Description: This is a very rare copy of the 1864 Illustrated Library Edition, the first U.K. edition of Dickens's popular classic to contain a full set of plates. The First Edition of 1861 was unillustrated and the New Edition of 1862 had just one plate and a title page vignette. The plates were produced by Marcus Stone in 1863 but this volume was only added to the Library Edition in December 1864. The 8 plates, it has to be said, were not of uniformly high quality and Dickens was reluctant to issue them at all but eventually felt compelled to, have commissioned them himself from the son of his old friend, Frank Stone. This volume was slipped onto the market, with little or no publicity, for the Christmas of 1864. No more than 264 copies ever found their way on to the UK market, the remainder of the 1,000 copies printed being exported to the USA and Australia. As an indicator of this book's rarity, there is no copy in the British Library or the London Dickens Museum and the only copy known to be in any major public holding is in Yale. All this information is derived from my own original research as documented in 'The Collected Dickens' (Jeremy Parrott, 2020) under my entry ILE 24. This copy has benifitted from professional restoration to the head and tail of spine using matching period cloth. Now clean and sound, this is the only copy to appear on the open market in at least the past decade and would be a handsome addition to any Dickens collection.
Price: 4000 USD
Location: Szeged, Csongrad
End Time: 2024-12-29T10:46:11.000Z
Shipping Cost: 0 USD
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Item Specifics
All returns accepted: ReturnsNotAccepted
Binding: Hardcover
Special Attributes: 1st Edition
Author: Charles Dickens
Publisher: Chapman & Hall
Subject: Illustrated
