Books

New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1911. First American Edition. Very Good/Good. First American edition in one of only a handful of known surviving dust jackets for this edition. Bound in publisher's brick red cloth decorated in blind and stamped in white. Very Good with light soiling and wear to cloth, worming to textblock edge, previous owner name to front free endpaper and several page corners bent. In a Good chipped, worn and stained dust jacket, with front flap partially separated and abraded at the bottom half and a horizontal closed tear across the spine panel affecting the word "Opera"; unsophisticated and a hitherto unrecorded variant nonetheless. French artist Andre Castaigne painted five watercolors for this work, utilized as color plates in this edition. As jacketed copies have only been recently been discovered— the first at auction in 2015— it is becoming clear that Bobbs-Merrill used each illustration for a color dust jacket design. This was an unusual…

The Phantom of the Opera, published serially in Le Gaulois from September 23, 1909 to January 8, 1910, and in volume form in late March 1910, is a novel by French writer Gaston Leroux. It tells the story of a mysterious masked man living in the catacombs of the Paris Opera House and his obsessive love for the beautiful Christine Daaé.