A TRAMP ABROAD by Twain, Mark - 1880

1880. In Two Volumes. Third Edition. London: Chatto & Windus, 1880. 32 pp Vol II ads dated April 1880. Original brown-ochre cloth decorated in black. First English Edition, third printing (with "Third Edition" on the title pages). This was Twain's only "two decker" work, which in our experience is one of the scarcest of all Twain editions: Blanck cited its existence but could not describe it, and it is pointedly absent from the collections covered by the McBride bibliography. The first printing was issued in April 1880 but generally has ads dated February; our educated guess is that the first printing consisted of probably 500 and certainly no more than 750 copies. It is possible that ALL of the three editions' copies were printed at the same time, and then bound up (with amended title pages) as demand merited. This "third edition" -- identical to the first except for the edition statement on the title page -- has ads dated April (as does the "Second Edition"). In August 1880, Chatto & Windus published the book in one volume -- which, due to the scarcity of all three two-volume "editions," is often collected as the first English edition. Condition is bright and close to fine (one little droplet-mark on a front cover). See Blanck 3386 (final note); not mentioned in McBride.