Wuthering Heights
New York: Harper and Brothers, 1848. First Edition. Wrappers. 2 vols. 1st American edition, 1st state of the ads on the back cover of vol. II. Original tan wrappers (hyped falsely as “by the author of Jane Eyre”), both parts lean right, chips and tears at the spine tips, edges and corners, a stain to the lower corner of the vol. II front wrapper and first 23 leaves, else a good, sound set. Fine, double, half morocco, folding case. Harper’s single volume. issue in cloth is more common and less valuable, and rebound copies are even more common, should be cheap, and have done for Wuthering Heights’ reputation as a rarity what the Boston Strangler did for the reputation of door–to–door salesmen. You say you’d rather have the 1847 London edition in cloth? Me too, but it’s a $350,000 to $650,000 book, assuming it’s complete, and depending on the condition of the cloth, and you should buy that if you can afford it, and if you can find one, which you cannot. It looks like 3 complete copies of our book in wrappers, with all 4 covers, have sold at auction in the last 50 years (2 other copies were missing one or more of the covers), this compared to 11 copies of the 1847 London edition sold in the same 50 years (2 of those 11 were in original cloth). The record price at auction for our book in wrappers is only $11,250, (Christie’s Dec. 3, 2010), but that was at the bottom of the 2008 financial trauma. Here is what’s important: Harper’s vol. I in wrappers is scarce but often available. Vol. II in wrappers is 10 times rarer than vol. I because the 2 volumes were sold separately, and the novel was too enigmatic and complex for readers in 1848, who gave up on vol. I, tossed it aside, and did not buy vol. II, so Harper trashed unsold copies, and vol. II in wrappers is now almost never available. Very good. Item #842
“Wuthering Heights is a more difficult book to understand than Jane Eyre because Emily was a greater poet than Charlotte. [...] She looked out upon a world cleft into gigantic disorder and felt within her the power to unite it in a book. That gigantic ambition is to be felt throughout the novel. [...] It is this suggestion of power underlying the apparitions of human nature and lifting them up into the presence of greatness that gives the book its huge stature among other novels.” –Virginia Woolf.
Price:
$30,000.00