[BUNBURY, Henry William.] ‘GAMBADO, Geoffrey’.
An Academy for grown Horsemen, containing the completest Instructions for Walking, Trotting, Cantering, Galloping, Stumbling, and Tumbling, illustrated with Copper Plates, and adorned with a Portrait of the Author.
London, W. Dickinson, S. Hooper, and Messrs Robinsons, 1787 [colophon: Mount Vernon (NY), William Edwin Rudge, 1929].
Folio, pp. [2 (blank)], [2], [2 (modern introduction)], [iii]-vi, [v]-xx, 38, [2 (colophon)], [2 (blank)]; with frontispiece portrait and 13 plates, printed on integral leaves, one with text printed verso; very minimal spotting; an excellent copy in paper boards imitating calf, borders blocked in gilt with Greek-key motif, spine gilt in compartments with panel inked red and lettered directly in gilt, top-edge cut, others retaining deckle edges, marbled endpapers, with a paper slipcase; very slightly bumped at extremities.
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An Academy for grown Horsemen, containing the completest Instructions for Walking, Trotting, Cantering, Galloping, Stumbling, and Tumbling, illustrated with Copper Plates, and adorned with a Portrait of the Author.
Limited edition, reprinted from the first, numbered 142 of 400 copies. A humorous parody of the manuals on horsemanship so fashionable in the late eighteenth century, Bunbury’s text was published pseudonymously as Geoffrey Gambado but the plates credited to his own name, with reference to the illustrator as ‘my ingenious elucidator’ (p. 28).
