Clemens, Samuel Langhorne

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Tom Sawyer's Comrade). … By Mark Twain. New York: Charles L. Webster and Company, 1886

In 8s (8 3/8 x 6 5/8 in.; 213 x 168 mm). Frontispiece and 173 text illustrations by E. W. Kemble, photogravure plate of a portrait bust of Clemens by Karl Gerhardt, albumen photograph portrait of Clemens mounted on the recto of the Gerhardt plate, engraved portrait of Clemens mounted on verso of rear endpaper, some other ephemera inserted; some soiling and reading wear throughout. Early twentieth-century half buckram by the Roycroft Bindery, paper spine labels, original front cloth cover bound in; quite rubbed at extremities.

Garth Cate (gift of his father; later inscribed by the author) — Victor and Irene Murr Jacobs (sale, Sotheby’s New York, 29 October 1996, lot 244)

Second American edition, inscribed with an aphorism and signed by the author on the title-page: "To Mr. Garth W. Cate: Taking the pledge will not make bad liquor good, but it will improve it. Truly Yours, Mark Twain, Nov. 25/06."

An accompanying letter from the recipient of Clemens's inscription to Victor Jacobs, 14 October 1964, explains the genesis of this inscription. In 1906, Garth Cate was working as the lecture manager for Elbert Hubbard of Roycrofter fame. Seeing Cate's well-worn copy of Huckleberry Finn, Hubbard offered to have it rebound and to ask Clemens to inscribe it. As Cate explains in the letter, "So I sent HUCK back to its spiritual father, and when it returned I was somewhat shocked, having been sent to a temperance Sunday School by a whiskey fearing mother. … Later on I was to marry a Christian Science practitioner, and when she saw this inscription she exclaimed: 'Why, that is the most immoral thing I ever saw! How could a great author send such a sentiment to a young man?'"