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First edition, a pocket description of the British Isles, historical and geographical, but with reflections on British character and customs. ‘La Nation Angloise aime beaucoup les Spectacles surtout la Tragédie... Les Anglois n’ont la vivacité des François, ni la lenteure des peuples septrentrionaux... Les Femmes d’Angleterre sont maîtresses de leurs volontés & même de leurs caprices...’ It also appeared in the same year with a La Haye imprint.

First published in 1641, as Herōologia Anglorum, or, An help to English history. Wing, H1719

A good example of one of Thomas Phillipps’s anastatically-printed lithograph facsimiles of manuscripts, for which copies of the original manuscript were transferred to zinc plates for lithography. In this case the text is a copy of his own transcripts from the records of Herald’s seventeenth-century Visitations and their disqualifications of arms born by gentlemen without authority. Sir Thomas Phillipps as a printer and patron of lithographic printing has been extensively studied and discussed by Michael Twyman in Early Lithographed Books (1990) — he printed many himself at Middle Hill, and supervised the production of others by printers such as Appel, who had exhibited new methods of anastatic printing at the Great Exhibition in 1851. Chambers, Early Private Presses, Middle Hill 41; Holzenberg, The Middle Hill Press, 88. Worldcat lists copies at the Grolier Club only outside Europe.

An eighteenth-century work on feudal barons and the history of land ownership in England. It was written by Madox, a legal antiquity and historian whose first appearance was in the publication Formulare Anglicanum in 1701. He produced a learned dissertation on ancient charters, which was praised by Bishop William Nicolson as having provided an ‘unspeakable service to our students in law and antiquities.’ (English Historical Library, 1776).

Baronia Anglica was first printed in 1736 and our issue is ‘a reissue of the sheets of the 1736 edition printed by William Bowyer (T97064), without the index to his ‘History of the Exchequer’ (which occupied the final 54 sheets...) with a cancel title page; Bowyer also printed the new titles; his records show 500 + 50 [large-paper?] + ‘500 more to give away’. The large-paper copies may show variation in placement of press figures, or in their presence or absence; the details are unclear’ (ESTC).

Extensive antiquarian transcripts from manuscript armorials and visitation documents (mainly sixteenth- and seventeenth-century) in the British Museum. Including Harleian MSS 1174, 1397, 1561, 4756, 7565, 1045, 1301 and Sloane MSS 4972-3. Evidently once part of a larger sequence, the volumes are marked VIII and IX respectively.

First edition. Edward Jacob ‘antiquary and naturalist, was born in Canterbury, the eldest son of Edward Jacob (d. 1756), surgeon and alderman, who served as mayor of Canterbury in 1727–8, and Jane, daughter of Strangford Violl, vicar of Upminster. About 1735 he moved to Feversham [sic] where he lived at 78 Preston Street and practised as a surgeon, following in his father's and grandfather's footsteps. Among his patients was Lord Sondes of Lees Court, Sheldwich. The Jacobs were a long-established east Kent family and several members had served as mayors and magistrates in Sandwich and Dover. Actively interested in local affairs, Jacob was four times mayor of Faversham—in 1749, 1754, 1765, and 1775...

Jacob interested himself in the history of Faversham soon after he had moved there, ‘having an early propensity to the study of antiquities’. He was elected a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries on 5 June 1755, and in 1774 published The History of the Town and Port of Faversham, dedicated to Lord Sondes’ (Oxford DNB).

This is one of the standard copies with 15 plates, some having an 4 additional plates. With a good local provenance (Philip Neame, Faversham-born recipient of the Victoria Cross for service on the Western Front and of an Olympic gold medal in 1924, apparently the only recipient of both).� Bibliotheca Cantiana 198-9.

Probable first edition in French of Sheridan’s best novel, dedicated to Richardson (1761). Two French translations appeared in 1762, Robinet’s, and another by the Abbé Prévost entitled Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire de la vertu. Rochedieu lists only Robinet’s which is probably the first. Rochedieu p. 299.

First edition in French of Life and Adventures of Joe Thompson (1750), a very popular ‘ramble’ narrative capitalising on the contemporary appetite for books of genuine voyages. Joe Thompson traverses the globe, and portions of the novel are set in America, where the author had travelled between 1742 and 1744. Of Kimber, the old DNB provides this comment: ‘Novelist and compiler, born in 1719, was son of Isaac Kimber... He gained a scanty subsistence by compiling for booksellers, and died, worn out with such drudgery, in 1769.’ Rochedieu, 177.

First edition in French of the pseudonymous Siege of London (1885) (another condensed French edition of 40 pages only also appeared in the same year). An excellent example of the many British speculative novels spawned by the fear of invasion, from the 1871 Siege of Dorking to Erskine Childers’s Riddle of the Sands (1903). In Posteritas’ account, the invasion is set against the background of a collapsed Gladstone Liberal government and crisis in the Middle East. The French invade via Portsmouth and later Dover and Scotland, with the aid of the perfidious Irish, and the novel culminates with the bombardment of Westminster and the Battle of Hyde Park. JISC locates the Bodley copy only in the UK.

A scarce little language tutor, first published some time before 1847, this edition with the account of a journey to London presented as dialogues and other useful examples. Millhouse was a tutor at Milan and produced a popular English-Italian dictionary.

One of several early French editions of James’ Letters of Charlotte (1786) a novel giving Werther’s Charlotte a voice of her own. The first French edition appeared the previous year, and another (besides ours) appeared also in 1787. All are rare: Rochedieu lists neither the 1786 French edition or ours. cf. Rochedieu, 168 (1787, ‘Londres’ Paris: Royez, 18mo).

First edition in French, rare. Cumberland’s Fielding-inspired novel was first published in 1795, though is lesser known than his first novel Arundel (1789). It is probably better, though, than its successor John de Lancaster (1809), ‘best left undescribed’ (Oxford DNB). Rochedieu (p. 74) lists an edition 1799 only. Copac lists the BL copy only.

An attractive manuscript, apparently executed by Jermyn Moorsom (d.1951), brother of Raisley Stuart Moorsom (1892–1981, a member of the Bloomsbury set), and comprising two foxhunting poems by the Victorian MP William Bromley-Davenport.

‘Lowesby Hall’—after Tennyson’s Locksley Hall—is, according to the sporting novelist George Whyte-Melville, ‘the best parody in the English language’.

The personal account book of an English provincial bobby posted in Northamptonshire (variously at Northampton, Kettering, Oundle, Paulerspury, Daventry, East Haddon and Naseby) recording every arrest he made in the course of a 32-year career.

After early stints in Northampton and Kettering, Clarke’s experience was based in smaller villages and his notebook is a valuable and grimly fascinating account of English rural life at the opening of the twentieth century. The crimes here records include drunkenness, obscenity, vagrancy, poaching, gambling, begging, petty theft, domestic abuse, animal cruelty, unlicensed use of firearms, bicycle and motoring offences and playing football on the highway. Clarke was an assiduous recorder, itemising every arrest and its outcome, then, at the end of the year making a final reckoning. So, for the year 1911 he sums up, in red ink: ‘24 proceeded against. 15 fined £10,18.0. 5 sent to prison 16 months 21 days. 1 dismissed. 2 warned of reward. I bound over for 12 months’. The hundreds of arrests made over the course of his career is totalled in pencil at the end: ‘32 years service, Cases 523, Fines £359.15.5. Sent to Prison 53 years 6 months 0 weeks 5 days. Pay £5272. 5 [shillings]. 7 1/2 [pence].

One interesting development charted here is, of course, the rise of motor transport and its attendant offences. In the early years Clarke apprehends very few motorists (but rather more cyclists), while towards 1930 the vast majority of his successes (and revenue) involve reckless and speeding drivers from all over England. A few excerpts give a flavour:

‘October 30th [1900] Danile Bailey John Abrahams Edward Smith & Jim Mallard charged with stealing Fruit valued 5/- the property of Jethro Johnson Fine and Costs 7/6 each.’

‘Dec 16th [1900] Frederick Albert Coe, scholar, age 13 Abbey St Daventry Charged with stealing a Dutch Cheese Valued 2/6 the property of Messrs Bayley Brothers & was ordered to receive 6 strokes with Birch’.

‘March 3d [1901] Richard Clarke Cycle Maker Coventry charged with being a wandering Lunatic at Daventry committed to Berrywood Asylum’.

‘19 August [1909] Fred[eric]k Juggings... Commercial Traveller charged with Indecently assaulting Mollie Simpson age 5 yrs at Weston Favell. Fine £2.10.0 costs 6/-’

‘June 17 [1914] Lady Mabel Gore Langton Cosgrove Hall charged with keeping 5 male servants with 3 licences. Cautioned.’

‘Jan 27 [1917] William Lee, Cold Ashby, charge with supplying to [sic] wounded soldiers with whisky. Fined £10.’

A typical Victorian handwriting copybook, devoting a page to each letter of the alphabet, with a single sentence, phrase or word repeated over several lines, the text of varying size. ‘All thy commandments are righteousness’; ‘Be ye angry and sin not’; ‘Fulminate’; ‘Knowledge is Power’, ‘Mathematician’; ‘Obrometer’, ‘Vice is attended with sorrow’; ‘X begins no word in the English language’. The sequence (nonetheless complete) is broken in two places, with two pages of elementary mathematical exercises, and the last page is signed ‘William Blundell June 29th 1868 in Sussex’.

First edition in French of Dunallan; or, Know what you judge (1825); the last published (but first written) work of this once much-read Presbyterian Scottish novelist (1782-1825). ‘Grace Kennedy's novels (at least eight) were all published anonymously and rapidly in the early 1820s, and met with considerable success, being reissued late into the nineteenth century...’ (Oxford DNB). Worldcat: NLS, Queen’s Public Library (NY) and Penn only outside continental Europe.

Kane O’Hara, Irish playwright (1711/12–1782), born at Templehouse in Connaught. ‘O’Hara’s first professional play was Midas, an English Burletta, which had its première production at the Crow Street Theatre, Dublin, on 22 January 1762. Midas was a clever, chauvinistic response to the success of a touring Italian troupe, the D'Amici family, which had brought a lively production of an Italian burletta to the Smock Alley Theatre on 19 December 1761. The Italian burletta, a slight comic opera already modish on the continent, captivated Dubliners with its simple domestic plot and brisk galante music’ (Oxford DNB). It transferred to London, became a hit and was performed there over 200 times by 1800. O’Hara was seriously shortsighted (he is seen here in spectacles) and lost his sight in 1778.

The etching by Edmund Dorrell (1778-1857) is comparatively rare, the plate apparently having been destroyed soon after it was first printed. This is a splendid example on a full sheet. O’Donoghue 25-II, 1802.

First edition. Marsh, biblical critic and later bishop of Peterborough was born at Faversham, Kent, on 10 December 1757 and educated at Faversham grammar school and the King's School, Canterbury, before going up to Cambridge. He travelled in Egypt, Arabia and Europe before returning to Cambridge for his BD. The Authenticity of the five Books of Moses, defending Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch was one of his qualifying sermons.

A very scarce account in French of the demise of Charles I, probably printed in Paris despite the ‘Londres’ imprint. Three issues of 1650 are known, the other two being octavo with 155 pages plus prelims. ESTC assigns Wing number H2091 to all three without further comment. The work was reprinted at Paris in 1792, an interesting anticipation of France’s own regicide in January 1793. Wing H2091; Thomason E.1353[1].

Sole edition, printed for the author. In verse with English translation in prose, on facing pages. Composed in the aftermath of the Duke’s fatal stabbing on the steps of the Paris Opera by an anti-monarchist Bonapartist, Louis Pierre Louvel. Noel de Quersonnières (1728-1845) formerly commissaire-général of the French armies was reputed to have died at the age of 116, though his dates suggest he only reached 106.

There appear to be two issues: for the English and French market respectively. The first contains a ‘Discours preliminaire’ explaining the translation, with a printed section title to the verso of the title. The second (ours) does not have the section title printed on the title verso and the leaves of the ‘Discours’ are cancelled (hence the apparent mispagination of the prelims in this issue). WorldCat BL, BN and Newberry Library only. The BL copy is of the first issue.