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Author: Dickens, Charles
Title: A Christmas Carol. In Prose. Being a Ghost Story of Christmas
Place Published: London
Publisher:Chapman & Hall
Date Published: 1843
Description:

[8], 166 + [2] ad pp. Illustrated with 4 hand-colored steel etchings by John Leech, & 4 woodcuts after Leech engraved by W.J. Linton; title-page printed in red & blue, half-title printed in blue. 6½x4", original light reddish-brown cloth stamped in gilt & blind, green coated endpapers, all edges gilt. First Edition, First Issue.

The accepted first issue of a complex book, as outlined in detail in Walter E. Smith's bibliography, Charles Dickens in the Original Cloth. The title page of this copy is printed in blue and black, ;with "Stave I" (rather than "Stave One") on first page of text, the text uncorrected, and with the yellow coated endpapers. John Podeschi, in his catalogue of the Gimbel Collection at Yale, describes a trial issue dated 1844, with the half-title printed in green and the title in green and red, as the first state, and also alludes to a copy with the green ink changed to blue but the date remaining 1844. He calls copies such as the present one "probably...the third state of the first issue." However, the states dated 1844, being experimental in nature, are of extreme rarity, and copies such as this, with Stave I, half-title printed in blue, title in red and blue dated 1843, and yellow or green coated endpapers (the green endpapers were apparently made first but the yellow ones were used in the binding of the earlier copies) are generally described as the first issue. (See Smith and others for a complete discussion of the bibliographic complexities of this book, and the varying perceptions of its editions, issues and states). Gimbel A79; Smith Vol. II, 4.

A little rubbing and light staining to cloth, expertly recased, slight corner wear; in very good or better condition.