Guest author Darren Stephens, MSLIS is a graduate of Catholic University’s Department of Information Science. He serves as an archival assistant with the University Special Collections.

Slumbering in sweet repose in Rare Books are two works of classic literature synonymous with horror and Halloween: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, first unleashed upon American readers in an almost certainly pirated Philadelphia edition, and Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven, given its most enduring visual form by Gustave Doré in a sumptuous folio. Together they trace the Gothic imagination from an anonymous novel of 1818 to an illustrated spectacle of 1884.

A Monstrous Acquisition: The First American Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus

This two-volume set of Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, published in Philadelphia by Carey, Lea & Blanchard in 1833, is the first American edition of Mary Shelley’s novel, and in the assessment of the standard bibliography, a probable pirated one.

The edition is identifiable by myriad bibliographic features that distinguish it from its predecessors and successors. Firstly, and perhaps poetically given the likely unauthorized nature of the publication, the title page attributes the work to “Mary W. Shelly,” a misspelling that has become the edition’s signature quirk in antiquarian description. Most significantly, the text reproduces Shelley’s anonymous 1818 original rather than her popular revised 1831 British edition. In this text, for example, the author’s introduction, in which she famously recounts the origin and inspiration for the story, is absent; in its stead is Percy Shelley’s original 1818 preface, and Elizabeth is described as Victor’s biological cousin rather than an adopted orphan. The copy is further distinguished by its original boards, a survival that marks it as an artifact of American bookmaking, and by publisher additions in the form of four pages of publisher’s advertisements at the beginning of Volume I and the publisher’s catalog at the conclusion of Volume II.

The characterization of the edition as pirated rests on the authority of W.H. Lyles and his 1975 Mary Shelley: An Annotated Bibliography, cited in the trade literature as Lyles B6a. The timing is consistent with this assessment, as the 1833 Philadelphia printing appeared in a period before international copyright offered meaningful protection to British authors in the United States, and the decision to reprint the 1818 text rather than Shelley’s own 1831 revision suggests a commercial venture rather than an authorized reprint. The scholarly hedge “according to Lyles” is worth preserving in any public description, as the attribution reflects bibliographic convention rather than a legal determination.

The misspelling, the advertisements, and the textual divergences together make this copy a kind of monster identifiable by the sum of its parts, much like the creature it contains. It is a book that announces its own irregularities on the title page.

Bound in Gloom and Glory Alike: Poe’s The Raven, Illustrated by Gustave Doré

Bound in gloom and glory alike, this first-thus edition of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven, published in 1884 by Harper & Brothers, illustrated by Gustave Doré, and with an introduction by Edmund Stedman, invites readers to ponder and pore over Poe’s most persistent refrain through the dense, dark atmosphere of Doré’s work.

This volume represents nineteenth-century bookmaking at its most ambitious. The elephant folio format gave Doré’s plates room to take flight, and the engravings, juxtaposed with passages of the poem, carry the poem’s melancholy into visual territory that words alone cannot reach. The commission was Doré’s only American one, undertaken for Harper & Brothers in 1882, and it would prove to be his final work; he died in January 1883, just as he was finishing the engravings, and the book was published posthumously. There is something fitting in that chronology—an artist whose imagination had already given form to Dante’s Inferno, Milton’s Paradise Lost, and La Grande Bible de Tours turned at the end of his life to Poe’s midnight visitant.

Doré’s genius lay in his prodigious and masterful use of chiaroscuro, the dramatic play of light against encroaching dark that makes his plates feel less like illustrations than apparitions. His raven imagery became synonymous with the poem itself, much as his visions of Dante’s circles or Cervantes’s windmills became inseparable from those texts in the popular imagination. Yet during his lifetime, Doré was often a target of art critics, many of whom dismissed him as a popular illustrator unworthy of serious attention; his ambitions as a painter and sculptor went largely unrecognized. Only after his death did critical estimation begin to shift, and today his raven engravings are regarded as among his most evocative achievements, a posthumous vindication of sorts.

Donated in 1921 and held in Rare Books for over a century for purposes of posterity and preservation for “evermore,” this copy invites the curious to make an appointment and come “rapping, rapping” and “tapping, tapping” at the Rare Books reading room door.

Citation: Lyles, W. H. Mary Shelley: An Annotated Bibliography. New York: Garland Publishing, 1975.