TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD - UNCORRECTED PROOF COPY by Lee, Harper - 1960

Barnstable, MA: Crane's Duplicating Service for J.B. Lippincott Company (Philadelphia & New York), 1960. First Edition. Octavo (23cm); folded and gathered signatures, comb-bouned into pale yellow printed wrappers; [ii],[8],9-292pp. Holograph publication date of July 11, 1960 written in green pencil at lower margin of front cover and title page. Light wear to text edges, with some mild creasing to upper corners, else clean throughout; mild toning and wear to covers, with a few tiny tears, faint creases, and a handful of small spots; comb-binding intact; Very Good+. Housed in a custom clamshell case by Faenwyl Bindery. Uncorrected proof copy of Lee's first published book, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1961, and basis for Robert Mulligan's Oscar-winning 1962 film starring Gregory Peck. This format preceding both states of the perfect-bound advance copy, created directly from the publisher's long galleys by Crane's Duplicating Service, a small print shop in Barnstable, MA whose sole function was the printing and binding of publisher's advance copies. A preliminary leaf prints a half-page statement by Crane's, with pages hand-numbered (in copy). Lee first received galleys for her novel in January 1960, and made some substantial changes to the text. Those changes appear to have been implemented prior to the production of the Crane proofs. A side-by-side reading against the finished text shows a few dozen mis-spelled words, almost as many dropped letters, and a few awkward spaces. While no hard numbers are known for how many such proofs were printed, marketing materials for Crane from this period suggest they would not undertake a job printing fewer than 11 copies of a proof, with other known examples from this period numbering between two to three dozen. We have been able to trace one copy at auction, moderately stained, with a typed and printed label pasted over the title on the front cover, bearing a date of June 20, 1960; one of our more esteemed colleagues recalls a copy being offered 30+ years ago; an OCLC search suggests a dozen holdings for "uncorrected proofs," though upon closer inspection, several of these are for the perfect-bound advance (often called proofs), or are simply duds, and none of the metadata I've been able to examine suggest that those holdings are in this format. Anyway - unless you can produce a set of long galleys, this is certainly the earliest (and scarcest) format of maybe the most beloved work of American fiction published in the last 75 years.