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London : by J. D. for Richard Chiswell, 1679. First edition. “Now among all the benefits that could be conferred upon mankind, I found none so great as the discovery of new arts, endowments, and commodities for the bettering of man’s life” (Francis Bacon) – an important collection of his various writings, letters, speeches, etc., grouped into several sections: political and moral discourses, with a good many aphorisms – “Discretion in speech is more than eloquence”; his scientific experiments, particularly relating to metals and minerals; his thoughts on medicine and theology; and the “Baconiana Bibliographica”, with thoughts on his own writings by himself and others. With an introduction by Thomas Tenison (1636-1715) – “Nature gives the world that Individual Species, but once in five hundred years”.
Crown 8vo (176 x 109mm). [2],272,[ii],104,[viii]pp – the introduction and contents leaves bound at the rear in this copy. With all fly-titles, imprimatur leaf, final blank, errata, etc. Engraved portrait frontispiece by Frederik Hendrik van Hove (1628?-1698). Contemporary calf, skilfully rebacked, preserving most of the original spine and label; sprinkled edges; lightly rubbed; endpapers rejointed; a few minor internal marks, chips and slight creases; tiny hole to one leaf; occasional light spotting and browning, but a sound and attractive copy of an important compilation. Bookplate of Dr and Mrs H. R. Knohl.

£750

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London : Arthur L. Humphreys, 1903. Second Humphreys edition. A delightfully printed and bound edition of some of the finest essays in the language. Fifty-eight essays from “Of Truth” to “Of Vicissitude of Things” – “Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man”.
Pott 4to (164 x 122mm). viii,(324)pp. Title-page in red and black. Bound (for Hatchard’s) in an elegant contemporary half crimson crushed morocco, banded and gilt; top edge gilt; marbled endleaves; a few minor signs of age and use, but a very good and handsome copy.

£125

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London : Vizetelly & Co., 1887. First Mermaid edition. The unexpurgated text of the ten major plays in Havelock Ellis's sought-after Mermaid Series of “The Best Plays of the Old Dramatists” – “The Maid's Tragedy”, “Philaster”, “The Wild-Goose Chase”, “Thierry and Theodoret”, “The Knight of the Burning Pestle”, “King and No King”, “Bonduca”, “The Spanish Curate”, “The Faithful Shepherdess” and “Valentinian”. Edited, with a long and perceptive introduction, notes, etc., by John St. Loe Strachey (1860-1927).
Two volumes. Crown 8vo (187 x 113mm). xl,(472); viii,(518) + 32pp advertisements dated September 1887. Portrait frontispieces. Bound in a most attractive recent half chestnut morocco, banded and gilt, by Bayntun-Riviere of Bath; cloth sides; marbled endpapers; top edges gilt; a few leaves slightly spotted, but a very good set.

£400

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London : Privately Printed in the Department of English at University College London, 1934. First edition. A previously unpublished seventeenth-century poem, ascribed to Arthur Duke, and here edited and hand-printed by Geoffrey Tillotson (1905-1969) and A. H. Smith on a hand-press at University College.
Foolscap 4to (23cm). [8]pp. Original pictorial wrappers depicting the hand-press and giving a date of 1935; a little spotted, but overall a very good copy.

£20

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London : Henry Colburn, 1827. New and revised edition. Second only to his friend Samuel Pepys as the key diarist of his time – John Evelyn, scholar, man of science, garden designer and architect, founding Fellow of the Royal Society – the execution of Charles I, across Europe in the 1640s, Oliver Cromwell, Charles II, Prince Rupert, the Great Plague, the Great Fire of London, the Dutch War, Robert Boyle, all the great and good of his era, and much else besides. Originally published in two volumes in 1818, edited by William Bray (1736-1832), but here revised and expanded.
Five volumes. Demy 8vo (217 x 136mm). [2],xl,394,[ii]; [iv],464; [ii],(442),[ii]pp; [ii],552,[iv]; [iv],(400)pp. Plates (three folding), portraits, folding table. Bound, for Sotheran, in an elegant later (twentieth-century) half chestnut morocco, banded and gilt; top edges gilt; marbled endpapers; a few faint marks; some occasional internal browning and spotting; a few slight creases and small flaws, but a very good set in a handsome binding. Very occasional pencilled annotation of a former owner.

£500

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Preston (HRT) : Cupid Press, 1950. First edition : limited to 660 numbered copies on mould-made paper. A fine and unnusual selection of 114 seventeenth-century lyrics – Aphra Behn; William Congreve; Sir William Davenant; John Dryden; Thomas D’Urfey; Sir George Etherege; George Farquhar; John Oldmixon; Thomas Otway; Sir Charles Sedley; John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester – but most impressive for some remarkably fine and little-known poems from lesser and even anonymous poets. With an absorbing introduction and extensive notes by Hadfield. Beautifully produced and with illustrations by Rex Whistler.
Medium 8vo (232 x 139mm). xx,(154),[ii]pp. Folding coloured collotype frontispiece and monochrome collotype illustrations by Whistler; bound in a stylish recent half burgundy morocco, banded and gilt; top edge gilt; marbled sides; partially erased stamp to verso of title-page; faint crease to frontispiece, but a very good and most attractive copy.

£250

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London : William Pickering, 1853. A handsomely produced edition of one of the earliest collected works of the Sweet Singer of the Temple, printed at the Chiswick Press and here in a highly attractive binding by Roger de Coverley & Sons. Originally published in 1835-1836 and including all the extant poems, letters, etc., then known, with lives of Herbert by Izaak Walton and Barnabas Oley, notes by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, etc.
Two volumes. Demy 8vo (217 x 139mm). xii,414; (xxviii),384pp. Engraved frontispieces. Title-pages in red and black. Bound in a stylish early twentieth-century full crushed chestnut morocco, banded and gilt; all edges gilt; a few faint marks; endleaves tanned from turn-ins, but overall a very good set indeed.

£250

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London : John Russell Smith, 1869. First Hazlitt edition of “the greatest song writer ever born of English race” (Swinburne). After the neglect of almost two centuries, the most complete collection of Herrick’s work to have appeared up until that time, adding a number of poems never previously printed, as well as alternative versions of a number of poems, further poems attributed to Herrick, and a number of surviving letters, a biography, etc. Edited and introduced by William Carew Hazlitt (1834-1913) in the “Library of Old Authors” series.
Two volumes. Crown 8vo (195 x 124mm). xxx,(1)-256,256*; [iv],(257)-526pp. Portrait frontispiece. Facsimiles. Bound in an elegant later (early twentieth-century) half red crushed morocco, banded and prettily gilt by John Ramage (1836-1911) & Co.; top edges gilt; marbled sides and endpapers; a very good set indeed.

SOLD

London : Oxford University Press, 1975. First edition of this authoritative Oxford Standard Authors text, edited and introduced by Professor Ian Donaldson. Includes the Epigrams, The Forest, The Underwood, Ungathered Verse, Songs and Poems from the Plays and Masques, Leges Convivales, Dubia, etc.
Post 8vo (198 x 129mm). xxii,410pp. Facsimiles. Bound in an elegant contemporary quarter brown morocco, banded and gilt; marbled sides; very good.

£100

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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 the 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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Boston : Little, Brown & Co., 1866. Limited to 100 numbered copies. The first nineteenth-century and only the third collected edition of Marvell, improving on the error-strewn editions of 1726 and 1776. Poems (some in Latin, one in Greek), satires, songs, etc. The introductory life of the poet (“the best in print”) is taken from an 1844 article in the “Edinburgh Review” attributed to Henry Rogers (1806-1877). First published in this form in Boston in 1857 and not published in London until 1870.
Post 8vo (194 x 122mm). (liv),(336)pp. Title-page in red and black. Engraved portrait frontispiece. Bound, without half-title, in a stylish contemporary half purple-black roan, banded and gilt; top edge gilt; marbled sides and endpapers; some light rubbing and minor wear; outer leaves lightly tanned; very faint spotting to fore-edge, but overall a very good copy. With the armorial bookplate of the American architect and designer Edward Francis Searles (1841-1920).

£250

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London : Vizetelly & Co., 1887-1889. The unexpurgated text of ten Massinger plays in the admirable Mermaid Series of “the best plays of the old dramatists” – The Duke of Milan, A New Way to Pay Old Debts, The Great Duke of Florence, The Maid of Honour, The City Madam, The Roman Actor, The Fatal Dowry, The Guardian, The Virgin-Martyr, and Believe As You List. Edited and introduced by Arthur Symons (1865-1945). First edition thus.
Two volumes. Crown 8vo (19cm). xxxii,496; [x],(470)pp. Portrait frontispieces. Original decorative cloth; lacks front free endpaper to vol.i; vol.ii a little dulled; a few minor signs of age and use, but a good set.

£50

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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 : 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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