A Tramp Abroad (First Edition, Second State)

Twain's return to travel writing after The Innocents Abroad, a bestselling account of a European walking tour that closes with the celebrated comic essay "The Awful German Language".

A Tramp Abroad is Mark Twain's account, part memoir and part deliberate exaggeration, of a walking tour he undertook through Germany, Switzerland, and Italy in the summer of 1878 with his close friend the Reverend Joseph Twitchell. Illustrated throughout with 328 engravings, chief among them the work of True Williams, the book extended the commercial success of The Innocents Abroad a decade earlier and confirmed Twain's standing as America's leading humorist working in the travel genre. Its most enduringly celebrated section is the appended essay "The Awful German Language," Twain's comic dissection of the difficulties an English speaker faces in mastering German grammar, gender, and word order, a piece that has been reprinted independently many times since and remains one of his most frequently quoted shorter works.

The frontispiece caption is the point by which collectors distinguish the earliest states of the first edition: copies captioned simply "Moses" represent the true first issue and are considerably scarcer, while this copy's "Titian's Moses" caption identifies it as the second state, still within the first edition proper and carrying every one of the textual points by which the edition as a whole is identified.

First edition, second state. Octavo. Bound in brown publisher's buckram. Gilt illustrated vignette to cover with blind margins. Titling, illustration, and publisher's stamp to spine in gilt. 631, i, [ii]pp. 328 illustrations throughout. Frontispiece captioned "Titian's Moses." All first edition points present: "fee" for "feel" on p. 37; "2oo" for "200" on p. 46; "spirting" for "spurting" on p. 414; "stuck" for "stick" on p. 465. Good. Slight fraying to head and foot of spine. Slight wear at corners. Front hinge cracked and a bit loose. Free endpaper and first two leaves of prelims detached from binding. 

BAL 3386.

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Catalogue Number: HH000142