Uncle Tom's Cabin, or Life Among the Lowly (One Hundred and Seventy-Third Thousand)

Boston: John P. Jewett and Co, 1852. Reprint. Softcover. Good-. Large octavo, 166pp., illustrated on the interior panels of the wrappers (the first depicting the "Wide-Awakes" of Hartford, CT; the rear showing a pool hall scene, with no caption--both of these probably inserted later). A good copy only of this fragile publication, bound in limp canvas cloth, with applied labels to front and rear wraps (this seems to be a slightly later attempt at structural reinforcement, rather than a variant binding from the publisher). Wrappers quite worn, with some shallow loss to extremities, the front inner hinge slightly exposed, but holding. Contents quite clean, with scattered occasional foxing and a few small stains. On the front wrapper is printed "An edition for the million!" and the notice "173,000 copies already published in America." Printed in two columns. This is an early reprint of Stowe's classic. There were so many different kinds of reprints that even BAL neglected to attempt to catalogue them. However, they do describe this one as among the very earliest reprints, listing it along with others bearing the "edition for the million" notice and similar publication numbers, under number 19524. Though rather hard to trace in commerce due to its glut of similarly-titled reprints, this example is clearly scarce in commerce. OCLC records just a half dozen separately listed holdings bearing the "edition for the million" statement, and none with this precise number of copies in print (173,000). AAS holds most of the variants.