With the Apparently Original Dust Jacket from the 1860s

TRANSFORMATION: OR, THE ROMANCE OF MONTE BENI.

(PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY). HAWTHORNE, NATHANIEL.

(Leipzig: Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1860). 165 x 123 mm. (6 1/2 x 4 7/8"). xii, 292; vi, 280 pp. Two volumes in one. First Tauchnitz Edition (Todd & Bowden's fourth setting), published the same year as First American and English Editions.

Original vellum-like paper boards, covers with gilt lacy borders, smooth spine heavily gilt and with gilt lettering, all edges gilt. Apparently IN THE ORIGINAL maroon pebbled paper DUST JACKET. With a total of 60 photographs (including frontispiece) mounted on stiff paper. Clark, p. 252; Todd & Bowden 515 Db. Back board with a small stain near the bottom, inexpensive paper faintly browned; jacket a little dampstained, splitting repaired with white tape along the joints on the inner side. Even with defects, a notable survival.

Attractively bound and enhanced with photographs of Italian art and architecture, this is the first Tauchnitz printing of Hawthorne's "The Marble Faun" (as it is called in various American printings) or "The Romance of Monte Beni" (as it is titled in the Tauchnitz and early London editions). The work was Hawthorne's last completed novel, the principal fictive product of the author's European residence from 1853-60, and probably the most brooding, Romantic, and distinctive major work in the Hawthorne canon. The present edition is part of an important continental publishing phenomenon that flourished for more than a century. The descendant from a line of two previous printer-publishers, Christian Bernhard, Freiherr von Tauchnitz (1816-95) founded in Leipzig in 1837 the printing and publishing firm of Bernhard Tauchnitz, which became famous for its inexpensive reprints of English language books. Tauchnitz began his "Collection of British Authors" in 1841, and two years later he negotiated the sole rights to publish English books in Germany; among those authors whose work he issued were Ainsworth, Dickens, Disraeli, and Thackeray. As is obvious from the present item, Tauchnitz published American authors as well. His inexpensive paperbound editions, a precursor to mass-market paperbacks, eventually numbered more than 4,000, and the business was continued by the Tauchnitz family until being destroyed by bombing in World War II. There are often a number of different Tauchnitz editions or impressions of any particular work; in the present case, the bindings differ significantly, and the number of photographic plates varies widely from copy to copy. According to Clark, "The absence, presence, or sequence of inserted photographs has no significance in determining textual priority." The presence of the original dust jacket from the 1860s--which has done so much to protect the nearly virginal white binding--represents a remarkable survival. (ST20736)

Price: $350.00