Twain, Mark [pseudonym of Samuel Clemens].
New York: Charles L. Webster and Company, 1885. First printing, earliest cloth issue. A lovely first edition of what is arguably one of the greatest American novels of the 19th century. Huckleberry Finn has a rather complicated printing history and is found in a variety of states.
Three issue points are now considered as definitively identifying the first printing of the first edition, and this copy includes all three: on page [9], the second subheading of Chapter VI reads "Huck decided," which was later changed to "Huck decides"; on page 13, the illustration "Him and another man" is erroneously listed as being on page 88 (it is actually in page 87), and page 57 reads "with the was" instead of "with the saw."
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There are a number of changes made during the printing of the book (or perhaps this title was printed using more than one sets of plates, which differed slightly). This copy has the following variants, based on Jacob Blanck's Bibliography of American Literature: on the frontispiece, the scarf is not visible and the printer is the Heliotype Printing Company (Blanck state 2); the title-page is a cancel, correcting the copyright date to 1884 (Blanck's state 2—the uncorrected version has only been found in pre-publication copies); the page number (folio) on page 155 lacks the final 5 (Blanck's state 1); and page 283 is a cancel (Blanck's state 3—a prankster defaced the original engraving plate by drawing a bulge in the pants of a character, which was fixed in this copy, as in all known cloth-bound copies).
In addition to these issue points described by Blanck, subsequent research has discovered two other variants. In this copy, page 143 has the lower-case L missing from the start of the first line (first state) and a broken b in body in line 7 (probably first state).
A very attractive copy in the original green publisher's decorated cloth stamped in gilt. The spine title is rubbed and slightly faded, and there has been some professional mending to the spine tips. The interior is clean and tight, although the bust of Twain opposite the engraved frontispiece has crease near the gutter. Overall, a nice copy of a great book.
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