Green cloth binding with gilt title on the spine and black title on the front board.

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Green Cloth Binding. Condition: Good. A. Frederics (illustrator). First edition of this humorous novel by Jerome K. Jerome in the original publisher’s binding. A first edition, with ‘Quay Street’ to the publisher’s address to the title page. A well received humorous travel work telling of a two-week boating holiday along the Thames. Three Men in a Boat was conceived as a serious travel guide, but quickly gained a reputation of being a comedy due to its humorous style and lengthy sentimental passages. Jerome K. Jerome wrote a sequel set on bicycles in Germany.With illustrations in text throughout by A. Frederics. Externally sound with some shelf wear. With illustrations in text throughout by A. Frederics. A good book.

Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog),published in 1889, is a humorous novel by English writer Jerome K. Jerome describing a two-week boating holiday on the Thames from Kingston upon Thames to Oxford and back to Kingston. The book was initially intended to be a serious travel guide, with accounts of local history along the route, but the humorous elements took over to the point where the serious and somewhat sentimental passages seem a distraction to the comic novel. One of the most praised things about Three Men in a Boat is how undated it appears to modern readers – the jokes have been praised as fresh and witty.

The three men are based on Jerome himself (the narrator Jerome K. Jerome) and two real-life friends, George Wingrave (who would become a senior manager at Barclays Bank) and Carl Hentschel (the founder of a London printing business, called Harris in the book), with whom Jerome often took boating trips. The dog, Montmorency, is entirely fictional but, “as Jerome admits, developed out of that area of inner consciousness which, in all Englishmen, contains an element of the dog”.The trip is a typical boating holiday of the time in a Thames camping skiff.

Following the overwhelming success of Three Men in a Boat, Jerome later published a sequel, about a cycling tour in Germany, titled Three Men on the Bummel (also known as Three Men on Wheels, 1900).

Jerome Klapka Jerome (2 May 1859 – 14 June 1927) was an English writer and humorist, best known for the comic travelog Three Men in a Boat (1889). Other works include the essay collections Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow (1886) and Second Thoughts of an Idle Fellow; Three Men on the Bummel, a sequel to Three Men in a Boat; and several other novels. Jerome was born in Walsall, England, and, although he was able to attend grammar school, his family suffered from poverty at times, as did he as a young man trying to earn a living in various occupations. In his twenties, he was able to publish some work, and success followed. He married in 1888, and the honeymoon was spent on a boat on the Thames; he published Three Men in a Boat soon afterwards. He continued to write fiction, non-fiction and plays over the next few decades, though never with the same level of success.