Was autographing books, other than to friends (such as Shelley to Byron), even “a thing” in the early 19th century? I’m sure Dickens and Clemens signed a few since they were celebrities from reading their works, but I’ll have to google when the author publicity appearances and signings (especially for an unknown like Mary G., who was only famous as the consort of a semi-famous poet) became common.
Should have sold it on Pawn Stars. Then we could watch Rick blow a gasket when Chumlee uses the pages for rolling paper…
Rick: “I have a buddy who’s an expert on mufflers and pre-Victorian Gothic horror fiction by polyamorous Brits, mind if I have him take a look at it?”
Expert: “There’s a couple of giveaways… one is that in Mary Shelley’s known signatures she always ended the second ‘l’ with a downward sloop, and the other is this picture of Boris Karloff as the Frankenstein monster on the cover, which means it dates to after the 1931 movie.”
Rick to camera: “Most people assume that the novel Frankenstein was a novelization of the Boris Karloff movie, but in fact the Karloff movie was actually based on the book. God I hate the Old Man. In this case 113 years before the movie.”
Rick to Owner: “Well, we’ve just been told that the item is completely worthless.”
Owner: “How about $25,000 then?”
Rick: “I’ll go $300, that’s the best I can do.”
Owner: “$20,500?”
Rick: “$310, best I can do.”
Owner: “Okay then.”
Owner to camera: “I’m happy, it’s enough for a couple of Beverly Hillbillies slot machine pulls and a black tar heroin fix for the next three days, and I took the book off a dead guy at the Salvation Army and wrote Mary Shelley on it with a Sharpy myself because that’s the name of the daughter I abandoned, so it’s all good.”
Now that would be the ultimate Antiques Roadshow find!
It looks like its only inscribed, without a signature, which I believe was more the custom of the time. She wrote “To Lord Byron, From the Author.” (or something to that effect, I’m on my phone and can’t look it up. )
I was assuming she signed it that way because it was originally published anonymously, but you know what happens when you assume…
No, I seem to recall that “from the author” was SOP for signed copies back in the day. There’s a signed copy of something by Milton, can’t recall if it was Paradise Lost, that he signed that way.
I don’t think signing books became a thing until the end of the 19th/early 20th century. There were signed, limited editions of books like Joyce’s Ulysses and Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, and Hemingway was known for long, personal inscriptions, etc.
A Polk Street book dealer in San Francisco once told me he had a first edition Frankenstein with a letter tucked inside written by Percy to the publisher, apologizing for his wife’s bad writing. The story sounds too apocryphal to be true to me.
Damn well played, Sir!
Not bad, but it needs more Subway sandwich talk.
Yeah, plus Chumlee asking “So, Frankenstein… he’s like a wolfman, right?”
It’s “Frankenwhoosh!”