Extracts from Adam's Diary First Edition - Mark Twain - Bauman Rare Books

Extracts from Adam's Diary

Mark TWAIN

Item#: 68614 We're sorry, this item has been sold

Extracts from Adam's Diary

“THIS NEW CREATURE EATS TOO MUCH FRUIT”: FIRST EDITION OF EXTRACTS FROM ADAM’S DIARY, IN SCARCE ORIGINAL DUST JACKET

TWAIN, Mark. Extracts from Adam’s Diary Translated from the Original Ms. New York and London: Harper and Brothers, (1904). Octavo, original pictorial red cloth, original dust jacket.

First edition of Twain’s satirical story of Adam and Eve, with frontispiece and 44 full-page whimsical, faux-cuneiform tablet illustrations by Fred Strothmann, in scarce original dust jacket.

“The Adamic diaires are, in form and tone, sophisticated folktales, and they embody a major strand in Twain’s complex tapistry of artistic devices, patterns and ‘mythic’ imagery. They serve not only as seemingly naive (or radically innocent) commentaries on one of the most influential stories in Western literature and religion but also supply an imaginatively instructive alternative for his readers to the Sunday school Bible images that Twain had rejected as he gradually emancipated himself from the Presbyterian fundamentalism of his youth” (LeMaster & Wilson, 274). “This simple text, originally about 4000 words in length, has had a complex publishing history that has produced multiple versions. Mark Twain wrote his original draft sometime before early 1893. When he was invited to contribute a humorous piece to the Niagara Book, a souvenir publication for the 1893 Buffalo World’s Fair, he reworked his Adam material by placing Eden at Niagara Falls and working in local Buffalo place names, such as Lake Erie and Tonawanda… In April 1904 Harper published [this first book edition of] Extracts from Adam’s Diary as an 89-page book, using the Niagara Book version and adding illustrations by Fred Strothmann. The following year, Mark Twain rewrote the story, removing all references to Niagara so it could be merged into Eve’s Diary” (Rasmussen, 133-34). BAL 3480. Johnson, 80-81. McBride, 214. MacDonnell, 55.

Scarce original dust jacket slightly soiled with light wear to edges. Book about-fine with bright pictorial cloth. A beautiful copy.

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Aquatint Copperplate process by which the plate is “bitten” by exposure to acid. By changing the areas of the plate that are exposed and the length of time the plate is submerged in the acid bath, the engraver can obtain fine and varying shades of gray that closely resemble watercolor washes. Although the name contains the word “tint”, this is a black-and-white printing process; aquatint plates can often be hand colored, however.
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