Roughing It

Hartford, CT: American Publishing Company, 1872. First American edition, early state. Hardcover. Fair. 591pp. Octavo [23 cm] Brown cloth over boards with lettering and decorative stamping in gilt and blind on the backstrip and boards. Light peach endpapers. Two frontispiece illustrations, and six inserted full-page plates. One leaf of publisher's advertisements at the rear (p. 592). Merle Johnson states with regards to the advert- "Most copies of the first edition examined have this feature but whether or not the very first copies have it present or not cannot be stated with any degree of certainty." Front board partially detached. Front flyleaf completely detached, but present. Stitching visible in the inside margins. Text block cracked multiple times. Light dampstaining to the bottom fore-edge corners of the preliminary pages. BAL 3337. Zamorano 80, 18. Merle Johnson, pp. 13-16. McBride's, p. 83. With "premises- said he / was occupying his." Unbroken type (first word of first line of contents p. xi). P. 156 has "Trees" and "thirteenth." "Eastern" on p. 330. "Y" in "My" on p. 19 is damaged. With a section on the Mormons and Salt Lake City. Fully illustrated by eminent artists. A first edition of Mark Twain's personal narrative of his years spent vagabonding. The English edition preceded this American edition by just a few days. (Inventory #: 68777)