The Scarlet Letter A Romance

Boston: Ticknor, Reed and Fields, 1850. First edition. Original cloth housed in a custom half-morocco box. Near Fine/Case Near Fine. First edition with all the points called for. 8vo. Pp. [i-iii], 2-54, [55], 56-322, [323-324]. Original blind-stamped ribbed brown cloth, gilt lettering on spine. Early ownership name (Jon. A. French) in pencil on a front fly. Red morocco bookplate of noted financier, bibliophile and art collector Donald Stralem on the front pastedown, with corresponding offsetting bleeding through the two leaves of publisher ads. Minor expert restoration to spine ends and hinges. Cloth unusually fine; gilt quite bright. In a brown half morocco case, Fine but for loss of silk pull; hinge of chemise starting. The first edition of 2,500 copes published 16 March 1850 sold out in ten days: Hawthorne's fame was assured and, significantly, American literature was established as an art form distinct from the shackles of the English tradition. Walt Whitman, referencing Hawthorne's 1846 collection Mosses From an Old Manse, had complained, "shall real American genius shiver with neglect while the public runs after this foreign trash?" (quoted from Young America: Flowering of Democracy in New York City by Edward Widmer (Oxford, 1999). Hawthorne's answer was to produce the sublime work at-hand, literature's first symbolic novel.An exemplary copy that is certainly the finest we've seen. CLARK, A16; BAL, 7600.