Books

The First UK printing of this illustrated edition published by Frederick Etchells & Hugh Macdonald, London in 1929. The BOOK is in Very Good++ or better condition. The limited issue of only 35 copies which have been signed by Kauffer to the limitation page, this one unnumbered. Printed on T. H. Saunders mould-made paper, and bound in quarter morocco. There was also a trade edition of 500 copies unsigned on normal rag paper and bound in cloth. Original blue quarter morocco, titles to spine silver, blue buckram boards with Kauffer's design in silver to the front board, edges untrimmed. The morocco spine is slightly sunned and rubbed. Internally, apart from some offsetting to the endpapers, the book is clean and the binding remains tight. Frontispiece and 7 hand coloured pochoir illustrations by E. McKnight Kauffer, using the pochoir process. This deluxe signed issue is extremely rare, with only two copies recorded at auction in the past 50 years. Kauffer was born in the U.S.A. but…

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).