TALES OF THE GROTESQUE AND ARABESQUE

Philadelphia: Lea and Blanchard, 1840. FIRST EDITION, from a printing of perhaps only 750 copies. With page 213 in the second volume numbered correctly, and page 219 with the "i" in "-ing" and the hyphen in "attributes" both misaligned. 200 x 117 mm. (8 x 4 1/2"). Two volumes..
Publisher's brown muslin, very expertly re-cased, preserving most of original backstrip and cloth covering, replica printed paper labels, new (well-chosen) endpapers. BAL 16133; Heartman & Canny, pp. 49-54; Day, "History of American Literature" I, p. 148. ◆Spines and heads of boards faintly sunned, extremities a little rubbed, with minor fraying in spots, but the expertly restored bindings very tight and generally pleasing. First volume with lower third of each leaf lightly dampstained (a bit darker at very front and back, otherwise faint), intermittent foxing and occasional minor stains elsewhere in both volumes. Not without significant internal condition issues, but still appealing when judged against competing copies of a book notoriously difficult to find in agreeable shape.

This is the first edition of Poe's first short story collection, featuring one of his most enduring and influential stories, "The Fall of the House of Usher." Heartman & Canny note that these volumes, containing 25 previously published tales, "mark the culmination of Poe's effort, beginning as early as 1834, to get his prose tales into volume form. It is a milestone in his career as a prose writer, but it was a failure commercially"--perhaps for no one so much as the author, who only received 25 copies of the title as payment. As Day observes, the contents here are clearly suggested in the title, which "gives us an indication of the mood of much of Poe's prose fiction." More important, the collection also demonstrates some of Poe's theories about the short story that would help shape that format for American writers. Poe saw the short story as a symbolic form of writing, equal to poetry "in its ability to convey latent meanings through a prose both symmetrical and intense." (Day) Poe's life (1809-49) was short and filled with tragedy, but his literary influence is enduring and thriving. In the words of ANB, "nothing has spoken so convincingly for his importance as has the influence of his works. His detective fiction and his macabre treatment of the uncanny and the disgusting pervade twentieth-century popular culture. Among the foundations of modernism is the analytic attitude he brought to literature, his determined separation of the man who suffers and the artist who creates.".