Out of India.
New York: G. W. Dillingham, Publisher, Successor to G. W. Carleton & Co., 1895. First American edition, unauthorized. Hardcover. This is the first, and unauthorized, American edition. The volume collects, notably without Kipling’s permission, his newspaper travel sketches and letters originally published in 1891’s Letters of Marque and The City of Dreadful Night and Other Places.
This is an unequivocally handsome piracy, bound in linen cloth strikingly illustrated on both the front cover and spine. The elaborate front cover illustration features a cartouche in gold with outlines of two pairs of birds, within dark green capital, above a column-like dark green rectangle with gold ray-like lines, with reverse cut title lettering “OUT | OF | INDIA” amid swirls of smoke in dark yellowish brown rising from a gold censer and framed on left and right with profiles of tusked elephants in dark green on each side of gold lettering “RUDYARD | KIPLING”. The no-less elaborate spine features the title and author in gilt print above a dark green shield faced with a gold tiger head before two crossed rifles in dark yellowish brown, with dark yellowish brown smoke rising upward from a gold fire above dark green crossed logs. The book was issued in two distinctly different hues of linen cloth boards – a “light yellowish brown” and a "grayish yellowish green” - with no precedence assigned to either variant.
This is the “light yellowish brown” binding in very good condition. The illustrated cloth binding is lovely - surprisingly clean and bright with no apparent color shift between the covers and spine, sharp corners, the spine ends almost unwrinkled, and only a few trivial blemishes and a touch of shelf wear to the bottom edges. We would grade this book as near fine if not for a cosmetic split to the gutter at the front endpapers, exposing the intact mull beneath and not affecting binding integrity. The sole previous ownership mark appears to be contemporary, a name and city inked on the front free endpaper recto and dated "1895". The contents are bright and retain a crisp feel. We find no spotting. The text block edges are uniformly age toned and the endpapers show minor browning from the pastedown glue.
“The publication of this volume, the first American edition of the newspaper travel sketches and letters which had originally been collected (without Kipling’s authority) in the 1891 A. H. Wheeler & Co. Indian editions of Letters of Marque and The City of Dreadful Night and Other Places, mightily irked Kipling, who sent the same letter text on 3 November 1895 to The Nation, The Critic, and the New York Tribune, denying his ‘knowledge or sanction’ of the book”. The contents are the “same as Letters of Marque and The City of Dreadful Night and Other Places, without those titles, with the chapter headings of the former changed and given the master divisional title “Part First,’ while ‘The City of Dreadful Night’ is headed ‘Part Second', ‘Among the Railway Folk’ is headed ‘Part Third', and ‘The Giridih Coal Fields’ and ‘In an Opium Factory’ are joined together as ‘Part Fourth.’”
Joseph Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) was an English poet, short-story writer, and novelist chiefly remembered for his celebration of British imperialism, stories and poems of British India, and his tales for children. Despite this reputation, Kipling’s extraordinary body of work “eludes all labels in its range and variety… Kipling's work is not only of the highest artistic excellence, it is deeply humane and fully expresses the sense of one of his favourite texts: ‘Praised be Allah for the diversity of his creatures.’”
Kipling was not yet quite thirty years old when this unauthorized first American edition was published, testimony to his early popularity. By his twenties, Kipling’s stories of Anglo-Indian life made him a literary celebrity. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1907; he was the first English language author awarded and remains the youngest person to receive the Prize.
Reference: Richards A83; ODNB. Item #009010
Price: $175.00