64 wood-engraved illus. Small folio, orig. white half-pigskin & polished buckram sides, spine gilt, t.e.g., others uncut, by Sangorski & Sutcliffe. [St. Lawrence, Waltham]: The Golden Cockerel Press, 1931.

A very fine copy of Gill’s “most memorable book…one of the glories of bookmaking for which he designed the type and himself engraved the beautiful initial letters and illustrations on wood.”–Blumenthal, Art of the Printed Book, p. 40 & no. 118. Limited to 488 copies on Batchelor handmade paper (there were a further twelve copies on vellum).

Preserved in a box. More

Lithographed title (tiny repaired tear to outer lower corner) & 19 lithographed plates, each with a blank guard sheet. 1 p.l. (lithographed title), xvi, 92, vii pp., one leaf. Small folio, cont. aubergine morocco, sides richly panelled in gilt, spine richly gilt. London: Ch. Hullmandel, & R. Ackermann, [1824].

First edition and the prettiest copy of this book I have seen. This “was the most important English treatise on lithography to be published in the first half of the nineteenth century. It was one of the few early treatises to appear in a large format (imperial octavo) and was, with... More