“IT WAS TO BE A PICNIC ON A GIGANTIC SCALE”: RARE FIRST ISSUE OF THE INNOCENTS ABROAD

TWAIN, Mark. The Innocents Abroad, or The New Pilgrims' Progress… Hartford, Conn: American Publishing Company, 1869. Octavo, original brown cloth gilt. $6500.

First edition, rare first issue, of Twain’s satiric “anti-travel book” (MacDonnell, 33), his first full-scale work and first major success, illustrated with over 200 in-text line cuts by True Williams and others.

Based on Twain's letters to the San Francisco Alta California, New York Tribune and Herald describing his steamship tour of Europe and the Holy Land, The Innocents Abroad [first published 1869] is the "humorous narrative that assured [Twain's] position as a leading author and shows his typical American irreverence for the classic and antique" (Hart, 148). "Twain, by turns both savage and gentle, deflates the pretense of the Old World shrines as well as the Americans who worship at them" (MacDonnell, 33). "Still read with pleasure, The Innocents Abroad has come to be regarded as a definitive document in the perpetual concern of readers with the New World and the Old, and the relation between the two" (LeMaster & Wilson, 400). Contributing illustrator True Williams "ranks as the most prolific illustrator of Mark Twain's books… For Innocents Abroad he did most of the illustrations not copied from photographs" (Rasmussen 516). With 14 plates and hundreds of in-text illustrations. With all first issue points (reference numerals lacking on pp. xvii and xviii, last entry on p. xviii reads "Thankless Devotion—A Newspaper Valedictory," no illustration on p. 129, chapter LXI misprinted as XLI on p. [643], and "Personal History…" heading p. [654]). BAL 3316. Johnson, Twain, 9-12.

Interior fine; minor expert repairs to front joint and inner hinges, light rubbing to gilt on original cloth, mild wear to spine ends with very shallow chipping.