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No. 637 of 1650 copies. Very Good red-orange cloth-covered boards with gilt lettering on spine. Covers have faint dampstains on front and back, slight fraying to head and tail of spine, a few small bumps and slight wear to extremities, and faded gilt lettering, else clean and intact. Pages have offsetting on endpapers and light age toning, else clean and intact. A few illustrations, beautifully hand-colored in watercolor, included. A semi-fictionalized novella by American author Herman Melville (1819-1891) about Captain Amasa Delano and his encounter with a Spanish slave ship and its captain, Don Benito Cereno. Delano observes odd behavior by Cereno and does not realize until he departs that the slaves had revolted aboard Cereno's ship and taken over. Melville's inspiration for this novella was the real-life 1817 account of Delano in which he recorded his encounter with the slave ship Tryal which similarly had been taken over by slaves after they revolted. Back colophon: "The text of this edition of 'Benito Cereno,' illustrated by E. McKnight Kauffer, is reproduced from that of the first (1856) edition of 'The Piazza Tales.' It is printed in the Walbaum type with the pictures hand-coloured through stencils at the Curwen Press upon Van Gelder paper. This is No. 637 of 1650 copies printed for sale in England and America."
