The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Tom Sawyer’s Comrade)...by Mark Twain. With One Hundred and Seventy-Four Illustrations.

Small 4to. New York: Charles L. Webster and Company, 1885. Small 4to, 366 pp., 174 b&w illustrations including frontispiece, portrait frontispiece with tissue guard (second state). Original library sheep binding expertly rebacked, with title labels to backstrip on red and black morocco. Corners rubbed, minor scattered foxing and chipping, otherwise a nice copy of a scarce binding issue. Ink inscription on front endpaper by the original owner, dated March 12, 1885. § First US edition, mixed issue of the first printing, with a very early ownership inscription dated March 12, 1885. A copy inscribed by Twain is dated Feb. 21, 1885; copies were received from the bindery in November of 1884. Photogravure portrait frontispiece in the second state, with the imprint of the Heliotype Printing Company and with "Karl Gerhardt, Sc." added to the finished edge of the shoulder. Only three substantive changes were introduced after the first printing: at p. 13 the erroneous page reference "88" was changed to "87" (as in this copy); at p. 57 the misprint "with the was" was corrected to "with the saw" (not in this copy); and at p. 9 the misprint "Decided" was corrected to "Decides" (also not in this copy). Thus this copy has two of these in the first state. The frontispiece was printed separately and inserted at random, and has no relation to the order of the printed sheets. Copies in the original half morocco binding are the least often met with. Less than two weeks before publication, the publisher Webster announced that he was binding 20,000 copies in cloth, another 2,500 in sheep (this copy), and 500 copies in half morocco. See BAL 3415. Grolier, 100 American, 87. Johnson, pp. 43-50. Kevin MacDonnell, "Huck Finn among the Issue-Mongers," Firsts; The Book Collector's Magazine, Volume 8, Number 9 (September 1998), pp. 28-35.