Description
The Innocents Abroad, or The New Pilgrims’ Progress;
Being an Account of the Steamship Quaker City’s 1867 Pleasure Excursion to Europe and the Holy Land; with Descriptions of Countries, Nations, Incidents and Adventures, as they Appeared to the Author.
by Mark Twain (Samuel L. Clemens)
with twenty pages of illustrations drawn in 1995 by Heather McAdams
This is Mark Twain’s travelogue in a new release, with text following a copy of the first edition in the possession of Northwestern University Library, and cartoon illustrations by Heather McAdams.
The people of those foreign countries are very, very ignorant. They looked curiously at the costumes we had brought from the wilds of America. They observed that we talked loudly at table sometimes. They noticed that we looked out for expenses and got what we conveniently could out of a franc, and wondered where in the mischief we came from. In Paris they just simply opened their eyes and stared when we spoke to them in French! We never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language.
So wrote Mark Twain in 1867, in one of his most exuberant nonfiction works. The companion themes that fill it—the shallowness of the sites to be visited and the shallowness of the visitors—prove to be prophetic of tourism today, as revealed in Heather McAdams’ cartoons, completed for this edition.
The Innocents Abroad was printed in an edition of 200 on Johannot, set in Monotype Bell. It has 445 text pages plus 20 pages of illustrations in two volumes which are each 7¾ by 11¼ inches. The non-adhesive binding with exposed spine sewing consists of 7 black double raised cords attached to hard covers wrapped in red cloth. The two volumes are in turn housed in a black and white linen covered hard case wrapper with black leather straps over brass studs, intended to suggest a portmanteau.
Is it old-fashioned to single out for praise books that marry shape or form to content in a way that creates a reverberation between the two? Isn’t this a reasonable ideal? For Mark Twain’s ‘Innocents Abroad’ Trisha Hammer has created a binding and box that together resemble a traveling case, and Heather McAdams has provided 20 pages of illustrations, made while she retraced Twain’s itinerary … The results are witty and wry.
—Michael Frank, The New York Times, 2004
The Innocents Abroad was designed by Bob McCamant and printed by Martha Chiplis. The binding was designed and executed by Trisha Hammer. It is numbered and signed by the artist and bookmakers, and was published in 1998.
From the book’s colophon:
… edition limited to 200. The body type is Monotype Bell, cast by Michael and Winifred Bixler of Skaneateles, New York. The paper is Johannot. Illustrations were printed from photopolymer plates made by Soho Letterpress of New York, New York. Robert McCamant designed the book. Martha respaced the type and printed the book. Trisha Hammer designed and executed the binding.
Copies are signed by Heather McAdams, Robert McCamant, Martha Chiplis, and Trisha Hammer.
One copy available due to a book dealer return: As new, fine.
