by Austen, Jane

Published in [1884?] by Porter & Coates, Philadelphia
Binding: Hardback
Condition: Very Good
Comments: This is a delightfully decorated copy of the Jane Austen classics, and includes an essay titled, “A Biographical Notice of the Author.” American publishers in the late nineteenth century discovered that one of the ways to make their books stand out in a flooded market of mass-produced books was with ornate covers such as the one sported here: a brown cloth cover and spine holding black embossed decorative elements of every kind of description, as well as a fairytale gothic castle clinging to a waterside clifftop under a crescent moon and stars, all within its own frame. And that’s before the gold bands, with their own blind stamped decoration, containing the title and publisher’s name! (Perhaps that overabundance of decorative work left the artisans too exhausted to add anything except a blind stamped frame around the back cover.) There is only one illustration within the book itself, a plate titled “In the Drawing Room,” a frontispiece behind tissue paper, depicting a gathering of young women from “Pride and Prejudice. Interestingly, they appear to be wearing dresses with the hoop skirts of the mid-nineteenth century, not the fashions of the era in which Austen wrote her masterpiece.

It could be they are dressed that way because the original version of this edition was published in 1859, when such dresses were fashionable. The Library of Congress catalog entry for this title lists that as the publication date, but with Derby & Jackson of New York as the publisher. The publisher of this copy is Porter & Coates, according to the title page, but no publication date appears anywhere in the book itself. It is definitely late nineteenth century, however: An owner’s name is written on the front flysheet dated as 1889, and some reputable sources that display photographs confirming their copy is the same edition as ours say it was published in 1884. This is NOT one of the Alta Editions that Porter & Coates published between 1867 and 1895, however. Those books are labeled as such as part of their decorative stamping, and nothing like that appears on this copy. The cover is in surprisingly good condition for a book of its age, with only some light bumping on the corners and slightly more damage on the ends of the spine, particularly the bottom, being worth mentioning. The pages are also in good shape—there is some expected age tanning, but the block is holding together well and we only found one tear in the margin of one page, and no marks. Even better, the paper itself is not nearly as brittle as that found in many books of this era. Where things start to fall down is at the hinges, especially at the front end papers. The cover is definitely starting to separate from the text block. However, this should be easy to repair, and worth it for a collector of nineteenth-century decorative bindings. See our photos for details.

Seller Inventory #: 0000573