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Lot 124

MELVILLE (HERMANN)
Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, FIRST AMERICAN EDITION, New York, Harper & Brothers, 1851

27 November 2018, 13:00 GMT
London, Knightsbridge

Sold for £7,500 inc. premium

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MELVILLE (HERMANN)

Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, FIRST AMERICAN EDITION, some foxing throughout, one or two very short tears at edges, 6 pp. advertisements at end, BAL first binding of publisher's red "A" (morocco-grain) cloth, covers stamped in blind with a heavy rule frame and Harper's circular device in centre, neatly rebacked preserving most of gilt lettered backstrip (loss to three or four letters), original brown-orange coated endpapers, double fly-leaves at front and rear, preserved in red cloth solander box, black leather spine label lettered in gilt [BAL 13664; Grolier, 100 American, 60; Sadleir, Excursions in Victorian Bibliography, p. 339], 8vo (191 x 118mm.), New York, Harper & Brothers, 1851

Footnotes

'A BOOK THAT HAS NO EQUAL IN AMERICAN LITERATURE': the first American edition of Moby-Dick in the rarer red cloth binding, albeit restored. This edition followed the original English edition (The Whale, in three volumes) by a month, and contained thirty-five passages and the "Epilogue" previously omitted. "[Melville's] great book, Moby Dick, was a complete practical failure, misunderstood by the critics and ignored by the public; and in 1853 the Harpers' fire destroyed the plates of all of his books and most of the copies remaining in stock [only about sixty copies survived]... Melville's permanent fame must always rest on the great prose epic of Moby Dick, a book that has no equal in American literature for variety and splendor of style and for depth of feeling" (DAB). "Within its pages can be found the sound and scents, the very flavor, of the maritime life of our whaling ancestors" (Grolier, 100 American).

Provenance: "Screvon M. Kinne"[?], faint pencil inscription dated "Decr 2nd 51" at the head of the fly-title.

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