Black Beauty. The Autobiography of a Horse.

“We call them dumb animals, and so they are, for they cannot tell us how they feel, but they do not suffer less because they have no words": Finely Bound Example of Anna Sewell's Black Beauty

Black Beauty. The Autobiography of a Horse.

SEWELL, Anna.

Item Number: 101633

London: Jarrold's, .

Finely bound example by Bayntun-Riviere Bindery of Sewell’s classic Black Beauty. Quarto, bound in full green morocco with pictorial horse inlays in morocco on the front panel, gilt titles and tooling to the spine, raised bands, marbled endpapers, all edges gilt, inner dentelles. In fine condition. Housed in a custom green cloth box. An exceptional presentation.

Sewell “was told in 1871 that she had only 18 months to live; by the end of that year she had begun Black Beauty, her only book, and five years later she was still alive and at work on it.” Sewell had great difficulty in finding a publisher and sales at first were slow. “She lived to see the book published, but died a few months later, before she could know of its huge success… Black Beauty was the most celebrated animal story of the 19th century, an account of a horse’s experiences at the hands of many owners… The book revived the ‘animal biography,’ a genre popular in the late 18th and early 19th centuries but which had been dormant for half a century” (Carpenter & Prichard, 66, 479).

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