Mark Twain’s Jumping Frog of Calaveras County 1869.
Size: 6 7/8 x 4 7/8 in.
This is a short story by Mark Twain titled “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and other Sketches”, edited by John Paul and published by C. H. Webb in New York in 1869.
It was his first book and gathered together twenty-seven stories that were previously published in magazines and newspapers and became his first great success as a writer.
The story is about a man named Jim Smiley, who loved to gamble and would bet on anything. Smiley caught a frog and named it Dan’l Webster, then trained it to jump. A stranger visited camp and Jim started showing off, offering to bet $40 that his frog could out-jump any other frog in the county. The stranger took the bet, but told Jim that he needed to have a frog of his own, so Jim went out to look for a frog, catches it, and leaves Dan’l Webster alone and unattended - while the stranger pours led shot down Dan’l’s throat. When Jim returns with the stranger’s frog, he lets them loose - and Jim picks up Dan’l to find the frog much heavier than he remembered. When Dan’l belches out a handful of lead shot, Jim realizes he’s been cheated and goes after the stranger, but never catches him.
This is the book that brought Twain national attention. It is a third edition with gilt titling to the front cover and spine, a blindstamped frog on the rear cover, beveled edges, the copyright page is dated 1867, it has a page dedicated to John Smith followed by a one-page advertisement, then a Contents page and total of 198 pages in the book, and it measures 6 7/8 x 4 7/8 inches wide. See BAL 3310.
The first edition consisted of only 1000 copies, the second printing consisted of 552 copies, and there are no records to show how many third editions were printed, so there was a limited run of the first two editions, and all the points of issue are present: there is minor loss to the upper right corner of the 1 in “21” on page 21, partial loss to the e in “life” on the last line of page 66, and partial loss at the foot of the i in “this” on page 198, all as called for.
Mark Twain was the pen name of Samuel Clemens (1835 - 1910), who was born in Florida, Missouri, shortly after an appearance of Haley’s comet and would famously die with its reappearance. His family moved to Hannibal, Missouri when he was four, and this served as the setting for two of his most famous works - The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Twain worked as a printer’s apprentice, a typesetter, piloted a steamboat on the Mississippi River, served just two weeks with a Confederate volunteer unit in the Civil War, then took off on a stagecoach headed west, where he became a writer for a series of newspapers, and for those who don’t know, he got his pen name from his piloting days on the Mississippi - “Mark Twain" was slang for “two fathoms of water” - the depth of the water in the river below a steamboat.
The book probably needs to be rebound. The covers and spine have faded, the binding is loose between pages 48 and 49, 72 and 73, and 96 and 97, the crown and heel have wear, there are chips on a couple of pages and scribbles on the rear endpapers, and still a complete version of this Twain title, and we’ve tried to keep the opening bid low enough for people to afford the book if they’d like to rebind it.
Prices for the first edition range up to $22,000, for the second edition prices range from $950 in poor condition to $4000, and the third edition ranges from $750 to $1700, so this is a bargain for Twain’s first published book.
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