Rare book shop Peter Harrington has recovered, restored and found loving homes for many romantic treasures. Each catalogue is painstakingly curated by a team of Peter Harrington rare book dealers, and the latest is no exception. Launched in conjunction with Valentine’s Day, 2021, the Literature in Love catalogue includes a list of rare books dedicated to romance and eroticism, featuring poetry, prose, play scripts and more.
Poems. With Elegies on the Authors Death. Author John Donne 1633.
First edition of the principal collection of Donne’s poetical works, issued two years after his death
DONNE, John. Poems. With Elegies on the Authors Death. 1633. £25,000.00.
The first of John Donne’s exquisite poetry collections was published two years after his death, in 1663. Containing some of the English language’s greatest romantic verses, this first edition represents, in part, Donne’s pivotal introduction to the poetic canon. The collection includes the scholar and cleric’s most famous work, ‘The Flea’, alongside others, such as ‘The Sun Rising’ and ‘Air and Angels’, but notably excludes his erotic ‘Elegy: To His Mistress Going to Bed’, which remained unprinted until another editor dared to include it in 1669. John Donne is widely regarded as the finest of the metaphysical poets.
Marriage A-la-Mode. A Comedy. As it is Acted at the Theatre-Royal. Author John Dryden 1673.
DRYDEN, John. Marriage A-la-Mode. 1673. £1,750.00.
Playwright, poet, critic and England’s first Poet Laureate, John Dryden, was no stranger to love in literature . His Restoration comedy Marriage A-la-Mode follows two couples as their overlapping stories play out numerous comic tropes, from mistaken identities to a complicated love quadrangle. Published in the same year it was first performed, the play appears exactly as it was written for actors at the Theatre-Royal in London’s Covent Garden, thus transporting its reader into this farcical love story as it originally unfolded on stage.
Miscellaneous Poems. Advice to a Painter and Second Advice to the Painter 1681. Author Andrew Marvell 1679.
MARVELL, Andrew. Miscellaneous Poems; Advice to a Painter; Second Advice to the Painter. 1681; . £12,500.00.
Contained in this first edition of three works is Andrew Marvell’s tantalising, seductive and, in 1689, salacious ‘To his Coy Mistress’ – one of the best-known erotic poems written in the English language. Eminently quotable (‘Had we but world enough and time…’), the racy monologue – delivered to an apparently coquettish love interest – carries a great sense of urgency, both in form and language, as its speaker attempts to ‘reason’ with her chastity. Particularly vivid is Marvell’s double entendre: ‘my vegetable love should grow vaster than empires and more slow…’, which requires little imagination to interpret!
Comedies, Histories and Tragedies. Author William Shakespeare 1685.
SHAKESPEARE, William. Comedies, Histories and Tragedies. 1685. £185,000.00.
First published in 1685 and self-described as ‘never-before printed in folio’, the seven scripts added to this Fourth Folio completed the final edition of Shakespeare’s work printed in the 17th century. With these inclusions, the folio contains 50 play scripts in three genres – comedy, tragedy and history – and though six of the new additions are no longer attributed to Shakespeare (the seventh being ‘Pericles’), the Fourth Folio was considered the preeminent edition of Shakespeare’s work until the 18th century. And of course, among others, inside Shakespeare’s Fourth Folio is one of the most powerful and enduring love stories of all time: ‘Romeo and Juliet’.
A Collection of Poems, in Two Volumes. Author William Shakespeare 1710-11.
SHAKESPEARE, William. A Collection of Poems, in Two Volumes. . £22,500.00.
Shakespeare’s sonnets cover a swathe of emotions experienced by lovers. Admiration, nervous anticipation, connectedness, jealousy, betrayal and rejection; the 154 sonnets contained in this edition, first published as a collection by the author himself in 1609, are amorous and tragic in equal measure. Alongside his most famous, such as Sonnet 18 (‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day’) and ‘A Lover’s Complaint of his Angry Mistress’, are lesser-known treasures, including Sonnet 43 , whose finishing rhyming couplet is breathtakingly romantic:
‘All days are nights to see till I see thee, And nights bright days when dreams do show thee me.’
Peter Harrington rare book dealer is committed to maintaining the condition of rare books and delivering them to newfound owners. The list of rare books in the Literature in Love collection has been carefully curated to appeal to the most romantic of collectors: those who celebrate life’s seductions, courtships and heartbreaks – and everything that happens in-between.
In 1877 Pauline Tarn was born in London to British and American parents. She was schooled and spent much of her childhood in France, and began writing verses in French aged 10; at 16 years old she pronounced poetry her vocation. ‘Elle peut elever, elle peut encourager, elle peut montrer le vrai et denoncer le faux… Elle a un grand role a jouer dans l’Univers…’ (Qtd. by Goujon; Engelking). Here, in her personal diary years later, we glimpse the deep feeling and sense of purpose poetry inspired in Tarn throughout her life and, more poignantly, the way she reclaimed poetry for women: She can uplift, she can inspire, she can reveal the truth and denounce the false… she has a great role to play in the Universe…
In 1900, the British-American Francophile received an inheritance which enabled her to immigrate to France as a financially independent woman. She experienced a renaissance, adopting the pointed pseudonym Renée Vivien (Re-née; ‘rebirth’), dressing in men’s clothes, and embarking on a passionate affair with her first lover, the salonièrre, playwright, novelist and poet Natalie Clifford Barney, who would later form the Académie des Femmes in response to Paris’ prestigious all-male French Academy. Barney, a formidable intellect and openly lesbian writer, rejected monogamy and was known as the Amazon of Paris; in Greek mythology, the Amazon warriors lived in exclusively female society and matched their male rivals in strength and skill.
Portrait studio photograph of Natalie Clifford Barney and Renée Vivien in Directoire-era costume
Vivien and Barney’s partnership was creatively bountiful and romantically tumultuous. They soon uncovered a deeply felt and shared appreciation of Sappho, the 6th-century lyric poet from Mytilene on the island of Lesbos, Greece, whose poems exist in mostly fragmentary form – much of it recovered on strips of papyrus during excavations in Egypt or else quoted by other authors. Approximately just 650 lines of Sappho’s work are extant today. Vivien and Barney both learnt ancient Greek to read her writing, which describes love, sensuality, longing and heartbreak between women without the prejudice that came to exist some millennia after she wrote. Vivien was the more committed student and, during what Tama Lea Engelking has coined her ‘prolific Sapphic phase’, produced the first ‘explicitly lesbian translation of Sappho’s poetry’ (Mendès-Leite). In 1903 its first edition was published. It features Sappho’s original Greek verses alongside Vivien’s direct translations and unique versification in French; its cover features a custom illustration by Symbolist and Art Nouveau artist Lucien Levy-Dhurmer.
Wide-ranging admiration of Sappho’s poetry has endured for thousands of years, but her influence on female and lesbian poets is particularly significant: ‘For the woman poet who experiences herself as inadequate or inadequately nurtured by a nonexistent or degraded literary matrilineage, for the lesbian poet who looks in vain for a native lesbian poetic tradition, Sappho is a very special precursor’ (Garber). Sappho’s status as foremother to women, lesbian and feminist writers is likewise attached to her continually high status, alongside men, in the poetic and literary canon. She was venerated in antiquity, and included by Hellenistic Alexandrian scholars among the most highly-esteemed Nine Lyric Poets. Virginia Woolf once observed, ‘perhaps in Lesbos, but never since have these conditions been the lot of women’ (Qtd. by Garber.); Sylvia Plath’s ‘Lesbos’ ‘presents the island as an unreachable ideal place, the counterpart to everything that is wrong with real women’s lives’ (Wilson, The Guardian). These writers were in awe of Sappho’s freer, more equal world.
Before Vivien reinstated Sappho as a lesbian poet, translations – written and published by men – had frequently muffled or censored her work; Vivien was ‘one of the first women writers to rewrite Western myths from an enlightened lesbian-feminist perspective’ (Marks). And, like Sappho, Vivien’s work impressed male writers and critics, then very much the gatekeepers of culture. She received high praise from an unlikely source: the well-known littérateur Charles Maurras, famously disdainful of non-native speakers and their ‘false Parisian polish’ (L’Avenir de l’Intelligence), who considered
Her use of the French language, whether in prose or in verse… remarkably fluid. There is neither impropriety in the choice of words nor a false note in the harmony of sounds. She knows that the mute e is responsible for the charm of our language. She plays with the eleven-syllable line of verse that Verlaine considered the most accomplished of all… (Qtd. by Marks).
His snobbery aside, it is unsurprising that Maurras’ expectations were defied by Vivien’s poetry and command of the French language: ‘The frequent letters Vivien exchanged with her assistant and editors concerning the minute details of her poems – some of which were literally written from her death bed – suggest how meticulous she was’ (Engelking).
In 1904, Vivien and Barney moved to Mytilene where Vivien purchased a house. They intended to establish a community for women poets in imitation of the academy Sappho once had on Lesbos. However, the couple’s volatile partnership led to their separation before their plans were fulfilled. In a tragic reflection of the legends surrounding Sappho’s own premature death, Vivien fell into a depression which manifested in anorexia and addiction, and she died aged just 32. In Vivien’s personal tragedy, ‘the intensity of Sapphic passion presages a fall…’ (Gubar).
In 1951, French writer André Billy gave Vivien her final moniker: ‘Sapho 1900’. His words suggest her status as the lesbian poet of her time – a title hard-earned and well deserved.
Vivien’s Sapho features in our recent catalogue, a celebration of romantic love, in its ecstasy and anguish, expressed in the great stories and poetry from across the ages.
One of the highlights of our recent Fifty Fine Items catalogue, the first edition of Johnson’s Dictionary, is a landmark publication in the history of the English language. Tom Elliott examines Johnson’s approach towards his greatest literary labour.
“Lexicographer. n. s. A writer of dictionaries; a harmless drudge, that busies himself in tracing the original, and detailing the signification of words.”
~ Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language, 1755
Towards the middle of the eighteenth century, respectable Englishmen and women faced two problems: their language and the people using it. In times gone by, writing and publishing had been the province of a privileged few, but recent revolutions in printing and education had led to a rise in literacy: more people than ever before were engaged in the production and consumption of books, newspapers, pamphlets, and more. Print culture had created a new society of letters that existed not just in England but across its empire. As a most unfortunate result, English had “spread, under the direction of chance, into wild exuberance.”
That was the diagnosis of Samuel Johnson who, in 1746, had been tasked with creating ADictionary of the English Language to help document the “boundless chaos of living speech.” Johnson’s monumental undertaking would eventually go down as “one of the greatest single achievements of scholarship,” earning him his reputation as “arguably the most distinguished man of letters in English history.” The Dictionary’s impressive size and weight (two volumes, in folio) signalled its significance—on a par with the King James Bible and the First Folio of Shakespeare. It was a source of national pride; as the author Christopher Smart put it: “I look upon with equal amazement as I do upon St Paul’s Cathedral; each the work of one man, each the work of an Englishman.
Doctor Samuel Johnson by Joshua Reynolds
At the time Johnson was undertaking his work, however, he was not the titan of letters he would later become. He was languishing before his gargantuan task. Although he had envisioned the project taking him just three years, it ended up lasting more than eight.
The problem was the unruliness of English. “When I took the first survey of my undertaking,” Johnson wrote, “I found our speech copious without order and energetick without rules, wherever I turned my view, there was perplexity to be disentangled, and confusion to be regulated.” There was so much confusion, in fact, that Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield and the Dictionary’s patron, declared that Johnson should be given the emergency powers of a dictator to bring English into line: “We must have recourse to the old Roman expedient in times of confusion, and choose a dictator. Upon this principle, I give my vote for Mr Johnson to fill that great and arduous post.”
Johnson, for his part, received Chesterfield’s vote of approval with distaste: “the notice which you have been pleased to take of my labours, had it been early, had been kind, but it has been delayed till I am indifferent and cannot enjoy it.” Moreover, far from presenting himself as the noble saviour of a linguistic empire, Johnson viewed himself as a menial labourer. His amusing definition of a “lexicographer” as a “harmless drudge” says as much, as do the opening lines of the Dictionary’s “Preface”:
It is the fate of those who toil at the lower employments of life, to be rather driven by the fear of evil, than attracted by the prospect of good; to be exposed to censure, without hope of praise… Among those unhappy mortals is the writer of dictionaries; whom mankind have considered, not as the pupil, but the slave of science, the pioneer of literature, doomed only to remove paths of Learning and Genius, who press on forward to conquest and glory, without bestowing a smile on the humble drudge that facilitates their progress.
JOHNSON, Samuel. A Dictionary of the English Language. 1755. £275,000.00. (Item sold)
The fact that Johnson viewed lexicographers not as emperors but as labourers—linguistic rubbish collectors—is significant. Johnson was the grammar-school-educated son of a humble bookseller from the midlands. He had attended Pembroke College, Oxford, but had been forced to drop out when he couldn’t pay his bills. He turned to lexicography to stave off the debts that afflicted both himself and his family.
Moreover, his admittedly dramatic claim that he was a “slave to science” seems to point to an even more important part of his political history. Throughout his life, Johnson was forcefully opposed to what he called the “dreadful wickedness” of slavery, denouncing it publicly many times. In 1752, during his work on the Dictionary, Johnson employed a black Jamaican former slave named Francis Barber as his manservant. Barber would go on not only to help revise later editions of the Dictionary but also to become Johnson’s residual heir, much to the consternation of London society. If a lexicographer, in Johnson’s mind, was a “harmless drudge,” then it is noteworthy that his Dictionary defined a “drudge” as “one employed in mean labour; a slave; one doomed to servile occupation.” While Johnson’s drudge was “harmless” (and in no way comparable with what he called “the toil and torture” of slavery), he nonetheless aligned himself with the plight of servile work, befitting of someone far beneath the “dictator” that Chesterfield described him as.
Portrait thought to be of Francis Barber, attributed either to James Northcote or Sir Joshua Reynolds, 1770s.
If Johnson grappled with a wild and unruly English language, therefore, it wasn’t necessarily because he wanted, like many of his day, to rule over all who used it. At the dawn of the radical Enlightenment, his Dictionary seems to have been written both by and for “those who toil at the lower employments of life.” If it sought to regulate the English language, it did so to allow nobody and everybody to claim dominion over it, to be its master.
The first edition of Johnson’s Dictionary features in our Fifty Fine Items catalogue, which brings together fifty standout collectibles from the 13th to the 21st century.
Peter Harrington’s in-house bindery, The Chelsea Bindery, is one of only a handful of traditional binderies left in London. In 2020, to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the bindery’s founding, we produced a catalogue to showcase the beautiful bespoke work carried out by their expert bookbinders.
Bookbinding is a highly skilled craft, taking years to master. Many of the tools, processes, and materials used in traditional binderies have remained largely unaltered for centuries. It requires time, skill, and dedication to train as a master bookbinder, and only a few make this their chosen profession. Lauren Hepburn spoke to Jasmin and Rosemary, two bookbinders working at The Chelsea Bindery, about their roles.
How long have you worked for The Chelsea Bindery and what is your role?
Rosemary: Since 2017. I work mainly with text blocks; preparing books for binding.
Jasmin: I have been working at the Chelsea Bindery for six years, making cloth and leather boxes, which are used to house valuable books, and leather book cases – headbanding and decorating books with leather onlays. I am currently in training to do finishing (gold tooling), so that I will also be able to add decorative details to spines and covers in gold leaf.
What led you to this profession?
R: I love books and have always enjoyed making things with my hands. I took a two week bookbinding course, which led to me completing a Foundation Degree in Book Conservation.
J: My love for bookbinding started with my chance acquisition of a small Adana letterpress machine. I used it to make small artists’ books, and soon became especially interested in how books are bound. This led me to study Bookbinding and Book Restoration at the London College of Communication, and the discipline has been my passion ever since.
How long does it take to learn the skills of the craft?
R: A lifetime. I’m still learning!
J: You never really stop learning, as there are endless unique and challenging projects. It’s what makes it so interesting.
What does your typical day at the bindery look like?
R: I have quite a variety of jobs, so there is no set routine. I start with whichever task I am currently working on. That could be paper repairs, headbanding, making endpapers, onlays, sewing text blocks, and more.
J: I typically work on a number of projects at the same time, such as different boxes at various stages in the crafting process, or spokeshaving leather while waiting for glue to dry. The nature of the work I am doing depends on what needs to be finished most urgently.
What tools and materials do you work with; are they the same as would have been used historically or has technology changed the process?
R: There are a lot of tools which would have been used historically – form follows function, after all – but there are quite a few modern tools as well, such as Teflon bone folders or using the guillotine instead of a plough .
J: Things haven’t changed much! All of our work is still done by hand and we use bone folders, shears, animal glue, spring dividers, sewing frames, nipping presses, and many other traditional tools. Some key modernisations include the addition of PVA glue, and we use a Linotype machine for type casting, rather than single-letter hand tools for gold finishing. Overall, the work is still done as it has been for centuries.
Why do you think traditionally bound books continue to hold such an appeal with people?
R: People love books for many reasons, and even those who don’t generally have a fundamental respect for them. Books have been regarded as holy; mystifying in an age when few were literate; gifts; they have been bought for display, education, reference, and can be considered furniture or forms of art. When a book is decorated, beautified, it can increase its artistic, historical and monetary value.
When an evolving range of fiction became available to a literate society, more people wanted to read. The affection of a story’s readers often transfers to the books that contain them.
People cling to ideas of what constitutes a book; it took centuries for the use of papyrus to be substituted with other materials. The casual look of the codex has changed very little since it was invented. But the structure, materials and decorative styles have. Written records have been part of nearly every known culture on earth. All of today’s societies have a history full of book lovers.
J: I believe it is due to the difference between handmade and machine-manufactured books. There is a quality and individuality about handbound books; the skill and passion involved in making bespoke books speaks of human touch, and ensures that each one is distinct and special.
Roughly how many hours are spent working on each item?
R: It varies, depending on the size and the condition of the book, as well as what is required and wanted for it.
J: This is a difficult question to answer, as every job is different. The boxes that I make can vary between taking 3.5 hours and 10 hours – or more. It depends on the materials used, such as whether it is made with cloth or leather, its size, and whether other extra details are required, like padding, wells, ribbons, frames, and so on.
Our anniversary catalogue features first, limited, and
special illustrated editions, showcasing the Chelsea Bindery’s mastery of artisanal techniques, with each binding complementing the book it encases.
Tom Elliott introduces the first edition of Smith’s magnum opus, The Wealth of Nations.
Before Adam Smith was the father of economics, he was known in the 18th century as the author of a philosophical treatise called the Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), a study which examined why people become interested in the affairs and struggles of others. It described how a man might develop his sense of morality by trying to put himself in another man’s shoes, by trying to “enter, as it were, into his body and become in some measure the same person with him.” Seemingly a long way from the Smith of self-interest that is usually associated with the Wealth of Nations (1776), the Theory ofMoral Sentiments stressed the importance of sympathy for others.
First edition of Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. 1759. A crisp copy in a splendid and unrestored contemporary binding. £85,000. (Item sold)
Nevertheless, the seeds of the Wealth of Nations are visible in Moral Sentiments. Towards the end of the earlier work, Smith considers the economic implications of man’s ability to imagine the lives of other people. He describes what happens when a “poor man’s son… begins to look around him” and “admires the condition of the rich.” Inspired to acquire more wealth, the poor man approaches the rich man in search of work. By employing the poor man, the rich man finds that he can produce more than he needs to survive. As a result, Smith argues, the rich man will feel “obliged to distribute among those who prepare, in the nicest manner, that little which he himself makes use of.” This supposedly natural moral sentiment brings Smith to his most famous economic idea: that the rich “are led by an invisible hand” to distribute wealth equally among their workers. Not just an ideal of laissez-faire economics, in other words, the “invisible hand” originally described man’s natural obligation to give as much as he gains.
The first, second, and third editions of the Wealth of Nations.
What links the nascent economic theory of Moral Sentiments with the more fully developed version in the Wealth of Nations is precisely this emphasis on the “naturalness” of economic activity. In the opening pages of the later work, Smith famously argues that his object of study, the division of labour in society, is the result of a “certain propensity in human nature”: “the propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another.” This emphasis informs Smith’s account of man’s “natural liberty” to improve himself. He describes how man’s “study of his own advantage naturally, or rather necessarily leads him to prefer that employment which is most advantageous to the society.
First edition of Smith’s Wealth of Nations. 1776. Superb in its first binding, a beautiful and highly finished gilt contemporary calf, with an excellent association. £300,000. (Item sold)
Perhaps this explains the influence that the Wealth of Nations had on the ideals of early America. Smith’s depiction of the American colonies in the Wealth of Nations is hardly favourable. He calls them “countries which contribute neither revenue nor military force towards the support of the empire,” dismissing them as a “sort of splendid and showy equipage.” But if he insists on this, then it is only to disabuse Britain of its imperial fantasy. “The rulers of Great Britain,” Smith argues, have “amused the people with the imagination that they possessed a great empire on the west side of the Atlantic.” That fantasy, Smith felt, was groundless. It had merely obstructed the natural liberty of Americans to enter the free market of economic exchange
Given Smith’s critique of empire, it is especially fitting that the above first edition of the Wealth of Nations was purchased within a few weeks of publication by Dr Thomas Moffatt, a Scottish customs officer on his way from London to America. This potentially places Smith’s text on American shores on the eve of revolution, during the political maelstrom of the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia and the drafting of the Declaration of Independence. While this founding document of American nationhood borrows from John Locke’s philosophy in its insistence on the “inalienable rights” of “life” and “liberty,” it is arguably Smith’s economics that gives it its most American of dreams: “the pursuit of happiness,” the poor man’s longing to become rich.
First edition of Smith’s Wealth of Nations. 1776. Inscribed within a month of publication by Scottish customs official Thomas Moffatt shortly before emigrating to America. £300,000. (Item sold)
America’s ensuing struggle for independence shows just how easily “man’s study of his own advantage” can lead to war as much as to peace, to disharmony between former brethren rather than to the sympathy that Smith originally wrote about when he conceived of the “invisible hand.” The journey of the Wealth of Nations to America at the outbreak of war ironically marked the moment when a Briton could no longer imagine what it was like to be an American in the colonies, when he could no longer “enter, as it were, into his body and become in some measure the same person with him.
The Wealth of Nations making its way across the Atlantic in time to witness the founding of America is indicative of its rapid circulation across continents. A second, corrected edition in English was published in 1778; a third followed in 1784. In the ensuing decades, the Wealth of Nations circulated in multiple translations, coinciding with the emergence of the modern nation states and signalling the arrival of a new age of global economics.
Translations of the Wealth of Nations in German, French, Italian, Swedish, and Portuguese.
Recent Comments