Edgar Allan. Poe

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, of Nantucket , North America.

London: Wiley and Putnam, 1838 Large 12mo. Half-title. Original Horizontal-Ribgrain Cloth stamped in blind and lettered in gilt; extremities a rubbed, the spine worn at the ends, a good copy. First English edition, and the first of Poe’s books to be printed in England. This was also the first of Poe’s books to reach a second edition; for although Pym was never very popular in America, the English version was popular enough to be abridged and pirated in 1841. Although the text is supposed to be based in fact, most its tone of authenticity is due to Poe’s extensive borrowing from Benjamin Morrell’s Narrative of Four Voyages to the South Seas, as well as other sources. The text of this edition varies substantially from the American version published three or four months earlier. “In the English edition the final paragraph of the story, the climax as found in the American edition, is missing-the description of the mysterious figure that awaited Pym in the Antarctic: “But there arose in our pathway a shrouded human figure, very far larger in its proportions than any dweller among men. And the hue of the skin of the figure was of the perfect whiteness of the snow’.” This, it seems, had simply stretched the credulity of readers too far; and so the English version omitted the passage entirely, moving Pym’s death up by one day, and explaining in a seven-line note added to the preface that “the narrative consequently breaks off abruptly in its most important part.”bal 16201; Heartman & Canny 39-40; Hill, p. 237 (this edition: “very rare...”). NYPL/Gordan 478; Yale/Gimbel 31 (this copy?)

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• ordernr.: 9228

• bookseller: J.N. Bartfield (USA)