ANTHONY TROLLOPE FIRST EDITIONS AT
ASH RARE BOOKS
43 HURON ROAD
LONDON SW17 8RE
UNITED KINGDOM

London : Longman, Brown, Green & Longmans, 1855 [but 1854]. First edition. Trollope’s fourth book and the first of the Barchester novels. Only 1,000 copies were printed, of which Sadleir believed perhaps as many as 400 were later pulped. “Now, of course, ‘The Warden’ is rare. The demand for Trollope first editions far exceeds even the total limits of the original printing number. In consequence the price has risen rapidly” (Sadleir – writing in 1928).
Crown 8vo (194 x 122mm). iv,336 + 24pp inserted advertisements, dated September 1854. Bound in an elegant later half chestnut morocco, banded and gilt, by Robert Riviere & Son; top edge gilt; marbled endpapers; original cloth backstrip preserved at rear; a small area of slight fading to the top of the front board, but otherwise a very good copy indeed – clean, sound and beautifully bound. From the celebrated collection of the antiquary Harry Lawrence Bradfer-Lawrence (1887-1965), with his armorial bookplate.

SOLD

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, 1859. First edition. An uncommon and interesting early Trollope – the usual elements of love, marriage, money and family – “perhaps the most serious objection which can be brought against the book from the point of view of literature is that it is too much like life” (Algar Thorold).
Three volumes. Crown 8vo (185 x 118mm). iv,(336); iv,344; iv,(332)pp. No half-titles called for. Contemporary half tan calf, banded and richly gilt; red labels; marbled sides, endpapers and edges; some slight wear to corners; a few very minor marks, spots and faint creases, but a very good set of a difficult title. With the rather pleasing bookplate in each volume of one Arthur Palliser (1828?-1917), Gentleman at Arms, Captain in Queen Victoria’s Bodyguard and later a London magistrate. There is of course no way of knowing whether Trollope’s choice of the Palliser name in the political novels was influenced by any particular member of this Anglo-Irish family, but this was someone whose name he would almost certainly have come across.

SOLD

London : Chapman & Hall, 1866 [i.e.1865]. First edition. Clara Amedroz has to choose between kind and generous Will Belton and smooth and urbane Captain Aylmer – probably one of Trollope’s most undervalued novels and certainly one of the hardest to find in first edition. As long ago as 1928 Michael Sadleir wrote that “‘The Belton Estate’ in first edition, through some hazard of publishing history which I cannot explain, has simply disappeared. I have no record of ‘The Belton Estate’ being offered for sale in a bookshop catalogue or at auction”.
Three volumes. Crown 8vo (187 x 116mm). iv,284; iv,308; iv,276pp. Half-titles not called for. Bound, without the publishers’ catalogue sometimes found, in a pleasant contemporary half blue polished calf, banded and gilt; marbled sides, edges and endleaves; lightly sunned; a little rubbed and slightly scuffed; binder’s blanks neatly excised at the front of each volume; some slight marks and faint creases, but overall a very good, sound, and handsome set. Ownership inscription of R. E. Broome in each volume. Sadleir 22. Wolff 6767.

SOLD

London : Chapman & Hall, 1867. A reprint of the 1864 collected edition of the two series of stories originally published 1861-1863. Seventeen stories, including “An Unprotected Female at the Pyramids”, “The Mistletoe Bough”, “The Man Who Kept His Money in a Box”, etc.
Crown 8vo (19cm). [iv],404pp. Steel-engraved frontispiece by J. Brown after Marcus Stone. Original green cloth, ruled and lettered in gilt and decorated in blind in a Select Library of Fiction design; lightly rubbed and a touch worn; a couple of tiny splits at joints; endpapers cracked and tape-repaired; a little shaken and slack, but a reasonable copy of an early edition. Contemporary red armorial circular stamps of the library at Ickwell Bury, Bedfordshire, then the home of John Harvey (1815-1879) and his wife Annie Jane Harvey (1825-1898), née Tennant, author of “Turkish Harems and Circassian Homes”, etc., and (as Andrée Hope), “Vyvyans : or, The Murder in the Rue Bellechasse”, etc. Contemporary blind-stamp of W. H. Smith of the Strand, where presumably the Harveys bought the book.

£50

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London : Chapman & Hall, 1873. First British edition. One of Trollope’s best and most enjoyable – and “one of the most entertaining, worthless, attractive women in the history of the novel: the totally amoral Lizzie Eustace” (P. D. James). “The novel is rare in fine state, for it had great library popularity ... few copies in good original condition have survived the zeal of contemporary readers” (Sadleir, writing in 1928).
Three volumes. Crown 8vo (183 x 123mm). viii,354; viii,(364); viii,(354)pp. Bound (for Hatchard’s of Piccadilly), complete with half-titles, in a smart later (early twentieth-century) half red morocco; top edges gilt; marbled sides and endpapers; silk ribbons; a few very minor internal marks, spots and small flaws, but overall a very good set in a handsome binding. Monogram bookplates – possibly of George Capel Cure (1853-1943) of Blake Hall, Ongar – engraved by Allan Wyon (1843-1907), together with the more recent bookplate of the notable modern collector Robert James Hayhurst (1929-2016). Sadleir 39.

SOLD

London : Ward, Lock & Bowden, [ca.1895]. An undesignated reprint of the 1883 third edition. The original 1874 edition is of course of legendary rarity – as Sadleir noted in 1928, “No price records exist. Should a good copy come up for sale it will fetch as much as the most frenzied Trollopian present can afford to pay”. “We settle down, in companionship with Mr. Anthony Trollope, at the Gangoil Farm, on the other side of the Equator, just as easily and comfortably as we did at Orley Farm itself. There are not a few persons to whom the bare idea of colonial existence is intolerable; yet here it is made even charming” (London Evening Standard, 9th November 1874).
Foolscap 8vo (172 x 109mm). [vi],(314)pp. Bound in a smart recent half maroon calf, banded and gilt, by Bayntun-Riviere; top edge gilt; a few minor marks and small flaws, but a very good copy.

£200

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London : Chapman & Hall, 1879. First edition. A scarce late Trollope, featuring on Sadleir’s “A”-list of rarities (XIX Century Fiction, 1951). Disinherited son makes good in the goldfields of Australia, returning home a wealthy man to marry Hester Bolton, but the delightfully wicked Euphemia Smith turns up to claim a prior marriage. Trollope makes interesting use of his Post Office experience to hinge the story on a forged postmark. “Mr Trollope has perhaps never hit upon a story that more strongly arouses the reader’s attention and sympathy, and never told one with more mastery of the whole situation, in small things no less than in great” (The Graphic, 26th July 1879).
Three volumes. Crown 8vo (181 x 120mm). vi,290; vi,296; vi,302,[ii]pp. Bound, complete with half-titles and final blank, in a most handsome later half morocco, gilt on wide bands and decorated with small onlay flowers, by Zaehnsdorf; all edges gilt; marbled sides and matching endpapers; just a hint of rubbing; a few minor internal marks, but overall clean and sound, and a very good set indeed. With the attractive bookplates of both Ernest George Mocatta (1849-1927), stockbroker and book-collector, and Harold Charles (Harley) Drayton (1901-1966), the renowned financier whose library was dispersed at Sotheby’s in 1968. Sadleir 55 – “very scarce in fine condition”.

£1,000

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London : Chapman & Hall, 1880. First edition. A fine and unduly neglected late novel, the last of the Palliser sequence and Trollope at his most moving and humane.
Three volumes. Crown 8vo (20cm). viii,320pp; viii;(328); viii,312 + 24pp publishers’ catalogue. Original blue-green cloth, blocked in black and lettered in gilt; expertly recased and refurbished; endpapers rejointed; edges cleaned; some minor residual signs of age and wear; a few minor marks, but otherwise a very good and attractive set. With the bookplate of Leslie Benson in each volume and the earlier ownership inscription ‘Bradwell’ to each title-page.

£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. “A course (two courses indeed) of true love that does not run quite smooth, a strong contrast of polite and by no means polite society, a Government office and its humours, some hunting scenes, an anonymous letter, the vain endeavours of crabbed age to control generous youth – these are the ingredients of ‘Marion Fay’, and it must be confessed that most of them have met before inside covers bearing Mr. Trollope’s respected name. But what of that?” (Pall Mall Gazette, 22nd June 1882).
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 : Elkin Mathews & Marrot / New York : Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1927. First edition : limited to 530 numbered copies. Eleven witty Trollope sketches written in 1880 for the “Pall Mall Gazette” and never previously published in book form – The Tailor, The Chemist, The Butcher, The Plumber, The Horsedealer, The Publican, The Fishmonger, The Greengrocer, The Wine Merchant, The Coal Merchant and The Haberdasher. With a foreword by Michael Sadleir.
Crown 8vo. [2],xiv,(98),[ii]pp. Original dark red quarter cloth, marbled boards, lettered on spine in gilt; a few faint marks, some slight spotting, but a very good copy of an attractive book, in the remains of the original glassine dust-jacket.

£75

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London : Folio Society, 1951. First edition under this title – five of Trollope’s best short stories, one (Katchen’s Caprices) making its first appearance in book form, the others seemingly out of print since the nineteenth century. With an introduction by John Hampden and wood-engravings by Joan Hassall.
Demy 8vo (23cm). [xii],(170),[ii]pp. Wood-engraved illustrations and decorations. Original floral-patterned cloth; title-label; top edge red; edges and endleaves a little spotted, but otherwise a very good copy in the matching dust-jacket – a little worn at tips and slightly spotted on flaps, but still very good.

£25

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Oxford : Oxford University Press, (1999). First edition. A handsome companion, providing an alphabetical guide to Trollope’s work, friends, publishers, characters, topics, and anything else one might need.
Medium 8vo (25cm). xxiv,(626),[vi]pp. Portrait frontispiece. Illustrations. Maps. Original boards; a very good copy in the dust-jacket – just slightly creased on inner flap.

£25

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