Current Stock - B (last online update: 20th November 2011)

With the bookseller-binder's ticket of Barker...Market-place Hexham.

A very crudely printed cheap production, with the final e of Carroline in smaller and different fount than the other letters, badly composed (first line: Come all young men and maidens atend to my ryme), badly inked and in places almost illegible.

Geddie Middle Scots Poets pp.65 & 145. Well edited by Dr. John Jamieson (author of the Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language), and a pair of works recommended by Scott to his friends. Volume ii concludes with a glossary to both works, and an impressive list of subscribers. This copy has the armorial bookplates of Lord Napier, for whom it was presumably bound: there are gilt coronets to the spines.
"It is with The Bruce of Barbour that Scottish vernacular literature, as a distinctive national product, first begins to take shape.... [It] portrays the triumph of a splendid struggle for independent nationality...; and if not entitled to rank as a great national epic by virtue of qualities essentially poetic, it yet celebrates the daring and victorious career of a national hero in a manner not unworthy of the stirring theme....
...Harry [Henry the Minstrel] may be ranked next to Henryson. As a mere metrical achievement the poem is a great advance on Barbour's Bruce; and although Harry is not usually classed as a Chaucerian, there can be no doubt that he shared, directly or indirectly, in the Chaucerian influence." (Henderson)

Hill pp.13-14; Lada-Mokarski 34. With a loosely-inserted ALs. from Barrington inserted. Dated from his home "Beckett July 29th 1774" it is a request to M. Garnier to provide General Melville with a letter of safe-conduct "to certify that he travels as an antiquarian, and not as a spy." In fact, General Robert Melville (1723-1809: see DNB) did undertake his proposed researches into ancient sites of military interest in France, but not until some years later.
The volume includes Barrington's valued works on travel such as "The Possibilty of reaching the North Pole Discussed" and the "Journal of a Spanish Voyage in 1775, to explore the Western Coast of N. America" (the only contemporary account of Don Francisco Antonio Maurelle's voyage to Alaska), together with essays on natural history, the child prodigy Mozart, etc.

wakefield in gilt to upper cover: from the library of Hugh Cleghorn (1752-1837), the St. Andrews professor of civil history turned political adventurer: see his biography by Aylwin Clark or her article in the Oxford DNB.
Barrington's work complemented that of William Blackstone, particularly in its argument that much statute law was unnecessary and duplicated what was already common law.

From the series Collection des Mémoires relatifs a la Révolution Française.

H.D. Forbes copy. Bound after a copy of the same author's Considerations of the Existence of God, and of the Immortality of the Soul (second edition, 1677, lacking one or more preliminaries - the preface ends with an orphaned catchword - but textually complete).

Alston iii/357; Chuo 28; Jessop p.98. wakefield in gilt to upper cover: from the library of Hugh Cleghorn (1752-1837), Professor of Civil History at St. Andrews turned political adventurer (see Oxford DNB). The poet, essayist and philosopher James Beattie was Professor of Moral Philosophy and Logick in the Marischal College and University of Aberdeen.
"This book met with the most enthusiastic praise from William Cowper...who declared...that Beattie was the only author he had seen 'where critical and philosophical researches are diversified and embellished by a poetical imagination that makes even the driest subject and the leanest a feast for epicures'." (Chuo)

Chapman 3.A.ii; Rothschild 354.
"From the very first paragraph, when we learn of the dreadful power to stun and kill possessed by one of the Caliph's eyes, the story proceeds with an unremitted vigour....
Vathek was composed in French, and translated by Samuel Henley under Beckford's supervision. It was in translation that the book first appeared. He also added copious notes, reinforcing the impression that the text itself creates of a mind thoroughly at home in an exotic world..., where passions are flaunted more vehemently and punished more arbitrarily. Such materials served to anaesthetize any sense of guilt that Beckford's audacity might have engendered, and Vathek is the most wholehearted expression, among English works published in the 1780s, of that sheer iconoclastic exhilaration that shortly afterwards found definitive utterance in Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell." (Butt & Carnall)

Hill p.20; Howes B318; Sabin 4390. Survey of the western coast of America, followed by a voyage across the Pacific via the Marquesas, New Hebrides, New Guinea and Tonga to Singapore. On the voyage home Belcher was diverted to China, where he carried out a survey of Hong Kong, newly ceded to Great Britain.

From the Gladstone library at Fasque, with bookplates.
Covers the eventful years 1760-1793, a period of major upheaval in India, America and France, and at home.

Adams B.2308; Bibliographia Aberdonensis pp.31-2; Renouard Badius Ascensius ii/pp.195-6.
With a fine contemporary ownership inscription (dated 1533) at the foot of the title-page, that of Matthew Weymiss (or Matthias Weymss) of Dordrecht, "Gardianus" of a convent in Mecheln (Malines, Belgium). This ancient and important city was, from 1559, the residence of the only archbishopric in the country, and hence the religious capital of Belgium.
This is the second of two seminal Scottish histories from the press of the humanist scholar-printer Badius Ascensius (the other, by John Major or Mair, was published in 1521).
Following an early education in Dundee, Boece, like so many of his countrymen, proceeded to Paris, then the most frequented university in Europe, and became a regent or professor there, probably from 1492 to 1498. Among his friends and contemporaries in the college were Erasmus, "the splendour and ornament of our age," and John Major or Mair: among their pupils were John Knox and George Buchanan, both of whom brought the new learning back to Scotland with them. Boece's friendship with the great scholar-bishop William Elphinstone led to his appointment as the first principal of King's College Aberdeen.
In contrast to Mair, "Boece...was probably more typical of European, as well as Scottish, scholarship in the early sixteenth century. A work long on rhetorical flourishes and very short on either hard evidence or accuracy, his History of Scotland...was to be much more influential [than Mair's] in its own day." (Oxford Companion to Scottish History) It was "related in a style which the admirers of Boece compared to Livy, and followed the model of...the great Roman historian in sacrificing accuracy to a flowing narrative adapted to the public for whom it was written. This accounts for its rapid popularity.... In 1577 it was done into English for Holinshead's chronicles by William Harrison.... In the next generation, Buchanan, not unwilling to cavil at Boece, used his history as material for his own more elaborate work." (DNB)

Bouillé served in the Seven Years' War, and as governor in the Antilles conducted operations against the British in the American War of Independence; the present volume however concerns the French Revolution, to which he was hostile.

Blackmer 384 (this set, which realised £1,760 in the Sotheby sale of his books in 1989; his bookplate on each front pastedown).
The first attempt at a complete catalogue of the British Museum collection of sculpture. Combe had been appointed Keeper of Antiquities in 1807. Volumes i-iii illustrate pieces from the Towneley collection, drawn by William Alexander, and volume iv contains the sculptures from the Temple of Apollo at Bassae and two plates of the temple after drawings by John Foster done on the spot. The work was continued by Edward Hawkins (volumes v-x, 1826-43), and Samuel Birch (volume xi, 1861). Prominent among the collections are, of course, those of Lord Elgin (volumes vi-ix, containing 142 plates).
Complete sets are rare: Navari notes the Gennadius Library set, comprising the first four volumes only.

A handsomely printed and bound set, originally issued at £25 unillustrated, or - as here - with the addition of Sharpe's series of plates, at £35. Includes Johnson's Lives, with other memoirs by S.W. Singer (who probably acted as general editor), Richard Davenport and others. The British poets range from Chaucer and Spenser to (the most recent) Robert Burns and William Cowper, and incorporates many minor poets omitted from earlier anthologies. Most notably, the final twenty volumes contain verse translations from the Greek and Latin classics by the likes of Fawkes, Cooke, Rowe and West, and the best-known of them all: Pope's Homer and Dryden's Juvenal.

Kress B.4634; Goldsmiths' Library 18666.
"Brougham...touched nearly all subjects and adorned some by his eloquence and dialectical skill. The contact seems least superficial, the ornament particularly solid, in the case of political economy. Brougham's first considerable work was [the above].... Criticising Adam Smith, he maintains that the monopoly of the colonial trade did not produce all the detrimental effects ascribed to it. Referring to the slave colonies, Brougham not only denounces the slave trade as iniquitous - 'not a trade, but a crime' - but also argues that it is unprofitable.... Slavery, as well as slave trade, was assailed by Brougham's oratory...." (Palgrave)

Holland, Belgium, Vienna, Trieste, Venice, Bologna, Ancona, Rome, Naples, Florence, Genoa, Geneva, Paris, Hamburg, Berlin, Potsdam, St. Petersburg, Stockholm, Finland, Denmark, etc.

Egerer 315. Lockhart's first biography. A pencil note on the front free endpaper describes this as one of a "rare deluxe large format" issue, and both appearance and price (twelve shillings, as per the spine label) seem to confirm this. The cheaper issue was presumably that which formed volume xxiii of Constable's Miscellany.

Arnott & Robinson 3178; Sabin 9632. Signatures of Lady Chandos and Stowe Library bookplates; later discreet stamps of Jos. Lowrey.
"Fanny was young, still somewhat gauche socially, and she made many visitor's gaffes, criticizing the manners of Americans, their government, food, and intelligence, the loks and dress of the women, even the way their horses were trained.... In 1835 she made her position in America difficult by publishing two volumes of her journal, detailing he introduction to America, which many of its citizens found hard to forgive.... It remains notable for the freshness of its style and the penetrating unconventionality of its observations, rather than for anything shocking or coarse." (Oxford DNB)

The great popular poet of the Restoration's Hudibras is little understood and appreciated today, but his "remarkable series of characters, which remained in manuscript until [1759]...form one of the outstanding contributions to Restoration literature. The man who wrote them was a sort of later Ben Jonson, a wit among scholars and a scholar among wits, with the intellectual confidence of wide and unselective reading, and that contempt for pedantry which comes most easily to the non-academic writer." (OHEL) The "characters" occupy the whole of volume ii; volume i contains other miscellaneous satires in verse and prose, and a 23-page list of subscribers.