The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Twain, Mark [Samuel L. Clemens] - 1876

London: Chatto & Windus, 1876. First edition. Fine. First edition, preceding the American edition by six months. Handsomely bound in modern full blue morocco, raised bands on the spine, intricate gilt in the spine compartment and boards, marbled end papers, top-edge gilt. One of the classic American novels, Twain's bildungsroman follows the adventures of Tom Sawyer - and his friend Huck Finn -- in St. Petersburg, Missouri told with Twain's characteristic and unmatchable wit and humor. It would become his best-selling book and its sequel, "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," is arguably the greatest American novel of all time. "Mr. Samuel Clemens has taken the boy of the Southwest for the hero of his new book... and has presented him with a fidelity to circumstance which loses no charm by being realistic in the highest degree, and which gives incomparably the best picture of life in that region as yet known to fiction." (Contemporary Atlantic Monthly Review). Fine.