STORIES REVIVED. In Three Volumes

1885. London: Macmillan and Co., 1885. 2 pp undated Vol III ads. Original dark blue-green cloth.

First Edition, which consisted of only 500 copies. These three volumes consist of fourteen tales here "revived," that James had written some years earlier -- most from the 1870s, with some from the 1860s. Eight of them had been collected in America, either in A PASSIONATE PILGRIM (1875) or in THE AUTHOR OF BELTRAFFIO (1885, three months earlier). The other six appear here in book form for the first time: "A Day of Days," "A Landscape Painter," "Rose-Agathe," "Poor Richard," "Master Eustace" and "A Most Extraordinary Case." As James points out in his Vol I "Notice," "... these earlier stories have been in every case minutely revised and corrected -- many passages being wholly rewritten." This set is in E&L's binding variant "a" (no priority) -- with the "V" no larger than the "OL" on the spines, and with dark brown coated endpapers. Condition is only very good: there is some wear along the volumes' joints (as usual -- the spines are wider on the shelf than the text blocks); there is minor cracking of the original dark brown endpapers; and one can see faint evidence that lending library labels once adorned the front covers -- true of most copies. (One can also see that two bookplates once adorned the front endpapers.) Not as nice a set as we would like to be offering, but so priced: this is what life in the lending libraries did to books. Supino 27.1.0; Edel & Laurence A27a; Blanck 10573; Sadleir 1290.