The Professor

No book club edition is documented for an 1857 two-decker; the risk is the ordinary Victorian one. Smith, Elder's own later printings and the cheap collected and uniform editions of Charlotte Brontë's works are the common substitutes, and the Harper New York 1857 is frequently offered simply as 'first edition 1857' without the qualifier 'first American'. Copies rebound out of the original purple cloth lose the binding evidence entirely — Bonhams distinguishes 'the first edition, in the first binding' for exactly this reason — and a set whose rear advertisements have been removed cannot be placed in the first state.