HIGHLIGHTS FROM ASH RARE BOOKS
ASH RARE BOOKS
43 HURON ROAD
LONDON SW17 8RE
UNITED KINGDOM

London : John Mortimer; Parry, Blenkarn & Co., 1844. First edition. Ainsworth at the height of his fame with a tale of political intrigue and power at the court of Queen Anne – the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough; Robert Harley, first Earl of Oxford; Henry St. John, first Viscount Bolingbroke, etc. “Many would have backed Ainsworth’s talent against Dickens’s in 1840” (John Sutherland).
Three volumes. Demy 12mo (188 x 111mm). viii,(300); iv,(296); iv,(384)pp. Frontispiece and two etched plates in each volume by George Cruikshank. Bound in a superb later (turn of the century) half crimson morocco, banded and gilt in a rose design, by Lucien Broca (1839-1910) of Soho – the finest finisher in London at this time; all edges gilt; marbled sides and endpapers; marbled sides just lightly rubbed; a couple of spots, but overall a fine, clean and handsome set. Contemporary circular white morocco book-labels of Alexander Lawson Duncan (1859-1917) of Chalfont Grove and Jordanstone House, Perthshire.

£750

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London : “The Field”, 1877. First edition. A presentation copy, inscribed, signed and dated (30th June 1877) by the author to Samuel Hoare (1841-1915), later Sir Samuel Hoare M.P., Harrow and Trinity (Cambridge), banker, parliamentarian and keen amateur cricketer with the Quidnuncs. One of the monuments of cricket literature – a highly influential account which in attempting to define, perhaps for the first time, the quintessential Englishness of cricket, contrived to make it not just a game, but a lasting repository of high-minded Victorian ideals and the ultimate sporting extension of a deeply-imbued sense of national identity. Box takes in turn the origins of ball-games; the Dark and Middle Ages; progress and development; rising popularity; the moral, social and physical attributes; chapters on each of the major counties; the public schools; the eastern counties; intercolonial matches (in North America and Australia); school and village cricket; curiosities; the grounds; the laws; the poems, songs and ballads; a glossary, and a postscript on Shakespeare and cricket.
Crown 4to (26cm). x,496pp. Plates, text illustrations, diagrams. Original decorative cloth gilt over bevelled boards; all edges gilt; some mainly minor wear to extremities; a few slight marks, but overall a much better than average copy of a difficult title. With the significant pictorial bookplate of A. E. Winder – Anthony Edward (Tony) Winder (1944-1991), legendary cricket collector, who acquired (inter alia) John Arlott’s library in 1979 and is himself the subject of a book by David Rayvern Allen, published in 2008.

£500

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London : Longmans, Green & Co., 1900. First edition. Churchill’s personal account of the early months of the Boer War and his extraordinary adventures in South Africa. A particularly interesting copy in having been annotated in pencil in numerous places by an eye-witness to a number of the military actions – at Spion Kop, etc. At one point the anonymous annotator identifies himself as the field officer of the East Surreys who pointed out to Churchill “an expansive bullet of a particularly cruel pattern” being used by the Boers. For the most part the officer accepts Churchill’s account – “Very well described. I watched all this”, etc. – adding and identifying a name here and there, but elsewhere he bluntly corrects with a “Wrong” and other tokens of disagreement.
Crown 8vo (187 x 121mm). xiv,498,[ii] + 32pp advertisements dated October 1899. Maps & plans (three folding, one coloured). Bound in an elegant recent half crimson morocco, banded and gilt; sprinkled edges; a few spots; a few slight creases; one corner missing, not affecting text, but overall a very good and interesting copy. Woods A4.

£850

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London : Methuen & Co., (1911). First edition. “The man who says he has no illusions has at least that one” – Conrad with his classic of terrorism, set variously in St. Petersburg and Geneva and published 5th October 1911. “Any hesitation seems to lie, not in over-estimating, but in doing justice to the rare truth and beauty of Mr. Conrad’s latest book. No Englishman could have written it” (The Sketch, 25th October 1911).
Crown 8vo (20cm). [viii],(378) + (32)pp advertisements dated September 1911. Original red cloth, lettered and decorated in gilt; just a touch sunned; a hint of bruising; mild tanning of endpapers, but a very good copy. With the pictorial bookplate, designed by Oswald Tozeau, of Brand Whitlock (1869-1934), American author, journalist, lawyer and politician.

£400

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London : Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, 1830. First British edition. Alida de Barbérie is abducted by pirates – the brigantine “Water Witch” is pursued by Captain Ludlow. Set in and around the still half-Dutch New York of the early eighteenth century – the press was unanimous: “the mystery of the story, and the life and spirit of his characters, have, indeed, seldom been equalled, and is nowhere surpassed” (Morning Chronicle) – “Cooper, the American novelist, has no living superior” (The Scotsman). Precedes the American edition by two months, although a slightly earlier edition published in Dresden is known in a handful of copies.
Three volumes. Demy 12mo (188 x 114mm). viii,(322); [ii],316; [ii],308pp. Bound, without the advertisement leaves, in a smart contemporary half blue-green calf, banded and gilt; red labels; marbled sides; sprinkled edges; a few internal marks and spots, but still overall an excellent set. With the contemporary armorial bookplate in each volume of the colourful William Edward Powell (1788-1854), Member of Parliament and Lord Lieutenant of Cardiganshire, and the later bookplate of the well-known collector Robert James Hayhurst (1929-2016) in the first volume.

£750

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London : Chapman & Hall, 1840-1841. First edition, in book form, bound from the original parts, of both “The Old Curiosity Shop” and “Barnaby Rudge” – “Master Humphrey” was never reprinted, and even unsold copies were cannibalised (within weeks of issue) to make separate books of the two titles we know today. “I am conscious that my pen winces a little even while I write these words. But it was done, and wisely done; and ‘Master Humphrey’s Clock’, as originally constructed, became one of the lost books of the earth, – which, we all know, are far more precious than any that can be read for love or money” (Charles Dickens, in 1848). A specimen wrapper from both the weekly and monthly issue of the parts is preserved at the rear of each volume.
Three volumes, bound in two. Royal 8vo (252 x 164mm). [2],iv,306; vi,306; vi,426pp. Frontispieces and illustrations by George Cattermole, Hablot Knight Browne (“Phiz”), etc. Bound in an elegant mid-Victorian half tan polished calf, banded and gilt; marbled sides and edges; very faintly rubbed; a few very minor signs of age and use; rear hinge of the thicker volume with neat internal reinforcement; a very good, crisp and handsome set.

£750

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London : Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, 1831. First edition. Disraeli’s intriguing early novel of high society – “all rings, ringlets, and a little rouge” – a wastrel redeemed by the love of a good woman, etc., but also the novel in which we first see the evolution of Disraeli’s politics and what was soon to become his particular brand of one-nation conservatism.
Three volumes. Medium 12mo (195 x 115mm). iv,300; [ii],(270),[ii]; [ii],(266)pp. Bound, without the half-titles to vols ii & iii and a final advertisement leaf, in an elegant, slightly later, half blue-black morocco, banded and gilt; top edges gilt; marbled sides and endpapers; some rubbing, slight scuffing and mild wear; a couple of short splits; internally some occasional faint marks and mild tanning, but overall a very good and handsome set. With the nautical bookplate of the collector and pharmacist Robert James Hayhurst (1929-2016) in the first volume. Sadleir 738.

£750

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London : T. Fisher Unwin, 1901. First edition. Beyond the early pamphlets and offprints, Douglas’s first book and his first venture into fiction. He later claimed that just eight copies were sold – a slight exaggeration, but close on 600 copies of the original 750 were still unsold in 1903 and almost certainly pulped. Contains fifteen short stories (including “Elfwater”, “Nocturne”, “The Devil’s Oak”, and “Belladonna”) as well as the fantasy femme fatale novella “Nerinda”, most of the former written in collaboration with his then wife, Elsa Fitzgibbon (1876-1916).
Crown 8vo (185 x 122mm). (viii),(248)pp. Bound in a most attractive mid twentieth-century full red morocco, banded and gilt, by William Root & Son of London; top edge gilt; red silk marker; original pictorial cloth upper cover preserved at rear; a few very minor signs of age and use; a few faint spots, but overall a very good copy in a fine binding.

£400

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Edinburgh & London : William Blackwood & Sons, [ca.1890]. New edition. A handsome standard set of the novels – “Adam Bede”, “The Mill on the Floss”, “Silas Marner”, “The Lifted Veil”, “Brother Jacob”, “Scenes of Clerical Life”, “Felix Holt”, “Romola”, “Middlemarch” and “Daniel Deronda”.
Eight volumes. Crown 8vo (188 x 122mm). Bound in a beautiful turn-of-the-century art-nouveau half blue morocco, banded and richly gilt in a floral design with red onlays; top edges gilt; marbled endpapers; mild tanning of endpapers, but an exquisite set.

SOLD

London : Chatto & Windus, 1909. First edition. Dr Thorndyke, first of the modern forensic detectives, here appearing in eight stories, including “The Anthropologist at Large” and “The Blue Sequin”. Introduced in Freeman’s preface as “a somewhat new departure in this class of literature” — as indeed it was, with illustrations to back up the forensics. A Haycraft-Queen “cornerstone” of detective fiction.
Crown 8vo (20cm). (xii),288pp + 32pp inserted catalogue dated September 1908. Ten plates — six atmospheric studies by Henry Matthew Brock (1875-1960) and four “micro-photographs” of the evidentiary specimens. Plan. Facsimiles. Original pictorial cloth; a few faint marks; some very mild rubbing and wear; endpapers lightly tanned, but a very good copy of a major contribution to the field.

£400

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London : for the Proprietors, by William Clarke; J. Murray; S. Bagster [and others], 1815-1818. First edition. A charming compilation, originally published in monthly parts, bringing images and descriptions of out of the way architecture and antiquities throughout England, Wales and Scotland. The images, many of them the earliest known of the various towns, buildings and architectural features, were supplied by an array of local and travelling artists, including principally John Hassell, George Arnald, Frederick Wilton Litchfield Stockdale, Luke Clennell and William Deeble – the plates engraved by Greig himself, some from his own designs, as well as Thomas Higham, Edward John Roberts, William Wallis, John Charles Varrall, Deeble himself and numerous others. Although generally ascribed to Greig’s former partner, the artist and engraver James Sargant Storer, Storer was by now working with his son on other projects – his name appears nowhere in the credits and the work would appear undoubtedly to be Greig’s, he himself engraving around one third of the plates. The engraved plates are supplemented by hundreds of anonymous but exquisitely worked head and tailpieces giving further detail.
Seven volumes. Foolscap 8vo (157 x 99mm). 336 engraved plates. Head and tailpieces. Bound in a stylish nineteenth-century half tan calf, banded and richly gilt; burgundy labels; marbled sides; sprinkled edges; some minor rubbing; a few faint signs of age and use; some browning and spotting, but a very pretty set. Ownership inscription of J. Atkins in each volume.

£500

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London : Sampson Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1882. First edition : one of 1,000 copies of the first issue text, before the corrections made for the virtually identical second impression. One of Hardy’s most original, interesting and controversial novels – a Wessex tale of star-crossed lovers in which he aimed “to make science, not the mere padding of a romance, but the actual vehicle of romance”.
Three volumes. Crown 8vo (185 x 122mm). [iv],246,[ii]; [iv],240; [iv],(224)pp. Bound, complete with half-titles, in a very attractive later (early twentieth-century) full tan morocco, banded and extra gilt, by Birdsall; original cloth preserved at rear; top edges gilt; marbled endpapers; a couple of faint scuffs; a few internal faint creases and small flaws; endpapers lightly tanned, but a very handsome set. Purdy pp.41-47. Sadleir 1116. Wolff 2996.

£1,500

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London : Macmillan & Co., 1887. First edition : one of just 860 copies in the primary binding. The story of Grace Melbury, the faithful Giles Winterborne, and the faithless Edred Fitzpiers. Controversial for its time, but “his loveliest if not his finest book” (Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch) and “the most beautiful and most noble of Hardy’s novels” (William Lyon Phelps) – and indeed Hardy’s own favourite – “On taking up ‘The Woodlanders’ and reading it after many years, I like it as a story best of all”.
Three volumes. Crown 8vo (20cm). [iv],302,[ii]; [iv],328; [iv],316pp. Original holly-green cloth, ruled in black and lettered in gilt; a touch dulled; lightly worn at extremities; endpapers strained at hinges (two with neat repair); vol. i. recased and tightened; vols ii and iii a little shaken and slack; a handful of minor flaws, but a good set. Purdy pp.54-57.

£1,500

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London : Chatto & Windus, 1939. First edition. Household, “a discriminating hedonist, well versed in the pleasures of the table and the bed” as Michael Barber in ODNB has it, with his most famous and enduring novel – a laconic English sportsman sets out to bag “the biggest game on earth” – a Hitleresque dictator bent on the perversion of civilisation. Nominated at least once as “the best manhunt book in history”. Filmed as “Man Hunt” by Fritz Lang in 1941, with Walter Pidgeon, Joan Bennett, George Sanders, etc., and again by Clive Donner in 1976, with Peter O’Toole, John Standing, Alastair Sim, Harold Pinter, etc.
Crown 8vo (177 x 113mm). [vi],(272)pp. Bound in a stylish recent full black morocco, banded and gilt; to edge gilt; a few small internal marks and spots, but otherwise a very good copy.

£750

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London : by J. Streater, for Henry Twiford, George Sawbridge, Thomas Dring, and John Place, 1657. First edition. One of the earliest printed histories of London, second only to the early editions of Stow in terms of chronology. Compiled by the versatile and engaging Welsh author, royalist, politician and traveller, James Howell, after his release from a lengthy imprisonment at the time of the Interregnum. With accounts of St. Paul’s and the other ancient churches; the individual wards and precincts; the governance of the City; the walls, streets, gates and prisons; the Inns of Court; the twelve great livery companies; the company halls; the Tower, the Royal Exchange, the Guildhall and other prominent buildings; the Thames; London Bridge; the mayoralty; the city of Westminster and the Abbey; the Strand; Covent Garden; Lincoln’s Inn; Westminster Hall; Parliament, the Admiralty, etc.
Pott folio (270 x 166mm). [x],1-128,301-(408),[viii]pp – collates as institutional copies and complete despite the lacuna in pagination. Engraved portrait frontispiece and a very handsome double-page panoramic view of London from the south, frequently attributed to Wenceslas Hollar and depicting the city on the eve of the Civil War. Bound in a smart recent full calf; red label; repairs to margins of frontispiece and titlepage, not affecting image or text; minor repairs to dedication leaf, with partial loss of a few letters; panoramic view trimmed tight and just within left-hand neatline; text lightly and unevenly browned, with occasional spotting, but a good and servicable copy, attractively rebound. Ownership inscription (1760) of Isaac Hitchcock – possibly Isaac Hitchcock (1724?-1768) of Bildeston, Suffolk – with occasional annotation of similar date relating to the taking down of the old gates, etc.

£1,000

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London : Faber & Faber, (1957). First edition : [one of 2,000 copies]. His uncommon first book — a collection of forty poems, dedicated to Sylvia Plath, whom he had married the previous year. An attractive association copy — the review copy sent to fellow poet Roy Fuller (1912-1991), with the publishers’ review slip, Fuller’s pencilled notes on the reverse of the slip, and his inked ownership inscription. Fuller’s review appeared in the “London Magazine” in January 1958.
Demy 8vo (23cm). [ii],(60),[ii]pp. Original blue cloth, lettered in yellow; a very good copy in the Berthold Wolpe dust-jacket — also very good, with some minimal restoration to tips. Sagar A1.

£500

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London : Rainbow Press, (1976). First edition : one of just twenty-six lettered copies (of 226) printed for the author’s personal use and signed by Ted Hughes. A collection of thirty-one poems, designed and printed on hand-made paper by Sebastian Carter at the Rampant Lions Press in Cambridge. The ten illustrations, printed in blue, are by Ted Hughes himself.
Pott 4to (14cm). [iv],(66),[ii]pp. Illustrations. Original slate-blue Japanese paper boards, lettered in silver, with a cork roundel onlay; faint and tiny spot to rear endpaper, but a very good copy indeed in the original matching slip-case. Sagar A48 – noting that the compilers had not seen any of the twenty-six lettered copies.

£500

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London : Smith, Elder & Co., 1847. First edition. A sparkling collection of Hunt’s essays for the magazines – Hunt on fact and fiction; inside an omnibus; a visit to the zoo; beds and bedrooms; the world of books; a few remarks on the rare vice called lying; female beauty; statesmen-poets; English queens; social morality in Suckling and Jonson; the other side of Alexander Pope; the beneficence of bookstalls; bookbinding; British poetesses; Lady Mary Wortley Montagu; Pepys in Tangier; Madame de Sévigné – and much else.
Two volumes. Post 8vo (195 x 121mm). (xii),324; (x),358pp. Portrait frontispiece. Bound, without the inserted advertisements sometimes found, in a delightful later (early twentieth-century) full emerald green crushed morocco, banded and extra gilt in an ivy design, by William Worsfold (1856-1929) of Soho; boards and turn-ins ruled and gilt in an extension of the design; top edges gilt; original pink cloth preserved at rear; spines just a touch darkened; a few minor internal marks and spots, but overall a very handsome set. Armorial bookplate of the book-collector Charles Waterman Armour (1857-1927) in each volume, and discreet bookseller’s stamp of G. P. Putnam’s Sons.

SOLD

London : Richard Bentley, 1837. First edition. A superb account of the celebrated expeditionary explorations of the Far West by Captain Benjamin Louis Eulalie de Bonneville (1796-1878) – the Oregon Trail, the Snake River, Hell’s Canyon, the Bear River, the California Trail, etc. Bonneville met Irving in New York in 1835 and subsequently sold him his maps and notes to frame the narrative. Precedes the Philadelphia edition of the same year, which was published as “The Rocky Mountains”.
Three volumes. Crown 8vo (187 x 113mm). [ii],(304); [ii],292; [ii],302pp. Bound in a handsome contemporary half straight-grain morocco, richly gilt; marbled sides; sprinkled edges; some minor rubbing; a sprinkling of spots, but an excellent set. With the bookplate of the distinguished twentieth-century book-collector Robert James Hayhurst (1929-2016).

£500

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London : Tinsley Brothers, 1877. First edition : in the primary binding. “The leading idea in the tale is this: at Birmingham there is an immense property without an owner, and two years ago over 100 claimants from America and other countries held a family council there ... Something similar (under different names of localities etc.) forms the nucleus of my novel which shows how this vast property influences the lives of many people” (Jefferies in a letter of July 1876). His rare third novel, intended to appeal to lovers of the sensational in the style of Wilkie Collins — “He certainly succeeds in seizing on his reader’s attention from the first start, and his story, with all its faults, is never for a moment dull or trivial” (The Graphic, 25th August 1877).
Three volumes. Crown 8vo (20cm). [iv],(250),[ii]; [iv],278; [iv],(290)pp. Original dove-grey cloth, lettered in gilt, and ruled and blocked in black and gilt; spines a little darkened; a little rubbed; some slight splash-marks and faint spots; two endpapers a little cracked; a little shaken in places; a few minor internal marks and small flaws, but overall a good set of a notable rarity — ranked by Sadleir as the scarcest of all Jefferies’ novels.

£750

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London : Sampson Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1882. First edition : in the variant green (a) binding – Miller & Matthews (B15) make a persuasive case for regarding these slightly taller copies in green as having appeared earlier than the regular copies in brown. Jefferies and his haunting evocation of a Wiltshire childhood – “where there was magic in everything, blades of grass and stars, the sun and the stones upon the ground”.
Three volumes. Crown 8vo (180 x 119mm). viii,(288); iv,294,[ii]; iv,294,[ii]pp. Original decorative green cloth, blocked in black and gilt, and lettered in gilt; patterned endpapers; a few very minor signs of age and use; some occasional spotting to prelims and edges, but an excellent set. W. H. Smith blind-stamp to front free endpaper of the first volume.

£1,000

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New York : Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1951. First edition. His first and most famous novel, based on his own army experiences in the months before the attack on Pearl Harbor, which he witnessed. An immediate success, winner of the National Book Award, always included in lists of the major novels of the twentieth century, and the basis of the memorable and multiple Oscar-winning 1953 film, with Burt Lancaster, Deborah Kerr, Montgomery Clift, Frank Sinatra, etc.
Demy 8vo (207 x 136mm). [xii],(862)pp. Bound in an elegant recent half black morocco, by Bayntun-Riviere; top edge gilt; marbled sides and endleaves; very faint crease to the final leaves, but otherwise an excellent copy, clean and sound.

£400

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London : for Longman, Hurst, Rees & Orme, 1808. First edition. Lamb’s hugely influential rediscovery of the Elizabethans and Jacobeans, many of these specimens of their work culled from “plays which are to be found only in the British Museum and in some scarce private libraries” – Francis Beaumont, George Chapman, Thomas Decker, John Fletcher, John Ford, Fulke Greville, Ben Jonson, Thomas Kyd, Christopher Marlowe, John Marston, Philip Massinger, Thomas Middleton, George Peele, Cyril Tourneur, John Webster, and many more – “the most striking anthology perhaps ever made from English literature” (Edmund Blunden).
Crown 8vo (185 x 113mm). xii,484pp. Bound, without half-title, in a very handsome later (early twentieth century) full blue crushed morocco, banded and richly gilt, by Robert Riviere & Son; all edges gilt; inner gilt dentelles; marbled endleaves; some very minor rubbing and a hint of bruising, but a very good copy.

£500

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London : William Heinemann, (1960). First British edition. The celebrated Pulitzer Prize winner, voted “best novel of the century” in a 1999 poll.
Post 8vo (21cm). 296pp. Original maroon boards, lettered in silver; a few faint marks and minimal signs of age and use, but a very good copy in the original Fratini dust-jacket, just faintly spotted on lower panel with a couple of tiny nicks, but also very good.

£750

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London : Geoffrey Bles, (1950). First edition. Illustrations and colour frontispiece by Pauline Baynes. The first and best-known of the Narnia chronicles.
Post 8vo (198 x 130mm). (174)pp. Coloured frontispiece. Illustrations. Bound, without final blank, in an elegant recent full green morocco, banded and gilt; a few very minor marks and spots, but a very good copy.

£1,250

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London : Saunders & Otley, 1836. First edition. Marryat’s amiable and abidingly popular tale of the making of a seaman – although as one modern critic has it, “there’s something here to offend almost everyone”. Contemporary critics found it “a work of great power and surpassing beauty, sufficient of itself to have established his reputation as a man of genius” (London Courier, 19th December 1836).
Three volumes. Demy 12mo (186 x 112mm). (viii),(292); (viii),306; viii,314pp. Bound, without half-titles and advertisement leaves, in a neat contemporary half tan calf, banded and gilt; red labels; marbled sides, edges and endleaves; just a touch sunned; a few faint signs of age and use, but a very good and sound set. With the contemporary armorial bookplates of John Wingfield (1769-1862) of Onslow, Sheriff of Shropshire and Mayor of Shrewsbury, in each volume – and the more recent nautical bookplate of the notable collector Robert James Hayhurst (1929-2016).

£500

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London : Macmillan & Co., 1877. A standard edition of the poetry, printed on india paper and published in Macmillan’s “Globe Edition” series. Bound in 1883 in a very handsome binding, with fore-edge painting, for the Cambridge scholar-bookseller Robert Bowes (1835-1919) as a gift for his wife Fanny Bowes (1831-1903) on her birthday in June of that year. Inscribed and initialled by Bowes with his wife’s name and the date — with a further later inscription in a different hand commemorating her death in 1903. With Bowes’ personal “Quod Vis Potes” bookplate bound in. Bowes was a nephew of the publisher Alexander Macmillan (1818-1896) and his partner in the Cambridge bookshop of “Macmillan & Bowes”, while his wife Fanny Bowes was Macmillan’s sister-in-law. Sold together with the companion edition of “Poetical Works of Walter Scott” (1878), bound to match and evidently part of the original gift.
Two volumes. Foolscap 8vo (174 x 115mm). (xii),(626); (xliv),(560)pp. Bound in handsome full citron morocco, banded and extra gilt; all edges gilt; hand-painted endleaves in a design of tulips for Milton and thistles for Scott, the designs repeated in concealment beneath the gilt of the fore-edges and only revealed when the pages are fanned open; spines a little darkened and with some minor rubbing, but otherwise in very good order and an extremely rare example of a personalised binding of this type.

For more on these bindings, see my Bookhunter on Safari blog-post of 5th June 2020.

£1,000

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London : G. & W. B. Whittaker / Geo. B. Whittaker / Whittaker, Treacher & Co., 1824-1832. First edition. A complete first edition set of the five-volume series of her much-loved and most famous work – sharp, affectionate, precise and amused sketches of village life in Regency England – “Our landlord has a stirring wife, a hopeful son, and a daughter, the belle of the village; not so pretty as the fair nymph of the shoe-shop, and far less elegant, but ten times as fine; all curl-papers in the morning, like a porcupine, all curls in the afternoon, like a poodle, with more flounces than curl-papers, and more lovers than curls ...”. Walks in the Country, A Country Cricket-Match, A Christmas Party, Christmas Amusements, The Mole-Catcher, Children of the Village, The Cribbage Players, and so much more.
Five volumes. Crown 8vo (180 x 108mm). viii,292; vii[i],(312); viii,315,[i]; viii,345,[i]; iv,362pp. Bound, without half-titles and advertisement leaves, in a smart twentieth-century half tan calf, banded and gilt, for Sotheran; contrasting red and green labels; top edges gilt; a few minor marks and spots; the very occasional crease; mild offsetting in one volume; one leaf with tiny repair, but overall a very good set. With the nautical bookplate of George G. Stevenson in each volume. Sadleir 1752.

£1,000

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Bath : Old School Press, 2001. First edition : one of twenty copies (of 230) reserved in sheets for binders and signed by both Andrew Motion and the illustrator, Simon Brett. Four extended poems from the then Poet Laureate, delicately hand-printed on Magnani paper, illustrated with evocative and atmospheric wood-engravings by Simon Brett.
Post 4to (271 x 190mm). [48]pp. Four wood-engraved illustrations. Bound in black morocco, with delicately shaded pale morocco onlays, in an exquisite designer binding by Kate Holland, winner of the 2006 Mansfield Medal and First Prize for Best Book in the annual Designer Binders competition – the present binding dating from the same period; delicately marbled edges and endpapers; the binding housed in its original velvet-lined black cloth box, decorated with a crescent moon. A fine copy of a beautiful book.

£2,000

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London : Hutchinson & Co. (Publishers) / Jonathan Cape, (1960-1964). A first edition set of her scandalous trilogy – the separately published “The Country Girls” (1960) – Irish girls in black underwear, banned in Ireland, publicly burnt by her parish priest in Tuamgraney – “By turns beautiful and bawdy, funny and haunting ... often referred to as the quintessential tale of Irish girlhood, it is not the novel that broke the mould: it is the one that made it” (Eimear McBride); “The Lonely Girl” (1962) – filmed in 1964 as “The Girl With Green Eyes”, with Rita Tushingham, Lynn Redgrave, Peter Finch, etc. – and the darker concluding volume set in London, “Girls in Their Married Bliss” (1964).
Three volumes. Post & crown 8vo (21 & 20cm). (224); (254),[ii]; 190,[ii]pp. Original boards (black, mauve, blue); a few faint marks; some mild spotting to the endpapers of the first volume and edges of the second, but very good copies in the original pictorial dust-jackets by Jillian Willett, Hofbauer and David Fawcett respectively – the jackets with some minor rubbing and a couple of nicks, the back panel of the second a little splashed, but complete and overall also very good. Ownership stamp of the Raffin Stud, Castletown, County Meath, in the second volume.

£750

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London : Milestone, (1953). First edition. “The missing negatives were important right enough – a photographic record of the archives the Crime Commission had prepared for their next strike at the underworld ... Perrelli at the peak of his ability to chill and to thrill”. Although the “Nick Perrelli” house-name was used by various authors, American copyright records note this title as the work of George H. Dawson.
Crown 8vo (19cm). (128)pp. Original pictorial stapled wrappers; some minor wear and creasing; a few spots, but a very good copy of a scarce title. No copy located in any major library worldwide.

£125

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London : James Reynolds, 1846-1850. An attractive assemblage of eighteen of the well-known series of educational cards published by James Reynolds of the Strand, contained within the original Reynolds folder. Ranging somewhat beyond the subjects noted on the cover, twelve of the cards were drawn and engraved by John Emslie (1813-1875) – and four – “Comparative Magnitudes of the Planets”, “Transparent Chart of the Heavens”, “Transparent Diagram of the Phases of the Moon”, and “Transparent Solar System”, are constructed with cut-outs and translucent paper so that when held to the light the image becomes brightly illuminated. The remaining cards (undated except where noted) comprise “The Sun and Solar Phenomena”; “Eclipses / The Theory of the Tides”; “The Theory of the Seasons”; “Comets and Aerolites”; “Geographical Diagram of the Earth Adapted for Illustrating its Movements” (with two hemispherical volvelles); “Popular Geology” (1849) and a “Geological Map of England” (1849); “Waterfalls” (1846) and a “Panoramic Plan of the Principal Rivers and Lakes”; “The Stream of History” (1850) in two cards, showing the rise and fall of empires, post and pre-Christianity; a “Comparative View of the Principal Buildings in the World” (1850); an ethnographic card of “The Principal Varieties of Mankind” (1850), and a card of “The Antediluvian World” (1849), with early representations and reconstructions of prehistoric birds and animals from fossil remains. All the cards have clearly written explanatory text.
Medium 4to (29cm) – the cards individually each approx. 29 x 23cm (11-1/4” x 9”). Eighteen cards, mainly engraved on steel, all with original hand colour. The folder very lightly worn at tips; the individual cards with a few minor marks, spots and slight signs of handling and use; one volvelle a little loose, but overall a very good and attractive selection.

SOLD

London : Faber & Gwyer / Faber & Faber, (1928-1936). A first edition set of the three separately published volumes — “This is fiction, but with a difference — for the author, who wishes at present to remain anonymous, has himself lived the life of a hero” — the first two volumes were published anonymously, the first in an edition of just 1,500 copies. “The most satisfying piece of autobiography to be published in our time. All the equipment of a novelist is Sassoon’s. But what novel could equal in fascination this true story? The three books give him a place unique in English letters” (Howard Spring in the Evening Standard, 3rd September 1936).
Three volumes. Crown 8vo (183 x 113mm). (396),[iv]; 334,[ii]; 280pp. Bound, without one initial blank leaf, in a handsome recent full navy crushed morocco, banded and gilt; all edges gilt; a couple of tiny marks; mild tanning of outer leaves in one volume, but a very good set.

£1,500

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London : Charles Knight & Co., [1838-1843]. The first Charles Knight edition. Comprises two volumes each of the comedies, histories and tragedies, as well as the poems, a volume of seventeen doubtful plays sometimes ascribed to Shakespeare (or Shakspere, as Knight insists on having it), together with commendatory verses, a history of critical opinion, material on Shakespeare in Germany, indexes, and a final volume of Knight’s full-length biography. All furnished with introductory notices, notes, variant readings, a glossary, music to the songs, etc. – and profusely illustrated throughout by the leading wood-engravers of the day from the designs of William Harvey (1796-1866) and others. Using the latest technology, Charles Knight (1791-1873) was in the vanguard of bringing the price of books within everyday reach and bringing education and edification in their train with the use of copious illustration – here insisting on illustrations of “the realities upon which the imagination of the poet must have rested ... the localities ... the portraits of the real personages ... accurate costume in all its rich variety”.
Eight volumes. Royal 8vo (240 x 159mm). Pictorial title-pages, profuse vignettes and decorations throughout. Bound in a handsome contemporary full polished plum calf, banded and gilt; silk ribbons; some minor rubbing; a few scratches; a few front endpapers slightly split, but still firm; a handful of minor marks, but a very good, overall very clean and sound set of a tour-de-force of early Victorian publishing. Contemporary bookplates of William Payne to each volume – possibly the nineteenth-century actor William Payne (1804-1878), who carried Edmund Kean from the stage when he fell terminally ill in his last ever performance (Othello at Covent Garden in 1833).

£1,000

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London : for J. Dodsley, J. Johnson, G. G. J. and J. Robinson, T. Cadell, J. Murray [and others], 1793. A handsome early collected edition of Sterne, comprising “Tristram Shandy”, “A Sentimental Journey”, three volumes of sermons and two of letters, as well as “A Fragment in the Manner of Rabelais” and “The History of a Watch-Coat”, together with his own memoir of his life and family.
Ten volumes. Crown 8vo (175 x 112mm). Engraved portraits of both Sterne and his daughter Lydia, his daughter shown sitting beside the Nollekens bust of her father, engraved by James Caldwall from a painting by Benjamin West. Plates. Marbled leaf. Bound in a most attractive contemporary tree calf, prettily gilt and with contrasting red and green labels; lemon edges; some minor rubbing, a few slight marks and minor signs of age and use, but overall a very good and clean set with an attractive provenance. From the library of Fasque Castle, with the Fasque bookplates and ownership inscriptions, dated Liverpool 1798, of (Sir) John Gladstone (1764-1851). Gladstone was the father of William Ewart Gladstone (1809-1898) and this set would have formed part of the household furniture among which the four-times prime minister grew up. For more on Fasque Castle, see my Bookhunter on Safari blog-post of 10th May 2012.

£750

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London : The Sunday Referee and The Parton Bookshop, (1934). First edition : just 500 copies were printed, this copy being one of the second batch of 250 to be bound, with an additional inserted leaf bearing [February 1936] advertisements. The most remarkable debut in all twentieth-century English-language poetry – written before and published just weeks after Thomas’s twentieth birthday and already containing several of his greatest poems – “I See the Boys of Summer in Their Ruin”, “The Force that Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower”, “Where Once the Waters of Your Face”, etc.
Demy 8vo (23cm). [2],[ii],[3]-36,[iv]pp. Original black cloth with rounded back, lettered up spine in Dutch gilt; very slightly rubbed and a touch dulled; some spotting to endpapers and outer leaves, but a good and sound copy in the rare original dust-jacket – the jacket also with a sprinkling of spots, but barring a couple of short nicks and a slight crease, in very good state. A loosely inserted press-cutting of a 1953 obituary notice remarks that the book’s “impact was immediate and profound ... this poet had created an idiom ... he had disturbed the roots of our language”.

£1,000

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London : Richard Bentley, 1858 [but 1857]. First edition. “The best of the new novels. The author has left Barchester Cloisters and now finds his way into the civil service, upon which he has ideas as strong as those he has expressed about ecclesiastical endowments ... unusually good, and the character-painting ... excellent” (The Examiner, 19th December 1857). Trollope regarded it as “certainly the best novel I had as yet written” – notable also for what he regarded as his first successful love scene and the first appearance of Chaffanbrass.
Three volumes. Demy 12mo (181 x 111mm). iv,340; iv,322; iv,334pp. Bound in a neat, early twentieth-century, half blue calf, banded and gilt; marbled endpapers; sprinkled edges; some very minor rubbing and bruising; internally a little thumbed, with small marks, some creases, and very occasional annotation and underlining, but a good set of a scarce early title, most of the original 1,000 copies being intended for library lending. Sadleir 6.

£750

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London : Chapman & Hall, 1862. First edition, in book form, bound up from the original monthly instalments published between March 1861 and October 1862. Wills, codicils, property, family and love – “The plot of ‘Orley Farm’ is probably the best I have ever made ... I do not know that there is a dull page ... especially proud of its illustrations by Millais, which are the best I have seen in any novel in any language” (Trollope).
Two volumes. Demy 8vo (209 x 130mm). viii,320; viii,320pp. Forty stylish plates after Sir John Everett Millais (1829-1896). Bound, without half-titles, in a handsome turn-of-the-century half chestnut crushed morocco, banded and gilt, by Morrell – the bindery at this time headed by William John Morrell (1865-1957); top edges gilt; marbled sides and endpapers; just a hint of rubbing and mild wear; a touch bruised; some occasional spotting, but a very good set. With the armorial bookplates of the Hon. Henry Lloyd Gibbs (1861-1907), well-to-do City merchant, who died the day after his father, Lord Aldenham, in September 1907.

£750

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London : Chapman & Hall, 1882. First edition. An uncommon late Trollope title – love, marriage, politics and class divisions. Lady Frances Trafford falls for a post-office clerk, her brother, Lord Hampstead, pays court to Marion Fay, a humble Quaker.
Three volumes. Crown 8vo (182 x 115mm). viii,(304); viii,282; viii,(272)pp. Bound, with half-titles but without the final blank in vol.ii, in an elegant later (mid twentieth-century) half red morocco by Sangorski & Sutcliffe; top edges gilt; internally some occasional light thumbing and spotting, but a very good set. Bookseller’s label of Henry Sotheran Ltd. in vol.i. Sadleir 64.

£750

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London : J. Wallis, 1796. First edition : a reissue of the original edition, with the slip-case here dated 1802. An attractive and instructive table-game, comprising a double-hemisphere map of the world, marked out with the track of a round-the-world voyage – from Portsmouth back to London, via Iceland, Europe, Africa, Asia, the Americas, and then home via New Zealand, risking shipwreck and being removed from the game in the Straits of Magellan, to the South Atlantic and the Azores. One hundred stops are marked out for the players to move their markers at the dictates of a teetotum, and the letterpress rules appended below the map give brief geographical notes to educate and inform the young players – “32. Tripoly – a republic of Africa, on the Mediterranean Sea, famous for their piracies”. Engraved for Wallis by Stephen Cooke (1768-1854) of Fetter Lane.
Copper etching and line engraving on paper, with letterpress addition. Printed surface 48 x 61.5cm (approx. 19” x 24-1/4”). Original hand colour. Dissected, mounted on linen, and folding into the original slip-case, with an engraved label; the game lightly used and thumbed, with slight fraying to one edge; the marbled slip-case a little rubbed and worn, but in good order for a scarce and ephemeral item of this type. From the collection of the bookseller Percy H. Muir (1894-1979): the map was exhibited in his 1946 “Children’s Books of Yesterday” exhibition held at Albemarle Street (No. 188 in the Catalogue) and tucked inside the slip-case is the original exhibition caption-card.

SOLD

London : J. & C. Brown & Co., 1856. First edition. The very first appearance in fiction of a Scotland Yard detective – stories by “Waters”’ of the Yard, the narrator invented by journalist William Russell – the very first English detective stories. Originally published in Chambers’ Edinburgh Journal between 1849 and 1852, with some of the stories appearing in book form in New York in 1852, the present publication is the first appearance of all eleven, with a final twelfth tale not previously published.
Foolscap 8vo (18cm). (310)pp. Wood-engraved frontispiece, engraved by George Measom (1818-1901), later knighted for his charitable work. Original pictorial boards, a dramatic yellowback design in red and black; rebacked with a neat paper spine replacing the fragile lost original; some rubbing and wear; internally a few small marks, spots and slight creases, but overall an attractive copy of a cornerstone of the genre.

£1,000

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London : Duckworth & Co., (1919). First edition : [one of 2,000 copies printed]. Her second novel – an intriguing exploration of contemporary mores – love, marriage, happiness and success.
Crown 8vo (188 x 119mm). [iv],538,[ii]pp. Bound in a smart recent full blue-black morocco, banded, gilt and worked in blind; top edge gilt; marbled endpapers; a few minor internal marks and tiny creases, but a very attractive copy with a custom-made slip-case. Kirkpatrick A4a.

£750

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London : Macmillan & Co., 1933. First edition : [one of 2,000 copies]. A collection of over sixty poems, some of which had previously appeared in limited editions published in Dublin and New York. The collection includes some of Yeats’ finest work – “Blood and the Moon”, “Mad as the Mist and Snow”, “Byzantium”, “Coole Park, 1929”, “The Nineteenth Century and After”, “The Crazed Moon”, “Quarrel in Old Age”, “I Am of Ireland”, the “Crazy Jane” and “A Woman Young and Old” sequences, etc.
Crown 8vo (20cm). [2],(x),(102),[ii]pp. Original decorative cloth gilt in a handsome design by Thomas Sturge Moore (1870-1944); a few faint marks, but overall a very good copy in the matching Sturge Moore dust-jacket – the jacket lightly sunned, a little chipped, with a hole to spine neatly repaired with tissue backing. Contemporary (1934) gift inscription to Mary E. Scarlett and the later book-label of F. R. Furber – probably Frederick Robert Furber (1912-1972) of Bristol.

£500

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