Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Tom Sawyer’s Comrade)

Mark Twain

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Tom Sawyer’s Comrade)

New York

Charles L. Webster and Company

1885

The publication of Huckleberry Finn was complicated by a controversial plate showing an illustration of the character Uncle Silas, wherein the engraver appeared to have added a crude addition to the groin area of Silas’s trousers. Webster required the book’s salespeople to destroy the offending sheet in their samples; only the earliest copies of the first edition (bound in sheep and intended for libraries), like the one shown here, contained the original “curved fly” illustration (preceding the indecent addition). The plate was corrected with a straighter fly on Silas’s trousers for the copies bound in cloth.