ABSTRACT
The West African writer Amos Tutuola's The Palm-Wine Drinkard published by Faber and Faber in 1952, provoked controversy for its episodic rendering of Yoruba folktales in non-standard English. A revisiting of some of the Faber and Faber-Tutuola correspondence is necessary to initiate a discussion about Tutuola’s manuscript as a Faber and Faber product and to explore the role the publishing house played in the moulding of their textual commodity. There was certainly some dispute over whether the manuscript’s importance lay in its valuation as an anthropological or literary artefact; this chapter seeks to revisit some of those debates in order to explore their significance for the editing and shaping of the book, and to comment on the processes of establishing value when cultural products move from West Africa to Britain. The chapter also raises some issues about authorship over and above assumptions about the usual editorial interventions which are part and parcel of the processes that transform manuscripts into books.
