THE AUTOCRAT OF THE BREAKFAST TABLE. EVERY MAN HIS OWN BOSWELL

Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1890. Revised Edition. Hardcover. Some toning to the text. Neatly and recently rebacked retaining the original spine, the cloth clean and bright. Near Fine. Small octavo (3-1/4" x 5-5/8") in original flexible blue cloth. A Grolier American 100 book, this would be a run-of-the-mill copy but for the remarkable holograph additions by Holmes within. On the recto of the ad page before the title page announcing other titles by Holmes the author has handwritten the last and best known stanza of his famous poem "The Last Leaf"--"And if I should live to be/The last leaf upon the tree/In the spring,/Let them smile, as I do now,/At the old forsaken bough/Where I cling"--and SIGNED with his initials and the dates 1831 and 1890 corresponding to the date of authorship and the date of the inscription. There is some light feathering to the ink on some of the words which is likely why the poem is lightly striked with an x in pencil and written out AGAIN by Holmes on the light yellow front endpaper, again in ink, and SIGNED as before. In addition, on the front blank between the two pages with the holograph manuscript, the author has INSCRIBED and SIGNED the book: Dr. W. E. Rust/with the kind regards of/Oliver Wendell Holmes."

Dr. Rust was a surgeon operating in California in the 1850s and was contracted by the U.S. Government in the 1870s to work with the Apaches.