Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings, The Folklore of the Old Plantation
New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1881.
First edition, first issue, first state with "presumptive" misspelled on p. 9, bottom line, and without ads for this title in rear. 231, [1], [8, ads] pp. with a frontispiece, seven plates, and in-text illustrations by Frederick S. Church and James H. Moser. Bound in publisher's brown pictorial cloth stamped in black and gilt with pale green decorative buttlerfly endpapers. Fine copy with trivial wear to tips, cloth and gilt remarkably clean and bright. Professor of astronomy and mathematics living in Brooklyn, NY Walter Gribben's copy with his bookplate on front paste down, "19" neatly written in contemporary hand on the rear paste down. While copies of the first issue are not terribly uncommon, copies in such lovely condition are. A beautiful copy of this classic though controversial folktale collection rooted in Southern African American fable and oral tradition. Narrated through eye dialect of the charlatan Br'er Rabbit, a key trickster figure in African folklore. Basis of the suppressed 1946 Disney film Song of the South. BAL7100.
Price: $9,500