by Samuel Smiles
First edition of the first major self-help book
London: John Murray, 1859. First edition. xii, 343, [5] pp. with four advertising pages at rear. Bound in publisher's maroon cloth with boards stamped in blind and spine stamped in gilt, tan coated endpapers. Very Good+, recased, sunned spine, moderate rubbing to covers and endpapers. Nineteenth century bookseller deboss to front free endpaper and twenty-first century bookseller ticket to front pastedown. Contents toned with some thumbing and staining, paper lift with minor loss to p. 192. PMM 346.
The grandfather of all self-help books and originator of the term used to describe them. Samuel Smiles was a Scottish writer and government reformer whose influential treatise on the importance of industry and self-reliance grew from a lecture he had first given to a mutual improvement society. The book sold 20,000 copies in its first year of publication and became known as "the bible of mid-Victorian liberalism." First editions are surprisingly scarce in the original cloth.