A Tight Squeeze; Or, The Adventures of a Gentleman, Who, On a wager of ten thousand dollars undertook to go from New York to New Orleans in three weeks without money as a professional tramp.
1879. Boston: Lee and Shepard, Publishers & New York: Charles T. Dillingham, 1879.
Small 8vo, 282, (6, ads) pp. Original pink wrappers, printed with title and 3pp. of ads. Edges of wrappers worn with a few small chips, slightly larger chip to head and foot of backstrip, pages toned but clean, a very good copy of a fragile paperback.
§ First edition (offered in both wrappers and cloth; copies in wrappers are much harder to find). William Staats was an American journalist who worked for the Chicago Telegraph. The story was based on a real-life adventure, although whether it was Staats himself who took on the wager is not known. Final page with full-page advertisement for the first English translation of Jules Verne’s The Tribulations of a Chinaman, translated by Virginia Champlin, published later in the same year by Lee and Shepard. Wright 5147. Item #107569
Price: $750.00