The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy, Signed Harcourt Binding

Full Title:  The Life and Death of the Mayor of Casterbridge: A Story of a Man of Character

Binding Details:  Signed custom binding by the Harcourt Bindery, Charlestown, Massachusetts bound in morocco leather over complimentary cloth covered boards with a raised band to the spine and gold gilt titles and ruling. There are single gold gilt lines to the boards, hand-sewn silk endbands, marbled endpapers, with the top page edges gold gilted. The Harcourt Bindery label appears on the bottom of the last free endpaper.

Book Details:  Originally published by Macmillan in 1912 as part of the definitive Thomas Hardy collection called The Wessex Edition, this is the limited edition reprint of the 1912 edition published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich in 1981 with a limitation of 250 copies. Bruce Prine of Libri Vox in his review wrote the following summary, “Irritated and drunken, an itinerant farm-worker sells his wife and child to a stranger. Thus begins The Mayor of Casterbridge, set in rural and small-town England in the mid-1800s. In the original subtitle, Hardy called this the story of "a man of character," and the central character, Michael Henchard, is one of English fiction's greatest creations. Henchard is deeply developed as a realistic character, but also larger-than-life in the manner of a Greek or Shakespearean tragic hero — huge in his determination and huge in his failings. The novel deals with the struggles between individual will, the hold of the past, and the relentless control of circumstances in a changing society.”

Measures approximately 9” x 6” with 384 pages as well as a preface by Thomas Hardy. Please note that the pages are uncut as originally published in the 1912 edition.

Condition Report:  The binding is in FINE condition. Internally, the book is very clean with no signs of previous ownership. Overall, this is a beautiful binding that houses the definitive edition of Hardy’s classic novel.

A photograph of the binding appears in the photo section of the listing.