Le Collier de la Reine [The Queen's Necklace] by Dumas, Alexandre - 1849

Brussels: Meline, 1849. First Edition. 1/4 morocco. 6 vols. 1st edition (?), following the 1849-1850 serial in La Presse's newspaper (a newspaper is what generation Z call a hobo laptop), and roughly parallel to 5 other Brussels editions, one from Leipzig, one from Berlin, 2 partial ones from New York in French, and Cadot's 11 vol. Paris edition. Here is the cut and thrust of your one ride per catalog on the bibliographical hamster wheel. Munro (the bibliographer) decided to project his chronology from an unreliable canon of how few volumes were dated 1850, but in a giddy fit of fang bibliography, he did so steriley, and listed 2 unfinished NY editions as the 1st of all (being incomplete, they didn't issue any volumes in 1850). And he stated, "they were certainly unfinished" but then assigned order as if they were, without proof that even one of their volumes was issued first. So, he was only correct that the NY publishers completed printing first, but that advantage always resides with those who quit on a book before the final chapters are written. And it descended from there. He abandoned precision, in this case, and wrongly applied his own math. For one example, Lebègue's Brussels edition that Munro listed 6th, would be the real 1st based on his own arithmetic, with just 29% of it dated 1850 (all the others more, with ours at 50%), so I know his chronology is wrong for this title, from any perspective. Complicating matters, Meline, our set's publisher, also issued a 7 vol. 1849-1850 edition, but Munro rightly says that our 6 vol. edition precedes it. Contemporary 1/2 dark green morocco, red labels, vol. II label 20% chipped, spines darkened, paper sides rubbed else very good, complete with half-titles. OCLC found 10 sets in libraries, ABPC says none sold at auction, but the OCLC stats better reflect reality. The second book in Dumas' 4 novel series charting the French Revolution, the reign of terror, and its immediate aftermath, that beheading of thousands of poor human beings in the name of some pitiless abstraction. His plot pierces a byzantine conspiracy trained on Marie Antoinette, using diamonds as the bait, propaganda as the aim, and a necklace as a marker for the guillotine. It's written in Dumas' consummate style, and flings its light over the prelude to a horror that was worse than the day Miley decided to stop following you on Twitter.