Vol. I opens with a steel-engraved portrait of the author.

•  Howgego, II, C2.   Period-style quarter tan cloth and light blue paper–covered sides, spines with printed paper labels. Five plates and one map lacking (frontispiece present); two leaves each with tear along inner margin, not touching text; foxed throughout but without embrittlement.  (24387)

Binding:  Contemporaneously bound at the time of the writing of the manuscript in rich, dark brown goat over wood boards, spine plain and covers tooled in blind using a variety of rolls and rules to form three borders around a central panel, that panel tooled to create a cross.

•  Bound as above, strongly. Four natural flaws in the parchment, not affecting the text. One tear in one leaf repaired by stitching, costing a few letters; one lower corner lost away from text.; soiling and spotting variously as is typical. An interesting, impressive volume.  (30618)

•  Publisher's tan cloth, front cover pictorially stamped in red; corners and spine extremities rubbed, spine darkened, back cover with small stain. Pages age-toned, with one small inked annotation.  (25184)

•  Publisher's printed paper wrappers, in original printed dust wrapper; dust wrapper partially split along front outer fold and nicked at corners. Pages age-toned.  (28931)

16 steel-engraved maps

Provenance:  Front free endpaper with early pencilled inscription reading “Mary William own Book Syracuse Newyork [sic].”

•  American Imprints 24673.   Publisher's quarter tan straight-grained sheep and printed paper–covered sides; spine and extremities scuffed, paper darkened with spots of staining. Front free endpaper with inscription as above; back free endpaper excised. Variously foxed. A strong, charming, interesting schoolbook — inside and out.  (30508)

•  Library Company, Afro-Americana, 4726.   Publisher's blind-stamped cloth, spine with gilt-stamped title; spine and board edges sunned, cloth torn (repaired) and chipped at spine, spine with call number label. Front pastedown with institutional bookplate, title-page and map each with rubber-stamp, back free endpaper with circulation slip. Map and a few other leaves lightly foxed.  (19500)

Click the image for an enlargement.

The map is of the colony of Liberia with an inset plan of Monrovia.

•  Sabin 32351; Library Company, Afro-Americana (rev. ed.), 4863.   Removed from a nonce volume. Small water splatter stain in lower inner area of title-page, else notably nice and clean.  (26898)

Uncommon. WorldCat locates only five U.S. institutional holdings.

•  19th-century marbled paper–covered sides with terra cotta textured cloth shelfback, spine with gilt-stamped title and series number; sides scuffed, extremities rubbed, spine slightly discolored (more so at foot). An unusual item, here worn and variously foxed but unmarked by childish hands.  (30519)

    Some of both the voyages and the maps make their first published appearances here—among them the New England map depicting the Maryland and Virginia coastlines, engraved by R. Michault after one contained in Richard Blome’s Description of the Island of Jamaica, part of which work appears here translated into French. Altogether, a volume notable both for its strong African and North American content and for the aesthetic appeal of its plates and pleasingly ornamented typography.

Sabin 36944; Alden & Landis 674/159; Beinecke Lesser Antilles Collection 68; Baer, 17th-Century Maryland, 78. Recent 17th-century style mottled calf with covers framed in a gilt roll and double-panelled in gilt fillets with gilt-stamped corner fleurons,; spine with gilt-stamped leather title and author labels and gilt-stamped decorative devices. Several pages (not including title) and the versos of a few plates stamped by a now-defunct institution. Paper slightly embrittled. Light waterstaining to a number of leaves and plates, mostly in margins; the first map with two repairs. One leaf (blank?) prior to Colonies Angloises excised; lacking the folding map of the Nile. A good copy, in a handsome binding of recent vintage and contemporaneous style. (8746)

16 wood-engraved illustrations

•  American Imprints 8657; Rosenbach, Children's, 763 (this copy differing slightly from Rosenbach's physical description).   Publisher's printed tan paper wrappers. Some minor foxing, otherwise clean. An unusually crisp, unworn example of the genre.  (31454)

This set includes two volumes of supplemental text, adding a number of entries. The first edition was followed by two volumes of supplemental plates, not present here and not called for: Graesse describes this edition as “sans grav.”

The pagination is erratic in a number of places; there is a numbering gap from 2342 to 2351 between vols. IV and V, but the text and signatures are uninterrupted.

Uncommon: OCLC locates only two U.S. institutional holdings of this second edition.

Provenance: Most volumes with small inked ownership inscription in an outer margin: “G.R.W.” the mark of William Rollinson Whittingham (1805–79), fourth Episcopal Bishop of Maryland and an enthusiastic book collector.

•  Brunet, IV, 851; Graesse, V, 429. Not in Sabin.   Contemporary half binding, recently rebacked with tan paper, spines with printed paper labels; boards rubbed and faded with small chips, one vol. with front cover waterstained. Foxing almost throughout, generally no worse than moderate; light waterstaining in upper margins of vol. I; one leaf in vol. VII with lower outer portion torn away, with loss of words from about 18 lines on each side. Vol. II with printer's error replacing pp. 1065–72 with duplicates of pp. 1057–64; pagination erratic in other places. Most vols. with ownership mark as above; vol. VI with one pencilled and one inked marginal annotation.  (25862)

This is an untrimmed copy in original boards, with 24 pages of advertising for Carey publications bound in at the front of the volume. The preliminary map, engraved by John Bower, has hand-colored border lines; this American edition does not call for the plates found in the English first, but does include in-text depictions of several “Ethiopic inscriptions.”

•  Shaw & Shoemaker 33864; NSTC 2S3118. Publisher’s quarter tan paper over light blue paper–covered sides; front cover detached and back joint cracked, binding spotted, paper cracked and split along spine, spine label now absent and replaced with hand-inked title, spine with later paper shelving label. Front pastedown with institutional bookplate, front free endpaper with inked ownership inscription dated 1829. Half-title with portion of outer margin torn away (not touching text) and laid in. Map lightly foxed, with two short tears along folds. Pages age-toned, with occasional spots of foxing.

•  ESTC T78547 (for holdings of complete sets). Tipped onto a leaf of 19th-century paper; now in a Mylar folder. Lower margin and bottom of outer margin slightly tattered to a curve; otherwise relatively minor creasing, soiling.

An appendix of examples of Hottentot and Caffre language is also supplied.

The engraved plates include illustrations of a rhinoceros, a hippopotamus, dwarf mice, and Hottentot weaponry, as well as an oversized folding landscape and a map of the territory covered by the author.

•  ESTC T131019. Recently rebound in quarter calf over marbled paper sides, spines with gilt-stamped title labels. Title-page and two others of vol. I stamped by a now-defunct institution; one page with outer margin reinforced. Small hole to map. Title-page of vol. II with topmost left portion of title repaired and replaced in facsimile; title-page and five others stamped. Pagination skips in vol. II from 136 to 139. A few minor spots of foxing to plates; one plate with short edge tear carefully repaired.

•  Publisher's yellow cloth, front cover and spine stamped in green and gilt, binding dust-soiled and damp-stained with corners rubbed; lower edges of early pages and inner margins of some plate slightly waterstained (plates themselves undamaged, one lightly spotted). While the binding and some other bits of this volume have suffered a bit, the important parts are still gorgeous and, of course, the price has been adjusted to fit the facts.  (31976)

•  Shaw & Shoemaker 42738; Library Company, Afro-Americana, 10602.   Removed from a nonce volume. Lightly pencilled librarian's notation on p. [1]. Leaves separated.  (18440)

Click the image for an enlargement.

•  Disbound; three holes in inner margin, not touching text. Ink notation and numeral on first page. Some dog-earing and tattering in corners and outer margins. Pencillings in several margins. Occasional mild spotting. Now housed in a simple archival phase box. (13455)

The two folding tables are printed on very thin tissue or “tracing”-like paper.

•  Publisher's marbled paper boards, a little abraded and dust-soiled and with evidence of an old shelving label sometime removed from front cover; respined with black tape. Ex-library with stamps on new front endpaper, a front fly-leaf, and base of title-page; four-digit number stamped in lower margin of contents page. No other markings.  (30272)