Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Tom Sawyer's Comrade). Scene: The Mississippi Valley. Time: Forty to Fifty Years Ago...With One Hundred and Seventy-Four Illustrations.

New York: Charles L. Webster and Company, 1885. Tom Sawyer's Comrade). Scene: The Mississippi Valley. Time: Forty to Fifty Years Ago...With One Hundred and Seventy-Four Illustrations. New York: Charles L. Webster and Company, 1885.

Full Description:

TWAIN, Mark. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Tom Sawyer's Comrade). Scene: The Mississippi Valley. Time: Forty to Fifty Years Ago...With One Hundred and Seventy-Four Illustrations. New York: Charles L. Webster and Company, 1885.

First American edition, first issue, with all three definitive points present: Page 9 has "Decided" instead of "Decides," (not noted by BAL); Page (truncated) [13], the illustration captioned “Him and another Man” is incorrectly listed as at p. 88 (BAL first state); and page 57, the eleventh line from the bottom reads “with the was” instead of “with the saw” (BAL first state). Also with the following points: the title-page is a cancel, with the copyright notice dated 1884 (BAL second state, with the first state only noted in publisher’s prospectus and advanced sheets); p. 283 is a cancel, with the engraving redone and the line indicating the fly on Silas Phelps’s trousers a straight vertical line (BAL third state, the earliest known to appear in cloth-bound copies of the book); on p. 155, the second “5” of the page number extends below the first two numbers (Blanck’s third state); Leaf 238 is present as a blank; and the portrait frontispiece with Heliotype Printing Company imprint, no tablecloth visible and Karl Gerhardt, Sc on the edge (Blanck’s second state). Octavo (8 7/16 x 6 5/8; 214 x 168 mm). 366 pp. With one hundred and seventy-four illustrations wood-engraved text illustrations by E.W. Kemble.

Original dark green cloth pictorially stamped and lettered in gilt and black. Original peach endpapers. Some minor rubbing to cloth along edges and back cover. Corners a bit bumped and rubbed. Some chipping to head and tail of spine and a small chip on front joint. Previous owner's neat signature on front free endpaper. An ownership sticker of "Mrs. Frank Sprague" tipped in on front pastedown. Text is very clean. Overall a very good copy.

Provenance: "Harriet Chapman Jones Sprague was Frank Sprague’s second wife and 20 years his junior when they married. She bore him three children and dramatically changed his life... A woman of letters, Harriet was a close friend of Clara Clemens, and she introduced Frank to a whole new society including Mark Twain, author Oliver Herford, and Columbia Drama Professor Brander Matthews. Later in life, she became an important rare book collector and Walt Whitman expert." Frank J Sprague was one of the world’s great electrical inventors. "He joined Thomas Edison to work on electrical distribution systems for lighting." (A Frank Sprague Triumph. The Electrification of Grand Central Terminal. By John L. Sprague and Joseph J. Cunningham)

BAL 3415. Johnson, Twain, pp. 43-50. Grolier, 100 American, 87.

HBS 69412.

$4,500. (Inventory #: 69412)