Used - good - covers show moderate use wear with some scrubbing to leather at corners and spine folds - paper over boards scuffed along edges - each volume has a bookplate with name on the inside front cover a sound useful set.
The Little Classics is a 16-volume anthology series edited by Rossiter Johnson and published in 1875 by James R. Osgood and Company of Boston. Designed as a compact “little library” of short-form literature, each small-format volume (approximately 6–7 inches tall) is devoted to a specific theme, including Exile, Intellect, Tragedy, Life, Laughter, Love, Romance, Mystery, Comedy, Childhood, Heroism, Fortune, Narrative Poems, Lyrical Poems, Minor Poems, and Nature. The set gathers some of the most engaging short stories, sketches, essays, and poems by prominent 19th-century authors such as Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Washington Irving, Charles Dickens, and many others. Your copy is the desirable first edition in contemporary half red leather over marbled paper boards, a popular upgrade that gives the complete set a handsome, uniform appearance suitable for a Victorian home library. This attractively bound 1875 Osgood edition remains a charming example of 19th-century American literary taste and publishing.