HAWTHORNE, Nathaniel.
Transformation: or, the romance of Monte Beni [Title on spine: The Marble Faun].
Leipzig, Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1860 [c. 1878].
2 vols, 12mo, pp. I: xii, 292, II: vi, 280, [2], with 99 albumen print photographs (49 in each volume, plus frontispiece portrait after a painting); without half-titles as often; several photographic plates after art, sculpture, engraving; all edges gilt; in contemporary vellum over boards, gilt, all edges gilt, marbled endpapers; bookplate of George Henderson to upper pastedowns.
Added to your basket:
Transformation: or, the romance of Monte Beni [Title on spine: The Marble Faun].
First edition thus, extra-illustrated with ninety-nine albumen print photographs.
‘The novel, a useful guide to Rome, is the Tauchnitz book most often found extensively extra-illustrated with photographs and bound in elaborately decorated vellum’ (Todd & Bowden). The elaborate vellum binding was favoured by Italian binders who bound and marketed the edition for the tourist trade; copies often differ with half-titles usually lacking, as here, and the number of illustrations varying – this copy is especially well illustrated. While copies are seen with as few as a single photograph, or as many as over one hundred, the illustrations usually number approximately sixty.
Fourth setting, second impression, as described in Todd & Bowden 515Db and 516Db [vol. 2] for a copy of the same edition (with half-titles remaining). Extant copies in dated wrappers indicate printing was likely 1878.
