ILLUSTRATED BOOKS \ CUTS & ENGRAVINGS

Jerusalem Delivered & Illustrated

•   Fairfax’s English translation of the great Italian Renaissance epic, originally printed in 1600 and here edited by Robert Aris Willmott for the “Routledge’s British Poets” series. The volume is illustrated with a frontispiece and seven steel-engraved plates done from designs by Edward Henry Corbould, drawing and painting instructor to Queen Victoria’s children. Click the interior image for an enlargement.

•  Contemporary half calf over marbled paper–covered sides, gilt spine extra; sides and edges of paper showing light scuffing, spine leather a bit darkened; attractive. Marbled endpapers; all edges marbled to match endpapers and sides of covers. Front pastedown with small paper adhesions. One signature separated. An attractive edition, a pretty copy.

A Sweet Book

•  Early printing: Poems of country life, nature, and nostalgia. With a number of in-text and full-page engravings.


•  Very good; light wear to corners and spine extremities, spine gilt slightly dulled. Offsetting to pastedowns; back free endpaper torn. All edges gilt; pages clean. Inscription dated 1877 to front flyleaf. (1945)

A Hero’s Life — A Swedish Epic

•  One of the most beloved of all works in Swedish literature, Frithiof’s Saga is an epic poem consisting of 24 cantos or ballads, each describing an event in the mighty hunter’s life. The text of this edition was compiled by John T. Winterich from four English verse translations by William Lewery Blackley, Lucius Sherman, Thomas and Martha Holcomb, and, of all people, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. In 1837, 12 years after the epic’s original publication, Longfellow wrote a paper for the North American Review synopsizing each canto, interspersing selected lines of translation in English. These synopses, along with Longfellow’s contribution to the translation of Frithiof’s Saga (225 lines in all), are happily here incorporated complete into one volume for the first time. Bayard Taylor wrote the general introduction.

The book is profusely illustrated with pen drawings by Eric Palmquist, who has signed the colophon; of these, some are full-page, and some are spread across two pages with the text printed beneath. Most are smaller in-text drawings, including an extensive series of decorative tailpieces.

This edition was prepared under the supervision of Ragnar Svanström at the Royal Printing House in Stockholm, Sweden, and is limited to 1500 copies. Designer Karl-Erik Forsberg used a hand-set Berling Roman font which he himself designed; Forsberg also drew uncial letters, printed in red ink, for use on the title-page and for the canto-opening initials.

The binding is half natural Swedish linen stamped on the spine in red and black; the sides are covered with Swedish paper hand-grained to look like wood, and bear a small gold-stamped design of a warship, the Norse drakkar.

•  Limited Editions Club, Bibliography of the Fine Books Published by The Limited Editions Club, 1929–1985, 232. Original slipcase, swith pine sunned, edges and bottom rubbed (with small loss of paper), and a few scratches; very good overall. A fine copy.

Up & DownPocklington Gardens Street
  Hand-Colored Plates — Zaehnsdorf Binding

Click the interior images for enlargements.

•  First edition, illustrated with 16 hand-colored plates: Thackeray's second Christmas book, published under the pseudonym “Mr. M.A. Titmarsh,” is a collection of trenchant observations on the follies of his neighbors, upper crust and lower class alike. The illustrations were engraved by Henry Vizetelly after Thackeray's drawings.

Signed binding: Oxblood morocco framed in gilt double fillets, spine with gilt-stamped title and gilt-ruled compartments; board edges with double-rule fillet. Wide turn-ins with gilt roll, double-fillets, and dentelle roll; silk pastedowns and free endpapers, binding signed by Zaehnsdorf. All edges gilt. Original wrappers bound in.

•  NSTC 2T6768.   Binding as above, spine sunned to a rosy color, extremities lightly rubbed. Old cataloguing affixed to front free endpaper verso (i.e., to paper, not silk). Small line of staining to upper margins of most leaves, pages and plates otherwise clean save for three instances of offsetting from plates. A pretty little book — a nice thing in 1848 and a nice thing now.  (24381)

Becky! Comes to America

•  First U.S. edition of Thackeray’s first great literary success. This classic Victorian novel, illustrated with the author’s own designs, had originally appeared in London in serialized form commencing the year before this publication.

•  NCBEL, III, 857. Contemporary half goat with marbled paper–covered sides, spine with gilt-stamped leather title label; binding worn and rubbed, but sturdy. Title-page with early inked ownership inscription. Front free endpaper excised, back free endpaper torn. Pages with scattered light pencil markings and some spots of mild foxing, with most of the plates browned.
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Charming!

[Thomas à Kempis].

•  Elegant and engaging (French) Victorian Gothic edition of a much-loved spiritual classic. The original wrappers have been bound in, the front wrapper having a small engraved portrait of Christ crowned with thorns over the title "Salvator Mundi." The pages have a great variety of handsome engraved historiated and emblematic borders, with criblé backgrounds, surrounding the text, as well as small square engraved portraits of saints heading each section. Especially worthy of notice are the engravings on p. 3, showing Christ's nativity, and on p. 115, showing Him risen from the tomb. While the back wrapper attributes the Imitatio Christi to Jean Gerson, it is now known to be the work of Thomas à Kempis (1380–1471).
•  19th-century brown half morocco over marbled paper, and marbled endpapers; spine with title gilt in second compartment. Attached striped silk bookmark; top edges gilt. Light wear; light waterstaining to bottom margin throughout, touching a few page numbers but not borders or text. Some offsetting from borders. Fore- and bottom edges uncut. A potential source of much enjoyment or meditation.

Limited Edition — Tipped-In Illustrations

The Nonesuch Press

•  Limited to 1500 copies. Five full-color handcolored illustrations by Jacquier are tipped in, and the volume has an introduction by John Beresford.

•  McKitterick/Rendall/Dreyfus 47. Full marbled handmade cloth; leather label at head of spine with title in gilt, label missing one corner. All edges untrimmed. Bookplate on front pastedown of volume.

Tibullus Illustrated

•  “Romantic love and the pleasures of country life” are the foremost themes in the elegies of Albius Tibullus (ca. 55–19 b.c.). Tibullus was a Roman knight (eques) and a member of the circle of Messala. Though he was considered a minor poet, his elegant and discriminating style are widely appreciated and have caused him to become a part of the standard Classics curriculum. This handsomely printed and illustrated edition is edited with notes by Janus Brouckhusius (Jan van Broekhuyzen, 1649–1707); Classicist Edward Harwood (1729–94) says of it, “A valuable edition, but Brouckhusius is a bold editor, and has taken unwarrantable liberties with the text” (quoted in Dibdin). It includes eight engraved plates and a striking engraved title-page showing a pastoral scene behind a fountain dedicated to the poet.
Click the image to the right for an enlargement.

Provenance: 18th-century signature of “Wm. Digby” on front pastedown; ownership signature of “Pat. Cobburne,” dated 1726, at top of title-page; 19th-century armorial bookplate of Richard Howard, Esq., on front pastedown. Late 19th- early 20th-century bookseller’s ticket of John Britnell, Toronto, on front pastedown.

•  Schweiger, II, 1089; Dibdin (4th ed.), I, 382–83. On Tibullus, see: Oxford Companion to Classical Literature 571. On Brouckhusius, see: Sandys, History of Classical Scholarship, II, 329–30. Contemporary vellum over paste boards, soiled and somewhat warped; spine with chipped black leather title, gilt-lettered and -ruled. Light soiling and browning around edges of pages and plates, and some shallow tears not nearing text. Old slip from bookseller’s catalogue adhered to front pastedown; bookplate, ownership inscriptions, bookseller’s ticket as above.

First Edition, Inscribed bythe Author

Click the interior images for enlargements.

•  First edition of this “manual for manufacturers, art dealers, artists and collectors,” written by a member of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers and past president of the Chemists' Club. The volume is illustrated with eight plates, including microscopic close-ups of paint samples and reproductions of paintings displaying aging issues.

Provenance: Presentation copy signed by the author: “To Mr. Breiser[?] with the regards of Maximilian Toch,” dated [19]17.

•  Publisher's olive cloth, front cover with gilt-stamped title in decorative lettering embellished with an artist's palette, spine with decorative gilt-stamped title; cloth showing minor wrinkling and light discoloration over back cover and part of spine, corners and spine extremities slightly rubbed. Front free endpaper with inscription as above. Pages faintly age-toned, else clean.  (24491)

Cock Robin: The Very Scarce First U.S. Edition

Click the image for an enlargement.

•  “This is not Who killed Cock Robin, but a poem on that story,” Dr. R explains. This is the first American edition, taken from the first English edition (London: J. Harris, 1808). As there, the plates are well-done wood engravings, attributed to William Charles.

The first American edition is MUCH rarer than the second (Philadelphia, 1821).

Scarce in libraries: OCLC and NUC Pre-1956 find only 10 U.S. holdings.

•  Rosenbach, Early American Children's Books, 448; Shaw & Shoemaker 24052.   Original pale salmon-colored paper over light paste boards, binding lightly dust-soiled overall, front cover scuffed. Pages age-toned, first and last plates (affixed to covers) with offsetting.  (24522)

Homelessness Human & Canine . . .

•  Later edition of this sad tale of a homeless fiddler and his faithful dog, illustrated with plates and in-text engravings by Darley

•  Publisher's pebbled cloth, front cover black- and gilt-stamped with vignette and decorative title, spine with gilt-stamped title; binding showing minor wear over extremities. All page eges gilt. Front fly-leaf with gift inscription dated 1885; pages with light spots of foxing, otherwise clean. (5780)

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“Horse-Hoing” — 6NIFTY Fold-Out Plates

Single-click any image, for an enlargement.

•  Improvements in farming founded on a scientific basis made British agriculture one of the strongest in Europe in the 18th century. Though called to the bar, Jethro Tull (1674–1741) never practiced law, but devoted himself to farming on land that had belonged to his father. From the beginning he set about trying to discover ways of doing things better, including inventing a number of implements, as this work reveals both in text and in image. His work proved very successful—Tull’s “seed drills” revolutionized planting techniques—and it saw a number of editions; it was translated into French, whence it proved influential on the Continent. This volume’s six beautifully engraved, pleasantly intelligible plates (“W. Thorpe, sculp.) illustrate some of Tull’s inventions, including improved plows and drills for planting seeds.

First printed in London in 1731, Horse-hoing is here (likely) the fourth edition. Bound with it is the first edition of the interesting Supplement issued in 1736, directed largely to answering Tull’s detractors. The first title is fairly widely held, in libraries; the latter, much less so.

•  Goldsmiths’-Kress 7065; ESTC T81915 and N24607. Contemporary calf with remnants of gilt; dry, flaking, and partially gone to red, with some chips to edges, corners, and spine tips; old repairs to joints. Remnants of bookplate on front pastedown. Old water/mildew damage to lower margins, occasionally making its way a bit into text; several leaves repaired, long since. Plates generally quite clean and always pleasing, with faintest waterstaining to lower portion of plate 6 (only). All edges speckled red.

Turgenev — Love!

•  This Limited Editions Club edition of Turgenev's short story of romantic love is translated by Constance Garnett, carries an introduction by Alec Waugh, and is illustrated by Lajos Szalay with eight full-page illustrations in color and ten drawings in line within the text. This copy (number 1102 out of 2000 printed) is signed on the colophon by the illustrator. The newsletter and prospectus slip are included.

Binding:  Publisher's green calf, done by the Tapley-Rutter Company, with marbled paper–covered sides, spine gilt extra, in original slipcase.

•  Limited Editions Club, Bibliography of the Fine Books Published by The Limited Editions Club, 1929–1985, 502.   Fine, in a near fine slipcase (paper cracked along a small portion of one edge, and carefully laid back down).   (21808)

TO Part XVIII . . .

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