Condition Continued: The frontispiece preceding the title page has a long tear, no loss, very clean. No foxing on any of these pages. All the early pages look very clean. There's only a small amount of mostly inconspicuous foxing at some of the plates white margins, as in one or two or three spots and then across the way on the facing text page, and sometimes on the text page facing the blank verso of the glossy plate, a few random text pages have a few spots as well. All in all, very, very light. The pages are exceptionally clean. I don't think I saw any soiling. I didn't see any conspicuous creasing, no placeholder creases. There aren't any markings. No attachments. Nothing anywhere was removed. NOT ex-library. And no one has written their name or anything else anywhere in the book. The book is quite solidly bound.The spine has only a slight forward lean. I don't think there are any cracks or spaces between any of the facing pages. The covers are nicely tight, no issues at their junctures. There are only a few of the 1897 first editions with original boards for sale on the Internet. This one is priced well below the least expensive of those, and mine appears to be in better shape than that one.

Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, 1897. Hardcover. Written by Edith Wharton and Ogden Codman, Jr. First Edition (SD). Very rare book. Original marble boards. Illustrated with 56 b&w plates. The Decoration of Houses was Wharton's first major published work. When she was 16, in 1878, her father had arranged for a collection of two dozen of her original poems along with five translations to be privately published. It was titled Verses. This book was her next published book. She was at work on a revised edition of The Decoration of Houses, when she suffered a heart attack in 1937. She died two months later. One seller says that there were only 200 copies of this original edition printed.

'Thousands of books on interior design have come and gone since the 1897 publication of this pioneering manual, but The Decoration of Houses remains, thanks to the insightful and inspiring advice of its co-authors. Before she became the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton was a society matron, remodeling a summer home in Newport, Rhode Island. With the able assistance of architect Ogden Codman, Jr., Wharton assembled this corrective to the rampant vulgarity of her nouveau riche neighbors. Wharton and Codman defied the excesses of the Gilded Age, counseling readers to reject the popular penchant for clutter in favor of simplicity and balance.

More than an engaging item of period charm, this historic guide offers examples of design rooted in architectural principles. Black-and-white photographs illustrate the authors' ideals of classic beauty, depicting grand ballrooms and spacious boudoirs as well as the elements common to homes of every size and era: doors and windows, walls and ceilings, floors, halls, and stairs. One of the genre's most important and influential titles, this volume sparked a Renaissance in American interior design, and its sound advice and practical approach remain forever in style.'