2 Helen Hunt Jackson first editions are documented on this shelf, from A Century of Dishonor (1881) to Ramona (1884) across 2 different publishers. Each linked guide gives the points of issue that separate a true first printing of that Helen Hunt Jackson title from later printings and book-club copies — the publisher and year to expect, the number-line or edition-statement conventions, and the tells that show up in online listings.
Identification only, per the house rule: no prices and no appraisals here. Checking a Helen Hunt Jackson copy in hand? Type the title into the First-Edition Checker or photograph the copyright page with Snap & Sort.
- A Century of Dishonor — 1881 · Harper & BrothersNew York: Harper & Brothers, 1881, octavo, collating x, 457, [1], 6 pages (the last six being publisher's advertisements), bound in the publisher's original gilt-stamped brown cloth with brown coated endpapers. At her own expense, Jackson mailed a copy to every member of Congress together with a note quoting Benjamin Franklin -- "Look upon your hands: they are stained with the blood of your relations" -- as part…. The 1965 Harper & Row Torchbook reprint, issued with an introductory essay by Andrew F. Rolle, omits the fifteen supporting documents that filled out the appendix of the 1881 original; a copy lacking the full documentary appendix is a later abridged reprint, not the first-edition text.
- Ramona — 1884 · Roberts BrothersBoston: Roberts Brothers, 1884, octavo, collating [ii], 490 pages plus four pages of publisher's advertisements, bound in the publisher's original gilt-stamped green cloth (gilt on the spine, black and gilt on the front board) with floral endpapers. The 1884 first edition is entirely unillustrated; the earliest added illustrations were four halftone views of Rancho Camulos, promoted as 'the Home of Ramona,' bound…. The true first issue carries only the Boston: Roberts Brothers imprint dated 1884 on the title page. A later issue adds a four-line imprint for Samuel Carson & Co. of San Francisco and is dated 1885 on the title page; it should not be mistaken for the true first. Illustrated reprints beginning with the 1889 Roberts Brothers appendix and continuing through the 1900 Little, Brown 'Monterey' edition (paintings by Henry Sandham) and the 1913 Little, Brown 'Tourist Edition' (photographs by Adam Clark Vroman) add pictures of Rancho Camulos and other sites tied to the novel's tourist trade; none of this pictorial matter appears in the plain-text 1884 first edition.
More Nature, Western & Americana shelves: Ivan Turgenev, Jack Schaefer, James A. Michener, James Welch, John Muir, John Nichols.
← All authors · All genres · part of the First-Edition Identification resource.