TWAIN, Mark (Samuel L. Clemens).
A Tramp Abroad.
FIRST EDITION. Hartford: American Publishing Company, 1880. State B portrait frontispiece; second-state illustrated frontispiece, captioned "Titian's Moses"; State B sheets. With all four of the first-edition typographic points present and uncorrected (per BAL): page 37, line 7 up, "fee" for "feel"; page 46, line 11, "2oo" for "200"; page 414, line 9 up, "spirting" for "spurting"; and page 465, line 4, "stuck" for "stick."
Octavo. xvi, 17–631, [1] pp., the final leaf a publisher's advertisement for The Innocents Abroad. Double frontispiece portrait of Twain and Titian's Moses, with tissue guard. 328 illustrations (engraved plates and in-text wood engravings) by W. Fr. Brown, True Williams, B. Day, and other artists, with three or four pictures by Twain himself. Bound in publisher's sheep, with a black leather title label to the spine; significantly fewer copies were bound in sheep than in cloth, and it is scarce thus. BAL 3386. Very good plus to near fine, with light fading to the spine and wear to the extremities, the joints just starting at the spine head, the gilt along the board edges mostly rubbed, a two-inch leather snag to the upper rear board professionally restored, and a decorative owner bookplate.
Twain's comic answer to The Innocents Abroad. In the summer of 1878 Twain traveled through central and southern Europe with his friend the Reverend Joseph Twichell (fictionalized in the book as "Harris") — a tour of Germany, the Black Forest, the Alps, and Italy that produced the kind of book a humorist on a walking tour produces: one that mostly admits the walking didn't actually happen. Twain rides trains, takes coaches, climbs Mont Blanc by telescope, descends the Neckar by raft, and devotes one of the funniest essays in American literature to the structure of the German language. As Twain advised, it was a book "written by one loafer for a brother loafer to read." Sold by subscription, illustrated with 328 engravings, and read steadily ever since.
SKU TO-2026-111
