Philadelphia and Boston: Carey & Hart and Hill & Broadhead, 1847. Item #627

 4to.  275 x 225 mm., [10 ¾ x 9 inches].  99 pp.  Illustrated with an engraved mezzotint title-page and 9 mezzotint engravings by John Sartain.  Brown publisher’s cloth, gilt title and decoration on the upper board and in blind on the lower board.  Binding cloth uniformly faded, head and tail of spine and corners a bit chipped and frayed. Preliminary leaves foxed, text block foxed mostly at margins and on tissue guards.  Mezzotints generally clean.

First edition of Emerson’s poem, “The World Soul,” which appeared a few months before it was printed in his 1847 edition of Poems. This issued of Diadem also includes a number of stories from European authors including Julius, or the Two Prisoners, translated from the French by R. Toepffer, and Poor Margaret  translated from the German by Joana Schopenhauer.

The illustrations are by the English born and trained engraver John Sartain who emigrated to Philadelphia in 1830.  He brought with him the art of mezzotint engraving and was the first engraver to create a mezzotint in America.  Sartain went on to become one of the most renown art engravers in the United States during the middle decades of the nineteenth century.

Jacob Blanck, Bibliography of American Literature 5209.  Mantle Fielding, Dictionary of American Painters, Sculptors and Engravers, p. 317.  Carol Wax, The Mezzotint, p. 108.

Price: $175.00