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Lot 172

EMERSON, RALPH WALDO. 1803-1882.
Essays. Boston: James Munroe & Co., 1841.

5 December 2019, 10:00 EST
New York

Sold for US$2,805 inc. premium

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EMERSON, RALPH WALDO. 1803-1882.

Essays. Boston: James Munroe & Co., 1841. 8vo. Publisher's cloth, spine lettered in gilt, upper cover decorated in blind, some rubbing to cloth, minor wear at the spine ends.
Provenance: Rufus Choate (ink note to early blank).

"There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion."

FIRST EDITION, FIRST ISSUE, BAL's binding C (sequence "almost entirely arbitrary"), including the first appearance of "Self-Reliance." "Their ethical inspiration and stimulation, their occasional startling phrase, their individualistic idealism, which stirred renascent Yankee New England to its depths, speaks with the same simple power and force in the midst of modern complexities" (Grolier American 47). A clean tight copy of a landmark of American thought. BAL 5189. Myerson A10.1.a.

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