Clemens, Samuel Langhorne | A most attractive example of Clemens's first novel, the Swann copy

Clemens, Samuel Langhorne

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. By Mark Twain. Hartford: The American Publishing Company, 1876

8vo (213 x 165 mm). Half-title, frontispiece and 159 wood-engraved in-text illustrations by True Williams and others, 4 pages of publisher's advertisements at end; a few leaves with fold marks at corners, small closed marginal tear to last four leaves. Publisher's decorative blue cloth stamped in gilt and black, peach endpapers, gilt edges; slightly bumped at edges, spine slightly toned, very small scratches to covers, text block shaken. Blue quarter morocco clamshell box.

A bright, attractive copy of the first edition.

Clemens grew up in Missouri, on the Mississippi River, in a port town that inspired the fictional town of St Petersburg where Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn lived. "The first novel Mark Twain wrote without a co-author, Tom Sawyer is also his most clearly autobiographical novel… Enlivened by extraordinary and melodramatic events, it is otherwise a realistic depiction of the experiences, people and places that Mark Twain knew as a child" (Rasmussen, 459).

First American edition, first printing of the text with the following points: printed on wove paper, versos of half-title and preface blank.

REFERENCE:

BAL 3369; Grolier, American 79; Johnson, p. 27

PROVENANCE:

Arthur Swann (bookplate to front pastedown; his sale, Parke-Bernet, 22 March 1960, lot 54)