The Writings of John Muir: The Manuscript Edition (complete in ten volumes)

Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1924. Limited Edition. Hardcover. Very good. Large octavo, ten volumes. A crisp, clean, very good set in the publisher's green buckram. Filled with halftone and phorogravure illustrations, with photogravure frontispieces in each volume, along with printed tissue guards. Green cloth spines are inevitably evenly faded to a similar brown. Some mild to moderate dampstaining affects the bases of two volumes, though the internal contents are entirely unaffected. An unread set, with nearly all gatherings unopened. The brown leather spine labels show mild chipping and dryness, but they are unfaded and rather well-preserved. This is one of 750 limited sets which includes a tipped-in manuscript leaf in Muir's hand. This particular one contains an fragment from a draft of "The Mountains of California," chapter four, "A Near View of the High Sierra." The leaf reads, "[...]with larkspurs, lupines, + showy columbines; the whole forming brautiful vase-like adornments upon the rigid rockwaves. Here a few birds find a most-grateful[...]." There are some pencil corrections in Muir's own hand, some of which are barely legible. However, one of these was an edit which made it into the final version, beginning "In these bits of leafiness..." (see same paragraph of the final published version). Muir's complete writings were issued in several editions and bindings by Houghton Mifflin in the decade following his death, but the manuscript edition is naturally the finest. Despite its noted flaws, nevertheless a minimally handled, complete, and appealing set. Most recent auction records are quite strong for this set, usually selling beyond the high estimate.