Kipling Rudyard

1900 · Best.-Nr. 14944 — 1900. Also Letters from Julian Ralph Charles E. Hands and Douglas Story. Santiago de Chile: Hume & Co. 1900. Original printed fawn wrappers. First Edition unauthorized issued as a volume in the publisher's "Libreria Inglesa." This volume published in Chile includes three poems and two stories that Kipling wrote during the Boer War plus four poems written earlier; it is the first edition in book form anywhere of the poems "Pharaoh and the Sergeant" and "Kitchener's School" and of the Boer War tales "With Number Three" and "Surgical and Medical." "It has been said that this is the only case on record of a first edition of a book being published in a country never visited by the author and where people did not speak his language" Richards. Hume the proprietor of Santiago's main bookstore was a huge Kipling fan but it appears that he overestimated the Chilean Kipling market: he supposedly printed 400 copies but few sold and the remainder were either burned in 1906 or pulped at a paper mill in 1911 -- though some copies like this one apparently were neither read nor burned nor pulped. For this copy is as new -- no wear no soil leaves still unopened. Richards A166; Stewart 240. Housed in a cloth slipcase with inner chemise. unknown