Holiday 2020 Catalogue

L i t e r a t u r e 20 A Great Rarity: First Edition Of Kipling’s Captain’s Courageous , One Of A Very Few Known Signed Copies 17. KIPLING, Rudyard. Captains Courageous: A Story of the Grand Banks. London, 1897. Octavo, original gilt-stamped pictorial blue cloth, custom chemise, slipcase. $38,000. First English edition of Kipling’s richly detailed tale of American deep-sea fishing and faith in hard work, with frontispiece and 21 illustrations by I.W. Taber, signed by Kipling on the title page with his name crossed out and dated “1922” by Kipling on the last page of text. One of the few copies of this work signed by Kipling that we are aware of. “This is the only book of Kipling’s which is set entirely in America. All the characters are American. Not only that, but the heart of the book—its moral in a single sentence—is one of Kipling’s main beliefs of this period expressed in terms essentially American, or perhaps more particularly New England. He put it later in verse: ‘And the Gods of the Copy-book Maxims said: “If you don’t work you will die!” It is a saga of hard physical work in conflict with natural forces. It is a book which could hardly have been written by anyone who did not admire Huckleberry Finn ; it is a book whose claim to survival rests mainly on detail, and it is all American detail” (Mason, 119-20). Without scarce dust jacket. First serialized in Pearson’s Magazine , December 1896 to April 1897. Although the American edition preceded the English by about a month, this English edition is preferred. Text generally fine, with occasional tiny shallow inkstain along top margin of a few pages, inner hinges expertly reinforced, cloth with only minor rubbing to extremities, gilt quite bright. Very rare and desirable signed by Kipling.