Poe’s first collection of tales
Classic account of urban conditions
34 ENGELS, Friedrich. Die Lage der arbeitenden Klasse in England. Leipzig: Otto Wigand, 1845 £47,500 [ 156926 ] Octavo (208 × 132 mm). Contemporary marbled boards, hand written label to spine. Housed in a dark brown quarter morocco solander box by the Chelsea Bindery. Two pages of advertisements and folding lithograph plan of Manchester at end. Printed Heidelberg bookseller’s label to front pastedown, ownership inscriptions dated 1845, 1849, and 1909 to front free endpaper. Marbled paper chipped along joints, corners and spine ends a little worn, but very sound. Occasional light spotting; a very good copy. ¶ Die Erstdrucke der Werke von Marx und Engels , p. 10; Draper E171; Goldsmiths’ 34358; Kress C.6579; Rubel, Engels 18; Stammhammer I, 72.
33 POE, Edgar Allan. Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque. Philadelphia: Lea and Blanchard, 1840 £30,000 2 volumes, duodecimo in half-sheets. Original purple muslin, printed paper spine labels. Housed in a custom double slipcase, brown morocco label (spine darkened). Complete with 4pp. critical notices serving as adverts bound in before the title page in vol. 2 and all blank flyleaves. Blairhame leather book label to each front pastedown. Spines faded as usual, subtle early repairs to lower portions of joints of vol. I, vol. II spine label rubbed and spine with loss at head down to top edge of text block, small nick at outer edge of rear cover; scattered light foxing as usual, a couple of gatherings in vol. II just starting; still a good set, internally very good, of a title in a somewhat delicate binding seldom seen in anything approaching fine condition. ¶ BAL 16133; Bleiler 1313; Heartman & Canny, pp. 49–54. [ 160587 ]
First edition of Engels’s classic account of the condition of the working class in England. “In November 1842 Engels left for England to work in his father’s Manchester textile firm, Ermen and Engels. Already a revolutionary republican and an admirer of Jacobinism from his days in the Young Hegelian circle in Berlin, Engels was converted on his way to England by Moses Hess to a belief in ‘Communism’. Convinced also by Hess’s book of 1841, Die europäische Triarchie , of the imminence of social revolution in England, Engels used his two-year stay to study the conditions which would bring it about. From this visit came two pieces of writing which were to establish his lasting importance. The first, an essay entitled ‘Umrisse zu einer Kritik der Nationalökonomie’ (‘Outlines of a critique of national economy‘) published in the Deutsche-Französische Jahrbücher in 1844, was the earliest Young Hegelian attempt at economic criticism and exerted a decisive influence upon Marx’s identification of socialism with the critique of political economy. The second [the present work] . . . established his fame in Germany and has remained famous as a classic account of urban conditions during the period of the industrial revolution. Together these works attest to the importance of what Engels accomplished before his collaboration with Karl Marx and indicate that Marxist socialism was as much the creation of Engels as of Marx” ( ODNB ).
First edition of the first collection of Poe’s tales, one of only 750 copies published, including such notable titles as “The Fall of the House of Usher”, “Ms. Found in a Bottle”, “Siope” (“Silence”) and “The Visionary” (“The Assignation”); from the library of Natalie Knowlton Blair (1887–1951), with her book labels. “These volumes mark the culmination of Poe’s effort, beginning as early as 1834, to get his prose tales into volume form. It is a milestone in his career as a prose writer, but was a failure commercially” (Heartman & Canny, p. 53). BAL notes that signature 20, vol. II occurs in several states due to the progressive loosening of type during the course of a single printing, though having no relevance in terms of priority of issue. In this copy, p. 213 is correctly numbered, and the “i” in “ing”, line 13 up, and the hyphen at the end of line 6 up are both still in proper alignment.
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