?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 6,000 - $ 9,000
TRUE FIRST AMERICAN EDITION IN SALMON CLOTH VERNE, JULES. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Frontispiece with tissue-guard, and illustrated with steel engravings throughout. 8vo, original salmon cloth decorated in gilt and black, few small inkstains, spine dulled slightly with tiny frays to head and foot, minimal rubbing to extremities, one tiny mend to spine foot; internally quite clean; housed in 1/4 morocco folding case. Boston: James R. Osgood and Company, 1873 [but 1872]
first american edition, first issue. This edition differs from the more common George M. Smith subscription issue in the jellyfish vignette on the cover, the final "s" in "Seas" lacking from the title on the cover, the words "THE END" in unbroken type following the final paragraph, and with contents collating identically to the Sampson Low first English edition. Very rare, with best guesses (trending upward somewhat) plateauing at 50 or so copies of this true first American edition known to exist, the consensus that most were destroyed in the Great Boston Fire, which occurred in the same month as publication.
This copy in pale salmon cloth, known only by rumor if at all. We find only one mention of its existence: "Most of the surviving copies [of the Osgood edition, as here] were ... bound in green cloth, but single copies of blue, maroon and an odd salmon color exist" (Edwards, p. 35). quite likely a unique copy of a truly rare book. Taves & Michaluk V006; Myers, 56; see Arthur B. Edwards, Firsts Magazine, July/August, 1996, vol. 6, no. 7/8, pp 33-36.
