2 Isabella L. Bird first editions are documented on this shelf, from A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains (1879) to Unbeaten Tracks in Japan (1880). Each linked guide gives the points of issue that separate a true first printing of that Isabella L. Bird 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 Isabella L. Bird copy in hand? Type the title into the First-Edition Checker or photograph the copyright page with Snap & Sort.

A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains — 1879 · John MurrayThe true first edition was published in October 1879 by John Murray of London and collates xii, 296 pages with eight leaves of plates, octavo. The first-printing title page carries only the date 1879, with no separate edition statement and no copyright notice in the preliminaries. The text is presented as a series of letters Bird wrote to her sister Henrietta describing her 1873 journey through the Rocky…. The John Murray London edition of October 1879 is the first edition; an American edition from G. P. Putnam's Sons of New York followed the same year.
Unbeaten Tracks in Japan — 1880 · John MurrayThe true first edition was published in two octavo volumes in October 1880 (volume I: xxiii, 398 pages; volume II: xiv, 383 pages), bound in original pictorial cloth, with a wood-engraved frontispiece and text illustrations in each volume and one folding color map. The narrative takes the form of letters to Bird's sister describing her 1878 journey, made with a Japanese interpreter, Itō Tsurukichi, through areas…. John Murray issued a one-volume abridged edition in 1885, titled on its title page as a 'New Edition, Abridged,' that reduced Bird's original text by roughly half; a true first edition must be the full two-volume 1880 set, not the 1885 (or later) one-volume abridgment.

More Nonfiction & Memoir shelves: James Gleick, Jared Diamond, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Joan Didion, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John L. Stephens.

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