[Clemens, Samuel Langhorne alias] Mark Twain

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Tom Sawyer's comrade). Scene: The Mississippi Valley. Time: Forty to Fifty Years Ago. By Mark Twain. With one hundred and seventy-four illustrations

New York: J. J. Little & Co. for Charles L. Webster and Company, 1885. First American edition, first state.

Octavo (8 3/8” x 6 5/8”, 213mm x 169mm): binder’s blank, 1⁸ (±1₂) 2-10⁸ 11⁸ 12-17⁸ 18⁸ (±18₆) 23⁸(–23₈ blank), binder’s blank [$1 signed]. 183 leaves, pp. 1-9 (half-title, frontispiece, title, copyright, notice, blank, explanatory, blank, contents) 10-15 16-17 18-366. With a heliotype portrait frontispiece (BAL state 1).

Bound in the publisher’s green pictorial cloth (re-backed, with the original back-strip laid down), blocked in black and gold. On the spine, the title black to a gilt field, author and publisher gilt. Pale peach end-papers. Presented in a custom morocco-backed clamshell box with a chemise.

Re-backed, with the original back-strip laid down. Rubbed, and worn at the extremities. Bumps to the fore-corners, with loss. Tanned, with splits and chips throughout, many repaired. Finger-soiled in places. Ownership signature of “A J Snider” in violet ink to the recto of the front free end-paper. Ink-stamp of “SNIDER” to the half-title, offsetting to the verso of the front free end-paper. Collated complete as a first issue against the BAL (see below).


Samuel Clemens (1835–1910), publishing most famously as Mark Twain, was born in Missouri and is celebrated — the Kennedy Center has since 1998 bestowed an annual Mark Twain Prize for American Humor — for his portraits of the American South in the years surrounding the abolition of slavery followed by Reconstruction. The twin peaks of Twain’s substantial output are surely Tom Sawyer and its sequel and companion Huckleberry Finn, each a picaresque Bildungsroman (i.e., novels about a young rogue growing up). Little remains to be said of the novels, which must be counted — for all the controversies of their reception — among the greatest in American letters. For its use of eye-dialect and the N-word, the book has long been bowdlerized or else removed from reading-lists. It remains an undeniable root of American attitudes toward race.

The novel (what follows taken from BAL, although later bibliographies have refined various aspects) was published in late November or early December 1884 in London (Chatto & Windus), probably 10 December 1884 in Canada (Dawson/Chatto) and January 1885 in Leipzig (Tauchnitz). The New York (first American) edition was deposited for copyright 3 December 1884, but all but the prospectus and advance sheets bear the 1885 copyright; it was circulated for general sale by March 1885. BAL distinguishes issue at eight points:

1. The title-leaf: state 2 (state 1 appearing only in advance copies as described above), viz. a cancellans with the 1884 copyright verso. In later states the leaf is conjugate with 1₇.
2. Page <13>: state 1, viz. the illustration “Him and another Man” listed at p. 88. In later states this is corrected to p. 87.
3. Page 57: state 1, viz. “with the was” in the eleventh line from the bottom. In later states this is corrected to “with the saw.”
4. Page 283: state 3 (no examined cloth-bound volume has either states 1 or 2), viz. leaf 18₆ as a cancellans due to an engorgement at the fly of Silas Phelps’s trousers. In later states this leaf is conjugate with 18₃.
5. Page 155: state 1 (BAL is uncertain on priority of states 1 and 2, although logic would agree with their numeration), viz. numbered “15”. In state 2 this is corrected by the final “5” is slightly raised.
6. Page 161: quire 11 is unsigned on all examined copies.
7. Leaf 23₈: the final blank: “in all examined copies of the book bound in cloth, and showing the earlier form of pp. <13>, 57, 155, the leaf has been excised or pasted under the terminal end paper.”
8. The portrait frontispiece: state 1, viz. “the tablecloth, or scarf, on which the bust rests is clearly visible.” In state 2, it is invisible and “Karl Gerhard, Sc.” has been added to the finished edge of the shoulder within the image.

The ownership marks of Snider (perhaps indicating multi-generational ownership, and a bibliophilic family) prove difficult.

BAL 3415.

Item #JLR0861

Price: $3,800