– 32 – N e w A c q u i s i t i o n s First Edition Of The Scarlet Letter, In Original Cloth 37. HAWTHORNE, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter, a Romance. Boston, 1850. Octavo, original blind-tooled brown cloth. $12,800. First edition of Hawthorne’s American classic, one of only 2500 copies printed, in original cloth. “Since 1837, when he had written [the short story] ‘Endicott and the Red Cross,’ he had often been tormented by a symbol—a scarlet ‘A,’ worn by an adultress in that tale—which had, at last, worked its way into a full-length book” (Kunitz & Haycraft, 349). The first edition of The Scarlet Letter sold out in ten days and “made Hawthorne’s fame, changed his fortune and gave to our literature its first symbolic novel a year before the appearance of Melville’s Moby-Dick” (Bradley, et al., 652). The novel “glows with the fire of a suppressed, secret, feverish excitement… a fire that neither wanes nor lessens, but keeps at its original scorching heat for years” (Allibone I:805). Clark’s typesetting states x2 and a2, no priority established. With four pages of publisher’s advertisements dated inMarch 1850 (themonth of publication) inserted between the front endpapers. Interior generally clean (some offsetting from bookplate to ad leaves only), expert restoration to spine ends only, corners gently rubbed, some very faint discoloration to cloth. An extremely good copy. “She had not known the weight until she felt the freedom.”
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