DICKENS, CHARLES. The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club. Half-title, 43 engraved plates by Hablot Knight Browne ("Phiz") and others (including engraved frontispiece, additional engraved vignette title-page). 8vo, bound in recent full red polished calf, spine tooled and lettered in gilt in compartments; plates foxed and browned, heaviest to blank margins, text with intermittent, mostly light foxing. Prime Pickwick, surmised to be one of a few first editions bound in book form, with the first five plates thus: Plate 1; Mr. Pickwick Addresses the Club, Pickwick's buttons are properly placed on his left, there are only two books in front of the secretary, and the 'g' in 'page' has a curly end * Plate 2; The Pugnacious Cabman, the tall soldier at the back does not have a mustache, as he would from the second issue on * Plate 3; The Sagacious Dog, the hinges on the gate are shaded by vertical lines (unshaded by the second printing), the hasp on the gatepost stands out sharply from the foliage, the gun on Jingle's shoulder has both hammer and trigger * Plate 4; Dr. Slammer's Defiance of Jingle, there are ten floorboards (later eleven), Dr. Slammer's left foot does not touch the crack in the floor, Jingle's left foot is in the center of the second board while his right foot is entirely on the narrow step * Plate 5; The Dying Clown, the foot of the listener touches the hat on the floor, the vase on the shelf is unshaded. Further, in a very few printings plate 14 bears the mistake of being on page 169 rather than page 154, as found here (Johanssen states that this was the 'rarest of all plates'). The plate on page 169 may also have been misprinted but this copy does show the proper page of 169 for plate 15. It was not uncommon, even in Dickens' time, for collectors to have the parts saved at the printers to then be bound up. The parts themselves were even formatted to allow this and the parts would even advertise binders to do so. (See Johannsen, Albert, Phiz; Illustrations from the Novels of Charles Dickens.) London: Chapman and Hall, 1837