Books

U Zagrebu [Zagreb]: Tiskom I nakladom A. Jakica, 1864. First Croatian edition. In contemporary half cloth. Panels covered with marbled paper. With 55 text illustrations. Cover worn, bumped at corners. First flyleaf not present. With ownership inscriptions by different hands in pencil and ink. Inked out collection number on the front panel and the title page in crayon. A few pages fingermarked. Overall in good condition.. First Croatian edition. In contemporary half cloth. Panels covered with marbled paper. With 55 text illustrations. 244 p. Page 220, 235 and 243 misnumbered. Scarce, first Croatian edition of Defoe's 1719 novel, Robinson Crusoe. Based on the German translation by Otto Leonhard Heubner, published in Leipzig in 1857. Extremely scarce, we could trace only one copy in institutional holding worldwide, in the library of the Museumsgesellschaft Zürich. .

Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe, is one of the earliest and most influential novels in the history of English literature. It is a fictional autobiography of the title character, a castaway who spends 28 years on a remote tropical island near Trinidad, encountering cannibals, captives, and mutineers before being rescued. The story is widely perceived as a comment on the British Imperialism of the age and the emerging ideology of the 'self-made man', and it reflects on the author's vast array of experiences.

The first edition of Robinson Crusoe was published without Defoe's name on it, and is titled 'The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventure of Robinson Crusoe, Of York, Mariner: Who lived Eight and Twenty Years, all alone in an un-inhabited Island on the Coast of America, near the Mouth of the Great River of Oroonoque; Having been cast on Shore by Shipwreck, wherein all the Men perished but himself. With An Account how he was at last as strangely deliver'd by Pyrates.' Identification is typically through comparison with known first edition features (typeset, errors, page count, publisher details, etc).