Book
Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter was first printed and published by Ticknor, Reed, And Fields in 1850. It was also the first printed novel in the United States. It is a romance novel about seamstress’s “affair” with a minister and the events following the birth of their child, who was then socially shunned and stigmatized along with her mother. From its first publication to recent times, there have been many reincarnations of the book across different media, such as film or drawings.
The events of the novel take places in the 1640s in Boston, Massachusetts. The New England Colony society at the time was composed of Puritan dominant immigrants from the United Kingdom. The puritans emphasized on adhering to the strict moral and religious principles, and rejected Roman Catholic rituals, frowning upon the idolization and physical pleasures.
The 1850 first edition of the novel had a brown fine rib-grain cloth cover, with blind stamping on the front and back, the book title, author last name and publisher's name are stamped on the spine in gold. Comes with a clamshell box for storage. The copy seen in the photographs below are part of the collection at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto.