WILD ROSE: A TALE OF THE MEXICAN FRONTIER. London and New York: Macmillan and Co., 1895. Octavo, original decorated blue cloth stamped in gold and blind, top and fore-edges untrimmed, bottom edge rough trimmed. First edition. Gritty romantic melodrama set in and around a mining town in the American Southwest. Claim jumping, train robbery, shootouts, murders, corrupt sheriff and crooked businessmen, lynch mob, jail break; the code of the West violated and the heroic protagonists killed by villains. The "real" West in fiction before Wister's THE VIRGINIAN. The author was the son of Francis Francis (1822-1886), a well known and highly regarded British sportsman and naturalist who wrote a significant body of work on fish culture and angling. Francis senior hunted and fished in the wilds of North America in the 1880s, most likely accompanied by the younger Francis, who wrote of his various excursions in the American West in SADDLE AND MOCCASIN (1887). This London edition (which agrees in all particulars with Wolff's copy) was printed in the United States by Norwood Press of Norwood, Massachusetts, perhaps from the same plates used for Macmillan's 1895 American edition. Wolff 2336. Publisher's embossed presentation stamp on title page. Mild spine lean, some rubbing to cloth, mostly along outer joints, a very good copy. (#133399).
Price: $100.00
No statement of printing.