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The rarest book in American literature: Poe's Tamerlane

My first personal encounter with the rarest book in American literature was memorable, even moving, for many reasons, but its physical appearance wasn’t one of them. If ever a book ought not to be …

The young poet, who’d left Richmond, Virginia, after dropping out of university when his foster father, John Allan, gave him insufficient funds to continue (Edgar had racked up gambling debts in a reckless attempt to make up the difference), may not have shared his identity with Thomas when the printer produced his “little volume” with its “many faults.” Indeed, Poe’s name is nowhere to be found in Tamerlane. As Sands removed it from its vintage Rivière & Son enclosure and passed it over to me, I commented that old-fashioned slipcases like this often held real treasures; that for a book to merit such fancy housing in an earlier era meant it’d been rare for a long time. If we read them literally out of their covers, write our thoughts in their margins, underline or smiley-face favorite passages, or even criticize the author (I own Angela Carter’s college copy of John Donne’s selected poems, in which she’s written “This is lousy, this last line”), they’re a dynamic presence in our lives.

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