THACKERAY, William Makepeace.

Vanity Fair: A Novel Without a Hero.

"Never lose a chance of saying a kind" : First Edition of Thackeray's Vanity Fair; Finely Bound by Bayntun in a Cosway-Style Binding

London: Bradbury and Evans, 1848.

$4,500.00

In Stock Item Number: RRB-150809

Custom Clamshell Box (+$450)

* Custom Clamshell Boxes are hand made by the Harcourt Bindery upon request and take approximately 60 days to complete

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First edition, first issue of Thackeray's masterpiece. Octavo, bound in full green morocco elaborately bound by Bayntun in Cosway-style with a portrait of Thackeray inset on the front cover, elaborate gilt titles and tooling to the spine, front and rear panels, inner dentelles, raised bands, green ribbon marker, green silk moiré endpapers, all edges gilt. In very good condition. Housed in a custom slipcase.

Vanity Fair was Thackeray’s first major work and established his continued high standing among Victorian novelists. "After that book [Vanity Fair] there could be no doubt about the greatness of its writer… at last the novel of real life on the great scale has been discovered" (Saintsbury, in Grolier, English Prose Fiction, 102). "As Thackeray’s masterpiece this novel has outlasted the great majority of his work… The Waterloo scenes are among the best narrative passages in an English novel. Of her type, Becky has never been bettered, and the author’s famed irony still stings" (Farrow, 50). It has been the subject of numerous television and film adaptations, most recently into the 2004 film directed by Mira Nair, starring Reese Witherspoon, Jonathan Rhys Meyers and Bob Haskins.