Jan 26, 2016 | Videos
Sketches between the Persian Gulf and Black Sea, Robert Clive. First Edition, London: Dickinson Bros, 1852.
You can view our first edition of Sketches here.
Presented by Adam Douglas, Senior Specialist in Literature at Peter Harrington Rare Books.
Large folio (552 x 417 mm). Contemporary olive-green morocco by J. Clarke (ink stamp on front free endpaper verso), spine richly gilt in compartments, red morocco double lettering-pieces, sides with decorative gilt frames enclosing central gilt arms of Algernon Percy, 4th Duke of Northumberland (1792–1865), wide gilt inner dentelles, marbled endpapers, gilt edges. Lithographic title and 24 tinted lithographed plates after Clive, one folding, 2 with 2 images, 6 leaves of letterpress printed on rectos only. Extremities rubbed, occasional foxing, but in much better condition than usually met with, overall an excellent copy.
First edition of this rare lithographic plate book, bound for Algernon Percy, 4th Duke of Northumberland, who as Lord Prudhoe, the second son of the second duke, had first travelled to Egypt and the Levant in 1826. In Cairo he met Edward William Lane, whose Arabic lexicon he subsequently sponsored, and other important Egyptologists, notably Jean-François Champollion. When he succeeded his brother as Duke of Northumberland, he maintained his particular interest in the Middle East alive by collecting antiquities, which later became the founding collection of the Oriental Museum at the University of Durham.
Rare. OCLC lists four copies in Britain institutional holdings: two at the BL, and one each at the National Art Library and the V&A; three in the US (Yale, University of Michigan, and Trinity University, Coates Library); and one in Australia, at the State Library of NSW. The American University of Beirut lists a copy under the variant title, A Series of Lithographic Drawings from Sketches: Comprising the Undermentioned Subjects, Lying Principally between the Persian Gulf & the Black Sea, which seems to be the same work. A note in a Sotheby’s catalogue suggests that the work appears also to have been published under the title Sketches of Nineveh and the Holy Land (ref. Sotheby’s sale, 13 October 1999, lot 256), but the work is not listed under that title in OCLC. We trace only four complete copies sold at auction going back to 1967.
The binder John Clarke was “one of the best and most prolific London binders of the period” (Ramsden), who was binding from about 1820 to 1859. He joined in partnership with Francis Bedford in 1841 and they worked together until 1859, from when Bedford worked on his own. Nothing is recorded of Clarke after this date.
The plates comprise: 1 Sculptures at Nimroud-Lions; 2 Moosul; 3 Hît; 4 Distant view of Mount Ararat; Arab encampment near the Birs Nimroud (2 on one sheet); 5 Sheikh Adi; 6 Baghdad; 7 Roman ruin on the way to Palmyra; 8 Sculptures in the Mount at Nimroud; 9 A night with the Nestorian patriarch in the village of Be-a-latha; 10 Ruined fortress of Hoschab; 11 Sculptures in the Mound at Nimroud; 12 Vignette of camels’ heads; Hussein, Sheikh of the Alouins; 13 Damascus; 14 Lake Van and town of Ardische; 15 Tank Kesra. Ctesiphon; 16 Town and fortress of Van. Armenia; 17 Leezan; 18 Amadia; 19 Julamerk; 20 Interior of the Koordish chief’s house in the village of Espinadar; 21 Palmyra (folding panorama); 22 Erzroom; 23 Sspian Dagh; 24 Kerbela.
Jan 26, 2016 | Videos
The Importance of Being Earnest, Signed by Oscar Wilde. First and Limited Edition, 1899. London: Leonard Smithers and Co, 1899.
You can view our first edition of The Importance of Being Earnest here.
Presented by Sammy Jay, Rare Books Specialist at Peter Harrington Rare Books.
Square octavo. Original pale purple cloth, gilt lettered spine, gilt floral motifs from designs by Charles Shannon on spine and covers, edges untrimmed. Housed in a custom-made green cloth solander box. Discreet book labels of Llewellyn Wright and J. O. Edwards on front pastedown; spine of box faded, spine of book sunned, one very small black blemish on back cover, front and rear free endpapers browned (as usual). A fine copy.
First and limited edition, one of 100 numbered large paper copies signed by Wilde. The Importance of Being Earnest, Wilde’s last play, opened to great acclaim on Valentine’s Day 1895 but was withdrawn after Wilde’s failed libel suit against Lord Queensbury led to his arrest. The subsequent “utter social destruction of Wilde” (ODNB) meant that the play was not published in book form until February 1899, after Wilde’s release from prison. Richard Ellmann comments that Smithers’s handsome editions of Earnest and An Ideal Husband “brought Wilde a little money”. Wilde’s signature on the limitation leaf poignantly reflects his mental state after the shattering nature of his recent experiences, concluding dramatically with a firmly executed oblique downwards stroke.
Jan 26, 2016 | Videos
The Arctic Regions, William Bradford. First and Only Edition. London: Sampson Low, Marston, Low and Searle, 1873.
You can view our first edition of The Arctic Regions here.
Presented by Ben Houston, Rare Books Specialist at Peter Harrington Rare Books.
Large folio (618 x 498 mm). Original brown morocco elaborately gilt, marbled endpapers. Housed in an oatmeal cloth folding case. Title page in red and black and with mounted albumen print, 140 further mounted albumen photographs, 115 of them mounted in the text and 25 as inserted plates within printed borders on card mounts with letterpress captioning, including one double-page plate, mounted on linen guards throughout. Skilfully rebound with the elaborately stamped leather from the original binding mounted on the front board and spine, somewhat rubbed, occasional marginal dampstaining and finger-soiling, title leaf with paper repair at head not affecting text, one leaf loose from its stub, some fading to the mounted photographs, but the majority still fairly strong, overall a good copy of this magnificent though somewhat fragile production.
First and only edition of this highly uncommon and highly desirable Arctic record, one of perhaps as few as 300 copies. The book forms a record of the last of seven voyages to Labrador and Greenland that Bradford sponsored or participated in during the 1860s: “all early examples of what one might call ‘eco-art tourism’”(Books on Ice).
Bradford was born in Fairhaven, Massachusetts in 1823, and established himself as a painter of ship portraits in Lynn and other local harbours, his work being characterised by its “correctness … and carefulness” (DAB). From this he progressed to coastal studies, gradually moving northwards up the New England and Canadian coasts, and thence, inspired by the recently published accounts of the Franklin search expeditions, to the Arctic. “I was seized with a desire, which had become uncontrollable, to visit the scenes they had described and study Nature under the terrible aspects of the Frigid Zone” (quoted in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography).
Between 1861 and 1867 he carried out a series of annual expeditions “along the coasts of Nova Scotia and Labrador for the purpose of painting northern scenery and icebergs”, and in 1869 he obtained the support of broker and railroad baron Le Grand Lockwood to fit out the Scottish steamship Panther for his most ambitious voyage yet. His party of forty included John Bartlett, the son of the owner of the ship, who later captained for Peary, Dr Isaac Hayes, who had served under Kane, and two photographers, John B. Dunmore and George B. Critcherson, from the leading Boston photographic studio of James William Black. Departing from St John’s on 3 July, the party sailed as far north as Baffin Island and Melville Bay, Greenland, and Bradford “returned with a collection of photographs and a vast number of sketches of the rugged landscape and the details of Inuit life”. He was later to say that this vast archive of photographs had saved him “eight or ten voyages to the Arctic regions, now I gather my inspirations from my photographic subjects just as an author gains food from his library. I could not paint without them” (quoted by Horch).
In the early 1870s Bradford settled in London, setting up a studio which attracted considerable aristocratic patronage (his most important commission came from Queen Victoria, the painting entitled “The Panther off the Coast of Greenland under the Midnight Sun” which was hung in the library of Windsor Castle), enjoying a second career as a lecturer on the Arctic, and in 1873 publishing the present volume; “no doubt … one of the most sumptuous of the century … one of the nineteenth century’s most spectacular photographically illustrated travel books” (Parr & Badger). The technical problems that attended the handling of wet-plate negatives under extreme conditions makes the quality of Dunmore and Critcherson’s images all the more remarkable, being “counted not only amongst the earliest, but also the best polar photographs”.
Jan 26, 2016 | Videos
The Holy Land, Syria, Idumea, Arabia, Egypt & Nubia. From Drawings Made on the Spot … With Historical Descriptions, by the Revd. George Croly, LL.D. Lithographed by Louis Haghe; — Egypt & Nubia, from Drawings Made on the Spot … With Historical Descriptions by William Brockedon, F.R.S. Lithographed by Louis Haghe. London: F. G. Moon, 1842–49.
You can view our first edition of The Holy Land here.
Presented by Adam Douglas, Senior Specialist in Literature at Peter Harrington Rare Books.
2 works, together 6 volumes, large folio (60 x 46 cm). Contemporary red half morocco by Hayday & Co., spines richly gilt, matching morocco-grain cloth sides, marbled endpapers, gilt edges. Holy Land: 122 tinted lithographed plates (two vignette titles and 120 plates), uncoloured engraved map; Egypt: 124 tinted lithographed plates (three vignette titles and 121 plates), uncoloured engraved map; all plates in the scarcest format, finely coloured by hand, cut to the edge of the image and mounted on card in imitation of watercolours, as issued, mounted on guards throughout. Slight rippling to some of the plates, occasional light foxing to guards; overall an excellent set, the images clean and the delicate hand-colouring vivid and fresh.
First editions, the complete set in the preferred deluxe coloured format. “Roberts’s Holy Land was one of the most important and elaborate ventures of nineteenth-century publishing, and it was the apotheosis of the tinted lithograph” (Abbey Travel). No publication before this had presented so comprehensive a series of views of the monuments, landscape, and people of the Near East. The Holy Land was offered in three formats: single tint lithographs in paper wrappers; proofs in portfolios; and, the grandest and most expensive format, coloured and mounted in portfolios, as here, at twice the price of the cheapest format. The completion of the publishing project, Egypt and Nubia, was similarly published in three formats between 1846 and 1849, though this time the price of the deluxe coloured-and-mounted format was three times the price of the simplest format.
David Roberts, RA (1796–1864), enjoyed a wide popularity in his day for his European views, but his outstanding success was certainly The Holy Land, and it is on this that the modern appreciation of his work is based.
In August 1838 he arrived in Alexandria to start a carefully planned enterprise. It is claimed that he was the first European to have unlimited access to the mosques in Cairo, under the proviso that he did not commit desecration by using brushes made from hog’s bristle. Leaving Cairo, he sailed up the Nile to record the monuments represented in the Egypt & Nubia division of the work, travelling as far as Wadi Halfa and the Second Cataract. At the time of publication it was these views that excited the most widespread enthusiasm.
An exhibition of the original drawings was opened in London in 1840. They created a considerable stir and drew praise from Ruskin. The exhibition catalogue also served as a prospectus for the projected work, and was apparently very successful in bringing forward subscribers, without whom any work of this size would have been doomed. The work was subsequently published in a variety of smaller formats. In a dramatic gesture, the lithographic stones for the original large format work were broken at an auction of the remaining plates in December 1853 so that the originals could never be reproduced.
Jan 26, 2016 | Videos
The Four Gospels, The Four Gospels of Lord Jesus Christ according to the Authorised Version of King James I. First Edition. Waltham St. Lawrence: Golden Cockerel Press, 193.
You can view our first edition of The Four Gospels here.
Presented by Adam Douglas, Senior Specialist in Literature at Peter Harrington Rare Books.
Folio (332 x 230 mm). Original white pigskin with Gill design in gilt on front cover and title in gilt on spine, raised bands on spine, bound by Sangorski and Sutcliffe with two metal clasps, gilt edges. Custom folding box enclosed within collector’s chemise and blue morocco-backed slipcase. Printed in 18-point Golden Cockerel Face type, 65 wood-engraved illustrations by Eric Gill, 4 of which are full-page. Very minor soiling to binding, but an exceptional copy and the only known copy on vellum to carry an inscription by the illustrator.
Number 9 of 500 copies of which this is one of 12 copies printed on vellum, presentation copy inscribed by Eric Gill on the colophon, “ To Leonard Woolf and Babette N. Clayburgh”. Near neighbours in East Sussex, Gill and Woolf had developed a close friendship around the early 1930s and collaborated on a number of different projects. For the 1931 Hogarth Press edition of Vita Sackville-West’s translation of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duineser Elegien, for example, the Woolfs approached Gill to design and cut the initials. The California socialite Babette Clayburgh (1889–1941) and her husband Herbert Eugene Clayburgh (1878–1972), a San Francisco silk magnate, were prominent book collectors. They joined the Book Club of San Francisco in 1920.
As noted in the bibliography of the Press, “this is the Golden Cockerel book usually compared with the Doves Bible and the Kelmscott Chaucer. A flower among the best products of English romantic genius, it is also surely, thanks to its illustrator, Eric Gill, the book among all books in which Roman type has been best mated with any kind of illustration”.
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