The Innocents Abroad (Easton Press Collector's Edition)

TWAIN, Mark. The Innocents Abroad, or The New Pilgrim's Progress. Norwalk, Connecticut: The Easton Press, 1962.

Octavo. Full blue leather. Spine with raised bands, gilt-decorated. All edges gilt. Moiré silk endpapers. Satin ribbon page marker. Collector's Edition. Part of the Easton Press Masterpieces of American Literature Collection. An early and scarce Easton Press production.

The Innocents Abroad was published in 1869 and was the book that made Mark Twain's national reputation. It is an account of the voyage of the chartered steamship Quaker City through Europe and the Holy Land in 1867, in which Twain — then a thirty-one-year-old journalist from Missouri — found himself travelling with a group of American pilgrims who had come to encounter the great monuments of Old World civilisation in a spirit of reverence. Twain was constitutionally incapable of reverence, and the book is the record of his irreverence: a systematic deflation of the sentimental assumptions American tourists brought to Europe, delivered in a comic voice of such freshness and precision that it changed what American prose could do.

The journey took the Quaker City to France, Italy, Greece, Turkey, Palestine, and Egypt, and at each stop Twain submitted the famous monuments to the same scrutiny he would later apply to the institutions of his own country. The blue skies of the Mediterranean were often damp and grey; the celebrated antiquities were frequently disappointing at close quarters; the piety of the Holy Land was thoroughly entangled with petty commerce; and his fellow passengers, whom he catalogued with affectionate malice, were exactly as provincial as he was, though considerably less willing to admit it. The comedy is inseparable from a genuine argument about the relationship between expectation and experience, between the inherited reverence Americans felt for Europe and the democratic irreverence that was the deepest expression of their own culture.

The book sold over 100,000 copies in its first year and remained the best-selling of Twain's works in his lifetime. It established the mode that he would develop further in Roughing It, A Tramp Abroad, and ultimately Huckleberry Finn. The Easton Press edition of 1962, part of the early Masterpieces of American Literature Collection, predates by more than a decade the "100 Greatest Books Ever Written" Collector's Edition series for which Easton Press is better known, and is among the scarcer titles in the earlier programme.

Fine. Presenting as new. Bookplate unadhered.

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Catalogue Number: HH000479