Search Results: Early Dust Jackets from Sumner & Stillman

1899. [in jackets and original case] New York: Doubleday & McClure Company, 1899. Original blind-stamped sea green cloth, with dust jackets and with publisher's printed paperboard slipcase. First Edition (published eight months before the 1900-dated English edition) of this collection of pieces that had appeared in Indian periodicals prior to 1890. These volumes include the first authorized edition of "American Notes," of "Letters of Marque," of "The City of Dreadful Night" and of "The Smith Administration"; according to Kipling's Preface he was "forced" to issue this title "by the enterprise of various publishers" who were pirating and embellishing his earlier works. The half-title versos bear Kipling's usual icon from India, the swastika -- which until the 1930s signified peace and continuity. This is an amazing set. The two volumes are absolutely fine and bright. Their two dust jackets are likewise fine (a few trifling edge-nicks, but that's all). The reason everything is virtually as-new is that… Read More

1901. [in 1901 dust jacket] London: Macmillan and Co., 1901. 2 pp undated ads. Original red cloth with Ganesha device in gilt, with dust jacket. First English Edition of the book that "is acknowledged as Kipling's masterpiece in fiction... The novel is the finest written about the India of the British Empire" [CGEL]. It follows the adventures of an orphan son of a British soldier who is raised by an Indian woman, becomes a disciple to a Lama, and ultimately becomes an undercover agent as well. The illustrations are by John Lockwood Kipling, the author's father. The American edition is considered to have been published earlier (though in the same month as the English one). As with most of Kipling's British editions published by Macmillan, the binding is red cloth with in gilt the "Ganesha" device -- an elephant's head with a swastika (the latter had been a ubiquitous symbol in India for millennia; its use ceased in the early 1930s, when events in Germany gave the symbol a whole new meaning). This… Read More