English Literature
Contact Donovan Rees or Zach Larsen
British literature and history from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, with an emphasis on poetry, fiction, and drama.
We usually have a selection of literary works from the STC and Wing period (i.e. before 1701), and a broad range of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century fiction and poetry, particularly the Romantics. We also have a selection of historical manuscripts, prints and broadsides, and works in translation.
Among important works which have passed through our hands are the editor's presentation copy of Milton's Lycidas, Swift's Modest Proposal, the autograph draft of Byron's She walks in beauty, the autograph manuscript of Jane Austen's only play Sir Charles Grandison, Dickens’s copy of Vanity Fair, Trollope's classical library, and, over the years, some fifty Shakespeare First Folios.
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[ACCADEMIA DELL’ARCADIA.]
Favola di due gatti e della scimia coll’appello de’ medesimi gatti all’orso, divisa in due parti,...
Florence, Bernardo Paperini, 1730.
First combined edition, rare, of two fables in parallel Latin and Italian verse by members of the Roman Accademia degli Arcadi, comprising Due gatti ed una scimia (first 1728) and the first appearance of its sequel, Appello de’ due gatti all’orso.
£475
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‘A.C.’ and ‘A.L.C.’
Dialogue entre un médecin et un homme du monde …
Paris, chez les marchands de nouveautés, 1824.
Rare first edition of this entertaining satirical dialogue between ‘M. de B.’ and ‘le docteur X’, taking a swipe at contemporary medicine and the medical profession.
£375
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AESOP.
Les fables d’Ésope, mises en françois, avec le sens moral en quatre vers, et des figures à chaque fable. Nouvelle edition,...
Lyon, Amable Leroy, 1809.
An illustrated Lyon schoolboy edition of Aesop’s Fables, uncut in its original wrappers with the ticket of a French bookseller in Rome.
£250
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AESOP; Jean-Baptiste Morvan de BELLEGARDE, translator.
Les fables d’Esope phrygien, avec celles de Philelphe. Traduction...
Utrecht, Jacob van Poolsum, 1734.
Aesop’s Fables in the translation read by French schoolchildren for two centuries, with fine copper-engraved illustrations, a neatly bound set with English aristocratic provenance.
£650
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AIKEN, Conrad.
Thee.
New York, George Braziller, 1967.
First trade edition, inscribed ‘For Geoffrey and Joyce [Bridson] / this little hymn of love / from Conrad / 1968’.
£250
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AIKEN, Conrad.
Selected Poems.
New York, Oxford University Press, 1964.
Second printing (first 1961), inscribed: ‘For Geoffrey from Conrad and Savannah with a Hosanna 1968’. Born in Savannah, Georgia, Aiken spent winters there later in his life. It was in Savannah in April 1968 that Bridson recorded the unbroadcast interviews which provide a valuable insight into the...
£150
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AIKEN, Conrad.
The Collected Novels … Introduction by R.P. Blackmur.
New York, Holt, Reinhart and Winston, [1964].
First edition, inscribed: ‘For Geoffrey and Joyce [Bridson] con amore but o at what a distance from Conrad 1964’.
£150
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ALBERTI, Leon Battista.
El Momo. La moral e muy graciosa historia del Momo; compuesta en Latin por el docto varon Leon Bapista...
Alcalá de Henares, Joan Mey Flandro, 1553.
First edition in Spanish of Alberti’s Momus [or De principe], translated by Augustín de Almaçan and with an introductory 8-page Exposición by the Toledo ascetic writer and scholar Alejo Venegas (1495?–1554?).
£3800
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[ALDERLEY EDGE.]
Alderley Edge and its Neighbourhood.
Macclesfield, J. Swinnerton, [1843].
First edition of this locally printed collection of legends, people, and sites of interest around Alderley Edge, Cheshire, with an inscription to the library of the (later Royal) Archaeological Institute from the Institute’s principal founder Albert Way.
£175
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ALEXANDER, [Charles] A[rmistead].
The Fall of Aztalan, and other Poems …
Washington, W. M. Morrison, 1839.
First edition, a presentation copy, of an uncommon epic poem about Aztlán, the legendary North American ancestral homeland of the Aztec peoples before their migration to central Mexico in the eleventh century.
£1750
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ALFIERI, Vittorio, and Charles LLOYD, translator.
The Tragedies of Vittorio Alfieri; translated from the Italian...
London, Printed for Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown … 1815.
First edition of this translation of Alfieri’s (1749–1803) tragedies into English, undertaken by the poet Charles Lloyd ‘on the suggestion of a friend whose judgement I highly respect’, likely Robert Southey, whom he addresses as his ‘sponsor’ in the ‘Dedicatory Sonnet’.
£450
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AMADUZZI, Giovanni Cristoforo.
Epistola ad Johannem Baptistam Bodonium qua emendatur et suppletur commentarium de Anacreontis genere...
[(Colophon:) Parma, Bodoni, 1791.]
First edition of Amaduzzi’s philological and bibliographical commentary on Anacreon, addressed to Bodoni, ‘artis typographicae restitutor’ (p. 3).
£275
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ANACREON.
Ανακρεοντος τηιου μελη praefixo commentario quo poëtae genus traditur et bibliotheca Anacreonteia...
Parma, [Bodoni] ‘in aedibus Palatinis’, 1791.
Thick paper copy, apparently one of 12 copies from an edition of 212. This attractive edition of Anacreon’s Odaria was edited by G.C. Amaduzzi and printed by Bodoni. ‘The editions of 1785 and 1791 are printed in capital letters, and more elegant and exquisitely finished productions cannot...
£650
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[ANON.]
Quia Amore Langueo.
[Colophon:] Chiswick, Caradoc Press, 1902.
One of 250 copies on paper (there were also 20 on vellum), printed from a fifteenth-century manuscript at Lambeth Palace Library.
£75
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[ANON].
Elogio del corno. Dell‘ autore della felice produzione italiana intitolata Della Necessità ed Utilità dei Debiti.
Venice, Stamperia Graziosi, 1796.
Only edition, as far as we can tell unrecorded, of this anonymously published poem in praise of the horn. Although ostensibly a chaste work extolling the virtues of the instrument, there is enough to suggest that the poet may have been thinking along less musical lines; the horn, we are repeatedly told,...
£275
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[ANON.]
Le moine galant, ou la vie de Don F… Bernardin, ecrite par lui-même.
[S.l., s.n.,] 1756.
Scarce first edition of this satirical ‘autobiography’ of a pleasure-driven law student-turned-monk, replete with amorous adventures.
£450
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[ANON.]
L’Isola de’ solitari o sia il felice a suo dispetto operetta alle donne di spirito italiane.
Pisa, Ranieri Prosperi, 1791.
First and only edition of a very rare, late eighteenth-century social satire, taking a swipe at intellectual academies and society’s ingratitude towards good actions.
£350
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ANSELMI, Giorgio, the younger.
Georgii Anselmi nepotis Epigrammaton libri septem. Sosthyrides. Peplum Palladis. Aeglogae...
Venice, Maffeo Pasini, September 1528.
The definitive edition of the epigrams of Giorgio Anselmi, grandson of the astrologer and music theorist of the same name, with several epigrams on his grandfather’s lost works on magic and the occult.
£875
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[ARABIAN NIGHTS.]
Arabian Tales; or, a Continuation of the Arabian Nights Entertainments. Consisting of Stories related by the...
London, Faulder, and Hookham and Carpenter, Egerton, Walker [and five others], 1794.
First edition of this translation of the Continuation des mille et une nuits (1788–9) by Denis Chavis and Jacques Cazotte; despite the very close similarity to the title of the translation by Robert Heron published in Edinburgh in 1792, the text here is different.
£1000
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ARISTOPHANES.
The Frogs, a Comedy. Translated from the Greek of Aristophanes, by C[harles] Dunster, A.M …
Oxford, J. and J. Fletcher; London, Rivington, Payne, Faulder, Cadell; Cambridge, Merrill, [1785].
First edition in English, and the only separately published translation of The Frogs in the eighteenth century. ‘It is … somewhat surprising that in an age so studious of ancient literature as the present, and which so much abounds in translations of the Greek and Latin classics, we have versions...
£500