[Rarebooks] fa: WILLIAM BECKFORD in THE EUROPEAN MAGAZINE - 1797

[Ardwight Chamberlain]

Listed now, along with other 17th, 18th & 19th-Century English titles,  
auctions ending Sunday, September 25. More details and images can be  
found at the URL below or by searching under the seller name arch_in_la.

http://www.ebay.com/sch/arch_in_la/m.html?_trksid=p4340.l2562

Thanks again,
Ardwight Chamberlain
L.A.

The European Magazine and London Review, Containing the Literature,  
History, Politics, Arts, Manners & Amusements of the Age. By the  
Philological Society of London. Vol. 32. From July to December 1797.  
London: Printed for J. Sewell, 1797. FIRST EDITION. Thick 8vo,  
untrimmed, in early marbled boards and leather spine; 432 pp. + index  
and publishers adverts, nine copper-engraved plates.

Includes an article on William Beckford, Esq. of Fonthill, accompanied  
by an engraved plate (lightly foxed). Beckford (1760-1844), a true  
English eccentric, was one of the most scandalous and exotic figures  
of his day: author, aesthete, collector, and arbiter of taste, 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, where he spent much of his time accumulating  
one of the most spectacular collections of paintings, books, and  
objets d'art in England.

Also includes plates of antiquarian and slang lexicographer Francis  
Grose, Burgos Cathedral, Lord Malmesbury, Old House at Hackney,  
Carisbrooke Castle, Rosemary Hall on the Island of St. Helena, and an  
early (first?) printing of "On the Birth of a Posthumous Child" by  
"the Late Robert Burns (Not in his Works)." Spine dried, rubbed and  
flaking with loss; hinges cracked and fragile but boards are holding;  
engraved armorial bookplate of Sir Charles Grave Hudson, Bart., of  
Wanlip, Leicester; later bookplate of the University of Chicago  
Libraries, with their ink stamps on the rear paste-down and first  
contents page (no  other library markings); some browning/offsetting  
to and from the plates (most noticeable on the frontispiece); light  
bumping and dust-soiling to the untrimmed edges of the pages;  
otherwise quite clean and fresh.