Life on the Mississippi

$450 · Offered by Book Collector Inc

Author: Twain, Mark [PSUED Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835-1910) Year: 1883 Publisher: James R Osgood and Company Place: Boston Description: 624 pages with frontispiece and over 300 black and white illustrations. Royal Octavo (9" x 6 1/4") Issued in the original brown cloth with gilt lettering and pictorial on spine and black and gilt lettering with pictorial on cover. Lacks the illustration of Twain's head in flames on page 441, and the corrected "St Charles Hotel" on page 443. Simultaneously published in 1883 in the United States and Great Britain, the book is the first submitted to a publisher as a typewritten manuscript (BAL 34II) Second state of the first American edition. Twain once remarked that he considered this book his masterpiece, the book that would outlive his other works and endure as a classic. Of course, Twain once defined a classic as a book everybody talks about but nobody ever reads. At first glance it seems to be a travel book, but it is really a highly readable discursive autobiographical account of Twain's boyhood and his region, and of a culture that radically changed since he left home 30 years earlier. It makes good reading as background for Huck Finn . The only thing that is known of the printing history is what Twain wrote in 1891: that 50,000 copies were printed and bound, but only 32,000 sold. Implication is that the unsold copies were reissued by Charles L Webster between 1884 and 1891 when he took over Osgood's stock. Copies are found with Osgo

• Binding: Hardcover

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