Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Tom Sawyer's Comrade).

New York: Charles L. Webster and Company, 1885. First edition, first state. Acceptable. In green pictorial cloth stamped in black and gilt. Page 283 a cancel. Misprints on pages 9, 13, 57, and 155 uncorrected, indicating first-state issue. A cheaply manufactured book, few copies survive that do not show wear and tear. In this case, we have taken measures to rehabilitate the spine and strengthen the hinges (splitting in most copies), and apply restorative cloth to the spine ends (stripped and fraying in most copies), extending the life of the book. Edges, lower corners rubbed, exposing boards. Pages toned and moderately stained. Text block a bit (truncated) tired. Still, a prize copy of the first edition of one of the three defining books of nineteenth-century America. BAL 3415.

Hemingway famously declared that "all modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn,” and it has had an enduring influence on American letters. Ralph Ellison, in his essay collection Shadow and Act, writes about the novel that: "in the United States the Negro and his status have always stood for moral concern. He symbolizes among other things the human and social possibility of equality. This is the moral question raised in our two great nineteenth-century novels, Moby-Dick and Huckleberry Finn. Jim, therefore, is not simply a slave, he is a symbol of humanity, and in freeing Jim, Huck makes a bid to free himself of the conventionalized evil taken for civilization by the town." (Inventory #: 6674)