21 B a u m a n R a r e B o o k s “Glows With The Fire Of A Suppressed, Secret, Feverish Excitement” (Allibone): First Edition Of The Scarlet Letter In Original Cloth 20. HAWTHORNE, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter, a Romance. Boston, 1850. Octavo, original blind-tooled brown cloth, custom chemise and clamshell box. $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 adulteress 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). Clark’s typesetting states x2 and a2, no priority established. With four pages of publisher’s advertisements dated in March 1850 (the month of publication) inserted between the front endpapers. Wakeman 308. Bookplate. 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. “The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread.”
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