Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

MARK TWAIN [SAMUEL L. CLEMENS],.

Item Number: 114362

New York: Charles L. Webster and Company, 1885.

First edition, first issue of Mark Twain’s masterpiece. In near fine condition with light wear to the extremities. Octavo, blue pictorial cloth. Subscribers who had already purchased Tom Sawyer, and wanted a binding to match, were invited to request a blue cloth binding on Huckleberry Finn instead of the publisher’s green. This is one of those blue bindings—twenty times more rare than the green. This copy has all of the commonly identified first issue points (copies were assembled haphazardly by the printer and there is yet to be agreement among bibliographers as to the priority of many points). First issue points include page [9] with “Decided” remaining uncorrected (to “Decides”); page [13], illustration captioned “Him and another Man” listed as on page 88; page 57, 11th line from bottom reads “with the was,”. Debate continues over the priority of other points of issue and state. This copy contains the following points of bibliographical interest: frontispiece portrait without cloth table cover under the bust, bearing the Heliotype Printing Co. imprint; copyright page dated 1884; page 143 with “l” missing from “Col.” at top of illustration and with broken “b” in “body” on line seven; page 155 with the final 5 being slightly larger than the first two numbers”; page 161, no signature mark “11”. In very good condition with light wear to the extremities. Housed in a custom half morocco clamshell box. A nice example.

Ernest Hemingway once declared about The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, "All modern literature comes from one book by Mark Twain. It’s the best book we’ve had. All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing since." Huck has been called "the most praised and most condemned 19th-century American work of fiction" (Legacies of Genius, 47).