The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

New York: Charles L. Webster, 1885. First Edition, First Issue of Mark Twain’s masterpiece. Octavo, blue pictorial cloth binding. With the armorial bookplate of book collector L.M. Kaufman designed by Artemis. A 19th Century vintage ownership inscription from Los Angeles, California on front free endpaper. Very good tight copy. Enclosed in a gilt-stamped morocco and cloth slipcase. Some excellent reinforcement at extremities by an expert book conservationist. Subscribers who had already purchased Tom Sawyer, and wanted a matching binding, were invited to request a blue cloth binding for Huckleberry Finn instead of the publisher’s original green. This is one of those blue bindings, twenty times more rare than the green. Copies were assembled rather haphazardly by the printer and there is yet to be full agreement among bibliographers as to the priority of some of them. With the following B.A.L. first issue points: page 9 with “Decided” remaining uncorrected to “Decides”; page 13 illustration captioned “Him and another Man” listed as on page 88; and page 57 the 11th line from the bottom reads “with the was”, the frontispiece portrait shows the bust of Twain on a cloth covered table, page 143 with “l” missing from “Col.” at the top of the illustration and with a broken “b” in “body” on line 7; page 155 with the final 5 being slightly larger than the first two, and page 283, the leaf is a cancel. Debate continues over the priority of other points of issue and state. All in all, a beautiful copy. Ernest Hemingway once proclaimed about The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: “All modern literature comes from one book by Mark Twain. It is the best book we’ve had. All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing since.”