Ancient Regime

by TWAIN Mark TAINE H. A.

$12,000 · Offered by Biblio

First edition · Signed

1876. Signed. (TWAIN, Mark) TAINE, Hippolyte. The Ancient Regime. New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1876. Octavo, original green cloth. Housed in a custom half polished calf clamshell box. $12,000.Mark Twain's signed copy of Hippolyte Taine's The Ancient Regime, signed ""Saml. L. Clemens, Hartford 1876"" on the front flyleaf and annotated by him on the final text leaf, ""Finished Jan 29th"" and beneath that note, ""Finished Sept. 10th,"" indicating that he read the book twice. With the bookplate prepared by Anderson Auction Company in 1911 stating ""This book is from the Library of Samuel Longhorne Clemens (Mark Twain)"" signed by Twain's literary executor and biographer Albert Bigelow Paine.Twain scholar Sherwood Cummings wrote of this book, ""[Twain] not only referred to it during the next decade in his notebooks and correspondence, but borrowed liberally from it for material and incidents in both The Prince and the Pauper and A Connecticut Yankee."" Moreover Twain scholar Stephen Railton (Professor at the University of Virginia) writes in his endnotes to A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (New York, Barnes Noble Classics, 2005): ""As Hank implies here and more explicitly on page 256, 'le droit du siegneur' (the privilege of the lord) was to have sex with an untitled woman on her wedding night before her husband. The list of aristocratic abuses here is derived from matieral Twain originally found in Hippolyte Adolphe Taine's The Ancient RegimeÉ which was also a source

• Year: 1876
• Edition: First Edition
• Binding: hardcover

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