[Rarebooks] fa: BUXTON FORMAN'S Edition of Shelley - 1 of 132 Sets - w/ HIS BOOKPLATE

[Ardwight Chamberlain]

Listed now, auction ending Sunday, Dec. 5. Details and images can be  
found at the URL below or by searching under the seller name arch_in_la.

http://shop.ebay.com/arch_in_la/m.html

Thanks,
Ardwight Chamberlain
L.A.

H. Buxton Forman, editor: The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley.  
London: George Bell & Sons. Five volumes, 8vo, original paper-covered  
boards, green cloth spines, printed spine labels; portrait  
frontispiece; large paper edition, one of 150 hand-numbered copies  
(this being no. 132).

Modest bumping and wear to the bindings, some sunning and darkening to  
the edges of the boards and spines, one spine with small white stain;  
one interior front hinge partly cracked but board is secure; endpapers  
a bit foxed, toning and light dust-soiling to the deckled edges of the  
text block, mild toning to the leaves; otherwise clean and sound. A  
solid set.
Loosely laid in is the large, elaborate bookplate of the work's  
editor, H. BUXTON FORMAN (1842-1917), one of the most prominent and  
ultimately notorious figures of nineteenth- and twentieth-century  
bibliography. Among the leading authorities of his time on the works  
of Shelley and Keats, editor of the collected works of both poets,  
president of the Shelley Society, antiquarian bookman of great renown,  
Forman is best remembered today as the partner of the bookdealer/ 
forger Thomas J. Wise in a long-running scheme to produce and peddle  
fraudulent first editions of such authors as Elizabeth Barrett  
Browning, George Elliot, Ruskin, Swinburne, and others. The bookplate  
shows Forman looking very innocent and studious beside a bust of his  
"household god," Shelley.