[Rarebooks] fa: JANE COLLIER - ESSAY ON THE ART OF INGENIOUSLY TORMENTING - 1753

[Ardwight Chamberlain]

Listed now, along with other 17th, 18th, & 19th-century titles, auctions ending Sunday, October 21. More details and images can be found at the URL below or by searching under the seller name arch_in_la.

http://tinyurl.com/cv6emlb

Thanks,
Ardwight Chamberlain
L.A.


[Jane Collier:] An Essay on the Art of Ingeniously Tormenting; with Proper Rules for the Exercise of that Pleasant Art Humbly addressed, in the First Part, To the Master, Husband, &c. In the Second Part, To the Wife, Friend, &c. With some General  Instructions for Plaguing all your Acquaintance. London: Printed for A. Millar, in the Strand, MDCCLIII [1753]. FIRST EDITION. Modern pebbled cloth and marbled boards, gilt-lettered spine label; [2] + 234 pp.; engraved frontispiece, woodcut decorations and initials. ESTC T33351.

First edition of the "best-known generic satire written in the eighteenth century by a woman" (Rizzo, Companions Without Vows: Relationships Among Eighteenth-Century British Women, 1994). A delightfully perverse, surprisingly modern satire in the Swiftian mode, Jane Collier's Essay was written while she served as governess to Samuel Richardson's children. Richardson admired the work greatly and in fact was the printer of this first edition for Andrew Millar. Henry Fielding was  another admirer, describing Collier as having "an Understanding more than Female, mixed with virtues almost more than human." The work proved wildly popular, going through at least nine editions by 1811, but the first edition was the only one published in Collier's lifetime, as she  died in 1755 at the age of forty. The charming frontispiece depicts a cat, that master of tormenting, toying with a mouse or rat, with the legend, "The Cat doth play, / And after slay."

Some browning to the frontispiece and last text leaf; cloth tape repair to frontispiece and title-page at the gutter; occasional light spotting/toning to the top edge of the text block; otherwise the contents are exceedingly clean and bright, almost as if issued yesterday rather than 250+ years ago, and firmly bound in a crisp modern binding. A very nice example.