Date 1601: Conversation as it was by the Social Fireside in the Time of the Tudors (Limited Edition)

TWAIN, Mark [Samuel L. Clemens].

Date 1601: Conversation as it was by the Social Fireside in the Time of the Tudors.

PRIVATELY PRINTED. 1920. One of 110 hand-numbered copies, this copy number 45.

Octavo. [15] pp. Sewn stiff wrappers printed in dark brown; the stock watermarked "Bay Path Book," a Strathmore Paper Company specimen paper. With a foreword that reprints at length Albert Bigelow Paine's account of the work's origin and private circulation. Near fine, with minor wear to the extremities and a small closed tear to the upper edge of the title page. BAL (p. 252) records a cloth-bound edition privately printed for Merle Johnson in 1920 with this same limitation of 110 copies; this copy is in wrappers.

Twain's mock-Elizabethan squib — a brief, deliberately coarse satire cast as a fireside conversation at the court of Queen Elizabeth, recorded by the Queen's cup-bearer, the comedy turning on scatological frankness set against ornately archaic period diction. Twain wrote it in the summer of 1876 as a private amusement for his clergyman friend the Reverend Joseph Twichell, circulated it among a few intimates, and never published it in his lifetime. Bawdy rather than truly obscene, the piece remained unprintable by mainstream publishers for decades and circulated instead as a perennial private-press favorite. A nicely preserved numbered copy of one of American literature's most enduringly underground texts.

SKU TO-2026-118