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.
-
POUND, Ezra.
The Literary Essays … Edited with an Introduction by T. S. Eliot.
London, Faber & Faber, [1954].
First edition, first impression.
£75
-
[POUND, Ezra.]
Agenda. Twenty-first Anniversary Ezra Pound Special Issue.
London, Agenda Editions, 1980.
Reprinting a number of works by Pound alongside criticism. Bridson’s article ‘Italian Painting in the Cantos’, one of his last publications, appears on pp. 210-217.
£75
-
POUND, Ezra.
Cantos 110–116 …
printed & published by the Fuck You / press at a secret location in the lower east side, New York City, USA, 1967.
Unauthorised edition (unsurprisingly), no. 261 of 300 copies. The contents are extracts and include a number of apparently unidentified lines; this piracy forced the publication of Drafts and Fragment of Cantos CX–CXVII (1969).
£150
-
POUND, Ezra, and Ernest FENELLOSA.
Introduzione ai Nô, con un drama in un atto di Motokiyo: Kagekiyo.
Milan, All’insegna del pesce d’oro [Scheiwiller], [1958].
Third edition, translations of Pound’s ‘Introduction’ and one play from Certain Noble Plays of Japan by his daughter Mary de Rachewiltz. This third edition added ‘Un intervallo di 40 anni’ by Pound, dated November 1958.
£30
-
POUND, Ezra, and D.G. BRIDSON.
‘An Interview with Ezra Pound’ in New Directions 17. Norfolk, Conn.,
New Directions, [1961].
First edition, printing the majority of the interviews recorded in 1956 and broadcast in 1959. Other contributors to this issue included Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Williams.
£100
-
POUND, Ezra, and Giovanni GIUDICI, translator.
H.S. Mauberley, tradotto di Giovanni Giudici con tre disegni inedita...
Milan, all’insegna del pesce d’oro [Scheiwiller], 1959.
First edition, no. 141 of 1000 copies, a parallel-text Italian translation of Pound’s modernist masterpiece Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920).
£100
-
PRESENT FOR THE YOUNG (A).
London: Printed for The Religious Tract Society … and sold at their Depository … also by J. Nisbet...
[c. 1827]
First edition. A finely illustrated anthology of religious verse, contemplations, and prayers for children. Pieces include poems on the seasons and stories about a Welsh Shepherd, and ‘The Hill and the Valley’, all with heavily metaphorical content.
£175
-
PRINCE, F[rank].
T[empleton]. Soldiers Bathing and other Poems.
London, The Fortune Press, [1954].
First edition, Prince’s second collection, inscribed ‘with good wishes from the author, F. T. Prince. 23 April, 1954.’
£200
-
PRINCE, F[rank].
T[empleton].
Poems. London, Faber and Faber Limited, [1938].
First edition of the first collection by the South African-born Prince. Prince had contributed several poems to Eliot’s Criterion in the mid-30s.
£180
-
PRIOR, Matthew.
Poems on several Occasions.
London: Printed for Jacob Tonson … 1709.
First authorised edition, preceded by Curll’s pirated collection of 1707. In the preface Prior complains that in Curll’s edition poems by other authors have been misattributed to him and that some of his own poems are ‘transcribed … so imperfectly, that I hardly knew them to be mine’....
£400
-
PRIOR, Matthew.
The Poetical Works … now first collected, with explanatory Notes, and memoirs of the Author, in two Volumes …...
Rivington and Sons, J. Dodsley [and five others], 1779.
A handsome copy of this collected edition of Prior, edited by Thomas Evans, inscribed on a front endpaper: ‘George Augusta Hill given him by Ladies Anne and Gertrude Fitz-Patrick, out of the Library of the late Earl of Upper Ossory Ampthill Park who died Feb 1st 1818’.
£500
-
QUARLES, Francis.
The Shepheards Oracles: delivered in certain Eclogues …
London, Printed by M. F. for John Marriot and Richard Marriot … 1646.
Third edition of this pastoral allegory, first published in 1644, which uses the genre as a thin veil for the discussion of autobiographical, political, and religious matters. The poem includes portraits of Quarles’s friend Phineas Fletcher and of Archbishop Laud, who is described as an Arminian ‘Master...
£300
-
RACKHAM, Arthur, illustrator.
Some British Ballads.
London, Constable & Co. Ltd., [1919].
First trade edition, illustrated by Rackham, of these ballads sourced largely from Francis James Child’s English and Scottish Popular Ballads, our copy in a handsome Bayntun-Riviere binding.
£500
-
RANDOLPH, Thomas.
The Poems … edited by G. Thorn-Drury …
London, Frederick Etchells & Hugh Macdonald, 1929.
No. 21 of 40 copies on all-rag laid paper, signed by Thorn-Drury, from a total edition of 400.
£75
-
RAWLET, John.
Poetick Miscellanies …
London, printed for Samuel Tidmarsh, 1687.
First edition. Writing from the isolation of Newcastle, then a rural parish in fell country, Rawlet developed a mode of religious and descriptive poetry distinctly out of step with his own age, as is acknowledged by the editor in a verse preface: ‘Reader, expect not here, the filth of th’...
£1100
-
[RICHMOND.]
The Belvidere: a Poem. Inscrib’d to Joseph Grove, Esq. of Richmond, in the County of Surrey …
London: Printed in the Year 1749.
First edition, rare (British Library and Yale only) of a very attractive description in verse of a country estate in Richmond. The first pages offer a prospect of the garden with its flowers and shrubs, shaded walks and arbours, a bower with the escutcheon over the door of the late Sir William...
£2750
-
ROCHESTER, John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of, Wentworth Dillon ROSCOMMON, 4th Earl of, et al.
A Collection of Poems: viz....
London, printed for Daniel Brown and Benjamin Tooke, 1701.
Fourth edition of the important ‘Temple of Death’ miscellany of Restoration poetry, comprising some one hundred poems, retaining most of the poems from the third edition of 1693 and adding much new material, including the first appearances of works by Roscommon and Rochester.
£500
-
ROSCOMMON, Wentworth Dillon, Earl of.
Poems … to which is added an Essay on Poetry, by the Earl of Mulgrave, now Duke of Buckingham....
London: Printed for J. Tonson … 1717.
First edition of this collection, notable for Richard Duke’s unfinished Review, a vehement satire in response to, and in the allegorical manner of, Absalom and Achitophel, and featuring Dryden as one of the figures satirised. According to Tonson in the preface, it was written ‘a little after the...
£400
-
ROSCOMMON, Wentworth Dillon, Earl of.
An Essay on Translated Verse …
London, Printed for Jacob Tonson … 1684.
First edition of Roscommon’s influential Essay, in heroic couplets, which owes much to Boileau and to the author’s own education in France after the attainder of his kinsman the Earl of Strafford, with an introductory poem by Dryden.
£450
-
SANDYS, George.
A Paraphrase upon the divine Poems …
London, At the Bell in St. Pauls Churchyard. 1638. [Colophon: London, Printed by John Legatt 1637.]
First edition, the issue with the Dedication to Charles I on the title-verso.
£900