Self-Help;: With Illustrations of Character and Conduct.

London: John Murray, 1859. First edition of this scarce PMM title. Small octavo. xii, 343, [1, blank], [4, publisher's ads] pp.

Original purple cloth, covers paneled and ruled in blind, with blind floral central motifs. Original brown coated endpapers. Skilfully rebacked to style in the nineteenth-century (with period bookseller's label on rear pastedown), later bookseller's sticker on front pastedown, many pages roughly opened (with no loss of text, the worst being on the bottom of pp.167/168), and four pages with minor staining near gutter (215-218) pp. Overall, a near fine copy of a real rarity; only one other copy appeared at auction in the last twenty-five years (Bloomsbury, October 27, 1983, lot 66), and that copy had a marking that it had been in the PMM exhibition.

Samuel Smiles (1812-1904) "author, businessman, journalist and social reformer, is the epitome of that energetic probity which characterizes the best side of Victorian society... in 1859 his publisher, John Murray, issued the first of the innumerable editions of Self-Help. Its success was immediate and then unequalled: twenty thousand copies were sold in the first year, fifty-five thousand by 1864 and two hundred and seventy thousand by the end of the century. It was translated into almost every foreign language, but the proof of its success which most delighted Smiles was the number of letters attesting to its usefulness which he received from artisans - the class to whom it was directed - all over the world." (PMM, p. 346)

Printing and the Mind of Man 346.

HBS 66787.

$2,500.