Forum Auctions
Lot 228
Clemens (Samuel Langhorne) "Mark Twain". Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, first American edition, first state, illustrations by Edward W. Kemble, portrait frontispiece of the author's bust by sculptor Karl Gerhardt, small ink stain on fore-edge otherwise an excellent copy in original green pictorial cloth, gilt, small 4to, New York, Charles L. Webster and Company, 1885.⁂ A fine copy of the first American edition of this ground-breaking novel. Sold by subscription, Huckleberry Finn was finely bound and illustrated to appeal to buyers. As a result, the first edition is one of the most attractive and eye-catching of all American literary classics. Copies were issued in leather bindings (sheep or three-quarter morocco), in blue cloth for those who wanted it uniform with Tom Sawyer, and, as here, in green cloth. There is no priority between them: all were first available to the public on the same day in February 1885. A number of errors were discovered and then corrected during the printing of the first edition. Copies with the earliest, uncorrected states are always sought after by collectors. In this copy, the title-page is a cancel with the copyright notice dated 1884 (C, BAL second state, with the first state only noted in the publisher's prospectuses and advanced sheets), while the frontispiece is in the first state with the tablecloth visible and unsigned on the finished edge of the bust (A, BAL first state). Furthermore, the following issue points are respected: on p. 13, the illustration captioned "Him and another Man" is wrongly listed as being on p. 88 (A, BAL first state); p. 9 with the misprint "Decided" (A, BAL first state); p. 57, the eleventh line from the bottom reads "with the was" instead of "with the saw" (A, BAL first state); p. 143, missing 'l' in the illustration (A, BAL first state); p. 155, the final '5' in the pagination is missing (A, BAL first state), and on p. 161, the signature mark is absent (A, BAL first state). Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer "let fresh air into the minds of parents who had shut the door on their own childhood, and they will be classics the world over as long as there are boys" (Grolier 100 American Books).
![[§] JACOB EPSTEIN K.B.E. (BRITISH, 1880-1959)BUST OF A GENTLEMAN initialled and dated '09', bronze on marble basethe bronze 2](https://cdn.globalauctionplatform.com/3460b8af-433f-4d78-b36b-a9eb00a441df/81c9c5f5-e558-4b91-b797-aa0900c7f83e/468x382.jpg)
