THE QUICK OR THE DEAD? A STUDY

Philadelphia, PA: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1888. Hardcover. Good Plus. Octavo. Red, speckled cloth over maroon, marbled boards. Considerable shelf-and-corner wear, as well as scratches to boars. Text block clean. Frontis portrait of author by Wellington. Essentially an issue of Lippincott's monthly magazine. "Our Monthly Gossip with Readers and Correspondents" at end, followed by a contest consisting of 40 questions, several pages of "Book-Talk", and a 38-page section chock full of wonderful advertisements, from "The Hammond Typewriter", to smaller classifieds advertising boneshaker bicycles, corded corset wastes, and Antidote for Alcoholism with the heading "Drunkard" "Wanting is ------what?" (Jocoseria)

Amélie Louise Rives Chanler Troubetzkoy (23 August 1863-15 June 1945), writer and celebrity, was born in Richmond, Virginia, and lived much of her life at Castle Hill, the Rives family estate in Albemarle County. ...Precocious and doted on by her family, she was largely educated by tutors at home where, encouraged to follow the example of literary relatives, she began writing at an early age."

"Rives's first published work, the romantic short story "A Brother to Dragons," complete with imaginative Elizabethan dialogue, appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in 1886 and received praise. Two years later she published The Quick or the Dead?, which became her best-known work. The novel was considered semierotic, daring, even immoral, and the controversy surrounding its publication led to it selling an impressive 300,000 copies. Some accounts of the public reaction to the novel include its being banned from libraries and condemned by religious leaders. Regardless, it launched the young writer into celebrity and literary notice." (Library of Virginia: Dictionary of Virginia Biography).