[Rarebooks] fa: WILLIAM BECKFORD - BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS... 1780 - Signed DE COVERLY BINDING

[Ardwight Chamberlain]

Listed now, along with other 17th & 18th-Century English works,  
auctions ending Sunday, April 3. 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.

[William Beckford:] Biographical Memoirs of Extraordinary Painters.  
London: Printed for J. Robson, New-Bond-Street, MDCCLXXX [1780]. FIRST  
EDITION. Bound in full forest green crushed morocco with ornately gilt- 
tooled front and back covers, spine, and turn-ins; all page-edges   
gilt; 8vo (19 x 12 cm); [4] + 158 + [2] pp.; with the errata leaf.  
ESTC T62056.
 From the library of Lord Rosebery at The Durdans, Epsom, with his  
small ink stamp on the title-page. Additionally, the front free- 
endpaper bears the armorial bookplate of John Roland Abbey. Spine  
sunned to an even olive brown, thin shallow wrinkle to the leather on  
the rear cover; title-page with an early, tidy ink notation: "By Wm.  
Beckford Esqr. - Fonthill"; first leaves slightly bumped at the top  
edge; otherwise very clean and fresh in a splendidly Beckfordian  
binding worthy of its former owners. Archibald Primrose, 5th Earl of  
Rosebery (1847-1929) was the "golden boy" of his day, a leader of the  
Liberal Party, husband of a Rothschild heiress, Prime Minister from  
1894-95, and three-time winner of the Derby. The Durdans, his home at  
Epsom, was, according to Henry James, "a delightful house, full of  
books and entertaining sporting pictures." Indeed, Rosebery was a  
confirmed bibliophile and his collection was considered one of the  
finest libraries in private hands in the country. John Roland Abbey  
(1894-1969), for his part, was arguably the greatest book collector of  
his time, beginning his collecting in 1929 and eventually amassing a  
library that, when just a portion of it was sold at auction by  
Sotheby's in 1966-1970, brought nearly £1 million. The bookplate here  
is dated 1933, suggesting that this book was one of Abbey's earlier  
acquisitions. The binding is by Roger de Coverly, with his imprint  
("R. DE COVERLY") stamped in gilt on the front turn-in.

First edition of the author's first book, a collection of satirical  
fictitious biographies of imaginary painters published when the  
precocious Beckford was just twenty, and purportedly written when he  
was sixteen. The tone of the memoirs ranges from the scholarly/ 
satirical to the youthfully facetious, as in the painters' names  
(Blunderbussiana, Watersouchy, Og of Basan, etc.), to the amusingly  
macabre, particularly in the biography of Blunderbussiana, a Salvator  
Rosa-like artist raised in mountain crags among bandits and murderers  
who has a gift for depicting Satanic vistas and human anatomy  
("Instead of carrying with him on his walks a nice pocket edition of  
some Elzevir classic, he never was without a leg or an arm, which he  
went slicing along, and generally accompanied his operations with a  
melodious whistling; for he was of a chearful disposition, and, if he  
had had a different education, would have been an ornament to  
society"). While some of the satire is rather obscure to us today, it  
still makes a fascinating and often quite funny read. First published  
anonymously, Beckford was pleased enough with it to allow his name to  
appear on the title-page of subsequent editions.

William Beckford (1760-1844) was a true English eccentric, one of the  
most scandalous and exotic figures of his day. Author, aesthete,  
collector, and arbiter of taste, he was a sort of late-Georgian Oscar  
Wilde-cum-Martha Stewart. When his father, a former Lord Mayor of  
London, died, he became the richest commoner in the country at the age  
of 10. Hounded out of the country after a youthful indiscretion with  
the future Earl of Devon, he spent years in self-imposed exile on the  
Continent, then decades more as a near-recluse in Fonthill Abbey, the  
immense neo-Gothic "folly" he designed and built for himself. A long- 
time Member of Parliament who never went near Parliament, he spent  
much of his time accumulating one of the most spectacular collections  
of paintings, books, and objets d'art in England. His best-known  
literary work is Vathek, the first and best Oriental-Gothic novel in  
English.

A truly handsome copy of an uncommon title, and with an impressive  
provenance, to boot.