Mark Twain

A first printing copy of the classic American children's book about an orphan boy growing up on the banks of the Mississippi River in Missouri.

• Mark Twain (American).
• Hartford, Connecticut: The American Publishing Company, 1876. 
• Bound in original blue pictorial cloth elaborately stamped in black and gilt on spine and front board, peach endpapers, triple fly leaves on laid paper. 

While Twain is best known today as the author of canonical children's books like this one and its sequel, Huck Finn, before Tom Sawyer he was actually famous instead as a travel writer and humorist lecturer. Tom Sawyer was Twain's first novel entirely composed by him (an earlier novel, The Gilded Age, was co-authored with his friend Charles Dudley Warner). While it did eventually achieve bestseller status, its initial reception was modest, with a first printing of only 5,000 copies. Today, its reputation has made it a highly sought rarity in the first printing, as here, and copies in great condition are scarce. Twain bibliographer Kevin MacDonnell summarizes it thus: "This was a true boy's book, and surviving copies are proof of how rough on books little boys can be."