Description

Bradford Press / Charles Winthrope & Sons, New York [Published date: 2013]. Hardcover in dust jacket, 277 pp; illustrated throughout with black-and-white line drawings by Dan Beard; 22 cm. Facsimile reprint of the 1892 first edition originally published by Charles L. Webster & Co. in New York. In very good+ condition/very good+ dust jacket. Green pictorial cloth with gilt and black stamped illustration to front cover and spine, reproduced exactly from the original edition, in a color-illustrated dust jacket depicting scenes from the novel. Binding tight; pages clean and unmarked. An heirloom-quality reproduction issued under the Bradford Press imprint, replicating all features of the original including the title page, explanatory note, humorous "Weather in This Book" preface, and the complete text and illustrations. Twain's satirical novel follows the irrepressible Colonel Mulberry Sellers, reintroduced from The Gilded Age, in a comic tale of Old World aristocrats and ambitious Americans swapping places, pursuing titles, and chasing schemes during the Gilded Age. This high-quality modern reprint preserves the typography, artwork, and layout of the original while offering the durability of new production. [From front jacket flap] What would happen if Downton Abbey or Upstairs, Downstairs were crossed with a Marx Brothers farce? If we were lucky, we would get a story like Mark Twain's The American Claimant. This Charles Winthrope & Sons replica of the 1892 first edition offers a wild ride into a decade that seems uncannily like our own. In this comedy, exuberant Americans, newly rich or hungry to be so, envy the British tradition of estates and titles and want to scheme or marry their way into it; while Old World aristocrats, comfortable and bored, admire the Yanks for their egalitarian turbulence and yearn to join in. Into the center of all this, Mark Twain unleashes Colonel Sellers, the irrepressible hustler from The Gilded Age, his epic story from twenty years before. As you read The American Claimant and enjoy Dan Beard's illustrations, you will be delighted to see that the passage of time has not sobered our Colonel at all. His manic dreams of big money are loopier than ever, and in the midst of our own gilded age of crazy start-ups and quick illusory millions, his words and adventures keep this satire amazingly fresh.