The Derrydale ‘1601’ in Original Condition

[1601] Being a fireside conversation in the tyme of the Goode Queene Bess in which divers persons of reknown hold converse on concerns personal and intimate. By Mark Twain.

[New York]: Done into a privately emprynted booke, 1926.

Price: $20,000.00

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"One hundred copies of this conversation have been printed for H.D.W./ of which this copy is no. 65" with Connett device A at foot of limitation leaf. Text within printed borders on paper watermarked Vidalon. Collation: blank leaf, half-title, title page (verso “… of which this is copy No. 34” [numbered in ink], Connett device A at foot), foreword (3 leaves, last verso blank), fly-title, text (6 leaves, last verso blank), blank leaf. 1 vols. 8vo. The Derrydale ‘1601’ in Original Condition. Original cream boards, title printed on upper cover. Fine copy in original glassine wrapper (some chips). Brown half morocco folding box, with leather label on upper cover with Derrydale logo in gilt. Siegel A; Frazier T-6-a; BAL 3388 for first edition (1880), BAL 3407 for first authorized edition (1882); not in the Meine bibliography (1939).

Item #265825

The famed Fireside Conversation, written while Clemens found himself at an impasse during the composition of Huckleberry Finn. The work circulated privately — and gleefully acknowledged to his friends — but was never published during his lifetime. In the 1920s, the text gained new readers after the Grabhorn Press edition of 1925, with an introduction by Charles Erskine Scott Wood, who had prepared the 1882 edition for Clemens in the print shop at the U.S. Military Acadmy at West Point. One of the rarest of Connett’s books, identifiable only by the small device at the foot of the limitation. Frazier notes that in a letter preserved at Harvard, Connett writes, in part, “I am sending you a copy of that most terrible but authentic masterpiece of Mark Twain's - '1601'. A boy will deliver it to your house tomorrow. I'm afraid to send it through the mail. I did a somewhat overpowering design for this book in the vain hope of overpowering the text but I find the text can't be overpowered — no how!”
A note preserved in Connett’s copy, sold in 1994, identifies the H.D.W. mentioned in the limitation notice as Henry D. Whiton. Henry Devereux Whiton (1871-1930), was a Long Island yachtsman, industrialist, patron of the Beebe expedition to the Galapagos, and philanthropist whose residence is now the Lawrence Country Day School. RARE.