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A handsome A. and C. Black publisher’s binding.

A good example of splendid A. and C. Black publisher’s binding, the design almost certainly by John Leighton. The binding was offered in several colours: red, green and blue, some with additional blocking in blue or red. This variant is perhaps the most elaborate, in three colours.

A substantial library catalogue from Arthurstone House, Meigle, Perthshire, listing over 2500 titles with their respective press and shelf locations. The books cover a wide variety of subjects (science, literature, art, classics, travel, topography and agriculture) and date from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century (with the largest concentration in the later eighteenth and earlier nineteenth centuries). This is a typical country house collection in a library probably formed in the later eighteenth century and reorganised after 1869, when this handsome catalogue was evidently produced. The earliest book we have noticed is a 1550 edition of Macchiavelli, while among the latest works is Darwin’s Naturalist’s Voyage of 1845. Other authors and works include Sir Walter Scott, Charles Lyell, Shakespeare, Swift, Descartes and Ossian and there are copies of Cook’ second and third voyages, nine works on chess and eighteen on America, several pages of entries for ‘Scotland’, together with a quantity of pamphlets, many on military subjects.

Arthurstone (Perthshire, close to both Perth and Dundee) dates from around 1789 but was remodelled and extended by the industrialist and philanthorpist Peter Carmichael who added a library and a billiard room when he purchased the house in 1869. The library apparently featured oak panelling, along with intricately carved busts of literary figures ncluding Robert Burns, Wordsworth and Shakespeare.

A rare French broadside advertising the virtues of ‘Scotch Pills’ or ‘Grana angelica’ invented by the seventeenth-century Edinburgh physician Patrick Anderson which continued to be popular in Scotland, England and France well into the nineteenth century. The long text in 12 chapters outlines the supposed virtues of the pills as a cure for almost any complaint. This French version imitates the English broadsides of the second half of the eighteenth century (there are several in ESTC) which themselves mimicked the form of Royal proclamations with woodcut arms at the head. It also reproduces the purported trademark of Anderson and his successor Isabelle Inglish which seems to have been pirated as often as the pills themselves.

‘Some time after 1625 Anderson was appointed physician to Charles I. In 1635 he published in Edinburgh Grana angelica, a treatise in Latin which puffed his mild aperient pills, made with aloes, colocynth, and gamboge, and pronounced a sovereign remedy for cleansing the system after carouses. Anderson claimed to have brought the formula of the pill back from a trip to Venice about 1603. Although this formula was allegedly deposited in the Rolls House, Edinburgh, to protect his proprietary rights, attempts to trace the document there have proved unsuccessful. Charles II was said to have constantly used the pills, known as Scots Pills, as his ordinary medicine’.

Sole edition of this rare suite of ten hand-coloured lithographs commemorating a ball inspired by Ivanhoe, held in Brussels on 5 February 1823 by the Prince and Princess of Orange in honour of the British community in that city. The ball was an early expression of ‘Scottomania’, and of the revival of interest in medieval pageantry, that occupied European high society following the publication of Ivanhoe in 1819. There were thirty-two guests at the ball, all attending in elaborate costume and dancing a special quadrille which became the talk of the town and remained ‘the principal topic of conversation at Brussels’ several months later (according to the The Repository of Arts, May 1823). The additional printed programme (not necessarily issued with the plates) tells us that Lord Danlo was Ivanhoe, while the Black Knight was played by Mr de Janti, and Mrs Berkley taking the role of Rowena. Further down the list is Mrs Fielden (sic), as Alicia, wife of the Joseph Ffeilden who owned this copy – she can be seen on the left in Plate VII. Jowers, Theatrical Costume 3126. COPAC shows copies at NLS, Edinburgh, and V&A. Worldcat adds Paris-INHA only.

First edition of the ‘Ettrick Shepherd’s’ first major success, the work which placed him on a par with Scott and Byron as fashionable poets of the 1810s. In dialect throughout, the poem imagines a return to Scotland of Mary Queen of Scots, and a poetical contest (the ‘Wake’) held in her honour at Holyrood. Jackson, p. 371.

A rare caricature of domestic strife, Calcutta-printed by Scottish printmaker James Moffat (1775-1815), better known for his Indian topographical views popular among British colonial residents in India. A woman, dressed in a short shift, angrily pulls a bottle from the hand of a drunken man, who sits with his right fist raised and a cigar hanging from his mouth as smoke billows around his head. He holds onto a bottle with his left hand, a glass and pile of cigars at his elbow. The woman points with her left hand to a clock on the wall which shows the time as five past five. In the background on the left, a dark-faced, cloaked figure stands before the curtained doorway on the left.

‘Moffat was a Scotsman who arrived in India aged only 14, living in Calcutta from 1789 to 1815. He appears to have learnt his profession of drawing and engraving in India. According to Wynyard Wilkinson (‘The Makers of Indian Colonial Silver’, London, 1987, p. 137) he was apprenticed as an engraver to the silversmith John Ludvig Jacobi in 1789, and then worked from 1794-1804 for another silversmith John Mair and his successor firms, while engraving and publishing his own views. An advertisement in the ‘Calcutta Gazette’ in 1797 offering to produce ‘Picturesque copper-plate engravings’ led to a series of views of Calcutta and its environs.’ ?

First edition. An account of the author’s ‘pilgrimage’ to the Palace of Holyrood in Edinburgh, where French monarch Charles X had taken refuge (for the second time) following his deposition by the July Revolution in 1830. The object of his pilgrimage was not so much Charles himself, but his young nephew Henri, son of the Duke and Duchess de Berri, named regent of French in exile. A detailed report of this extraordinary young man is given, together with the striking silhouette portrait. The ‘Récit’ of the meeting is followed by various reflections on the author’s return journey through London, and then by a ‘rêve’ in which he dreams of a return to Paris and restoration of the monarchy under a young king Henri.

First edition of this critical jeu d’esprit,First edition of this critical jeu d’esprit, a contribution to the debate over the Elegy inspired by Johnson’s assessment in his Life of Gray (1777) and which was to continue well into the nineteenth century. It includes the complete text of the Elegy on pp. xii-xx. Young was professor of Greek at Glasgow University.

First edition. Scottish antiquarian and Sharpe ‘lived in and for the past’ (Oxford DNB) and this early collection is steeped in Scottish occult lore and witchcraft (in which Sharpe was an acknowledged expert). Inspired by Scott, who became a lifetime friend and correspondent, the author spent a short spell at Oxford, but returned to Edinburgh in 1813, where he lived until his death in 1851. He left one of the most extensive collections of antiquities ever accumulated by a private individual in Scotland. Jackson, p. 310.

First edition, the second of two verse collections by a successful Edinburgh miniature and silhouette painter. Several poems are in Scots dialect and at least two are on artistic subjects: ‘Song, The Enamoured Painter’ and ‘Epistle to a Friend, on the Decay of Taste for the Fine Arts in Scotland, 1812’. This is a subscriber’s copy, one of two copies ordered by Archibald, twelfth Earl of Eglinton (restorer of Eglinton Castle). Painter Henry Raeburn is among the other subscribers. Not in Jackson.

First edition. Paterson was born in 1790, the son of a stone carver. He attended Edinburgh University before becoming Professor of English at Jena. He was ordained in 1837 and was a minister of the Free Church at Kirkud. ‘This Poem is written in direct imitation of the style of W. Scott: and as an imitation it must be allowed to have a very fair proportion of merit’ (The British Critic). Jackson, p. 381.

First edition—Highland poetry inspired by the mountain landscape of Craig Phadrig, which is topped by an ancient Pictish hillfort. Carey muses on the legends of Macbeth (including the Weird Sisters), on the parallel between Macbeth and Napoleon Bonaparte), and Scottish history up to Culloden. Jackson, p. 348; Johnson, Provincial Poetry, 163; Aubin, p. 373.

First and only edition of a book of poems that the author ‘never would have published’ had it not been ‘in compliance with the wishes of many of his friends, relying on whose superior judgment, he launches his little volume, with all its defects, into the world; if it contributes any thing in a harmless way to the amusements of a winter’s evening, it is the extent of the author’s ambition, and the end for which any thing of his was originally composed’ (Preface). Included are several poems about Burns and a number of poems reflecting on the poet’s everyday life, including a ‘Song when the Author was Librarian to the Dalkeith Subscription Library’.

Morison’s pocket edition of Dunbar commences with a Life of Gavin Douglas, from a manuscript then in the possession of the Literary and Antqiuarian Society of Perth. Not in Jackson or Johnson.

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.

A very rare spurious edition of these erotic and bawdy poems by Burns and his circle, first published in 1799 (of which edition only 2 copies are known to survive). The title-page is headed ‘Not for maids, ministers or striplings’. The Roy collection of Robert Burns contains several similar reprints to ours (including our issue) each with differing title-pages giving ‘1827’.

‘Shepherds I have got the clap,
Stroking of my Anna;
My time’s filled up, oh sad mishap,
With taking salts and senna.
I for her King’s Place forsook,
Where girls I had past telling;
But now my pipe’s turned to a crook,
My b—, how they’re hanging...’ Roy collection of Robert Burns, p. 141 b.

First edition of this adaptation, published by subscription and dedicated to the Prince of Wales. According to the subscribers’ list, the Countess of Sutherland took two copies.

‘We know no reason that Mrs. Turner has to blush (as she does, in her modest address to her readers,) for a performance executed with strict fidelity, especially with the support of so very respectable a list of subscribers; and when it may even be added that, in some particular instances, she has even improved on her author …’ (Monthly Review). Jackson, p. 157.

First published the previous year. Edinburgh poet, Thomson’s Whist admirably reflects the eighteeneh-century appetite for the game, first described in detail by Hoyle in 1742.

First edition (a second edition was printed the following year) of this rather Ossianic performance. ‘A legendary tale has something in its nature apt to impose upon the imagination, by the venerable robe of antiquity in which it is usually veiled’ (Critical Review). John Tait (1748-1817) was a Writer to the Signet and afterwards judge of the Edinburgh Police Court (1805). He also wrote an elegy on Robert Fergusson (d. 1774), which appeared in the latter’s posthumous Poems, 1779. Jackson, p. 26.