Tanglewood Tales

First American edition, first printing of Hawthorne’s final children’s book. A spectacular American literary presentation copy inscribed by Nathaniel Hawthorne to Oliver Wendell Holmes: “O.W. Holmes from his friend N.H.”

Holmes wrote about Tanglewood Tales with great enthusiasm in a letter to its publisher, James T. Fields: “Hawthorne’s book has been not devoured, but bolted by my children. I have not yet had a chance at it, but I don’t doubt I shall read it with as much gusto as they, when my turn comes. When you write to him, thank him if you please for me, for I suppose he will hardly expect any formal acknowledgment” (September 6, 1853).

The two were friends for many years. Holmes served as Hawthorne’s pallbearer in May 1864. The next month he wrote in The Atlantic, “Our literature could ill spare the rich ripe autumn of such a life as Hawthorne’s, but he has left enough to keep his name in remembrance as long as the language in which he shaped his deep imaginations is spoken by human lips.”

Inscribed copies of Tanglewood Tales are rare at auction, with no other examples appearing since 1974. This volume, inscribed by Hawthorne to Holmes, must be counted as one of the best nineteenth-century American literary presentation copies in private hands.

BAL 7614 (first printing, with only Boston Stereotype Foundry on the copyright page). Clark A22.2a.

Provenance: 1. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., inscribed by Nathaniel Hawthorne; 2. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., with his calling card inscribed to his nephew, presenting the book as a Christmas gift: “Ned with love Merry Christmas from his uncle Wendell.”

$30,000