"While it was passing through the press, or just as the stereotyping was fairly begun, he made a contract with the Messrs. Harper to pay for seven thousand five hundred copies on the day of publication at the rate of one dollar per copy, to be sold within two years, and to continue to publish at the same rate afterwards, or to surrender the contract to the author at his pleasure; terms, I suppose, more liberal than had ever been offered for a work of grave history on this side of the Atlantic. In London it was published by Mr. Bentley, who purchased the copyright for eight hundred pounds, under the kind auspices of Colonel Aspinwall; again a large sum, as it was already doubtful whether an exclusive privilege could be legally maintained in Great Britain by a foreigner."
The demand for the book was large: in five months five thousand copies were sold in America, and an edition of half that number sold in England. By January 1, 1860, there had been sold of the American and English editions together, 16,965 copies. It was translated into Spanish, French, German, and Dutch.
Octavo.
Collation: Two volumes. Volume I: xl, 527 pp. Volume II: xix, 547 pp.
EDGAR ALLAN POE
(1809-1849)
82. The Raven | And | Other Poems. | By | Edgar A. Poe. | New York: | Wiley And Putnam, 161 Broadway. | 1845.
The poem first appeared in print in the columns of the New York Evening Mirror for January 29, 1845, where N. P. Willis, its editor, says in a note: "We are permitted to copy, (in advance of publication,) from the second number of the American Review, the following remarkable poem by Edgar Poe." Willis issued the poem again in the weekly edition of the Mirror, dated February 8, and Charles F. Briggs, with whom Poe afterward became associated, also published it in the Broadway Journal of the same date, crediting it to "Edgar A. Poe." Both of these weeklies seem to have appeared before the American Review came out. We are not told the reason for Mr. George H. Colton's editorial courtesy in permitting this advance publication when the second, or February number of his paper, The American Review: A Whig Journal Of Politics, Literature, Art And Science, was so soon to appear. It is a curious circumstance that Willis and Briggs gave the author's name freely, while Colton's issue, as originally intended, appeared with the pseudonym of "—— Quarles."