Catriona: A Sequel to "Kidnapped" Being Memoirs of the Further Adventures of David Balfour at Home and Abroad.
London: Cassell and Company Limited, 1893. First edition. Hardcover. This is the first edition of Robert Louis Stevenson’s sequel to Kidnapped (1886), billed as “Memoirs of the Further Adventures of David Balfour at Home and Abroad”.
Condition is better than very good plus, and maintained thus in a handsome, half-Morocco slipcase. The publisher’s navy cloth binding is square, clean, tight, and unfaded, retaining rich hue with no color shift between the covers and spine and bright spine gilt. We note some shelf wear to the corners, light, superficial scuffs to the rear cover, a horizontal dimple to the cloth beneath the spine title panel, and a few trivial blemishes to the front cover. The contents are surprisingly bright with a crisp feel, and no spotting or soiling. The decorative endpapers are intact, as are the publisher’s earliest state August 1893 advertisements, following the text.
The sole previous ownership mark is the armorial bookplate of “John Wm. Roy Crawford” affixed to the front pastedown. John William Roy Crawford (1868-1939) was chairman of the board of the Huguenot Trust Company of New Rochelle and a former vice president of the Standard Oil Company.
The half-Morocco slipcase features dark green spine and corners over green cloth sides with a scalloped fore edge. The rounded spine features raised and gilt-ruled spine bands and gilt-bordered compartments, the second and third compartments printed with title and author, the first and third through sixth compartments featuring a stylized Scottish thistle. The slipcase is in very good condition, with the mildest uniform spine toning and a few incidental scuffs.
In 1892, Stevenson “wrote Catriona, the sequel to Kidnapped (published in America under Stevenson's original title, David Balfour). Though it never achieved the popularity of Kidnapped it was notable for his successful portrayal of women characters, long regarded one of his failings as a novelist. He called the interpolated 'Tale of Tod Lapraik' 'a piece of living Scots'."
Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) was best known for his novels. 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”.
References: The New York Times; The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson; ODNB; Britannica. Item #008581
Price: $400.00