Mark Twain | The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Hartford, 1876, and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, New York, 1885, first editions

Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens]

Two volumes:

(i) The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Hartford: The American Publishing Company, 1876

FIRST EDITION, 8vo (213 x 164 mm), second printing, issue A, frontispiece and 159 wood-engraved text illustrations by True Williams and others, half-title, 4 pages of publisher's advertisements at end, publisher's decorative blue cloth stamped in gilt and black, light peach endpapers, front free endpaper cut out, extremities bumped

First American edition, second printing, issue B of text with points: printed on laid paper, versos of half-title and preface not blank, p. XII mispaginated XVI.

(ii) The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Tom Sawyer's Comrade). New York: Charles L. Webster and Company, 1885

FIRST EDITION, 8vo (215 x 167 mm), frontispiece and 173 text illustrations by E.W. Kemble, half title, photogravure plate of a portrait bust of Clemens by Karl Gerhardt (BAL state 2), publisher's pictorial green cloth, stamped in gilt and black, light peach endpapers, plain edges, housed in green cloth slipcase, very occasional spotting, hinges starting, binding slightly worn, boards marked

First edition, early issue of one of the Great American Novels.

First editions of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn present a welter of issue points, and copies are usually described as being "early" or "later" issues, as an absolute priority of issue has been impossible to establish. The points of this copy are as follows: frontispiece is "Heliotype," tipped in, cloth not visible on table; title-page is tipped in, dated 1885, with 1884 copyright on verso; p. 13, has "Him and another Man" listed at p. 88; p. 57 reads "with the was"; p. 59, has "le" for "let"; p. 143., has "Co" for "Col."; p. 155 set with larger font of second 5; p. 283, the leaf is a cancel and the engraving has been corrected.

"All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn." Ernest Hemingway, The Green Hills of Africa, 1935.

The UK first edition of Huckleberry Finn was issued six months before this first American edition, in red cloth. The American edition was issued in green and blue cloth, with a small number bound in leather, in February 1885. Green cloth is most frequently seen.

LITERATURE:

(i) BAL 3369; Grolier, American 79; Johnson, p. 27; (ii) BAL 3415; Grolier, American 87; Johnson 43–50