Available Copies from Independent Booksellers
Price: US$600.00 + shipping
Condition: Very Good
Description: Fonseca and Carolino's inadvertent masterpiece has been called many things. "Perhaps the worst foreign phrasebook ever written" . A book of "miraculous stupidities." "The most ludicrous foreign attempt ever made to teach our language." Most often under the title English as She Is Spoke.the mid-nineteenth-century Portuguese phrasebook has become a minor classic. Yet it is not as a book of instruction intended for those Portuguese who would learn English that it has survived-nay thrived-for the last century and a half, but rather it is as a work of accidental comedy and unintended humor."-George Monteiro. The New Guide to Conversation began as an 1836 French-Portuguese phrasebook by José da Fonseca; in 1855, Pedro Carolino, with only a limited grasp of English, translated the French text to make an English-Portuguese phrase book. In succeeding years, excerpts made the rounds of English-language magazines until in 1883, a London publisher reprinted the book under the title, English As She Is Spoke, and within a year, six editions appeared (the book was not protected by copyright). This is apparently the first American edition (published in mid-1883), and the first edition with an introduction by Mark Twain. For more information, see BAL 3412 and George Monteiro, English as She Is Spoke: 150 Years of a Classic, Luso-Brazilian Review, Volume 41, Number 1, 2004. First American edition and first edition with the Twain preface (first printing). A very good copy in somewhat scuffed thin cloth-covered boards; the cloth is beginning to fray at the top of the spine (there was also a simultaneous paperback version). Uncommon.
Seller: Downtown Brown Books, Portland, OR, U.S.A.
Price: US$1875.00 + shipping
Description: BAL 3412. Contains Clemens's 5-page Introduction. Issued in both wraps and cloth, this is a scarce set of unbound sheets consisting of 13 signatures (the preface sheet and front endpaper are loose), a result of the publisher's bankruptcy a few years after publication before all copies had been bound for sale. Adding to the scarcity is that this appears to be a copy belonging to Mark Twain's first bibliographer, Merle Johnson, with a full-page note in pencil on the detached front endpaper SIGNED by Johnson: "What is this? Nothing but the sheets of the 1st Edition all uncut and all that -- those in the cloth covers have been neatly trimmed down for the common people. Merle Johnson." Housed in a cloth chemise and slipcase with a gilt-lettered morocco spine label. About Fine in Fine chemise and slipcase
Seller: Charles Agvent, est. 1987, ABAA, ILAB, Fleetwood, PA, U.S.A.