Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Tom Sawyer’s Comrade)

FIRST AMERICAN EDITION, FIRST STATE, Heliotype portrait frontispiece, text illustrations by Edward W. Kemble, early ownership signature (Lawrence Green, April 6th 1885), original green pictorial gilt cloth, 8vo, New York, Charles L. Webster & Company, 1885, preserved in a solander box.

In this copy, the title-page bears the copyright notice date 1884; frontispiece is in the first state with the table cloth visible and unsigned on the finished edge of the bust; on page 13 the illustration ‘Him and another Man’ is wrongly assigned to page 88; page 9 carries the uncorrected ‘- Huck Decided to Leave’, page 57 has the misprint ‘with the was’; page 143 omits ‘I’ in the illustration; page 155 has no final ‘5’ in the pagination; and on page 161 the signature mark ‘11’ is absent. These points do not have bearing on priority of issue, nor does the binding (other copies being bound in leather, and in blue cloth), with the whole of the first and second printings issued on the same day in February 1885. The UK edition was published first, for copyright reasons, in December 1884.

[BAL 3415; Grolier, 100 American, 87; Johnson, pp. 43-50; Kevin MacDonnell, “Huck Finn among the Issue-Mongers”, Firsts; The Book Collector’s Magazine, Volume 8, Number 9 (September 1998), pp. 28-35.]