The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine.; Vol. XXX, New Series Vol. X, May 1886 to October 1886

New York: The Century Co, 1886. Presumed First Edition, First printing thus. Hardcover. Fair [Merits repair or rebinding]. vi, 972 pages. Illustrations (some full page). Maps. Index. Boards weak and have been previously repaired with tape. Minor edge tear/chip to fep. Some damp staining at page edges noted--all pages separate and text clear. Number stamped on title page. The upper right corner of two Index sheets/4 pages have been lost, with very minor loss of Index text. Format is mostly two column. Some illustrations cross columns. The Century Magazine was an illustrated monthly magazine first published in the U. S. in 1881 by The Century Company of New York City, which had been bought in that year by Roswell Smith and renamed after the Century Association. It was the successor of Scribner's Monthly Magazine. The initial editor was Richard Watson Gilder, the managing editor of Scribner's, who would go on to helm The Century for 28 years. Gilder largely continued the mixture of literature, history, current events, and high-quality illustrations that Holland had used at Scribner's. The magazine was very successful during the 19th century, most notably for a series of articles about the American Civil War which ran for three years during the 1880s. It included reminiscences of 230 participants from all ranks of the service on both sides of the conflict. According to an author writing in the New York Times, the publication of The Century "made New-York, instead of London, the center of the illustrated periodicals published in the English language..." The magazine was also a notable publisher of fiction, presenting excerpts of Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in 1884 and 1885 and Henry James' The Bostonians. Original bound volumes such as this one are extremely scarce, especially when not institutional ex-library. The contents in the six issues in this volume include: Balloon Experiences, Faith Healing, Indo-China, Liszt, William Morris, Persia, and Homing Pigeons, Authors include Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge, Benjamin Franklin, Clarence King, Richard M. Johnston, Thomas Nelson Page, William Dean Howells, Emma Lazarus, Matthew Arnold, Sidney Lanier, Frances Hodgson Burnell, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Robert Louis Stevenson, Robert Underwood Johnston. There is a substantial amount of material from Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, including information on Antietam, Chancellorsville, Fredericksburg, South Mountain, New Orleans, Naval Operations, and Shiloh. Among the authors are: O. O. Howard, James Longstreet, Henry Kyd Douglas, George McClellan, D. H. Hill, and John Greenleaf Whittier. Among other topics and authors are: George Bancroft, Civil Liberty and Equal Rights, Democracy, Legal-Tender, Abraham Lincoln, Militia, Mormon Problem, David Crockett, Fisheries, Labor Question, Ocean Signal Stations and E. W. Kemble.