The New Guide of the Conversation in Portuguese and English in Two Parts by Pedro Carolino; Mark Twain, Intro - 1883

NY: Dover. 1969. vg. Paperback. ISBN:0486223299 Abridged republication of the 1883 ed. of "The New GUide of the Coversation in Portuguese and English." xii + 114 pages; 7.25" tall; pink front cover & spine .

NY: Halcyon-Commonweaalth Foundation, 1966. 60 pp., Paperback, very good. - If you are reading this, this item is actually (physically) in our stock and ready for shipment once ordered. We are not bookjackers. Buyer is responsible for any additional duties, taxes, or fees required by recipient's country.

Boston: James R. Osgood and Company, 1883. First US edition. Hardcover. Very good. Fonseca and Carolino's inadvertent masterpiece has been called many things... "Perhaps the worst foreign phrasebook ever written" ... A book of "miraculous stupidities." "The most ludicrous foreign attempt ever made to teach our language." Most often under the title English as She Is Spoke...the mid-nineteenth-century Portuguese phrasebook has become a minor classic. Yet it is not as a book of instruction intended for those Portuguese who would learn English that it has survived-nay thrived-for the last century and a half, but rather it is as a work of accidental comedy and unintended humor."-George Monteiro. The New Guide to Conversation began as an 1836 French-Portuguese phrasebook by José da Fonseca; in 1855, Pedro Carolino, with only a limited grasp of English, translated the French text to make an English-Portuguese phrase book. In succeeding years, excerpts made the rounds of English-language magazines until… Read More

Boston: James R. Osgood & Company, 1883. First Edition. Softcover. About Fine in Fine chemise and slipcase. BAL 3412. Contains Clemens's 5-page Introduction. Issued in both wraps and cloth, this is a scarce set of unbound sheets consisting of 13 signatures (the preface sheet and front endpaper are loose), a result of the publisher's bankruptcy a few years after publication before all copies had been bound for sale. Adding to the scarcity is that this appears to be a copy belonging to Mark Twain's first bibliographer, Merle Johnson, with a full-page note in pencil on the detached front endpaper SIGNED by Johnson: "What is this? Nothing but the sheets of the 1st Edition all uncut and all that -- those in the cloth covers have been neatly trimmed down for the common people. Merle Johnson." Housed in a cloth chemise and slipcase with a gilt-lettered morocco spine label.