first edition
1848 · New York
by Bartlett, John Russell
New York: Bartlett & Welford, 1848. First edition, 8vo, expanded to small folio, xxvii, [1], 412; the whole interleaved in folio throughout; 20th-century quarter brown morocco over marbled boards; generally fine; judging from the soiling on the page edges, this copy was interleaved at an early date, much earlier than the relatively modern binding, but there are no annotations on the interleaves. This popular and influential work went through four editions, the last in 1878, and was translated into Dutch and German. After Pickering's Vocabulary of Words Peculiar to The United States (1815), which treated a mere 500 words, no significant work on Americanisms appeared until this work of Bartlett, which Mencken calls "the first attempt at a comprehensive dictionary of Americanisms." Kennedy 11380; Sabin 3738; Vancil, p. 20.
(Inventory #: 44488)