[Rarebooks] fa: STOW'S "SURVAY OF LONDON" - 1603

[Ardwight Chamberlain]

Listed now, along with other 16th & 17th-Century English titles,  
auctions ending Monday, March 21. More 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?_trksid=p4340.l2562

Many thanks,
Ardwight Chamberlain
L.A.


[John Stow: A Survay of London. Conteyning the Originall, Antiquity,  
Increase, Moderne estate, and description of that City, written in the  
yeare 1598. by Iohn Stow, Citizen of London. Since by the same Author  
increased, with divers rare notes of Antiquity and published in the  
yeare, 1603. Also an Apologie (or defence) against the opinion of some  
men, concerning that Citie, the greatnesse thereof... London:  
Imprinted by Iohn Windet, Printer to the honorable Citie of London,  
1603.] Second edition. Small 4to (18.5 cm) in modern chocolate calf,  
gilt spine title; [6] + 568 pp.; woodcut initials, head- and tail- 
pieces. Pforzheimer 993; STC 23343; ESTC S117889.

An imperfect copy of this scarce and important work of British urban  
topography and sociology: lacking the original title-page (supplied in  
facsimile), as well as one leaf (A4) between the dedicatory epistle  
and the beginning of the text itself, presumably a blank or  
transitional leaf, as both the dedication and the first page of the  
text are present and complete (see image above); also lacking seven  
leaves at the end (OO5-PP2), comprising the final blank and erratum  
and the appendix by William Fitzstephen, but Stow's "Apologie" is  
complete (see image below). Except for one leaf missing from the main  
text (X3, pp. 309-10 of the chapter on "Aldergate ward"), an  
essentially complete example of Stow's classic contemporary portrait  
of Elizabethan London.

This is the second and definitive edition of Stow's magnum opus, the  
last to be published in his lifetime. A vivid evocation of the London  
of Shakespeare and Queen Elizabeth, of Jonson, Bacon, Beaumont and  
Fletcher, Hakluyt and Raleigh, composed and published while they all  
were alive, Stow's monumental Survey is "an invaluable guide-book to  
Elizabethan London, its rivers, bridges, customs and streets... [Stow]  
wrote with the naked and unadorned plainness of a Defoe... He   
moralizes a great deal but criticises never" (Seccombe and Allen, The  
Age of Shakespeare). "Not only interesting for the quaint simplicity  
of its style and its amusing descriptions and anecdotes, but of unique  
value for its minute account of the buildings, social condition and  
customs of London in the time of Elizabeth I" (DNB)...