Description

Red cloth decorated in gold and blind. All edges gilt. 256pp. Cloth mottled on spine and front board, some wear to gilt on edges. Cloth on front gutter shows very small hole. Hinges are firm and all pages firmly attached. Neat former owner’s name in lovely script on fly, dated 1858. Very early chromolithograph frontispiece, with tissue guard intact, by Schenck. A very early attempt at machine lithography, possibly by George Baxter. An anthology of poetry, including selections by Wordsworth, Longfellow, Leigh Hunt, Thomas More, Charles Dickens, and dozens of others. A nice copy, with wear as described, quite scarce. No copy located in the British Museum Catalog. These little books of poetry were first issued in the 1823 as annuals and continued to be published up through the late Victorian period. It has been suggested that the present volume is a “best of” collected from earlier annuals, but this has not been confirmed. Considered pocket-books, due to their diminutuive size, it is not surprising that few have survived. Only one other copy now for sale that we were able to locate, and that from the 1870’s.