Life on the Mississippi

Boston: James R. Osgood and Company, 1883. First edition. Fine. First State, with the image of Twain in flames on p. 441 and with "The St. Louis Hotel" caption on p. 443. In the original publisher's brown cloth with gilt vignettes on the front board and spine. A copy in exceptional condition. In Fine condition overall. Binding still tight and appearing unread. Gilt on front cover and spine still bright. A spot of minimal rubbing at the top of the spine and previous ownership writing on the front paste-down. The last time a copy in comparable condition came up at auction, it made $8,750 (Christies, 2016).

The author's firsthand look at navigating the Mississippi by riverboat and the changes to that area many years after the Civil War, Life on the Mississippi was written concurrently with Huckleberry Finn and shares several themes with the literary masterpiece. "The material offered by observations on the journey is various beyond enumeration, and much of it is extremely amusing. Hoaxes and exaggerations palmed off by pilots and other natives along the way upon supposed ignorant strangers; stories of gamblers and obsolete robbers; glimpses of character and manners; descriptions of scenery and places; statistics of trade; Indian legends; extracts from the comments of foreign travelers, - all these occur, interspersed with two or three stories of either humorous or tragic import, or of both together" (The Atlantic Monthly, September 1883). Fine.