Life and Adventures of Black Hawk

Cincinnati: George Conclin, 1839. Second edition (?). Hardcover. Good-. 12mo, 264pp., illustrated with eight plates, including frontispiece portrait of Black Hawk. Mildly ex-library, with a single stamp, partially abraded, to p. 13. In good condition at best overall in a very ordinary contemporary brown cloth binding, with the ghost of a spine label; now gone. General wear to extremities, tidemark to the fore-edge, which has wrinkled many leaves, but not affected the general cleanliness of the interior. Wanting the front free endpaper and possibly a half-title, else complete. Binding sound. A perplexing very early edition of this classic sympathetic biography of the Sauk Chief, who died the previous year (just after the first edition was published). This edition notably missed by Sabin and Thomson. Howes (D459) merely notes a second edition published in 1839, though we have found two distinct editions; one with our page count and another with 288pp. Without a copy of the other edition to compare, we are unsure of the significant differences which necessarily exist due to the page count disparity. Nevertheless, the last copy of this 264pp. edition, containing eight plates, seems to have most recently appeared in recorded commerce in the 1950s. Ernest Wessen, in his "Midland Notes" catalog, seemed to think this was a second printing of the second edition (first published in 1838 with the additional plates, now yielding 264pp., after the original 252pp.), thus naturally preceding the 288pp. 1839 edition. Sutton, which mentions the book on p. 110, unfortunately does not shed light on the relevant details, merely noting that the book was already in its sixth edition by 1840. In any event, a very scarce and entirely unsophisticated presentable copy of a very early edition of this important biography of Black Hawk; also a notable example of Cincinnati printing and binding during the heyday of printing in the Queen City.