Every Saturday / Volume V, No.105, January 4, 1868 / original Wraps. Foul Play; Billy Buttons; Family Ghosts; An Old Wife's Song

Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1868. First Edition . Soft cover. Very Good. 10 1/2" x 7. Engravings. Boston:Ticknor & Fields, 1868. The January 4, 1868 issue (Vol. V, No. 105) of Every Saturday. 10 1/2" x 7", newsprint wraps, 32 pp. + 8 pp ads. Very Good; moderate edge wear (see scans), standard modest amount of age toning. Sturdy and supple. An extraordinarily scarce original wraps copy of Every Saturday, a literary journal which is found, when it is found, almost always as six-monthly hardbound aggregations. Every Saturday was the weekly offering of Fields & Osgood after Ticknor & Fields; each of which offered, in the publisher's words, "choice reading selected from current foreign literature" - i.e., usually reprints from similar overseas journals, generally English ones, but often as well from advance sheets, and even the reprints were often pre-publication of the novel from which they were taken. This issue includes the typical variety of topics; please see cover-listed contents on scan. Most Every Saturday entries were reprinted from foreign journals, and occasionally became the first American appearance of works of some famous (or to-become-famous) authors, such as Jules Verne and Charles Dickens. Herein, pre-publication, are the first two chapters of "Foul Play", by Charles Reade and Dion Boucicault; also pre-publication, the first three chapters of Norman MacLeod's "Billy Buttons"; James Hannay's "Family Ghost"; Jean Ingelow's poem, "An Old Wife's Song"; and a number of other literary diversions (see scanned image of the contents), as well as eight pages of quaint ads, four at the beginning and four at the end. A small piece of publishing history. L-ES1