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DICKENS, Charles.
Sketches by Boz.
Illustrative of Every-Day Life and Every-Day People.
First edition, first printing (Whiting). With almost all the internal flaws given by Smith lacking only one which he considers universal. Dickens's landmark first book so successful that it was immediately reprinted and a second series called for. Sets of the first series in the first printing and in original cloth are far from common.
2 volumes, duodecimo, pp.viii + 348; [iv] + 342. Original green cloth, spines gilt, yellow coated endpapers. One with the grain horizontal the other with the grain vertical - there is no priority. Housed in a cloth solander box. Illustrated by George Cruikshank. Volume I: corners of 7 leaves torn none effecting the text, a few smudges here and there, plates browned and occasionally rubbed at edge, bookplate of the Peterhead Reading Society to front pastedown. Spine a little rolled, cloth a little marked and with some very minor rubbing to the tips. Volume II: exceptionally clean with only the most occasional mark to the text, ownership signature of one A.M.G. Crookshank (so near and yet so far!) to recto of frontispiece, two armorial bookplates to the front endpaper, the barest trace of rubbing to the ends of the spine but a lovely copy. Together an attractive and unsophisticated set of Dickens's first book.
