A finely bound, first American edition of Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.<ul><li>Mark Twain (American).</li><li>Illustrated by E.W. Kemble.&nbsp;</li><li>New York: Charles L. Webster, 1885.</li><li>366 pages.</li><li>Octavo.</li><li>Bound in publisher's deluxe Morocco binding, deluxe half brown morocco and marbled boards, gilt spine with raised bands, with marbled edges and endpapers.</li></ul> The first edition comprised 30,000 copies; the publisher Webster announced that 20,000 would be bound in green or blue cloth ($2.75), 2,500 in a sheepskin library binding ($3.25), and 500 in this deluxe half morocco binding ($4.25). The remaining copies were perhaps bound in the same proportion. In his "Huck Finn among the Issue-Mongers," Kevin MacDonnell has shown that there are only three points which distinguish the first printing from the second printing of 10,000 copies:"the plates were corrected to reflect three changes in the text: at page 13 the erroneous page reference '88' was changed to '87'; at page 57 the misprint 'with the was' was corrected to 'with the saw'; and at page 9 the misprint 'Decided' was corrected to 'Decides.'" Our copy exhibits all three first printing points. The Uncle Silas plate at page 283, which was defaced at some point during the printing, is here in the cancel state. As for the other points enumerated by Blanck and Johnson, they derived from corrections made to the electrotyped plates during the course of printing and do not indicate a priority of issue. Huckleberry Finn prompted Hemingway to state: “All modern literature comes from one book by Mark Twain. It’s the best book we’ve had. All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing since.”

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, First American Edition

A first edition, illustrated copy of Mark Twain's A True Story, and the Recent Carnival of Crime.<ul><li>Mark Twain (American).</li><li>Boston: James R. Osgood and Company, 1877.</li><li>92 pages</li><li>Illustrated, including 4 full-page illustrations.</li><li>Bound in the original green cloth, upper cover blocked in black and lettered in gilt.</li></ul> The first part of this work, A True Story, was first published in The Atlantic in November 1874. The story is a retelling of the experiences of Mary Ann Cord (renamed “Aunt Rachel” in the story), the African-American cook at Clemens' sister-in-law’s farm in Elmira, New York. Born into slavery in Virginia, she recounts the horror of her husband and seven children being taken away from her at a slave auction. She is sold to a North Carolina plantation, but when freed by Union forces during the Civil War, she stays and works as a cook for a regiment of Union soldiers. When the regiment is joined by a colored regiment, she is shocked to be reunited with her youngest son who had been a fugitive slave prior to the war. Written in dialect later made famous by Twain in Huck Finn, A True Story also appeared within Twain's Sketches New and Old (1875). This edition, issued with another story in which Clemens recounts being visited by his own conscience in the form of a dwarf, was issued as part of Osgood's Vest Pocket Series.

A True Story, and the Recent Carnival of Crime

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