[Rarebooks] fa: THOMAS DE QUINCEY - WORKS 14 vols. 1853-60 - 1st rev. ed. of CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER

[Ardwight Chamberlain]

Listed now, along with other 19th-century titles, auctions ending Sunday, November 11. More details and images can be found at the URL below or by searching under the seller name arch_in_la.

http://tinyurl.com/b6wjep2

Thanks again,
Ardwight Chamberlain
L.A.



Thomas De Quincey Selections Grave and Gay. From Writings Published and Unpublished [De Quincey's Works]. Edinburgh: James Hogg, 1853-1860. First edition thus. Fourteen volumes (complete), 8vo (19.5 cm), in original publisher's cloth stamped in gilt and blind.
A complete set of this collection published by James Hogg, friend and associate of De Quincey. The author had been a regular contributor to Hogg's Weekly Instructor and in 1853 agreed to allow his works, revised and edited by himself, to be collected and published by Hogg. While the bindings and half-titles bear the somewhat misleading title Selections Grave and Gay, the set is generally referred to, and is in fact, the Collected Works. Contains a number of previously unpublished essays as well as an important edition of the work for which De Quincey is most famous.

Autobiographic Sketches. 1853, 1854. Two volumes.
Miscellanies: Chiefly Narrative. [and] Miscellanies. 1854. Two volumes. The second vol. includes "On Murder, Considered as One of the Fine Arts."
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. 1856. An important edition of de Quincey's most famous work, the first to include his extensive revisions and additions to the 1821 text as well as a new preface. (Cloth splitting at the top of the front hinge.)
Sketches Critical and Biographic. 1857. Shelley, Keats, Wordworth, Oliver Goldsmith, etc.
Studies on Secret Records, Personal and Historic. With Other Papers. 1858.
Essays Skeptical and Anti-Skeptical, on Problems Neglected and Misconceived. 1858.
Leaders in Literature with a Notice of Traditional Errors Affecting Them. London: James Hogg & Sons, [no date].
Classic Records Reviewed or Deciphered. London: [no date].
Critical Suggestions on Style and Rhetoric. With German Tales and Other Narrative Papers. London: [no date].
Speculations Literary and Philosophic. With German Tales and Other Narrative Papers. [and] Selections Literary and Philosophic. Two volumes. London: [no date]. Includes "Coleridge and Opium-Eating," "Milton verses Southey and Landor," etc.
Letters to a Young Man Whose Education has been Neglected. And other Papers London: 1860. Frontispiece. Bound in at the end are additional half-title pages ("De Quincey's Works") and title-pages for all fourteen volumes (28 leaves), presumably for insertion by the binder if/when the set was ever rebound.

Bindings with some (mostly light) damp-spotting; bumping to the corners and spine ends; some small chips and tears to the cloth on the earlier volumes; light dust-soiling to the top edges of the text blocks; mild toning and faint spotting to a few preliminaries; a few small spots elsewhere; otherwise the contents are quite clean and sound, all volumes securely bound. From the library at Encombe House, Dorset, seat of the Earls of Eldon; most volumes with the signature "Eldon" and a bookplate bearing the family's heraldic devices and motto (Sit sine labe decus: "Let honour be without stain"). A solid set, hard to find complete.