Red leather binding with gilt decoration, banding and title on the spine. Gilt edge line and school badge on both boards. All edges gilt.

The First Self-Help Book, And A Printing And The Mind Of Man. With Illustrations of Character and Conduct. London: Overall, a near fine copy of a real rarity; only one other copy appeared at auction in the last twenty-five years (Bloomsbury, October 27, 1983, lot 66), and that copy had a marking that it had been in the PMM exhibition.
Samuel Smiles (1812-1904) author, businessman, journalist and social reformer, is the epitome of that energetic probity which characterises the best side of Victorian society.
In 1859 his publisher, John Murray, issued the first of the innumerable editions of Self-Help. Its success was immediate and then unequalled: twenty thousand copies were sold in the first year, fifty-five thousand by 1864 and two hundred and seventy thousand by the end of the century. It was translated into almost every foreign language, but the proof of its success which most delighted Smiles was the number of letters attesting to its usefulness which he received from artisans – the class to whom it was directed – all over the world.