Emmanuel Philibert ; or, The European Wars of the XVI Century [Le Page du Duc de Savoie]

New York: Appleton, 1854. First Edition. Very good. first edition in English. It may be the first separate edition in any language. It is certainly the only edition, published anywhere, that corresponds to the original Turin text as all others follow the revised Cadot text. Original cloth, small former owner's stamp (Starling) and date to pastedown, a few faint scratches else a fine and brilliant copy of unsurpassable quality, and a rare book. The default logic is to assume that this edition in English was translated from a section of the Turin issue in parts, but the ads in our book list Dumas' The Foresters (Catherine Blum), also published in 1854, and say that book was translated from a manuscript supplied by Dumas, so (if that's true) this book might also have been translated from a copy of the manuscript supplied by the author. But whether the source of our book was the related portion of the Turin parts edition, or was a pre-publication manuscript, by 1854, many translations of Dumas' novels into English were making the claim that they were published simultaneously with those in Paris and Brussels. That all said, you've read pleanty on the production of piracies, and the integrity of their producers, suggesting that 19th century publishers followed a creed along the line of: Honesty may very well be the best policy, therefore, by elimination, dishonesty is the second-best policy.