing anything at all.' (1)

Immediately following Lawrence's death in May 1935, Jonathan Cape ordered a reprint of Revolt in the Desert, considering Lawrence's contractual withdrawal of the book as effective only so long as he lived. Lawrence's executor, his brother A W Lawrence, stepped in and told Cape that the company would have no hand in a public edition of SP if they went ahead with this plan. So an agreement was made by which the firm would publish the full text, with an embargo on any further reprint of Revolt for the next thirty years.

Within the month, working from a copy of the American-printed text given to Cape by Doran in 1926, the Alden Press at Oxford had begun the task of type-setting the 280,000 word book. Since the American text had itself been set from a spoiled proof of the subscribers' edition, there were a few variations to be corrected, and so a copy of the subscribers' edition was borrowed from J G Wilson of the booksellers Bumpus & Co for the completion of the work.

Remarkably, the first trade edition of SP was published on 29th July 1935, just nine weeks after Capes had been given the go-ahead - in the now familiar large paper format, plus a 5 guineas [£5.25] limited de-luxe edition of 750 numbered copies, printed on pure rag paper and bound in quarter leather, which contained some of the coloured illustrations of the subscribers' edition. A further variant was a standard edition with four colour plates and two facsimiles. The facsimiles were of a page of the text as printed at Oxford in 1922 and a page of the subscribers' text showing its abridgement for Revolt, while the colour plates were the Kennington pastels of Lawrence, the Emir Abdulla, Auda abu Tayi and Matar. Only 60 copies were produced in this form and none were offered for sale, but Cape presented them to those people who had been intimately concerned in the manufacture or sale of the book. Doubleday, Doran & Co - the two rivals of earlier negotiations with Lawrence now conjoined - published the book in America.

At 30 shillings [£1.50], the price of the book was four times that of a novel, but over 100,000 copies had been sold in England by Christmas as the public rushed to share in this previous preserve of rich men. In America SP featured for the remainder of 1935 among the six bestsellers, its companion books all being of American origin.

The massive print order presented Capes with a mammoth problem of logistics. Sixty tons of paper, filling ten railway trucks, and three miles of binding cloth were ordered for the first impression. The Alden Press were very soon unable to cope alone with the demand, and duplicate stereo plates were cast so that the Cambridge University Press could print simultaneously, while three binderies were kept busy producing the finished copies.

The book has never since been out of print, and has been translated into many languages. A new smaller format edition was produced by Capes in 1940, when the previously suppressed first chapter was printed in full; the text was reset in 1954, and the 1973 reprint at last restored the few cuts which A W Lawrence, as editor, had thought it necessary to make, including the previously omitted names. For the fifth edition in 1976 the type of the 1935 edition was photographically reduced to fit onto the smaller page, with more lines per page and therefore fewer pages. Some text lines had to be re-set, to fit a paragraph into the page, and the page headlines were simplified. The maps were adapted for printing in single colour, and a selection of the 1935 illustrations was reproduced from new photographs of the paintings. SP first appeared in paperback, published by Penguin, in 1962, but surprisingly, even in the current edition [1985] the editorial cuts have not been reinstated.

1	Biog G, p 117

The writing of Seven Pillars of Wisdom - full listing