Redburn, uncut in original wrappers

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$ 18 900
AuktionsdatumClassic
15.06.2023 10:00UTC -04:00
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ID 967562
Los 120 | Redburn, uncut in original wrappers
Redburn, uncut in original wrappers

Herman Melville, 1849

MELVILLE, Herman (1819-1891). Redburn: His First Voyage. New York: Harpers & Brothers, Publishers, 1849.



Extremely scarce in original wrappers. The first American edition of Melville's autobiographical account of a young man's first voyage. The present copy is the only one recorded in RBH: it last sold in these rooms in 2004. More than half—414, to be exact—of the 750 copies printed by Harper would be remaindered.



Based on Melville's voyage to Liverpool in 1839 and designed to be a simple and popular adventure story, the manuscript for Redburn was completed in less than ten weeks and, without any attempt at polishing it, he submitted it to his American publisher Harper & Brothers for publication. After checking the proof sheets, which came out in August, he sent them along to Bentley for publication in England, where it appeared six weeks before the American edition. Melville alluded to Redburn for the first time in a 5 June 1849 letter to his English publisher Richard Bentley, in which he wrote that the novel would be practical rather than follow the "unwise" course of his previous novel, Mardi, which had been harshly criticized. He continues:



“I have now in preparation a thing of a widely different cast from Mardi—a plain, straightforward, amusing narrative of personal experience—the son of a gentleman on his first voyage to sea as a sailor—no metaphysics, no conic-sections, nothing but cakes & ale. I have shifted my ground from the South Seas to a different quarter of the globe—nearer home—and what I write I have almost wholly picked up by my own observations under comical circumstances.” (Horth, p.132)



Melville adopted this more commercial approach to writing as his family obligations increased and his working conditions became more difficult. Living with him in the small house in New York City were his wife, child, mother, sisters, and his brother Allan with his own wife and child. Melville later portrayed himself at this time as being forced to write "with duns all around him, & looking over the back of his chair—& perching on his pen & diving in his inkstand—like the devils about St. Anthony." Two years later Bentley would publish his masterpiece The Whale. Advertisements are paged 9-11 and [1]-2; BAL describes a total of 14 pages of ads for the first printing: [i-iv] and [1]-10. Leaves paged 9-11 are conjugate with the final text leaves. BAL 13659.



Octavo (193 x 135mm). Uncut. 6 pp. of adverts at rear (last gathering nearly detached, some curling to page edges, spotting internally). Original printed wrappers (chipping to spine, some fraying and soiling to wrappers, rear wrapper neatly reinforced on verso); modern clamshell box. Provenance: Christie's New York, 16 December 2004, lot 154.

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