An Unsurpassable Copy of the First Edition of "Uncle Remus"

UNCLE REMUS, HIS SONGS AND HIS SAYINGS. THE FOLK-LORE OF THE OLD PLANTATION.

HARRIS, JOEL CHANDLER.

(New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1881). 195 x 125 mm. (7 3/4 x 5"). 231 pp. [4] leaves (ads). FIRST EDITION, First State (with "presumptive" on the last line of p. 9 and "A Treatise on the Practice of Medicine" on the first ad page, rather than quotes from reviews of this title).

Publisher's pictorial green cloth, upper cover with gilt portrait of Brer Rabbit smoking a pipe, flat spine with gilt titling, butterfly-patterned endpaper (gilt rules at each end of spine neatly touched up). In a green linen chemise and a (slightly worn) matching dark green morocco-backed slipcase. Illustrated by Frederick S. Church and James H. Moser with frontispiece of "Uncle Remus and His Deceitful Jug," 15 in-text illustrations, and seven wood-engraved plates. Rear pastedown with book label of the Publishers' Bookbindings collection of Ellen K. Morris and Edward S. Levin. BAL 7100; Grolier American 83. AN EXCEPTIONAL COPY, clean, fresh, and bright inside and out.

This is an unsurpassable copy of the first printing of Harris' folk tales learned from African-American slaves, narratives described by the "Grolier American Hundred" as containing "a photographic reproduction of negro folk-lore, in accurate dialect." Harris grew up on a plantation, not as the privileged scion of Southern aristocrats, but as the bastard child of a single mother. The two lived in a small cabin near the slave quarters, where Harris heard stories around the cooking fires, Brer [Brother] Rabbit, and the other characters that would one day populate his tales. He apprenticed as a typesetter on a Confederate newspaper run by Joseph Addison Turner, who gave the young Harris the run of his 6,000-volume library and helped him improve his writing. Subsequently, Harris made a living as a journalist, writing humorous columns for papers in Savannah and Atlanta. Uncle Remus began appearing in these articles in 1876, and was the voice behind 180 stories over the next quarter century. When promoting his first "Uncle Remus" collection in New Orleans, the desperately shy Harris couldn't bring himself to read from his work, so Mark Twain did it for him. According to ANB, Harris' "ability to replicate dialectical patterns of blacks and his recording of folk tradition . . . contributed to the local color movement and created characters and stories influential and popular not only in his own time but worldwide today." Scholars still study his work to trace its roots in African and Native American traditions. This is a commonly-seen book, but, often having been used by uncareful hands, it is almost never found well preserved, and will not be found in finer condition than here. That is because it comes from the splendid collection of publisher's bindings assembled over three decades by Ellen K. Morris and Edward S. Levin. In response to an exhibition of the bindings held at the Grolier Club in 2000, Andrea Krupp, writing in the Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, praises the "pristine condition" of this "glittering and opulent collection." (ST20671)

Price: $7,500.00