Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Tom Sawyer's Comrade)
New York: Charles L. Webster and Company, 1885. Very Good. Item #49797
New York: Charles L. Webster and Company, 1885. First Edition, with all first issue points listed in the BAL, including the visible tablecloth frontispiece and the illustration on p. 283 in its original state [BAL's State A]. Small quarto (22cm); publisher's library sheep rebacked to style with corners retouched, retaining original endpapers, housed in custom clamshell box of navy goat over cloth, gilt spine in six compartments; 366pp.; two frontispieces including the first state of the inserted portrait, text illus. throughout by E.W. Kemble. Shallow chipping to endpaper and frontispiece margins, frontispiece slightly soiled, a few gatherings proud, else a Very Good and sound, professionally restored example in the original sheep binding.
"Before Adventures of Huckleberry Finn proved to be a classic that escapes its author’s definition of 'a book which people praise and don’t read,' it pleased few literary critics, particularly not the guardians of uplift. It challenged reticence about backwoods squalor and common ignorance, and it frustrated pious clichés. For later taste, its plot staggers before finishing lamely. Yet tens of millions of readers, even of translations that lose not only the crosscutting of the vernacular but the idiomatic lilt, have delighted in its onrushing humor of character and phrasing, its escapist tableaux, its positive warmth where deserved, and its myth of inborn virtue" (American National Biography).
BAL 3415.
Price: $8,500.00