Clemens, Samuel Langhorne | An unusually fresh copy of the first edition of Life on the Mississippi, together with the later issued "Suppressed Chapter"

The Passion of American Collectors: Property of Barbara and Ira Lipman

Clemens, Samuel Langhorne

Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain. Boston: James R. Osgood and Company, 1883

In 8s (222 x 142 mm). Wood-engraved vignette of a steamboat on title-page, 14 wood-engraved plates, numerous wood-engraved text illustrations; small marginal stain to preliminary leaves. Publisher's brown cloth blocked in black and with pictorial gilt vignettes on front cover and spine, gray endpapers, plain edges; slightest rubbing to extremities. Brown cloth slipcase; broken.

First edition, first state, with points: p.441, tailpiece with urn and head of Mark Twain; p.443, caption reads "The St. Louis Hotel." A four-page leaflet "The Suppressed Chapter of 'Life on the Mississippi,'" no. 209 of 250 numbered copies, is loosely inserted (BAL 3519). 

"Life on the Mississippi is really two books combined. The first twenty-one chapters are his early impressions of the great river. 'Old Times on the Mississippi,' written in 1875 is here reprinted with the balance of the book, chapter twenty-two to the end, being his story of his trip down the river as an honored guest” (Johnson, p. 43). Colin Wilson's Written in Blood credits Clemens's use of fingerprints to solve a crime in an anecdote related in Chapter XXXI as "a remarkable anticipation of a scientific discovery that was then known to less than half a dozen men."

PROVENANCE

Mrs. James Insley Blair (Blairhame morocco label; Christie's New York, 14 December 2016, lot 199)

REFERENCE

BAL 3411; Johnson pp. 41–43