MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE. London: Wiley and Putnam, 6, Waterloo Place, 1846. 12mo, two volumes: pp. [1-6] [1] 2-207 [208: blank]; [1-6] [1] 2-211 [212: blank], half title leaves and advertisement present, publisher's decorated green cloth, front and rear panels stamped in blind, spine panels lettered in gold and decorated in blind. First edition, first printings of both volumes, British issue with cancel title leaves. The English issue of the American first printing sheets in the publisher's original cloth. All copies of the first printing of the American edition were issued only in paper wrappers. The second of Hawthorne's three major collections of short fiction published in his lifetime, and the best and most important of the three. Includes a number of classics, "The Birth-Mark," "Young Goodman Brown," "Rappaccini's Daughter," and "The Artist of the Beautiful." The other fantasy stories are "A Select Party," "Mrs. Bullfrog," "The Hall of Fantasy," "The Celestial Railroad," "The New Adam and Eve," "Egotism; or the Bosom Friend," "The Christmas Banquet," "Roger Malvin's Burial," "P.'s Correspondence" (apparently the first American alternate history story), "Earth's Holocaust," and "A Virtuoso's Collection." "The darkness of his vision of the human psyche gives to almost everything he wrote, even works which were not supernatural fiction or fantasy, a sense that its protagonists are acting in obedience to the Gothic manipulations of the dead but shaping past, that they can never simply flourish in the here and now. It is in something like this sense that so much of his work seems to have been treated as allegory: his characters are so in bondage to the stories they have been appointed to undergo that they seem to 'stand' in an allegorical relationship to symbolic events, rather than to live them ... In the end, the Hawthorne romance of predetermination casts a long shadow over the American Dream, telling us that we must both dream very hard and surrender absolutely." - Clute and Grant (eds), The Encyclopedia of Fantasy (1997), p. 457. Anatomy of Wonder (1976) 1-16; 1-17; 1-18; and 1-19; (1981) 1-96; and (2004) II-505. Barron (ed), Fantasy Literature 2-79. Barron (ed), Horror Literature 2-39. Bleiler, The Guide to Supernatural Fiction 777. Bleiler, Science-Fiction: The Early Years 1070. Clute and Nicholls (eds), The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (1993), p. 551. Sullivan (ed), The Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural, pp. 196-99. Survey of Modern Fantasy Literature III, pp. 1536-43. Survey of Science Fiction Literature IV, pp. 2035-40. Bleiler (1978), p. 96. Reginald 06958. Wright (I) 1143. BAL 7598. Clark A15.1.a..2. Owner's signature at the top right edge of the front free endpaper of each volume. A fine copy. A seminal work of early American fantastic literature by one of the two founding fathers (the other was Poe) of modern American imaginative fiction. (#178977).
Price: $3,500.00
No statement of printing.