Treasure Island.
London: Cassell & Company, Limited, 1883. First edition. Hardcover. This is the first edition, first printing, first issue of Stevenson’s most enduringly famous novel, the coming-of-age pirate treasure quest of young Jim Hawkins.
Edition & Condition
The 2,000 first edition sheets were bound by the publisher in batches, resulting in a variety of binding cloth hues. This copy is the publishers original light sage green cloth with gilt-lettered spine and black endpapers. This copy’s first issue points include “dead man’s chest” not capitalized in line 6, p.2 and line 19, p.7; the first letter of “vain” broken (the “v” appearing as an “r”) in the last line, p.40; “a” not present at the beginning of line 6, p.63; “8” absent from pagination on p. 83; full stop not present following “opportunity” in line 20, p.178; “worse” in line 3, p.197; eight pages of publisher’s advertisements following the text coded “5R-1083”.
This copy is in very good condition. The green cloth binding shows light overall wear and soiling, retaining its green hue, with no appreciable color shift between the covers and spine, and still-legible spine lettering. The contents are quite respectably clean, light spotting substantially confined to the first few leaves and page edges. The tipped-in, four-color, frontispiece map is present, as is the original tissue guard.
The sole previous ownership mark is the strikingly illustrated bookplate of “H. Morely Fletcher” affixed to the front pastedown. Trinity College-educated physician Herbert Morley Fletcher (1864-1950), who “was associated with many hospitals in the London area and worked for King Edward’s Hospital Fund for more than thirty years”, became chiefly known “as a specialist in children’s diseases”. He served on the staff of the 1st London General Hospital as a major during the First World War and became “a Censor of the Royal College of Physicians and examined for the Conjoint Board and the Universities of Belfast, Cambridge, Durham, Glasgow and Sheffield.” (Royal College of Physicians)
The book is housed in a red buckram, gray-paper lined chemise nested within a quarter red Morocco slipcase with red buckram sides. The slipcase shows only minor shelf wear.
Treasure Island
At Braemar in August 1881 he began Treasure Island (originally called The Sea Cook), the book always associated with his name. The inspiration came from the drawing of the map of an island by his stepson (to whom the book is dedicated), and his father gave enthusiastic support… it was serialized, under the pseudonym Captain George North, in Young Folks, a boys' magazine, between October 1881 and January 1882. It attracted little attention. It appeared, to a chorus of praise, in book form in November 1883 and has never since been out of print. It has been translated into many languages and there have been plays, films, television and radio adaptations, sequels, and even musicals, as well as notable illustrated editions.
Stevenson
Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) was best known for his novels Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Treasure Island, Kidnapped, and The Master of Ballantrae. Stevenson cast off his family profession of engineer and led a rather peripatetic, albeit sickly, life (he had tuberculosis), his final years spent in the South Seas, including Tahiti, Honolulu, Gilbert Islands, and Samoa, where he died suddenly of a cerebral hemorrhage at age 44.
Stevenson “was overpraised in his lifetime and immediately after his death, and has been considerably undervalued since. A series of collected editions bore witness to the popularity of his books with the general reader, but from the 1930s onwards he was ignored or patronized by academic critics as merely a writer for children.” In recent decades, “Stevenson’s reputation drastically appreciated as “a writer of originality and power” whose novels can be “brilliant adventure stories with subtle moral overtones”. Treasure island continues to speak for itself.
References: Royal College of Physicians; ODNB; Britannica. Item #008480
Price: $9,500.00