“For backward or forward, eternity is the same; already have we been the nothing we dread to be.”
 
Mardi: and a Voyage Thither
Herman Melville
New York, 1849
 
Melville's third novel. First American edition, first printing. Publisher's blind-stamped brown cloth, spine gilt. 8 pages of ads in the rear of volume II as called for. Bindings a touch skewed, corners and spine ends lightly bumped, usual scattered foxing, endpapers discolored by binder’s glue, rear blank leaves excised from volume one and second rear blank leaf almost completely so from volume two - these excisions a seemingly common binder practice in this edition. Overall, a solid and bright Near Fine set.
 
'Presented as narratives of his own South Sea experiences, Melville's first two books had roused incredulity in many readers. Their disbelief, he declared, had been "the main inducement" in altering his plan for his third book, Mardi: and a Voyage Thither. Melville wanted to exploit the "rich poetical material" of Polynesia and also to escape feeling "irked, cramped, & fettered" by a narrative of facts. "I began to feel . . . a longing to plume my pinions for a flight," he told his English publisher.
 
Mardi began as a sequel to Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847), but changed radically while he was writing it and emerged as an altogether independent and original work. In its combination of adventure, allegorical romance, realistic portraits of characters and scenes from nature, philosophical speculation, and travelogue-satire, Mardi was Melville's first attempt to create a great work of fiction.' (Northwestern)
 
[Bibliography of American Literature, 13658]