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Apparent First Edition (NAP). After the last page of the book there are two pages advertising two other of his novels, A Fools Errand (1879) and Bricks without Straw (1880). I don't know whether the latter was a coming attractions kind of ad, so some uncertainty on whether it's a first edition or not. One thing that is not uncertain, and the reason I have priced the book a little more expensively than a few others, is the very good condition of the book. You can see the covers in the photos. They are very clean. The gilt lettering on the spine is very bright. The inlaid designs are in excellent condition. The cover edges are in very good condition, parts of the bottom ones have a slight bit of color loss. The corners are in very good condition, with only tiny spots of light rubbing. There are two teeny tiny tears at the spine's top edge, and a sliver of loss/rubbing at part of its bottom edge. The spine does have a forward lean, but the binding of the book is very solid from cover to cover with nicely tight pages throughout and nicely tight covers as well. There are no binding issues anywhere. The inside covers and end papers, front and rear, are a light green. The front end paper has a small, thin tear at its middle edge, and a light crease off its bottom corner. The frontispiece is in excellent condition. It is protected by a tissue guard which is in very good condition, no tears. The pages are exceptionally clean. Scrolling through a number of times I saw only the half dozen to a dozen small spots of soiling. That's over 538 pages. So, very clean pages. There is also no foxing of any kind anywhere in the book. The top corner of page 47-48 has a little crease. That caused the shadow of a crease just below the top corners of a couple of pages before and after it. I didn't see any other conspicuous creasing, which is pretty impressive for book of this age and length. There is a small loss at the bottom corner of page 475-476. It does not reach the print. There are no markings in the book. There are no attachments of any kind. And no one has written their name or anything else anywhere. 'Albion Winegar Tourgée was an American soldier, lawyer, writer, politician, and diplomat. Wounded in the Civil War, he relocated to North Carolina afterward, where he became involved in Reconstruction activities. He served in the constitutional convention and later in the state legislature. A pioneer civil rights activist, he founded the National Citizens' Rights Association, and founded Bennett College as a normal school for freedmen in North Carolina (it has been a women's college since 1926). An ally of African Americans since his Civil War days, later in his career Tourgée was asked to aid a committee in New Orleans that was challenging segregation on railways in Louisiana, and he was appointed the lead attorney in the landmark Plessy v. Ferguson case. The committee was dismayed when the United States Supreme Court ruled that 'separate but equal' public facilities were constitutional; this enabled segregation for decades. Historian Mark Elliott credits Tourgée with introducing the metaphor of 'color blind justice' into legal discourse. Albion's first literary endeavor was the novel Toinette, written between 1868 and 1869 while he was living in North Carolina. It was not published until 1874, and then under the pseudonym Henry Churton.' Figs and Thistles appears to have been his third novel. Seller Inventory # 004987
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