Description
ELIOT, George. Novels of George Eliot [George Eliot’s Works in Twelve Volumes]. New York: Harper & Brothers, n.d. [ca. 1880].
Harper & Brothers Library Edition. Incomplete Publisher’s Set. 8vo. 19 cm tall. Publisher’s full olive green cloth over boards. Half-set. Six volumes from the set of twelve: Adam Bede; Scenes of Clerical Life and Silas Marner; Middlemarch I–II; Daniel Deronda I–II. Good. Moderate moisture staining. Pronounced wear to board corners and spine ends. Pronounced chipping and tearing to leaves throughout with small losses that do not impact printed text. One prelim leaf and one title page leaf loose. Adhered white paper to upper board of Clerical Life and Silas Marner volume. Ownership signature of American humorist, journalist, and fiction writer Edgar W. “Bill” Nye on blank prelim leaf of each volume.
- This half-set of Harper’s uniform gathering of the major works of George Eliot (pseudonym of Mary Ann Evans)—among the earliest U.S.-published uniform Eliot sets—is signed throughout by American humorist, journalist, and fiction writer Edgar W. “Bill” Nye.
- Nye wrote in his 1888 book, Bill Nye’s Chestnuts, Old and New, in jest, “Daniel Webster and President Garfield and Dr. Tanner and George Eliot were all, at one time, poor boys. They had to start at the foot of the ladder and toil upward.”
