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19th Century Rare Book & Photograph Shop

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Flower Fables

ALCOTT, LOUISA MAY Original brown cloth. Light sunning, lower joint cracked through and partially split. Half morocco case. First edition of Louisa May Alcott s first book. This fine Transcendentalist association copy is inscribed in an unidentified hand for Alcott s former tutor and mentor: Miss Sophia Ford, with the best love of the Author 1855. Sophia Ford lived with the Alcott family for nearly a year, in 1845, at their home The Hillside in Concord, Massachusetts. (Hillside was later renamed Wayside by Nathaniel Hawthorne when he lived there.) Louisa May Alcott at that time was 13 years old and had just gotten a room of her own and commenced to write. At Hillside she began writing Flower Fables and had the experiences which would form the basis for Little Women. Alcott herself best described her relationship with Aunt Sophia in a reminiscence written in 1885: [Sophia Ford] is one of the most prominent figures in my early Concord days, when she kept school for the little Emersons, Channings, and Alcotts in the poet s barn. Many a wise lesson she gave us there, though kindergartens were as yet unknown; many a flower hunt with Thoreau for our guide; many a Sunday service where my father acted as chaplain and endless revels where old and young play together, while illustrious faces smiled upon the pretty festivals under the pines ( In Memoriam, Woman s Journal, April 1885). Louisa May Alcott s junior, Ellen Emerson (1839-1909), was the daughter of Ralph Waldo Emerson and the dedicatee of Flower Fables, for whom they were fancied. Sophia Ford herself had an unrequited passion for Henry David Thoreau and proposed marriage to him in 1847. She depended on Louisa May Alcott for news of Thoreau s illness and death in 1862.
  • $18,000
  • $18,000
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Autograph manuscript signed, An Apology for a Preface.

Lowell, James Russell Five pages (17 x 11 cm). Headed Let me see proofs in Lowell s hand. Ink smudge to first leaf. [With:] LOWELL, JAMES RUSSELL. Autograph letter signed. Westminster, [1888]. Two pages. Lowell s letter of enclosure for his Apology : I send back the Ms. as you wish. I have corrected a clip[?] or two here & there, for I was so hurried in order to keep my word with you that I did not read it over after writing it. Lowell s original revised manuscript for An Apology for a Preface, which appeared as a preface in his volume of collected lectures, The English Poets, The Camelot Series in 1888. Lowell observes in part, all prefaces may be said to have one valid excuse for being namely, that the judicious reader can, and generally does, skip them, thus securing one pleasurable emotion at least from his book a success beyond the average, if I may trust my own experience. And yet, feeling as I do my incompetence for this species of literature, in which I have no more practice than one has in dying, having written but one in my life, I see no great harm in doing what I had rather not do at all [With:] LOWELL, JAMES RUSSELL. Autograph letter signed. Westminster, [1888]. Two pages. Lowell s letter of enclosure for his Apology : I send back the Ms. as you wish. I have corrected a clip[?] or two here & there, for I was so hurried in order to keep my word with you that I did not read it over after writing it.
  • $1,800
  • $1,800
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Autograph manuscript On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners.

Lowell, James Russell 27 pages (24 x 19 cm), with additional revisions on the versos. Contemporary ink marks, a closed marginal tear to first leaf. Morocco case. A rare and important manuscript of one of Lowell s most famous essays, On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners. The foremost American man of letters of his time (DAB), Lowell was uniquely positioned to comment on foreigners attitudes towards Americans. He spent many years living and travelling in Europe starting in 1850, ultimately serving as the Minister to the Court of St. James in 1880-1885. American authors from Cooper and Irving to Poe and Melville commented on and sometimes seemed even obsessed by English attitudes towards America, and this essay received considerable attention in its time. It remains among Lowell s most significant and most enduring essays. It was for the cultivated men and women of these villages [of New England] that Lowell wrote. They of all persons delighted in his essay On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners, with its urbane reproof of criticism of our lack of urbanity; for the village cherished some dignity of manners and would accept a predestined hell easier than condescension from anybody (Cambridge History of English Literature). Rare. This is the finest Lowell manuscript to appear in over half a century. Only one Lowell manuscript of this length has appeared at auction since 1939. That piece, A Moosehead Journal (31 pp, sold at auction in 1968), is now in the Parkman Dexter Howe collection at the University of Florida, which includes 21 other Lowell manuscripts. None of those approaches this one in length and significance.
  • $8,250
  • $8,250
book (2)

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Twain, Mark Original half dark brown morocco gilt. Portrait frontispiece with sculptor s name on the shoulder, State 3 of title but no priority acknowledged, State 1 of p. [13], p. 57 and p. 155, without 11 signature on p. 161, and the original first state of the illustration on p. 283. Light wear. Near fine. First American edition, in publisher s morocco with the rare first state of the illustration on p. 283. While gathering advance subscriptions to Huckleberry Finn, traveling salesmen offered not only copies in cloth bindings but also deluxe leather bound copies such as the present example. The first copies printed were sent off to be put in those time-consuming bindings. Soon thereafter, as printing progressed, an unknown individual defaced the plate on p. 283 with an engraving of a penis at Uncle Silas s crotch. Thousands of copies were printed before the altered plate was discovered. Each of those offending leaves was cut out and replaced with leaf featuring the re-engraved illustration. This new illustration eliminated even the innocent hint of curvature (as was found in the first copies printed) and replaced Silas s fly with a straight line. As the defacement occurred only after the advance sheets were shipped to be bound in leather, the plate in its first state only exists in the earliest copies in publisher s leather bindings. This is a handsome copy of the first state of this American classic reflecting an infamous epiode in American publishing history.
  • $30,000
  • $30,000
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

Twain, Mark Original red cloth. Two gatherings a little loose. Minor wear. A very good copy. Half morocco case. First edition of the iconic American Boy s Book. Twain s first novel written without a co-author, Tom Sawyer proved to be one of the most durable works in American literature. By the time of Twain s death, it was his top-selling book. It had been in print continuously since 1876, and has outsold all other Mark Twain works (Rasmussen). Tom Sawyer was the first printed story of a boy in which the hero was recognizable as a boy throughout the whole narrative until Tom Sawyer was written, nearly all the boys of fiction were adults with a lisp, or saintly infants, or mischievous eccentrics in the work of Dickens there were hints of boys that were boys; but Tom was the first full blown boy in all fiction the book is a landmark (Booth Tarkington). This novel of a boy growing up along the Mississippi River is set in a town called St. Petersburg, inspired by Samuel Clemens s hometown of Hannibal, Missouri. The author may have been named Tom after a San Francisco fireman whom he met in June 1863. The real Tom Sawyer was a local hero, famous for rescuing ninety passengers after a shipwreck in 1853. The two were friendly during the author s years in California, often drinking and gambling together. Twain referred to the real Tom Sawyer in Roughing It, but in later years he claimed that he himself was the model for Tom and that Sawyer was not the real name of any person I ever knew, so far as I can remember (see Smithsonian, October 2012). This first edition was issued in England on June 9, 1876, preceding the American edition by six months. It proved to be his most popular work in his lifetime: by the time Mark Twain died, it was his top selling book (Rasmussen, 458). The true first edition of Tom Sawyer is among the most difficult of the great 19th-century American novels to obtain in collector s condition.
  • $27,000
  • $27,000