AMERICANA 60 First Edition Of Uncle Tom’s Cabin With Cruikshank’s Illustrations, Rare In Original Wrappers 65STOWE, Harriet Beecher. Uncle Tom’s Cabin. London, 1852. Thirteen parts. Octavo, original pale yellow wrappers, custom chemise, box. $8100 Second English edition (published the same year as the Boston first edition) of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s galvanizing novel of slavery, the first to feature illustrations by celebrated artist George Cruikshank, in the very fragile original thirteen issues. Stowe’s controversial novel proved immediately successful in America, and publishers in England, aware of the nation’s large and vocal anti-slavery contingent, quickly issued their own editions (14 English editions appeared in 1852 alone). This edition, with frontispiece, title page vignette and 27 full-page wood engravings after George Cruikshank, is frequently referred to as the first English edition; however, BAL asserts that the C.H. Clarke edition precedes. As noted in the Cruikshank bibliography, the edition in parts was printed “in yellow paper printed wrappers of very poor quality, and hence difficult to get in a good state” (Cohn, 777). Fragile wrappers fresh and clean with virtually no wear. Very rare in such outstanding condition. 66CHESNUTT, Charles W. The Conjure Woman. Boston and New York, 1899. Octavo, original pictorial, gilt-stamped brown cloth. $4000 First edition of the very elusive first book by Chesnutt, with seven short stories, in colorful original cloth. Born in 1858 of mixed descent and light-skinned, Chesnutt chose to live and work as a Black man. Trained as a lawyer, he is widely viewed as having “no peer in Afro-American fiction written before his time… Chesnutt saw the creation of literature as a weapon that could defeat racism” (Gates, Signifying Monkey, 116). Each of the seven stories offers a dual narrative structure, in which “a white Yankee narrator, John, who has bought a plantation in the South… introduces the often extraordinary ‘yarn’ spun by a Black narrator, a former slave named Uncle Julius” (Cotennet, Lives of a Book, 82). Text very fresh, front free endpaper and rear inner hinge expertly repaired, soiling to spine of colorful original cloth. “America’s First Great Black Novelist”
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