[Rarebooks] fa: RICHARD SHEPHERD - MISCELLANIES &c. - 4 vols. 1775-1781 - FINE in PERIOD CALF/GILT

[Ardwight Chamberlain]

Listed now, along with other 17th, 18th, & 19th-century titles, auctions ending Sunday, Sept. 23. More details and images can be found at the URL below or by searching under the seller name arch_in_la.

http://tinyurl.com/8trnfxv

Thanks again,
Ardwight Chamberlain
L.A.


The Rev. Richard Shepherd: Miscellanies: In Two Volumes. Oxford: Printed for W. Flexney, in Holborn, London; J. Fletcher and S. Parker, in Oxford, 1775. Two volumes. [with:] Reflections on the Doctrine of Materialism and the Religious Purposes to which Modern Philosophers have Applied it. The Second Edition, Revised and Corrected. London: Printed for W. Flexney, 1779. [with:] Free Examination of the Socinian Exposition of the Prefatory Verses of St. John’s Gospel. London: Printed for W. Flexney, 1781. ESTC T153566; T149988; T76879.

Together, three titles in four volumes uniformly bound in full period speckled calf, boards with gilt borders and rosettes, spines elaborately tooled in gilt with gilt-stamped red and green morocco labels; marbled endpapers; silk ribbon markers. First editions of the first and third titles. The second volume of Miscellanies is a reissue of Letters to the Author [Soame Jenyns] of a Free Enquiry into the Nature and Origin of Evil, Oxford: 1768, with an additional general title-page.

A superb set: contents are very fine indeed, exceedingly bright, fresh and crisp, virtually immaculate; in appealing period bindings with some light touches of wear and rubbing to the edges, two of the boards with patches of abrasion, one volume with joints cracked slightly at the top. From the library at Encombe House, Dorset, the seat of John Scott (1751-1838), 1st Earl of Eldon and Lord Chancellor of Great Britain, with his signatures ("Eldon") and armorial bookplates. Loosely laid in is a folded piece of Encombe letterhead paper (watermarked 1860), on which is a translation of a passage from the Aeneid, Book VI, written in pencil, possibly a nineteenth-century schoolroom exercise.

Richard Shepherd (ca. 1732-1809) was a theologian, divine and minor poet, and fellow of the Royal Society (the two-volume Miscellanies is dedicated to Sir Joseph Banks). All of the titles in this set are uncommon, especially in this condition. Of the first title, ESTC locates only three copies in institutions in the UK and two in the U.S.; of the second title, one in the UK and one in the U.S.; of the third, five in the UK and three in the U.S.